First Principles vs. Relying Solely on Research

One on the kind of most basic side is, like you said, the principles versus methods being knowing how to use these different methods comes from an understanding of certain principles. And some degree of education is helpful there. I think the vast majority of people that typically

listen to this podcast are probably good on that front in terms of trying to learn more but there's kind of a second kind of nuance that which we kind of talked about at dinner the other night of there's a kind of distinct difference in just following what conclusions from research papers are which can be very good and very helpful but if that is in the complete absence of any understanding of physiology or biochemistry like you mentioned you don't have that ability to think of things from first principles, I guess. And a lot of these questions that we might try to answer of how someone should eat or what happens when they eat a certain way can be answered just through that kind of first principles thinking, right? Instead of thinking, oh, I need to read every single meta-analysis on everything. I need to know all this stuff and have, how can I keep up to date with all this research? You can get a fair chunk of the way if you understand physiology that you may see in a textbook, right? Yeah. Look, just understanding first semester biochemistry will get you really far, like really far. And that's the thing with the conversation we had the other night is research is really important, but research can be very limited as well. And it's also up to the interpretation of the person reading the science. It's also, is the research any good? Did you actually read the research paper? Are you qualified to read research? So for a lot of coaches that aren't qualified to read research, they have no idea about any of that so i'm i'm one of those like i read a lot of research reviews and then i weigh my knowledge of biochemistry and physiology against what that author concluded because what i find too is a lot of the people that are doing the research reviews they're very good at reading research but their their actual cellular knowledge is not that good so then they put out a review and i look at it and i go okay i can kind of see where he inferred that or she inferred that now let me look back at how the body actually works that doesn't really make a lot of sense But if you don't actually know the underlying principles of how the body works, you don't know to discern whether somebody is full of shit or not. And then you're watching all of these talking heads that all have their own research. They're all arguing, oh, your study shit because of this. Well, no, let me explain why it's not shit. And then who the hell are you supposed to follow? And I guess this even comes more apparent when you look at, say, anyone picks a certain type of dietary approach that they're trying to promote. And you're again, you're trying to work out, is this bullshit or not? for a lot of this stuff there isn't going to be a research paper specifically on this right or there's going to be these gray areas where someone will say well there's no research done on this so there's kind of like a checklist that you can do to see well is there any sort of biological mechanism is it plausible even that it could possibly happen and if you can rule that out then you don't need to go any further right if it's biologically impossible you don't need to look for any other review papers