A witty quip, and I totally agree with the sentiment, but I'm wondering what other way we have to test hypotheses in vivo. Animal models are pretty key, but my knowledge of the field is incomplete.
"I guess doing strange things to rodents and measuring the outcomes is useful, but going so far as to turn it into health advice for humans is absurd." 16 days ago I said that.
This one seems a little more legitimate and a target for further research.
Animal models are a start, but you shouldn't use them to give definitive advice or conclusions. The headline is " Eating in 10-hour window can override disease-causing genetic defects" and it is a deception. You are not a mouse, health advice for mice and health advice for humans surely overlaps but there are certainly very many differences.
You solve this by doing a human study. It is a lot harder.
Interestingly, though, this correlates with the common idea of not eating in the evening. Say you have breakfast at 8, you don't eat after 6pm, when you have your dinner. 10 hours of eating right there with snacks and all. I'm guessing that's why the study was tried, though what do I know.
And yet some of the population that live more than everybody else of the planet, e.g. the population of Icaria, eat whenever they like, and its very common to eat at late hours (after 10pm).
Then again they have a few other tricks up in their sleeves: they eat lots of quality plants grown in their island, they have minimal work related stress (or, for that matter, minimal work in general), leave close to calming nature (including sea), have good community ties, and are legendary for not giving a fuck...
If including even human testing in animals the furthest out theoretical way would be complete physical modeling. There would be so many issues involved there it isn't funny including building it from faulty assumptions. Even with sufficient processing power to completely model a human accurately from their DNA and wonder why the functions don't match up or show health problems - say because the communal bacteria weren't included or the physics model didn't include this one obscure molecular physics interaction we didn't even know existed before now.
