| It generally takes biology students at the advanced undergrad to early grad student level two years of weekly literature reviews with groups of their peers and mentors where they discuss the merits and shortcomings of research papers before they become able to reliably be able to do this on their own.They start out spending several hours per paper to dive deep before taking less than an hour (my professor took 30 minutes) when they're proficient. For a layman to try to do the same without the same feedback mechanisms is an exercise in futility that will almost certainly result in misunderstandings. Most people online without that necessary background who claim to accurately interpret research literature are fooling themselves and the people who believe them. If you want to have a more informed and evidence-based perspective on some field, you should start with the resources that are tested on millions of students every year, constructed in a coherent fashion to communicate the more reliable findings of a field that are considered essentially true by consensus: I am talking about textbooks, of course. And if you can't be bothered to seriously read and learn the contents of thousands of pages of textbooks, how much can you say you really want to understand the context of research papers that assume that knowledge implicitly? If the above seems to be more work than you care to commit (a completely reasonable conclusion!), just stick to some basic heuristics that seem to have been held true for decades or longer and are consistent with the advice of medical professionals over the ages. Michael Pollan's advice to "Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much." is pretty solid. If you want to go further, you could try to max out your RDAs for all your micronutrients from a diet composed of whole foods by playing around on sites like Cronometer. For more evidence-based health recommendations centered around lifestyle changes, the Barbell Medicine Youtube channel is pretty solid. |