This is what sets my alarm bells off the most loudly. When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, we heard over and over how the science was settled. Fat was bad for you. Nutritionists the world over were supposedly on board with the food pyramid. Contrarians like Atkins who had objections to the science and advocated something different were ignored -- or to the extent that they received media attention, they were ridiculed or held up as misguided or frauds.

It was an extremely painful and costly example of top-down, politically motivated, government funded "science". Although we learned some lessons about sugar vs fat vs protein, society learned almost nothing about avoiding this kind of trap again in the future.