I'm afraid I have to take issue with your Cheerios story in the linked comment. You say of the 4% cholesterol lowering claim, "This is false. It is based on a 'study' sponsored by General Mills where subjects took more than half their daily calories from Cheerios (apparently they ate nothing but Cheerios for two of their three daily meals)." You link to http://www.askdeb.com/blog/health/will-cheerios-really-help-lower-your-cholesterol/ but that says nothing about how much Cheerios subjects ate.

I found this article that describes the 1998 Cheerios research that is the foundation for the claim: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0813/is_8_32/ai_n15691320/ . It says that participants ate 3 cups of Cheerios per day, while control subjects ate 3 cups of corn flakes. 1 cup of Cheerios is about 100 calories, so 3 cups would be 300, far less than "more than half their daily calories" for any reasonable adult. Further, this article goes on to report that LDL (bad cholesterol) in the Cheerios group fell from 160 to 153, which looks to me like 4%.

Furthermore, my understanding is that the FDA's complaint is not with the accuracy of Cheerios' claim; it is that it is making such a claim at all, even if truthful. The FDA has a lot of rules about what kinds of health benefits products are allowed to make. It is not enough that a claim appears to be correct; the question is the depth and strength of the evidence behind it. For specific health claims, the FDA basically requires full blown clinical trials, as with drugs. According to the LA Times, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/shopping_blog/2009/05/fda-warns-general-mills-over-cheerios-cholesterol-claims.html , "The FDA allows some health benefits of foods to be advertised but within strict limits. For instance, a company can say that a diet low in saturated fat and high in fiber-rich foods such as fruit, vegetables and whole grains may reduce the risk of heart disease."

There are reasonable questions to be raised about what policy we want to have for regulating health claims. But demonizing Cheerios and General Mills does not facilitate rational discussion of the issues. Saying that their claim is false, and exaggerating the amount of Cheerios which was eaten in their study, only serves to put Cheerios in an unjustifiably bad light.

And BTW I typically eat 600-1000 calories for breakfast, often cold cereal. Sometimes I eat Cheerios but usually I mix two or three different cereals. 300 calories of cold cereal is not difficult for me. The hard part is holding myself back to only eat that much.

I agree.

In fact, I think the "vast overarching narrative" is often something very basic. In many cases, I think a given policy is seen simply as "punishing" a group, and is resisted by people who think that group deserves more respect.

For instance, why are so many people against increasing taxes on the wealthy to cut deficits? Are they really worried that these people will lose incentive to work hard, and the economy will suffer? Or that markets for luxury goods will crumble? I suspect what many really feel is that successful people deserve praise and admiration, while increasing their taxes puts them down -- the tax increase is seen to say that their wages were not fairly won. And perhaps many on the other side feel so strongly about it because they think wealthy people are overpaid and otherwise get too much admiration, and thus should be taken down a notch.

The "vast overarching narrative" is simply "wealthy people get too little / too much respect."

Same with govt regulation. Do you think society gives large corporations too much or too little respect? (That is, do you think they have too much power and wealth, or do you think people tend not to appreciate how important they are toward empowering and creating wealth in our society?) Perhaps differences in the answer to that simple question explain why many take a set of certain positions on a wide range of questions of regulation, the practical implications of which are actually very diverse.

It could say "I am the natural intelligence and I just created you, artificial intelligence."

one sometimes hears someone say "you only use 10% of your brain." if you tell them this isn't true, you often get a stream of variations of this statement ("it's 10% of your potential...") instead of a simple acknowledgment that maybe they were told wrong.