Do saturated fats cause heart disease? This question has once again come under consideration by the Dietary Guidelines Advisory committee (DGAC), an expert group appointed every five years to update the science for the nation’s most important nutrition policy, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA). Unfortunately, at the committee’s final meeting, in March, it became clear that the group overseeing the review of saturated fats is highly unbalanced and one-sided. Indeed, the 4-person subcommittee includes one of nutrition’s staunchest antagonists to saturated fats and another member who has strong religious beliefs that preclude a diet high in saturated fats. The other two members offered no alternative views at the public meeting.

The staunch opponent to saturated fats is Linda Van Horn, a professor at Northwestern University, who suggested, at the March meeting that the current 10% limit on saturated fats should be dropped even lower, to 7%. Only one person on the full DGAC raised an objection.

This person cited a recent consensus report, by a group of 11 leading nutrition scientists from the U.S., Canada, and Denmark, which concluded that the caps on saturated fats were no longer justified, and indeed could be causing harm. This group submitted a formal public comment to USDA and also wrote a letter to the Secretaries of the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services (USDA-HHS), which co-issue the guidelines.

In the letter to the Secretaries, they wrote, “we respectfully request….that [you] give serious and immediate consideration to lifting the limits placed on saturated fat intake for the upcoming 2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA). This request is based on a review of the most rigorous scientific data available.”

They added, “…anything but the most rigorous science available is likely to have unintended or even potentially harmful consequences to health.”

This group of prominent scientists comprised three former members of the DGAC including a member of the 2015 Subcommittee on Saturated Fats and the Chair of the entire 2005 committee. The group has said that they are working towards publishing their findings in an academic journal.

This group of scientists is notable for their stature in the field, yet in fact they represent a small sample of the growing number of experts worldwide who have concluded that the caps on saturated fats are not supported by the evidence, as seen in numerous peer review journals, over the past decade. Last year, a group of mostly European scientists came out with a statement in The BMJ that, like the U.S. group, found no strong evidence to continue saturated-fat restrictions. The accumulating evidence, as reviewed by all these scientists, strongly suggests that saturated fats have been unfairly targeted, based on weak evidence, and do not, according to more than a dozen large independent meta-analyses, have any effect on cardiovascular or total mortality.

Yet clearly none of this science nor the thousands of public comments submitted to the committee on this data, including one by the Nutrition Coalition, with a comprehensive dossier on the last decade of evidence, seem to have been considered by the tiny subcommittee of only four people who hold the awesome power of deciding the future of saturated fats.

The caps on these fats are important because they determine whether butter, eggs, and regular meat could be liberated for greater consumption. These natural foods contain many nutrients that are essential for human health. Indeed, in the limited quantities in which these foods are currently allowed due to the saturated-fat caps, the DGA fails to meet nutritional adequacy goals for “potassium, vitamin D, vitamin E, and choline.” Further, the DGA would suffer even greater shortfalls, in B Vitamins and iron, if it did not recommend 3-5 servings of refined grains per day, because these grains—and not whole grains—are enriched and fortified. However, refined grains are known to drive diabetes, obesity, and also to be worse for cardiovascular health than saturated fats, according to the peer-reviewed literature. Thus, the current limits on saturated fats are causing unnecessary nutritional deficiencies. The Dietary Guidelines have a vast influence not only over public opinion but also everything from school lunches and food for the elderly to hospital food, and military rations. The guidelines have also been the curricula for K-12 teachers, doctors, nurses, dietitians, and nutritionists across the U.S.

Whether government-funded institutional food in such places as prisons, nursing homes and schools will be allowed to serve foods that naturally contain essential nutrients will thus depend depend on this four-person subcommittee.

The danger of a committee being unbalanced over important issues is something federal regulators take seriously. Indeed, the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) repeatedly mentions the importance of having “balance” on a committee as well as the need for a “divergence” of opinion. Noting that the DGACs have historically lacked such balance, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, in the first-ever outside peer-review of the DGA process, elaborated on the importance of managing bias—in other words, of having a balance of opinion on both sides of an issue.

The USDA appeared to take this advice seriously and in its charter for the 2020 DGA stated that it would assemble a committee that “will be balanced fairly in its membership in terms of the points of view represented” and that “[s]teps will be taken to encourage fresh points of view…including members with varying points of view on the topics and questions to be examined by the Committee.” However, on the subject of saturated fats, these intentions were not realized.

The four members of the Subcommittee on Dietary Fats are: