So far nobody's responded to my core point, which is about human social behavior and inductive inference in the absence of deep subject matter understanding.

People have also cherry picked this or that. I'll concede MSG. That's not the point. So far nobody's cherry picked margarine because there is now very strong evidence for the unhealthiness of trans fats.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_fat#Health_risks

For a generation doctors told people to replace butter with margarine. Got to avoid those unhealthy saturated fats!

Butter, it turns out, may actually be good for you: http://quantifiedself.com/2011/01/results-of-the-buttermind-...

What inductive inference are people supposed to draw from this pattern? Or are they just supposed to mindlessly trust in people with credentials next to their names?

It's a problem that goes way beyond medical science, too. Every time the president of the United States stands up and lies the country into war, every time a well-respected economist claims housing prices will always go up or a market pundit calls out that "this bubble is different," every time it is said that "no modern reactor can have an accident like Chernobyl" (this was the refrain prior to Fukushima), people lose a bit of their respect for the social mechanisms our society uses to identify and credential expertise.

This is the cause for the increasing mistrust of expertise. The quacks and fanatics and pseudoscientists are simply exploiting it. They didn't cause it. The claimants of expertise in our culture destroy their own credibility quite well, and when that happens people inductively extend that loss of credibility to entire categories of expertise and even to the concept of expertise itself.

It's difficult to respond to your core point when you just list off a bunch of kookiness and try to use that as a basis for saying that nearly every recent change in food has been bad.

You first need to demonstrate that food changes have been overall bad before we can even accept your core point, let alone respond to it.

You aren't even comprehending it. Even if every single claim I listed is completely wrong, the social phenomenon I am describing exists and must be understood if culture is to become more rational.

I've tried to point out the perception-of-expertise problem before in threads like this, and skeptics always get angry and defensive and dismissive.

MSG is fine. GMOs are fine. There is no housing bubble. That's what the experts say.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10...

How many people do you know whose financial well-being was destroyed by the housing bubble?

Bernanke graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University, among other accolades. You don't get more credentialed expertise than that. What conclusion are people supposed to draw here?

I'm simply pointing out the obvious one, and the one that many people do in fact draw: expertise is bullshit. I don't personally believe that -- I think the reality is far more nuanced -- but I can see how someone could draw that conclusion and I am not convinced that doing so makes them an idiot.