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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.