The most important thing is approaching other points of view with an open mind, with epistemic humility , that is, knowing that something of what you think can be wrong, even if, from the inside, everything feels right.

On the object level:

• Carbohydrates can be: fruit/whole grains/normal bread/normal pasta or North American crazy industrial snacks and "sugar-cereals" and "sugar-bread". The first one is good, the second one is bad.
• No idea about optimal salt levels, just a note on your language: "potentially deadly" is too vague to have a useful discussion. Crossing the road is "potentially deadly" for some definitions of "potentially deadly". Try to quantify the risk instead, at least approximately. 
• For facemasks, a surgical mask that you re-use for several day, without cutting your beard (beard makes it impossible to have a perfect fit), with a random size, removing it constantly to eat and drink, of course it is going to work badly. If you wear a serious P100 masks, of appropriate shape and size, with no beard (cut down to zero with a high quality manual razor) and never remove it, of course it is going to work, it is basic physics at that point. If it is a good idea to wear it, considering costs and benefits, is another discussion.
• Please be really careful about psychoactive substances, they might have long term effects that are little known because they are little studied. (This last statement is based on random stuff read on the internet, take with a grain of salt).

Thread criticizing the Cochrane mask study

There are cases where data and the authorities disagree. From the side of the authorities, it's a good strategy to call those people who disagree conspiracy theorists. 

Russiagate was essentially a conspiracy theory but given that it was endorsed by authorities most people don't use that label for it. 

Imagine what it was like for those of us who were talking about transhumanism, AI alignment, morphological freedom, cryonics, nootropics, keto diets, kettlebells, etc., in 2010, not 2023. 

Welcome to the bleeding edge. It's not an easy life. 

The most important thing to do is to learn to trust your research and the truth over what the tribe says. This can be very hard. I eventually sold most of my bitcoin after all my friends and family spent the summer of 2012 or so screaming at me that it was a bubble, a scam, etc., which seemed confirmed when the price crashed from $35 down to $5 -- don't make that mistake. 

Learn to isolate yourself from people that are reliably harmful. Don't be a crab in the bucket. Get out of the bucket. Deal with helping out the people you care about later.

If you find yourself leaning into conspiracy theories, one should consider whether they're stuck in a particular genre and need to artificially inject more variety into their intellectual, media, and audio diets.

Confirmation bias leads to one feeling like every song has the same melody, but there are many other modes of thought, and, imo, sliding into a slot that checks more boxes with <ingroup> is an indicator our information feeds/sensors are bad more than that we are stumbling on truth.

Probably actual p100 masks do stop COVID. This is because the filtering is far stricter, blocking all but a fraction of a percent of particulates. With such a mask you lose all sense of smell, an indication thst it is filtering everything.

I used one pre vaccine and didn't ever contract it, but that is just an anecdote.

Confirmation bias is an enormous factor in conspiracy theories. If you want accurate beliefs, including accurate uncertainties about your beliefs, you want to do some serious research on confirmation bias and .motivated reasoning. After studying cognitive biases for my job for four years, I believe those two carry the bulk of the practical effect.

Between the lines, I'm guessing your family is accusing you of sounding like a conspiracy theorist because you're overconfident of your certainty in your new beliefs, based on confirmation bias in your research. I approximately share each of the beliefs you mention, after a modest amount of research on each. But I'm much less certain than you seem to be about exactly where the truth on each subject lies.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gBma88LH3CLQsqyfS/cultish-countercultishness

Cult or Not-Cult aren't two separate categories. They are a spectrum that all human groups live on. 

All of these seem pretty obvious to me, so maybe I don't see the point. Or I'm a conspiracy theorist. :P