I’d argue that the fear you speak of spread because it was profitable. I hit the 90’s in my mid-teens and boy howdy did it seem like every news outlet, especially the local ones, had their sites set on making us terrified to eat or drink things we previously consumed without much thought. Fear gets viewers, which is how revenue is generated, so there’s an arguable conflict of interest there.
The real problem is some of those claims and reports were true, but we were so inundated with the rhetoric that everything was going to kill us that many of us sort of lapsed into apathy about it. Stepping back, the food industry in the US clearly does not have consumer health at heart and we struggle to find healthy options that avoid heavy processing or synthetic fillers. Those parents who sheltered their babies back then may have been on to something when it came to stuff we consume and we should have been on the path to demand better from our food sources had more of us been more diligent with our grocery choices (myself included, at the time), but instead we ended up with bread that lasts unnaturally long and has an allowable amount of sawdust as an ingredient.