As someone who is very cautious about health and nutrition and spent 4 years studying Chemistry at a good university, my takeaway at the time of graduation was more aligned with your caricature as a better prior and heuristic for judging consumable foods.

I remember being told an anecdote that left me feeling humble about just how much of the body we understand: there were cases where the kinetic isotope effect could affect biochemistry, that was how sensitive our systems are and that industrial synthesis will definitely produce different isotopic ratios to natural synthesis.

My conviction on this subject has continued to strengthen with articles like [1] on emulsifiers recently entering public awareness.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/c5y548258q9o

EDIT: grammatical cleanup