I do not consider these studies to be an activity that increases knowledge. It is my position they create ignorance. Paying "scientists" to do this type of work makes them insular and ignorant. Leading people to believe that this research is capable of providing them answers as to how they should improve their health makes them lazy and misinformed.
As I clearly indicated in my original post, I feel that we should be redirecting resources away from this wasteful "research" and putting better tools in the hands of the individual, to allow them to understand the particularities of their own needs.
For example, diabetics are given tools to measure their blood sugar, so they can make better informed decisions about their diet. This has been going on for decades.
I had an experience when I was younger and working in a call center for a period of time, and I was able to see patterns in my own biorhythms. I'd never been the sort of person to keep a journal, I'd certainly never have thought to rate my day on a scale of how I feel and track it on a chart, but my employers kept track of my performance, and I noticed that I'd have an off week every 6 weeks. Didn't seem to co-relate with anything in my external world, was just a pattern that was uniquely mine for reasons I don't claim to clearly understand.
But if I'd been provided with access to more sophisticated tools at the time, like my diabetic girlfriend was given, I might have learned something that improved my health.
So, I don't know what YOUR agenda is, but I guess one of my agendas is to prevent career "scientists" hoping to make a name for themselves as "the man with the answers" from hogging resources, dominating the discussion and keeping people ignorant as they live in their little insular little bubbles and pat themselves on the back for being so clever.
But, it goes deeper than that, really.
Imagine that you were going to sit down and design a diet for your chicken farm. You want to maximize meat production. If you increase the protein levels in your food, you get bigger, meatier chickens. But, there's a problem... some of the chickens will have a heart attack and die with these increased protein levels.
So, you make some charts, and you determine that if you increase it to 50%, chickens will start to die, but the weight of the dead chickens will be dwarfed by the increase in weight of those that survive. If you increase it to 80%, so many chickens will die that you have less meat than before you started. But, if you increase it to 65%, you will hit the sweet spot, where the overall amount of meat generated is maximized.
At no point do you actually take the time to observe any of the chickens and tailor their food intake to what you see. The individual chicken is irrelevant to the equation.
That is the underlying attitude I see in this study. It might serve the interest of enterprises that view humans as chickens, but it doesn't serve the interests of human beings. That actually makes me kind of angry.