This is great feedback! Thanks for giving it a try.
You're right that we're limited in how much news we can pull. Generally, we can only look about 90 days into the past for news articles.
I'd definitely like to expand the corpus of information that we can pull from. Getting access to reliable historical data is high on that list, as it will dramatically improve base rate estimation.
The data was based on behavior between 1999-2014, which means it was behavior that almost certainly was not health motivated since intermittent fasting wasn't popular then. So I think you have to ask: why were these people skipping meals? I think there are a lot of possible explanations and they are all potential confounds.
Like, one obvious reason people skip meals is that they don't have time. If you don't have time to eat, you're probably working long hours and really stressed out. Stress could easily contribute to CVD or otherwise take years off your life.
Another obvious reason to skip meals: you don't have money to buy food. Poverty is well known to lead to worse health outcomes.
Or one more: people skip meals because they have no appetite. What's a big cohort that routinely skips meals because they have no appetite? The elderly.
Maybe they ruled these kinds of things out in the full paper (I've only read the abstract) but so far I'm unimpressed.
I was wondering if anyone would catch that! Yeah, it's definitely part of the "fiction" here. L-glucose can bind to some things, e.g. taste receptors. "Nothing in nature can interact with it" was definitely an over-simplification
You know, someone else gave me similar feedback as well. I'm kind of reluctant to make it longer, but might be a better story if it is. Like: maybe have something about the government responses to it and what happens, etc, work some of the explanations in there. Going to keep this in mind, appreciate it!
Sweet, I actually love that! Upregulating a plant pathogen feels like it could be disastrous. If I had a better grasp of ecology I'd have thought of more examples like, haha. Might include it in a future iteration if you don't mind!
Thanks so much for reading it! That's a really interesting idea -- honestly I hadn't thought of it. I guess the rough thought is that too much ecological damage is done too fast for us to reverse it. But I'll keep mulling this over
You're right that we're limited in how much news we can pull. Generally, we can only look about 90 days into the past for news articles.
I'd definitely like to expand the corpus of information that we can pull from. Getting access to reliable historical data is high on that list, as it will dramatically improve base rate estimation.