[kodyo]

It's impossible for a layman to know because most people in accredited positions of authority lie without cessation.

Identify people you trust on a subject, filter their claims through your own ideas about what is reasonable, and hope for the best.

You might still get it wrong. Such is life.

[skrtskrt]

I've recently noticed on TikTok a big trend of food scientists, and chemists that basically just aggressively "debunk" anyone saying any sort of preservative or processed food ingredient is bad for you, and they always fall back on "proven safe for human consumption" which is just like circular reasoning that the FDA is perfect, righteous, and good.

There is of course a lot of kooky beliefs out there about food. But it seems like there is a very intentional social media campaign to associate ANY claim that the stuff in our food is not in our best interest with the kooks that believe the only safe thing to eat is raw goat balls or whatever.

For books anyway, I found The Hundred-Year Lie to be incredibly in depth, but there's a lot of chemistry so it's verrry dense.

[failbuffer]

That's not enough: you should also read the critics and opponents of what you think is true. That is, if you're truly trying to figure out reality and not just seeking psychological security.

Remember, the test of a true intellectual is that they can convincingly defend a position they find abhorrent.

[SV_BubbleTime]

“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

[iopq]

Or you just read a scientific paper. It's called a review and it goes over several studies and uses statistics to determine probability of claims. For example,

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8227014/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9776645/