[weakfortress]

These comments are always so hilarious. It demonstrates a significant lack of understand of how statistics actually works. You see this on reddit all the time, you'd think it'd be better here.

Power and sample size are determined by numerous factors depending on the question under study. You could have N=10 be statistically powerful and N=1,000,000 be statistically meaningless. It depends ENTIRELY on the subject under study. More is not always better and in many cases completely unnecessary.

https://sphweb.bumc.bu.edu/otlt/MPH-Modules/BS/BS704_Power/B...

Here is a decent guide. You may wish to read it so you can learn when you can dismiss a study based on N. You never mentioned, did you back out the study numbers and determine the N=17 number was outside the range of statistical power? If so, would you mind posting your calculations?

[johnday]

This is clinical nutrition. There are so many confounding factors that it is not reasonable to draw any conclusions about how the body works (especially as a layman reader on HN) from a study that tested 17 people. Indeed, their own introduction claims that previous larger studies have found no correlation between meal plans and effects on the body, at least wrt caloric expenditure.

> These comments are always so hilarious. It demonstrates a significant lack of understand of how statistics actually works.

I do have a PhD, but thank you for your input anyway.

[hahajk]

Would this be an intuitive way of putting it? If I pull a random 17 phones off an assembly line, and 16 of them are defective, I can pretty confidently say there is something wrong with the whole product line even though n=17?