Yup, there's a lot of information that can seem to point in contradictory directions, but you get some very, very clear signal out of it in a couple of importan

Yup, there's a lot of information that can seem to point in contradictory directions, but you get some very, very clear signal out of it in a couple of important directions. People still seem pretty resistant to simple interventions like this though. I think a big part of it is that most people have an incredibly powerful status quo bias, and get extremely uneasy with diverging from the norm of behavior they see around them (even if those norms are of generally far worse health than they're targeting). I've spent the last decade incrementally understanding more about nutrition and optimizing my diet, and I've reached the point where the divergence between mine and my friends' diets has become pretty insane. Not coincidentally, now that we're starting to enter the period where age catches up with our bodies, I'm by far the healthiest, by both appearance and symptoms. I've had friends ask me what I do, but it's far enough outside the norm that they assume it's impossible or that I have iron willpower (spoiler: I really don't. If you eat healthy, your tastes shift towards healthy food). This is a general problem with people; in the narrow case, it could be solved by changing their environment (ie blanketing the country with PSAs with simple messages, like we did for smoking). It would do infinitely more good to somehow grant people the intellectual confidence (or indeed, capability) to avoid blunt heuristics like the so-called "wisdom" of crowds, but I have no earthly idea how one would do that.