Since it actually starts with the medical diet studies (based on young healthy male participants) which determines what a "healthy diet"/"healthy weight"/"healthy lifestyle" is for everyone on the planet. They then do a press release, and the media passes that on to the public.

The public is exposed to that information at the same time the food manufacturers are exposed to it.

But the food manufacturers aren't going to go all-in on producing food that meets those recommendations immediately - that would be absolute folly.

Sure, they will start figuring out how they might accomplish those recommendations in what they produce, whether it's reducing fat content or increasing fiber, etc. Changing production takes quite a while - years actually. If they make a product that has more fiber, can their current equipment handle that? Or do they need to make changes to the equipment to keep the equipment from breaking down 10 times a day? So while they're waiting to see how the public takes to new food recommendations (conducting focus groups, surveys, watching their own sales to see whether foods that naturally are closer to those recommendations sell better than those which don't meet the new food recommendations) to make it clear what the public wants (meaning: what the public will buy) before they start creating new foods or revamping how they make foods to fit the dietary parameters set up by the healthy diet research.

Meanwhile, they also do lots of taste testing of a new product long before production starts - if they're trying to make a low fat cheese, then they start out with their test kitchens producing various types of low fat cheese - lots of taste testing. And very likely lots of totally unnatural ingredients included to try to imitate the taste and texture of all the missing fat until they finally have something that not only meets the health recommendations but gets as close as possible to real cheese taste and texture (no matter how far that falls from the mark). Once they have some potential low fat cheeses that don't have the taste and texture of mud in comparison to real cheese, they start doing taste testing with focus groups. From that they determine which ones are most likely to succeed with members of the public who actually want a low fat cheese. If they find that only a very small percentage of the public is interested in low fat cheese, they're not going to immediately convert all their production to low fat - they'll only convert just enough production equipment to meet the potential demand. (They also need to figure out what they're going to do with all the cream they remove from the milk used to make the low fat cheese, because it's an expense removing all that cream - they're going to try to recoup as much of that expense as possible, and hopefully even make a profit on that too - maybe add cream cheese or marscapone to their product line, because they know not all of their customers are going to go low fat.)

My point is that it's not really the food industry telling us what to eat - it's what passes for diet research, the dieticians, and the market analysis that shapes what the manufacturer produces.

The fashion industry on the other hand... that's why I sew. At least with the fabric outlets around here, I can find fabrics I like, in colors and prints I like, and make the style of clothes I like... because I'm old enough and rebellious enough that I just don't care anymore at all what's considered fashionable.

But then I do the same thing when it comes to food - I cook what I like and makes me feel better. As long as I can still get the basic ingredients, I'm fine.