If you graduated in the mid-1990s, you probably remember overhead projectors, dial-up Internet, and a world that still thought Pluto was a planet. But you also remember a lot of “facts” we were taught in class—facts that have since been revised, debunked, or replaced with better science. Education is a moving target, and in the nearly 30 years since 1996, a surprising number of lessons didn’t age so well.

Here’s a look back at some of the biggest ones.

---

Nutrition Myths

• Fat is bad. We were taught to avoid fat at all costs, and the USDA’s Food Pyramid told us to load up on bread, cereal, and pasta. Now we know that healthy fats are essential and that refined carbs and added sugars are far more harmful.
• Egg yolks raise cholesterol. Not really. Dietary cholesterol doesn’t directly translate into higher blood cholesterol for most people.

---

Fitness Fumbles

• Static stretching is the best warm-up. Today, sports science points to dynamic movement as the better pre-workout prep. Static stretching is more effective afterward.
• Spot reduction works. Crunches won’t burn belly fat. You lose fat system-wide, not in one spot.

---

Medical Missteps

• Ulcers come from stress. By the mid-1990s, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren had already proven that H. pylori bacteria was the culprit, but classrooms were still teaching stress and spicy food as the cause.
• All recycling helps. Recycling was presented as a cure-all for waste, but much of the plastic collected never actually got recycled.

---

Technology Turnarounds

• The Internet is a fad. A lot of adults—and some teachers—framed the early web as a passing novelty. Today, it runs everything from your phone to your bank account.
• Pluto is a planet. That held true until 2006, when Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet.

---

History Rewrites

• Columbus “discovered” America. Textbooks often skipped over the civilizations already here and downplayed the destruction colonization caused.
• Sanitized history. Many classrooms either omitted or glossed over Japanese internment camps, the Tulsa Race Massacre, and systemic discrimination. These topics have since moved closer to the mainstream.

---

Everyday Myths

• We use only 10% of our brains. Brain imaging shows that’s nonsense—the whole brain lights up with activity.
• Tongue taste map. Remember the chart with sweet only at the tip and bitter at the back? Debunked. Every part of the tongue can detect all the tastes.
• Only five senses. We were told sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell were it. Today, scientists recognize balance, proprioception, temperature, pain, and more as additional senses.

---

Final Thought

The ’90s classroom gave us a lot of floppy disks, film projectors, and “facts” that didn’t hold up. But that’s the beauty of learning—it keeps evolving. What was in your biology book in 1996 might be completely rewritten by 2026. The trick is not to cling to old knowledge, but to keep updating what we know.