Clearing a fully-general counter-argument: Everything is based on some amount of trust—radical doubt just doesn’t scale—you couldn’t trust most of what your science textbook tells you without running a lot of experiments, which people don’t tend to do.
With that out of the way, you can decide who to trust based on other information. So in this case, you can look at the collection of people reporting sports-related improvement, and see how it overlaps with people saying that <dubious thing> made them feel better.
As far as I know, there’s a PLETHORA of studies linking exercise to health. You say you assume they are p-hacked etc… hhm why? I know science can be unreliable, but when everything we have points in the same direction, and there’s a large volume of it, well, that’s certainly some strong evidence.
I also seem to recall that elite athletes do in fact live significantly longer than the general population on average.
Clearing a fully-general counter-argument: Everything is based on some amount of trust—radical doubt just doesn’t scale—you couldn’t trust most of what your science textbook tells you without running a lot of experiments, which people don’t tend to do.
With that out of the way, you can decide who to trust based on other information. So in this case, you can look at the collection of people reporting sports-related improvement, and see how it overlaps with people saying that <dubious thing> made them feel better.
As far as I know, there’s a PLETHORA of studies linking exercise to health. You say you assume they are p-hacked etc… hhm why? I know science can be unreliable, but when everything we have points in the same direction, and there’s a large volume of it, well, that’s certainly some strong evidence.
I also seem to recall that elite athletes do in fact live significantly longer than the general population on average.