If you are not confident in your own ability to recognize cranks (either in general or in a particular field) then sticking with conventional wisdom may be your best option. In general my experience is that it is not very difficult to spot genuine cranks however but YMMV. I’d suggest that health in general is a poor place to put great faith in conventional wisdom however since there are many powerful interest groups influencing things like government issued recommendations whose interests are not always well aligned with yours.
Nutrition and diet are relatively amenable to self experimentation however and so at least some claims are fairly easily testable. Obviously you aren’t going to be able to confirm claims of reducing your risk of heart disease or various cancers (for example) in the short term but claims about weight loss are trivial to verify and it is not terribly difficult to test other claims by having blood work done (triglyceride levels, LDL/HDL ratios etc.) and by keeping a record of possibly diet related symptoms under different regimes (mood, energy level crashes, digestive problems, etc.).
If you are not confident in your own ability to recognize cranks (either in general or in a particular field) then sticking with conventional wisdom may be your best option. In general my experience is that it is not very difficult to spot genuine cranks however but YMMV. I’d suggest that health in general is a poor place to put great faith in conventional wisdom however since there are many powerful interest groups influencing things like government issued recommendations whose interests are not always well aligned with yours.
Nutrition and diet are relatively amenable to self experimentation however and so at least some claims are fairly easily testable. Obviously you aren’t going to be able to confirm claims of reducing your risk of heart disease or various cancers (for example) in the short term but claims about weight loss are trivial to verify and it is not terribly difficult to test other claims by having blood work done (triglyceride levels, LDL/HDL ratios etc.) and by keeping a record of possibly diet related symptoms under different regimes (mood, energy level crashes, digestive problems, etc.).