> Why are these questions so hard to answer? At a micro level, because collecting accurate data on the best diet or the best workout system is functionally imp

> Why are these questions so hard to answer? At a micro level, because collecting accurate data on the best diet or the best workout system is functionally impossible and because a lot of the people who are theoretically researching these questions have a ton of conflicts of interest. At the macro level, these questions basically are answered: eat food, not too much, mostly plants. Exercise regularly with a combination of resistance training and cardiovascular training (i.e. lift something and run/bike/swim somewhere). The problems come when people: - get overly bogged down in super-specific details of diet and exercise - get overly invested in finding outliers to the broad guidelines - think they're going to find some magic bullet combination of these things that will let them live forever - are unable, due to personal characteristics or societal structures, to easily follow the two big guidelines All of which I get, and all of which are traps I've fallen into before. But the anecdotal evidence suggests that there are lots of ways to achieve good health, because humans are wildly adaptable creatures, and obsessing over the details is mostly a waste of time unless you're trying to perform a specific physical task at an extremely high level for an extended period of time.