Drew Burney

Right.

We don't know if that's a placebo or not at that point.

There's that size of the study matters, too.

So how many people are in it?

The more, the better, obviously, because you can make more generalized inferences from those populations.

And then, I mean, just all sorts of methodological stuff, too.

Is that a blinded study as well?

You know, like a lot of these, especially with supplements, are going to be funded by the supplement company.

And even if it's a blind study, that can still influence things one way or the other.

Those are some of the big ones, for sure.

But I mean, even if you do have smaller studies, though, but they're well done, over time, that can help, right?

Because you can do a meta-analysis, include those studies if they're well done.

They have proper controls.

They have proper blinding where the researchers don't know which condition the participants are in.

Those sorts of things help a lot.

So sometimes the incentive is that to take shortcuts, which is why, like you said, with adaptogens, those early studies, oh, they look really promising.

Well, that's because they were like, well, we can't do the perfect study.

So we're going to do a good enough study.

And then those headlines get picked up and going out of proportion.

There's like a few like pretty good quality studies.