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Linus Pauling won two Nobel Prizes, which is two more than most of us will ever win, and he used that extraordinary credibility to convince a generation of Americans that massive doses of Vitamin C could cure the common cold, fight cancer, and generally reverse the indignities of being mortal. The medical establishment disagreed. The supplement industry did not. The orange juice people were delighted.
For several delirious decades, Nobel Prize winners, supplement entrepreneurs, and your aunt Cheryl were all in agreement: megadosing vitamins would effectively end human disease and make conventional medicine look like medieval bloodletting. The science eventually disagreed. The industrial tubs of fish oil did not get the memo.
For the better part of a century, a rotating cast of nutritionists, futurists, and pharmaceutical optimists swore that the messiness of actual food — the chopping, the chewing, the cleanup — would soon be engineered out of the American diet entirely, replaced by a tidy daily capsule delivering perfect, scientific nutrition. Americans responded by spending $50 billion a year on supplements they wash down with a cheeseburger.
For six decades, America's most enthusiastic nutrition evangelists promised that the right combination of vitamins would render hospitals quaint relics of a more ignorant age. The hospitals are still here. The supplement aisle, however, now occupies roughly the same square footage as a small airport.
In the groovy 1970s, nutrition experts and social scientists confidently predicted that America's newfound obsession with health food would bankrupt every burger joint by 1985. They were watching McDonald's stock price while counting bean sprouts.
America's health experts have declared coffee both a deadly poison and a life-saving superfood, sometimes within the same decade. The whiplash-inducing reversals reveal more about expert confidence than caffeine science.
For over a century, America's brightest minds have been absolutely certain that we're about fifteen minutes away from running out of water. Meanwhile, Americans keep building water parks and washing their cars. Here's how the doomsday predictions kept shifting while the sprinklers kept spinning.
DuPont executives, Popular Mechanics writers, and polymer chemists promised Americans a gleaming synthetic future where plastic would upgrade everything from dinner plates to entire houses. They got their wish in ways they definitely didn't expect.
From radio to VCRs to streaming, entertainment executives have spent a century predicting their own demise with each new technology. The only thing that died was their credibility.
From grapefruit gospels to low-fat commandments, American diet experts have marched out miracle cures for obesity with the confidence of snake oil salesmen. Each generation's breakthrough solution somehow required the next generation's breakthrough solution.
For three decades, America's top nutrition authorities declared war on the humble egg, warning that your morning omelet was basically a heart attack on a plate. Then science changed its mind, and the experts quietly moved on to terrorizing other foods.