>But the anecdotes are piled up into giant mountains at this point

This is disorganized thinking. Anecdotes about what? Does my uncle having an argument with his doctor over needing more painkillers, combine with an anecdote about my sister disagreeing with a midwife over how big her baby would be, combined with my friend outliving their stage 4 cancer prognosis all add up to "therefore I'm going to disregard nutrition recommendations"? Even if they were all right and the doctors were all wrong, they still wouldn't aggregate in a particular direction the way that a study on processed foods does.

And frankly it overlooks psychological and sociological dynamics that drive this kind of anecdotal reporting, which I think are more about tribal group emotional support in response to information complexity.

In fact, reasoning from separate instances that are importantly factually different is a signature line of reasoning used by alien abduction conspiracy theorists. They treat the cultural phenomenon of "millions" of people reporting UFOs or abduction experiences over decades as "proof" of aliens writ large, when the truth is they are helplessly incompetent interpreters of social data.