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There really ought to be a parallel food supply chain, for scientific/research purposes, where all ingredients are high-purity, in a similar way to how the ingredients going into a semiconductor factory are high-purity. Manufacture high-purity soil from ultrapure ingredients, fill a greenhouse with plants with known genomes, water them with ultrapure water. Raise animals fed with high-purity plants. Reproduce a typical American diet in this way.
This would be very expensive compared to normal food, but quite scientifically valuable. You could randomize a study population to identical diets, using either high-purity or regular ingredients. This would give a definitive answer to whether obesity (and any other health problems) is caused by a contaminant. Then you could replace portions of the inputs with the default supply chain, and figure out where the problems are.
Part of why studying nutrition is hard is that we know things were better in some important way 100 years ago, but we no longer have access to that baseline. But this is fixable.
I would agree for a year to only eat food that is given to me by researchers, as long as I can choose what the food is (and the give me e.g. the high-purity version of it). Especially if they would bring it to my home and I wouldn't have to pay.
But yeah, for more social people it would be inconvenient.
2ChristianKl
It's not just a question of whether people agree but whether they actually comply with it. People agree to all sorts of things but then do something else.
Ah, yes. Recently I volunteered for a medical research along with 3 other people I know. Two of them dropped out in the middle. I can't imagine how any medical research can be methodologically valid this way. On the other hand, me and the other person stayed there, and it's almost over, so the success rate is 50%.
This post is a container for my short-form writing. See this post for meta-level discussion about shortform.