Gary, do you see the internet as more so hindering or helping the effort to combat pathological science?

The road to hell was no doubt paved with good intentions. 

Is it possible that the branch of "the mess" dealing with nutrition's impact on our health, found its humble beginnings in well-intentioned junk science? "Eating more than you burn makes you fat" sounds about as simple & sexy as "spending more than you make, makes you poor". It's almost too easy, one would question the reason to even test the hypothesis at all, let alone doing so with rigorous scientific protocol.....time and time again. 

Perhaps at first, the ominous 'they' only deceived themselves (not a crime), and only later did the external deception begin, when the unintended consequences of state-sponsored malnutrition became so profitable....for so many.

My comment on Young's rat experiment is that while it is more perfect than recent phone calls, the interpretation may be premature at least as described in the excerpt. It is important to attend precisely to what stimuli have been altered and what behavior is measured. As described, covering the floor with sand was able to INHIBIT a learned behavior -- almost surely, temporarily. We know rats could re-learn the location of the food -- possibly more slowly although that is also not known or easily learn from scratch on sand.  A great deal is known about animals' ability to navigate space and the so-called "place cells" of the hippocampus in rats, have reached a degree of sophistication that would make it inappropriate to call this cargo cult science. In fact, we may learn from what's wrong with Young's interpretation: Be careful not to assume that a necessary stimulus is also sufficient until you've removed other stimuli. Most important, and here we have a good analogy to the mess in nutritional research, do not assume that one variable is controlling in a multivariable set up. All Young knew is that as he did the experiment, sound was required but reasonable hypotheses to test are that sound is required if and only if the lights are on (rats prefer the dark). The idea that, e.g. saturated fat of the thousands of nutritional stimuli is reliably controlling is absurd in the absence of appropriate controls and high relative risk which are both rare. 
Ref: Muller, R and Kubie, J.  (1990) The firing of hippocampal place cells predicts the future position of freely moving rats.  Journal of Neuroscience 
DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.09-12-04101.1989