The vibrant certainty of scientists claiming to be authorities on these matters is disturbing, George V. Mann, a biochemist at Vanderbilts medical school wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Ambitious scientists and food companies, he said, had transformed [a] fragile hypothesis into treatment dogma.
Indeed, the subsequent 40 years of science have proven that, if nothing else, the warning against saturated fats was simplistic.
By itself, cutting saturated fats appears to do little to reduce heart disease. Several evidence reviews -- essentially summing up years of research -- have found no link.
There is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease, said one published in 2010 in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Current evidence does not clearly support guidelines linking saturated fat and heart disease, according to a review of experiments and observational studies published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Saturated fats are not associated with mortality, heart disease, strokes or type 2 diabetes, a major review in the British Medical Journal reported in July.
One of the most noted experiments on fats was the Women's Health Initiative, which involved more than 48,000 older women. Some had counseling to eat less fat and more vegetables and fruits; others continued, more or less, with their normal diets. Subjects in the diet group cut their saturated fat intake from 13 percent of their diet to 10 percent, as well as their consumption of other fats. Their levels of "bad" cholesterol dropped. Yet when it came to heart disease, researchers found no significant difference between the two groups.
To many critics, the trouble with the fat warning was not merely academic.
The campaign to reduce fat in the diet has had some pretty disastrous consequences, Walter Willett, dean of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health has said. With more fat-free products than ever, Americans got fatter.
