[taeric]

Odd, I would have expected this to be somewhat the case? Specifically, I would expect your activity leading into the meals, along with your expectations of what you will be doing after, would have some impact? Probably more impact from how hungry you were going into a meal. If you were already sated, for example, I'd expect your body to largely try and push the meal through as fast as it can.

Neat to see what other people's priors are, on this.

[coldpie]

> Odd, I would have expected this to be somewhat the case?

I don't think anybody was expecting to be surprised by this study. In practice, most science is pretty boring and rarely breaks expectations. But being unsurprising does not mean it's not worth doing. A lot of studies are simply validating expected outcomes and providing foundational data points for future studies to refer back to. For example, a future study might use this study to justify funding ("as shown in Study 2025.abcd, glucose is highly variable... we propose to further study this by controlling for ... which will help us understand the influence of ..." etc etc).

[taeric]

Ah, great point! I definitely got the impression that this was a surprise, but I can't say why I got that impression. That said, I did not intend this as a criticism of running the study! Quite the contrary, glad they did it. I was only meaning my comment to be contra the sense of surprise I had.

[coldpie]

It's a pretty common reaction :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43964238

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43964122

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43964428

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43963196

[perrygeo]

I'm very sensitive to sugar and starch when "at rest". If I wake up first thing in the morning and drink an orange juice or have a bowl of white rice before bed, my blood sugar and mood are out of control. But the same foods mid-day before/after/during intense mental or physical work are very well tolerated if not beneficial. So my priors agree with yours, timing and context absolutely matters.

[blitzar]

Non expert here ... My understanding was sleep, stress and many other variables all impact these things significantly (before we even consider food). Having a different context when you then add the same food thus should not result in the same outcome.

[layer8]

The study used 7-day rotating meals, so one would expect some consistency on average in a weekly rhythm, but it also only covered 14 days, so only two data points per meal and participant, if I read this correctly. In that case, I’m not surprised either that there is a lot of variation, also considering that this is a new meal regimen for the participants.

[pfortuny]

People think medicine is Physics. They really do.

[taeric]

I think I agree with the idea you are saying. That people think you can formulate our body to ignore a lot of the state that it holds.

I'll note that even basic physics has that problem. Try explaining to a 5th grader why a feather would fly in the same arc that a rock will take, if there was no air.

[pfortuny]

Well, I did not want to say "Mathematics" because it sounded a bit exaggerated. Of course you are right.

[Aurornis]

> Odd, I would have expected this to be somewhat the case?

Well of course. Studies like this help collect data and quantify the variations.

There's more to the study than the headline or even the simple summary. Knowing the range of variations is important, as well as starting to build a foundation to understand some of the factors that lead to the variations.