[tjr]

This is not feasible advice. I can't read studies and correctly interpret and summarize them in every area of science which could affect my day-to-day decisions. That's insane.

But if you wanted to study something out and make your own decision, you should be free to do so.

I think nutrition is a great example. Despite decades of research, there appears to be no one single answer as to what constitutes a healthy diet, or what the most important aspects of a healthy diet are.

Low-calorie? Low-carb? Dairy-free? Meat-free? Low-sodium? Low-fat? High-fat?

As an individual, you have lots of choices, including eating whatever you want with no particular dietary plan at all. But if you want to read a book or read research papers and change your diet, you can.

[cle]

Sure you can, go for it. But I doubt that many people have the time nor the skills required to actually come to some justified conclusion. The scary part is that many of them think they do. Often the very ones who tell you "read the science" or "just go read some papers" are the ones who dramatically underestimate the amount of effort and nuance it takes to synthesize the results of numerous researchers into a coherent meta-analysis. You can try, sure, and personally I enjoy it, but unless you're already an expert researcher in the field, you should be very skeptical that any conclusions you make are actually valid.

It takes an enormous amount of domain knowledge to reasonably interpret the statistics of experiments, epidemiological studies, etc. We may think we can read them and come to our own conclusions, but I think it's usually our hubris that leads us to believe that those conclusions are justified and not just rolls of the dice.