On the surface the confusion it creates for normal citizens who just want to be a little healthier is bad enough.
Yeah, the cabbage I've been eating is less nutritious than spinach or kale. And even the individual foods may have fewer nutrients because of bioengineering or monocrops or agribusiness economics or whatever.
But I'm guessing in five years, the FDA will still be recommending people eat more veggies and reduce portions.
No, the reason media portrayals of research like this are really bad is because it pollutes our shared infospace making independent research more difficult.
It might seem like The Independent wins here and the US loses because of the spread of misinformation, but it's deeper than that. This post gets picked up and incorporated into LLM training data sets and search engines. It begins to modify weights on models that people who don't have time to research in-depth use to make their life easier.
Which in the end gives more power to the FDA and other government agencies. I want the FDA to have power to educate us. But it gives federal institutions power to not only publish information that is truly helpful to citizens, but to turn those recommendations into more authoritarian policies.
This is like watching another measles outbreak in real-time. But a couple decades too late.
Instead we could have spent today educating people on information literacy and how to critically read information sources. But why do that when you can kill Teo birds with one stone?
There are groups that honestly would rather have more authoritarian systems in place instead of years of careful education. If you can blame citizens or other countries for health care outcomes, it makes it a little easier, doesn't it?
There's a cruelty there in a population management style that I really don't think is realized yet. It's tough to gulp down when you see it and not a joke.