I know how it feels. I’ve read more than a few scientific studies or articles about them and felt that way, too.

Like the writer is Oliver Laurel, part of that famous film-comedy team from long ago, and you’re his partner Stan Hardy. And it’s now time in the script for you to say what you so often say about one of his screw-ups.

“Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into, Ollie.”

Except what you’ve read in the study or about the study is not really a screw-up, per se. But it is why you have that butterflies-aflutter feeling just below your diaphragm.

You’ve just read contradictory nutritional data.

When it comes to your health, contradictory nutritional data is no laughing matter. In fact, it won’t be found in any of the Laurel and Hardy classics: “Babes in Toyland,” “Sons of the Desert,” or “A Chump at Oxford.”

But it abounds everywhere else it seems — which in and of itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes it’s proof of progress.

But sometimes it’s proof that food companies have banded together and funded questionable research in an attempt to promote the selling of a food whose anything-but-occasional consumption has been found in past research to be ... well, questionable.

A fine and infuriating example of the latter came to light in a 2016 historical analysis of the sugar industry and specifically a group called the Sugar Research Foundation. The analysis uncovered a slew of studies concerning sugar consumption in the 1960s and 1970s where the end results of the studies had already been determined.

Results that would find the main cause of heart disease to be fatty foods, not sugary ones. Those shady studies altered how we viewed both fat and sugar for decades.

If the 1960s and 1970s seem like ancient history, consider a second example Theresa Tamkins uses in a 2019 article for WebMD: “Why Science Can’t Seem to Tell Us How to Eat Right.” Funded by dairy industry groups, this study discovered (surprise, surprise) that a cheese- and meat-heavy diet was better for increasing HDL — the “good” cholesterol — than a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet.

Which — you guessed it —contradicted several prior studies that found the opposite.

But less-than-honorable-research intent is not the only reason there’s so much contradictory nutritional information — or even the most likely one. A far greater contradictory-information creator is that it really is impossible to create a food study that is flawless.

Yet the frequent use of a term like “super foods” would lead you to believe that flawless studies are indeed doable. Here’s why they are not.

For starters, a flawless study would need to be performed on a rather large group of people. While 10,000 is often seen as the ideal number, for argument’s sake, let’s agree upon 1,000.

Whatever the number, however, it would be crucial that the participants be a nearly equal mix of males and females from every age group and represent dozens of differing nationalities and ethnicities.

Those 1,000 would need to remain in a strict laboratory setting for the entire study, which should be lengthy. While 10 years would be best, once again, let’s settle for less, say a single year.

During this year, all 1,000 participants would need to eat the same diet every day, with one exception. Half would have the “super food” being studied sneaked into their foods undetectably (maybe by blending it into a smoothie or a sauce used as a meat or noodle topping).

Another absolute must to make the study flawless is that the amount, intensity, and type of exercise of all the participants has to remain the same as it was prior to it. Any change here could create others that could be incorrectly attributed to the consumption (or non-consumption) of the super food.

Moreover, to make sure the placebo effect plays no role in the results, the researchers and the participants can’t know during any point of the study which participants are eating and not eating the super food.

You, as the reader of such studies, need to keep all of this in mind so you don’t see any single study — whether it be about a single food, diet, exercise or exercise strategy — as the be-all and end-all. And I’ll even suggest the specific spot in your mind where you should keep it.

Right beside a bit of information you’ve read here in one way, shape, or form many times before. That you and I could eat the same amount of a food at the same time under the same conditions and what happens to that food in our bodies and then to our bodies is often different.

So often and different enough you could call the effects contradictory.

Feeling those butterflies aflutter again? Or that this is just another “nice mess” an Ollie-like guy has gotten you into?

Take heart. The clean-up comes next week.