There were plenty of tasty tidbits packed into the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee report that came out back in February.

As we reported, the panel of nutrition experts that wrote the report said it was OK to eat an egg a day. The scientific evidence now shows it won’t raise the amount of LDL cholesterol – the bad kind of cholesterol — in your blood or raise the risk of heart disease.

The panel, which advises the government on how to update the Dietary Guidelines every five years, also pushed the envelope a bit by recommending a plant-focused diet — not only because it promotes health, but because it’s also more environmentally sustainable.

But as two leading nutrition researchers argue in an opinion piece out this week in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association, there was another, even more important recommendation in the committee’s report that’s largely been overlooked: It’s all about fat.

For many years, the government has put a cap on how much fat we consume – recommending that we get only 20 to 35 percent of our daily calories from this nutrient.

What the new report advised instead was to “put the emphasis on optimizing types of dietary fat and not reducing total fat.” The advice to limit total fat to prevent obesity was also gutted.

This is a subtle but powerful change, Dariush Mozaffarian and David Ludwig write: “With these quiet statements, the DGAC report reversed nearly four decades of nutrition policy that placed priority on reducing total fat consumption throughout the population.”

Fat Thanks to Sona S. for the tip!

Source: Farewell, Low-Fat: Why Scientists Applaud Lifting A Ban On Fat : The Salt : NPR