Zone 2 Cardio Is Boring and That's the Point

You can triage most nutrition headlines in half a minute. Ask whether it describes a randomized trial or an observational association, whether the effect size is meaningful or merely significant, and whether the outcome is something you care about or a proxy for it. Most breathless coverage does not survive those three questions.

Protein timing gets far more attention than it deserves relative to total daily intake. The trials that hold up point to hitting an adequate daily amount spread across meals; the finer choreography around the workout window produces effects small enough to vanish once you control for the total. Get the sum right first.

Reading a clinical trial well starts with the boring questions: how many participants, for how long, measuring what, and compared against what. A dramatic relative-risk reduction can hide a trivial absolute change, and a surrogate endpoint is a promise, not a result. Skepticism here is not cynicism; it is literacy.