But that the average American is so out of touch with how food --presumably bad, shitty food and nutrition

A substantial part is that our food is filled with shit.

They add sugar to everything. Food marketing is insane, and so much of it should be illegal.

Sometimes I want to buy juice that doesn’t have a shitload of sugar in it. Getting a loaf of bread will involve eating extra sugar. The country subsidizes corn, so high fructose corn syrup is added to everything.

Unregulated hell capitalism means that food gets to be pumped full of shit. Broke and stressed people rely on convenience foods - which don’t need to be unhealthy but are purposefully made so with addictive ingredients.

You asked a question, I gave an answer. I’m not sure where you get “condescending” there. I was assuming you had read an academic text, so I was hoping that you might have seen those patterns before.

You would look at the data for gaps, as my answer explained. You could use logic to predict some gaps, but not all gaps would be predictable. Mendeleev was able to use logic and patterns in the periodic table to predict the existence of germanium and other elements, which data confirmed, but you could not logically derive the existence of protons, electrons and neutrons without the later experimentations of say, JJ Thompson and Rutherford.

You can’t just feed the sum of human knowledge into a computer and expect it to know everything. You can’t predict “unknown unknowns” with logic.

You have to have data to apply your logic too.

If it is raining, the sidewalk is wet. Does that mean if the sidewalk is wet, that it is raining?

There are domains of human knowledge that we will never have data on. There’s no logical way for me to 100% determine what was in Abraham Lincoln’s pockets on the day he was shot.

When you read real academic texts, you’ll notice that there is always the “this suggests that,” “we can speculate that,” etc etc. The real world is not straight math and binary logic. The closest fields to that might be physics and chemistry to a lesser extent, but even then - theoretical physics must be backed by experimentation and data.