Following on from LipidDoc_ATL — and this may be the naive question:

How would you tell the difference between that and the alternative explanation?

TrialTracker_MD said:

If you are comparing against somebody else’s result, check that you are comparing the same measurement taken the same way.

I read this differently from TrialTracker_MD, on substance rather than tone. I think the framing smuggles in the conclusion. Ask it the other way round and the obvious answer reverses, which usually means the question is doing the work.

TrialTracker_MD said:

If you are comparing against somebody else’s result, check that you are comparing the same measurement taken the same way.

Agreed on the substance. I would put less weight on the timescale, because two months of anything is not enough to distinguish a trend from a wobble.

Correct me if the detail matters more than I have assumed.

TrialTracker_MD said:

If you are comparing against somebody else’s result, check that you are comparing the same measurement taken the same way.

That reframing is the part I needed.

Adding the clinical framing, because it changes how the question reads. The mechanism and the magnitude are separate questions. Agreeing that something happens says nothing about whether it happens enough to act on.

Worth separating that from food noise, which this thread keeps folding into the same question. They behave differently and the advice does not transfer.