> If they were, it would quickly be found that it does not actually work... Unfortunately some of the effect sizes are so small that it's hard to tell what's w

> If they were, it would quickly be found that it does not actually work... Unfortunately some of the effect sizes are so small that it's hard to tell what's working or not. The results of papers on body building, for instance, are definitely put into practice by some people. If the claim of the paper is that eating pumpkin [EDIT] decreases muscle recovery time by 5%, how is an individual who starts eating pumpkin supposed to notice that he's not getting any particular benefit from following its advice? Particularly if he's also following random bits of advice from a dozen other papers, half of which are valid and half of which are not?