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- MSG is fine. Denying this is basically anti-scientific. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate#Safety)

- Preservatives -- it's hard to know what you're referring to without you being more specific. Something being "suspect" is basically a comment about human paranoia, not actual health effects.

- Nitrites -- again, weak evidence that they may be carcinogens in some circumstances. Nothing epidemiological as far as I can tell. The alternative (botulism or other contamination) is far worse.

"Anti-scientific"

Herein lies the problem. Science is a method, not a dogma or a series of religious pronouncements. Trans-fat and even cigarettes were once considered healthy according to the science of the day.

As far as suspicion of new food items goes, there's a scientific argument to be made there too. Human beings are the outcome of hundreds of millions of years of mammalian evolution that has optimized us to metabolize certain nutrients in certain ratios. In a healthy individual, this diet is likely to be optimal since evolution has been optimizing for it in a feedback loop for thousands of generations. Any deviation from this diet is likely to be neutral to suboptimal, and anything not present in this diet likewise.

Don't get me wrong... far worse than anything I mentioned in my original post above is the way we eat: tons of simple carbs and sugars. Drinking soda and eating empty calories is likely a lot worse for you than GMOs would ever be likely to be.

I do know a bit about genetics too, and I personally think that GMOs are probably safe in most cases. The only legitimate health issue I'm aware of is the possibility of allergies. I was talking more about the social context of opposition to them, and pointing out that it's based on reasonable extrapolations of a trend.

Right, and you are denying the outcome of applying that method.

MSG? Really? What's next, the evils of vaccines?

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.

Absolutely. Cigarettes were good for health too. Pretty much anything that makes an industry is good for you, until it's not. I highly doubt that GMO is different.

GMO might be different, but people are going to err on the side of caution.

All the hype about how GMO will end hunger and nutritional deficiencies and such is part of the problem. I'd say at this point breathless hype is seen as a contrarian indicator.

Hey, just jumping in, I have a BS in Biology and api's post here is full of non-scientific and pseudoscientific garbage.

I believe he suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect and his completely unsourced post should create a huge red flag in any readers mind.

I'm not going to go point by point as the average HNer should be able to research for themselves, but I will respond to this gem that generated the largest facepalm:

> Nearly all food "innovations" of the last 100 years are unhealthy ... The only beneficial modification to the food system from a nutritional perspective has been fortification with certain key nutrients,

This is such a shockingly misguided statement that it hurts to read it. This is why I believe he suffers from illusory superiority, because I think his utter inexperience with agrology is leading him to think that he actually understands this field and can speak with expertise on it.

For a counter-point that "all innovation has been bad", one should only have to look at Norman Borlaug, known colloquially as "the man who saved a billion lives" and "the father of the green revolution". Norman Borlaug was Nobel laureate and agrologist whose research changed agriculture around the world and is credited with preventing billions from starvation.

The innovations of the past century directly allowed nations to increase wheat and rice yields by 2-10X, saving more than one nation from mass famine. I certainly would not label that "unbeneficial" or "unhealthy".

And this is just the elephant in the room in terms of examples, believe me when I say you could write books on the subject of the benefits of agricultural development of the past century. Entire schools are devoted to this study.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_revolution

I should also have been more precise. By food "innovations" I meant synthetic alterations in the composition of food itself such as the introduction of chemically altered oils, flavoring additives, preservatives, and similar. Borlaug changed the way food is grown, not its composition.

I personally am not particularly afraid of GMO foods. I was pointing out the sociological and political reasons for opposition to them. Look into the history of health advice and you'll find the same pattern: something is said to be healthy and people are told to do it. Later it is found to be unhealthy, often dramatically so. Cigarettes and margarine / trans-fat are probably the clearest examples, but there are many others and many outside the realm of food.

Every time you say something is good then reverse yourself, you lose credibility. At some point people actually start taking your pronouncements as a contrarian indicator. "Oh, the experts say GMO foods are great... they must be on Monsanto's payroll and they're probably worse for you than cigarettes."

>Look into the history of health advice and you'll find the same pattern: something is said to be healthy and people are told to do it. Later it is found to be unhealthy, often dramatically so. Cigarettes and margarine / trans-fat are probably the clearest examples, but there are many others and many outside the realm of food.

Bad cherry picking used only to promote your own point. What about the enormous amount of good advice that has changed our lifestyles over the past century? Do you even know how people lived 100 years ago, how they ate?

What you should say is "some health experts have a habit of not always promoting scientifically sound advice, and many times promoting ideas that fly contrary to evidence. Fortunately as more evidence is gathered, those 'experts' are discredited and a better understanding of nutrition is the result".

When you don't cherry pick, you can find sources like:

The Harvard School of Public Health's Nutrition source. By any metric, "health experts promoting ideas". http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/

Can you take issue with these health experts providing advice? Anything they recommend that you think is grossly wrong? Because this is scientifically validated nutrition advice from health experts, the very thing you're trying to discredit by screaming "trans fats and cigarettes" as if those complex cases invalidate an entire scientific field of study.

Honestly, you're trying to smear the name of "experts" in general, without separating "health experts" (medical doctors, nutritionists, idiot laypeople who label themselves naturopaths, etc) from scientists. I feel like you're trying to find a way to ignore the entire science of nutrition because you got burned listening to a fad or because big tobacco ran roughshod over science six decades ago.

"Honestly, you're trying to smear the name of "experts" in general, without separating "health experts" (medical doctors, nutritionists, idiot laypeople who label themselves naturopaths, etc) from scientists. I feel like you're trying to find a way to ignore the entire science of nutrition because you got burned listening to a fad or because big tobacco ran roughshod over science six decades ago."

Absolutely. That's exactly what I'm doing. High-profile failures affect the perception of expertise, even across disciplines. The Harvard that credentialed the economists who said there was no housing bubble is the same Harvard that credentials the scientists who say GMO food is safe. The medical science that big tobacco ran roughshod over six decades ago hasn't changed substantially either-- the institutions and how those institutions are financed and run is largely the same.

People are simply not going to nod their heads to experts anymore. It's over, not just because of high-profile failures but because of the Internet. On the net anyone can appear as an expert. Anyone can look like they know what they're talking about.

How is science going to adapt to that? What I'd like to see is a solution to both problems: a more transparent, open, and engaging scientific process that both reduces the likelihood of major errors and frauds and more deeply engages the public.

Yeah, to each their own. You still sound extremely anti-science to me, so it's very clear we're going to have diametrically opposed opinions. Thanks for sharing!

I'm not anti-science. I'm not even anti-GMO, though I doubt they're some kind of panacea either.

You know... I have an apology I'd like to make. I'd like to apologize to all those marketing and sales people I slandered over my years as an engineer.

They were so irrational, said such ridiculous and inane things, made absurd and hyperbolic claims and chastised me for pointing out how unreasonable they were, insisted on framing things through awkward metaphors that bore little resemblance to underlying realities...

What they were trying to do was bang me over the head and get me to understand how actual human beings make decisions. They were trying to get me to pull my head out of technical realities (cough my ass cough) for a second and look instead at how things are perceived by people who are not experts.

Cause that's what I'm doing here. I am intentionally being hyperbolic and playing devils' advocate just a little because I want people to grasp why science and industry are mistrusted by so many in the general public. Most importantly, I want people to grasp that the people reaching these conclusions are not idiots. They're relying on methods of inductive reasoning that function on average very well in limited-knowledge scenarios. Evolution invented these methods of reasoning to keep us alive in situations where we have incomplete knowledge and are required to make important decisions.

I might draw different conclusions, but that's because I have a BS in biology and have created transgenic organisms in the lab before. That puts me in a tiny minority, probably less than a tiny fraction of 1% of the population.

I can either look at the rest 99.99% of humanity and the fact that the majority of them are suspicious of GMO food and say -- as most scientifically-minded skeptics do -- "man, those people are idiots." Now I've insulted them, which makes them even less likely to listen to me. Or I can say "hmm... why would so many otherwise intelligent people be afraid of something that is not likely to really be harmful to them?"