CarlaRPh_TPA said:

Order of operations matters more than any single choice here: establish a baseline, change one thing, wait long enough for it to express itself, then…

Coming at CarlaRPh_TPA’s question from a different direction. Most of what circulates confidently in this community traces back to one summary of one study, and the qualifier was dropped somewhere in the third retelling.

One concrete data point for the thread. For anyone reading later: the numbers in this thread are worth checking against a primary source before you act on them, including mine. Half the figures circulating in this community trace back to a secondary summary that dropped a qualifier.

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

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

Dr.NateNeph said:

For anyone reading later: the numbers in this thread are worth checking against a primary source before you act on them, including mine.

I read this differently from Dr.NateNeph, on substance rather than tone. The counter-case has not been addressed. Somebody upthread described the situation that does not fit, and the thread moved on rather than engaging with it, which is the failure mode this board is supposed to avoid.

Dr.NateNeph said:

For anyone reading later: the numbers in this thread are worth checking against a primary source before you act on them, including mine.

Fair, and it stops being fair at the extremes. The middle of the range is well understood; the ends are where the honest answer is that nobody knows.

If somebody has the primary source to hand I would rather cite it than paraphrase it.