The trend for the last 40-plus years was calories = obese, and fat = 2.5xcalories-per-gram of carbs or protein, therefore “low fat = good”.
However, a lot of low fat foods would add an excess of sugar to make the food palatable with the fat missing - resulting in food that still had plenty of calories. If you start a discussion about diets, fat, carbs, etc. you will inevitably trigger the not-yet-established (so probably does not qualify for the OP) discussion that different types of food have different effects - i.e. carbs, and especially sugar, trigger insulin which can result in fat storage which other foods - proteins, fat - will not. (I.e. Atkins diet). But certainly the paradigm “calories cause obesity” needs refinement and the nuances are being hashed out these days.
And even the people who say that Pluto should still be a planet mostly just ignore Eris (Eris? What’s that? They never told us about any Eris when I was a kid!), even though it’s bigger than Pluto, and thus has a stronger claim to planethood.
That article is 10 years old, and subsequent research a) does not seem to indicate a viral cause, and b) seems to bolster the ‘warped protein’ hypothesis.
In July 2015, after nearly ten years of Eris being considered the ninth-largest object known to directly orbit the sun, close-up imagery from the New Horizons mission more accurately determined Pluto’s volume to be slightly larger than Eris’s, rather than slightly smaller as previously thought.*
Yes, but most people apparently just get a list of planets to memorize. The nature of those planets must be largely glossed over, or people would have had the idea that Pluto is an oddball that doesn’t really fit in to either of the two subcategories of planets. If they knew this, they wouldn’t have been shocked, surprised, or upset that it got the heave-ho when we did find a class of objects that it does fit into.
I just assumed that everyone was familiar with Bruno Bettelheim’s “refrigerator mother” theory of autism, which he formulated in the 50s, and wrote about in a book called The Empty Fortress in 1967 that was the bible of autism for almost two decades.
Bettelheim treated autism (for families who could afford it) in hospitals that used psychoanalysis to attempt to get patients to dredge up non-existent trauma in order to exorcise it. If families couldn’t afford psychoanalysis, their kids went to state hospitals.
Even once parents, and specifically mothers were no longer blamed, autistic children were still thought to be “emotionally disturbed” or traumatized in some way, all through the 80s.
IMO, the reason that Andrew Wakefield was heralded like a savior by families with autistic children, was that in spite of all his many levels of wrongness, and the damage he did to the credibility of vaccines, he was suggesting that autism might be a medical disorder, and not a psychiatric one, back when a lot of people still thought it was the result of abusive parenting.
I have no love for the man, and it’s time for people to shape up-- a whole generation of autistic children have come and gone since his Lancet article. But I understand those first few parents who said “Finally someone believes we love our child.”
Astronomically speaking, I’d say that the Hubble’s Deep Field image(s) changed the view of Universe, namely the huge(!) increase of galaxies, etc, that astronomers had no idea even existed.
The discovery (and rough-imaging a few so far) of exoplanets was relatively stunning, too. They seem to be quite common amongst stars everywhere.
But those weren’t a surprise to astronomers. They looked at a patch of apparently empty space for much longer than had been looked at before. Of course they’re going to see stuff too dim for shorter duration images. That’s expected. No paradigms were overturned.
The fact that there were planets around other stars is no stunner. Again, those were expected. It would be a surprise if we didn’t find any.
What was unexpected was very large planets very close to some stars, the hot Jupiters. That caused a revision of solar system formation theories.
I do remember common wisdom (was it also current psychology thought?) was that domineering mothers and wimpy / absent fathers caused male homosexuality - right up until about the 70’s when gay lib pushed a more logical point of view…
And I recall an interview with Bruno Bettelheim where he said he was against sex education for a very simple reason - if you tell teenagers that sex is not harmful, that it feels good and is nothing to be ashamed of - what do you expect a bunch of bored teenagers to do?
Maybe. My point was that a simplistic “less calories” option with no regard for nuances was not the anti-obesity formula it was alleged to be. The theory also was to blame all problems on FAT, not SUGAR, so that the theory was a Atkins-type diet aimed at fat rather than carbs would mean less weight gain… when it appears to have had the opposite effect. Of course, there was a “pure liquid protein only” diet fad back in the 1980’s that was remarkably effective, if you could survive the heart attack.
There are nuances, such as the thermal effect of food, but less calories in then out is still the basic formula for losing weight.
There wasn’t a scientific paradigm that blamed all problems on fat. And there is no opposite effect. Your statements about insulin are wrong.
In the link below Alan Aragon goes over a debate he had with Dr. Lustig (the sugar is evil guy) and shows it’s not as simple as blaming cherry picking higher sugar consumption for things like diabetes and obesity.