It's hard to tell if we're eating better or just being duped in a new way. "Fat free" is bullshit, "Organic" is bullshit, "Gluten Free" is bullshit (unless you actually have celica's).
So, it's baby steps. We've learned to hybridize to improve yields and learned how to fertilize to improve yields. Both of these innovations have allowed to world to grow without widespread malnutrition (as we used to have).
Now we have an opportunity to innovate farming methods to rely less on poisons while improving yields on traditional farming (non-modern farming). It's one of those things where it's difficult to impossible to achieve without the ugly stage (given the parameter of a world not starving to death in the meantime).
We're not going to have a negative growth rate, and we're going to feed everyone.
That's to say nothing of the fact that even in your world where there are only people with classical Coeliac those people have to put up with the implication from the people mocking and sneering that they aren't genuine, and have to put up with waiters and waitresses who don't properly handle food or disclose its ingredients because they think it's a fad.
[0]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?linkname=pubmed_pubmed_ci...
The concern then is that restaurants will stop accommodating (because they simply can't afford to) altogether, and people with serious health issues will just have to eat elsewhere, which sucks.
Huge numbers of people have problems with modern diets, you can see it if you dig into any report on work absenteeism. It makes perfect sense if you reason evolutionarily that there would be a far greater number of "low level" allergies/problems than "high level" ones like those that cause people to go into anaphylaxis from nuts or shellfish. If allergies that can kill you quickly from fairly common things exist, i.e. not everyone suffering from them has died, then it would be suprising if lower level allergies to even rarer things were less prevalent. That's to say nothing of how little we actually understand our gut flora, i.e. not an allergy but just an unsuitability at that present moment, and how diverse it is across populations.
This faux-masculine "just toughen up and eat your veggies and that thing that's making you not feel well" hides behind a mask of intellectual superiority. It sneers down its nose at people who are trying to improve their health and pretends changing your diet to alleviate symptoms of various kinds is exactly the same as homeopathy. I think it's bled over from the criticism of fad diets for weight loss that pretend to get around the laws of thermodynamics, but diets can address health in many more ways than just weight loss so not all diets should be grouped together as somehow intellectual bankrupt.
It's absurd in the case of gluten where there are numerous non-classical symptoms associated with it and the only rational scientific response is to keep funding university research at the randomised double-blind peer reviewed research level. While we wait for the researchers to exhaust that research area, which will likely take decades given how, difficult it is to do studies on diet that are totally blind it will probably come through greater research into genetics and the immune system, people suffering symptoms should not be castigated for experimenting in a non-blind way on themselves. Of course that's subject to placebo and all the rest, but it's not remotely near anything like "my fad diet can defy the laws of physics".
This is technically true, but nothing requires "asking for changes" to done with the same painful effort as avoiding allergens. You don't need separate prep and storage to skip an ingredient, and 1% cross-contamination isn't going to hurt someone that just wants a different taste or nutrient balance.
Is asking too hard, or are there really that many people lying about allergies?
"Recent randomized controlled re-challenge trials have suggested that gluten may worsen gastrointestinal symptoms, but failed to confirm patients with self-perceived NCGS have specific gluten sensitivity. Furthermore, mechanisms by which gluten triggers symptoms have yet to be identified. "
So, yes, there is a lot we don't know - about a lot of things but there really isn't any evidence, even in your linked search, that people without wheat allergies or celiac disease should care about gluten. Not enough to justify slapping gluten-free on everything - which makes it a fad.
Regarding your point siliconc0w as I say in my other comment diets are experiments. Let's not conflate "my diet can defy the laws of thermodynamics" regarding weight loss with a diet directed at a different part of health. Nor should we forget that people can experiment with diets knowing the limitations of self-experimentation whilst simultaneously supporting double-blind peer reviewed work. Conflating people on a diet for the relief of symptoms with people on a diet because they think it suspends the laws of the universe is stupid, suggesting people with symptoms aren't allowed to experiment on a personal level while science grinds away at more solid conclusions is also stupid.
The second point is one of elementary reasoning. If someone points to a pile of papers with some published in 2014 and 2015 then a paper from 2013 with includes a couple of trials of ~30 people and ends inconclusively isn't a trump card. The paper, if you actually read it, makes no bold claims at all and is more of a meditation on how to methodologically advance our understanding, i.e. how to design experiments to exclude hidden coeliacs with better tests for them, the question of how gluten and gluten-free diets testing for NCGS need to control for FODMAPS, dairy and the like. They literally end with "Non-celiac gluten sensitivity is an entity awaiting validation, better diagnostic criteria, and, if it does exist, pathogenic mechanisms". And the studies they cite had mixed results on small n, again it's about more and better designed studies which I am sure those authors would agree on. But they were all just looking, as far as I can tell I didn't go to the studies they themselves cite, at basic symptoms. The MRI brain data came along in 2014, after all this.
http://lifehacker.com/5941881/what-does-organic-really-mean-...
The reality is that "Organic" doesn't mean anywhere near what people think it does, sadly. It's fairly watered down. It's a bummer.
There are attempts to standardize, but none have the recognizability needed by the majority of the populace to make them effective.
In regards to your statement, organic food is the conventional way to produce food, and note that I'm not talking about any standard, but about how people have been growing food before we discovered what fossil fuels are good for.
There's actually plenty of evidence to go around, plenty of studies, showing links between the western diet and type II diabetes, heart disease, obesity, cancer, with my father's PhD thesis being one, evidence that has been ignored because it flies in the face of the low-fat bullshit we've been fed, plus it goes against a multi-billion dollar industry. Artificial fertilizers are also known to be responsible for the destruction of our environment, leading to such effects as water pollution with nitrate or acidification of the soil.