The chemical food additives industry has been around for a long time now - certainly since the times of our great-great-grandparents. The difference is that now we have both more variety, and much more rigorous testing.
There's a reason every country has an equivalent to the FDA that has to approve food additives. These agencies were not formed in advance - they were formed as a reaction to dangerous unregulated food additives, supplements, medicines, and so on. The FDA was formed in 1906. Michael Pollan saying that our grandparents only ate real food is an example of the golden age fallacy.
There's a difference between "being around" and "everyone routinely consumes them". American diets change drastically in the middle of the 20th century.
The average American woman weighs 166.2 pounds, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As reddit recently pointed out, that's almost exactly as much as the average American man weighed in the early 1960s.
Men, you're not looking too hot in this scenario either. Over the same time period you gained nearly 30 pounds, from 166.3 in the 60s to 195.5 today. Doing the same comparison as above, today's American man weighs almost as much as 1.5 American women from the 1960s.
This is NOT a subtle change! And it has severe consequences.
I think it's clearly due to diet and the "hidden" choices in the food supply, but if anyone has contrary information I'm interested. It's a tremendous change that needs an explanation.
There's a reason every country has an equivalent to the FDA that has to approve food additives. These agencies were not formed in advance - they were formed as a reaction to dangerous unregulated food additives, supplements, medicines, and so on. The FDA was formed in 1906. Michael Pollan saying that our grandparents only ate real food is an example of the golden age fallacy.