I think consumers are honestly trying to be healthier, but the amount of effort required to understand food science is way too high.
What consumers are told is healthy vs unhealthy changes from year to year. First, saturated fat was considered bad for you so they were removed in favor of trans fats. Then trans fats were considered unhealthy so manufacturers replaced them with palm oil. Then we found out palm oil isn't great, so they use coconut oil instead. Who knows if that will hold up.
Ultimately consumers want a pattern they can follow to get healthier foods. "Natural" or "organic" are these patterns for some people. I don't know what a good alternative would be.
The food industry benefits from, and therefore desires, this situation. As a result of the confusion, many people throw up their hands, and just eat whatever they want, or avoid one bad thing but gorge themselves on another. People just want an excuse to indulge, and conflicting, ever-changing studies are perfect for that. The food industry, of course, helps out by muddying the waters with poorly-designed, misleading studies.
In reality, sugar, dairy, meat, salt, saturated fat (even coconut oil), and other processed oils, are all bad for you in different ways. A good heuristic for your diet is to maximize the amount of whole plant-based foods you eat. "whole" just means not having good things taken out -- so whole grains instead of processed, whole fruit instead of juices and jams which have had peel and fiber removed and maybe sugar added, avocados instead of avocado oil, etc. Even preferring whole beans to tofu which has had fiber removed -- though tofu isn't bad for you, it's just that whole beans, or whole-bean products like tempeh, are better.
The longest-living people on the planet all eat some variant of this diet -- mostly or entirely whole plant foods, with minimal meat, dairy, added sugar, oil, etc. Unfortunately, as many places become wealthier and more westernized, people tend to start to copy the American diet, which brings with it all the typical the American health problems -- diabetes, heart disease, increased cancer risk, and all sorts of other inflammatory diseases.
I don't generally trust scientific reporting on nutrition. Instead, I like this site, nutritionfacts.org, where they have a team of researchers that read pretty much every nutrition study and analyze them very critically, gradually building up a picture of what we should eat for good health.
What consumers are told is healthy vs unhealthy changes from year to year. First, saturated fat was considered bad for you so they were removed in favor of trans fats. Then trans fats were considered unhealthy so manufacturers replaced them with palm oil. Then we found out palm oil isn't great, so they use coconut oil instead. Who knows if that will hold up.
Ultimately consumers want a pattern they can follow to get healthier foods. "Natural" or "organic" are these patterns for some people. I don't know what a good alternative would be.