2000 Lunarstorm was the first advertisement-financed social media site.
2000 Fad Diet: Raw Foods Diet where foods eaten cannot be above a certain temperature and must be unprocessed and organic.
2001 Fad Diet: Spark People, a diet program website, was launched.
2001 Fad Diet: High Protein, Low Carb Diet (essentially an updated Atkins diet) was popularized.
2002 Friendster social media site was born.
2002 Fad Diet: The Paleo Diet resurfaced after Dr. Loren Cordain published a book with the same title.
2002 Fad Diet: Optavia, originally called Take Shape for Life and a subsidiary of Medifast, was born.
2002 Swedish toxicologists Margareta Tornqvis and Eden Tareke discovered acrylamide when researching the 1997 mystery surrounding Swedish railroad workers, fish, and livestock who had become paralyzed and died. Acrylamide was found in the sealant the railroad workers were using in a tunnel and was also produced during the Maillard Reaction when cooking foods. This research changed the food industry almost overnight, as they introduced gas chromatography and protein mass spectrometry to measure the Maillard reactions in their foods and reduce the carcinogen levels in final products.
2003 Susan Racette et al. published an article in the Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Journal stating that BMI underestimates health risk of Asian population.
2003 LinkedIn goes online.
2003 Myspace was launched, and for the first time, people could customize their profile.
2003 WordPress was born, which popularized blogging.
2004 Facebook was created.
2004 Fad Diet: The Coconut Diet replaced fats with coconut oil.
2005 Youtube video platform was launched.
2005 USDA My Pyramid was introduced. No daily servings were included. The side of the colorful pyramid depicted a figure ascending a staircase, intended to demonstrate the new exercise recommendations.
2005 Fad Diet: The Cheater’s Diet where you could cheat and eat what you wanted on the weekend, but diet the rest of the time.
2005 Fad Diet: BistroMD, a weight loss plan marketed to people over 50.
2006 Facebook was launched outside of the college sphere and quickly monopolized the market.
2006 Twitter was created.
2006 Part D Prescription Drug Benefit of Medicare was implemented. Drug companies initially didn’t want to sell medications with Medicare because they felt it would shrink their profits drastically. Thanks to lobbyists, bulk purchasing was excluded from the deal, leading to a $205 billion dollar profit to pharmaceutical companies over a 10 year period.
2006 Fad Diet: The Maple Syrup Diet where people drank a syrup-lemon drink instead of eating.
2006 The me too movement was founded, and the hashtag #MeToo went viral in 2017.
2007 Fad Diet: Juice Fasts and Master Cleanses claimed to eliminate toxins.
2007 Fitbit was created.
2007 Corporations now viewed lobbyists as a way to make the government their partner.
2008 Fad Diet: Lose It launched and centered around calorie counting.
2008 Businesses started participating in social media and advertisements began to boom.
2009 Check In’s were added to social media, thanks to Foursquare.
2009 The Endocrine Society published a study reporting that BMI overestimates fatness in black people.
2009 Weibo was launched in China as a hybrid of Facebook and Twitter. It is one of the largest social media platforms in China.
2009 Fad Diet: Whole 30, which claimed you could reduce inflammation in 30 days by following this diet. Inflammation avoidance and elimination became the new wellness buzz phrases.
2009 Fad Diet: Dr. Siegel’s Cookie Diet, which were meal replacement cookies with fiber.
2010 Fad Diet: Coconuts… just put it in everything.
2010 Instagram was launched.
2011 Snapchat started.
2011 WeChat was developed by China.
2011 Fad Diet: The HCG diet involved injecting HCG (pregnancy hormones) and eating as low as 800 kcals per day. The FDA pursued legal actions against the claims and made a public statement about how dangerous this was. This diet was mostly encouraged by naturopaths as a way to fight obesity.
2011 The USDA MyPlate was published. It was a colorful depiction of a circular plate divided into 4 groups, with vegetables and fruits taking up one half, grains and proteins taking up the other half, and a small circle representing dairy off to the side.
2012 Fad Diet: Gluten Free Diets gained popularity and claimed to reduce inflammation and help with gut health.
2013 Black Lives Matter (BLM). One year prior, on February 26, 2012, Treyvon Martin, an unarmed, Black teenager, was stalked and shot while walking through his father’s neighborhood. His murder was acquitted. In response to this injustice, BLM was formed. They work to abolish white supremacy and empower black communities.
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2013 Fad Diet: Paleo made its 3rd comeback.
2014 Fad Diet: K-E Feeding Tube Diet marketed to brides to use a feeding tube for 10 days.
2014 The Farm Bill was now a $100 billion/year piece of legislation that gets renegotiated every 5-7 years and includes food production, nutrition assistance, habitat conservation, and international trade. This particular cycle, it took 4 years of Congressional negotiations to revise the bill. Funding for socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers (in place since 1990) was cut in half. That money went towards expanding military veteran farmers and new farmer training. It increased the amount of money new farmers could borrow to purchase farmland and prioritized socially disadvantaged farmers in the loan process. It marginalized the conservation programs, which helped farmers address climate change and rebuild soil and water systems. It did however, maintain incentives for new and socially disadvantaged farmers, and now including veteran farmers. Farmers continue to get subsidies, but instead of direct payments, the farmers get paid if the crop prices drop or if the crop yield is poor. The bill does nothing to address the sources of market volatility. The bill does include a mandate for a Whole Farm Diversified Risk Management Insurance product for specialty crop farms, organic farms and those farms who are focused on local markets. These farms have been left out of insurance options in the past. The bill cut $8 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP,) which equates to a loss of $90/month for 850,000 households who participate in this program, most of which are elderly or with children. Funding for community food projects is increased and creates a Food Insecurity Nutrition Incentive grant program to encourage fruit and vegetable consumption in SNAP participants. Industrial hemp now has the go ahead for research purposes in 9 states.
2016 21st Century Cures Act. Widely supported by pharmaceutical companies, this act allows medical devices and drugs to be approved by the FDA quicker by allowing manufacturers, under certain conditions, to bypass randomized clinical trials that ensure drug safety.
2016 TikTok was born.
2016 Donald J Trump was elected as President and incited the largest spike in white supremacist violence, hate crimes and spread of lies and misinformation ever in the United States history that lasted beyond his one term of presidency.
2017 Fad Diet: Ketogenic Diets have been used to treat epilepsy under extensive medical supervision since the 1920s. This diet became mainstream as a high fat, high protein, and low to no carb diet to put the body into Ketosis… though in reality it makes your brain and body run more like a dilapidated old car and is extremely dangerous for kidney function.
2018 Farm Bill. The 2018 iteration of the Farm Bill made some improvements, but there are still glaring inadequacies. On the bright side, the bill provided needed improvement to the Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network, a program designed to assist farmers with concerns surrounding stress and mental health. It also extended SNAP funding and established payments to cover crop rotations for soil health and “advanced grazing management,” as well as “compressive conservation planning.” Additionally, there is funding for seed research to help farmers adapt to a changing climate. Smaller farmer assistance programs were combined to create the Farming Opportunities Training and Outreach (FOTO), which is intended to help future farmers gain the skills, knowledge, and resources they need to succeed, particularly for underserved farmers. There are also “important improvements to programs in the farm safety net that make sure farmers of color are not left behind,” including increased reporting surrounding Underserved Producers and “recommendations for improving participation in insurance programs.” Owners of land that has been generationally passed down without formal estate or will documentation (which means there is no clear title to the land for its heirs) will be able to access programs that will “enable them to protect the soil and water, and continue to operate viable farms that feed their communities.” These farmers are often African American. There is also $40 million in scholarship funding for agricultural colleges that were created to “serve African American students who could not access higher education due to segregation.” This iteration also mandates equitable relief for “producers who received incorrect servicing by the USDA when applying for direct loans.” Industrial hemp has been removed from the controlled substances list, allowing states and other local entities to establish their own regulations surrounding the crop. It’s not all good, though. There is no additional funding for the Farm to School Grant Program, and schools still cannot acquire regional and local foods for their students. There are also decreases to the Community Food Projects Grant Program, and taxpayer money is still used “to subsidize factory farms.” Long-term cuts to the Conservation Stewardship Program have been created, which will total over $5 billion after 2023. In the 2014 Farm Bill, there were cuts to conservation, and those funds were not returned in the 2018 iteration. There is no money allotted for climate change research, and there is still not enough funding for socially disadvantaged and beginning farmers. Additionally, this iteration “widens loopholes for wealthy mega-farms to exploit commodity and crop insurance subsidies, allowing nieces, nephews, and cousins who may have never worked on the farm to receive taxpayer-funded subsidies. This will continue to drive consolidation in the farm sector, allowing the biggest farms to keep growing and gobble up smaller and midsized operations that are so critical to the wellbeing of rural communities” (Farm Aid, 2018).
2018 Parler was launched as a free-speech platform that turned out to be a safe haven for white supremacists to organize violence.
2018 Fad Diet: Veganism, no animal products, not even honey, and your clothes just became more expensive too.
2018 Fad Diet: ProBiotics and Digestive Health.
2020 $306,226,988 was spent on pharmaceutical and health product lobbying, and there were 1502 registered lobbyists for this group alone, almost 64% of whom were former Government employees
2020 May 25, 2020 George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer. His death sparked global outrage outside of just the black and indigenous community and launched a year of protests and public calls for reform on all institutional systems that keep Indigenous people, people of color and Asians oppressed.
2021 Multiple Canadian Indian Residential Schools were discovered to have mass graves of thousands of Indigenous people, mostly children. These innocent lives were tortured, starved, and abused physically, sexually, and emotionally.