From the other side of the consultation, briefly. Order of operations matters more than any single choice here: establish a baseline, change one thing, wait long enough for it to express itself, then measure again under the same conditions.

DanielChem_CHI said:

If you are comparing against somebody else’s result, check that you are comparing the same measurement taken the same way.

There is a second half to this that has not been said yet. The mechanism and the magnitude are separate questions. Agreeing that something happens says nothing about whether it happens enough to act on.

One concrete data point for the thread. Say what you would expect to see if you were wrong, before you look. It is a small discipline and it changes what you notice.

Following on from DanielChem_CHI — and this may be the naive question:

Why A1C lags the way it does, and what to look at in the meantime if you want to know sooner?

Moderator note: a couple of off-topic posts removed.