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Controlled experiments in humans are expensive, time consuming, and actually very difficult to do. Meanwhile any grad student can do a mouse model. The motivation of most academic labs is citations and grants, not useful information. Putting it together…

It’s probably saner to look at large populations of different types of athletes / exercise patterns in a longitudinal study.

Selection effects are ridiculously strong for almost anything related to health.

I strongly believe that's why nutrition science is soooo far behind the rest of medicine. There aren't nearly enough serious RCTs (whereas regulations make them abundant for other medical interventions).

Imagining adorable mice dumbbells

With enough gains, Pinky & the Brain can finally take over world.

Pinky and the gains

We still are in the experimental phase about how we can get two groups of human study participants to keep behaving mostly the same, while also complying with the change in exercise we want data on.

Maybe the real value is in training mice to do useful work.