I’m not saying people can’t choose for themselves.

I’m just saying if people rely on their own data collection and analysis, well people are pretty horrible doing that for topics like health. We are aware of so many logical fallacies and biases that humans predictably fall for. For example, we rarely actually take into account the survivorship bias in health gossip we hear. Our confirmation bias, availability heuristic, etc… That kind of stuff takes a properly set up and repeated study.

Not sure what you mean by who said statistics is the best answer. Statistics “is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data” and like I’ve said above people tend to have poor intuitions on how to transform observations into conclusions.

But I’m only talking about people who desire to have reliable conclusions. Folks who don’t (though I think I’ve never met one) don’t need to worry about it.