The committee's own contemporaries, including the American Medical Association, argued the randomized-trial evidence available at the time was not conclusive; a 2015 systematic review of that era's trials (Harcombe et al., Open Heart) found they did not support the fat-reduction guidance. The guidance nonetheless anticipated later epidemiological findings that some public health bodies still endorse in modified form, so the historical evidence question and the current guideline question are not the same question.
What would resolve this A historical consensus among nutrition scientists and historians of science on how to weigh the era's limited randomized-trial evidence against later, larger observational and trial evidence; this atlas records the dispute rather than adjudicating it.
OpenNutrition science, history of scienceZoe Harcombe, Julien S Baker, Stephen Mark Cooper, Bruce Davies, Nicholas Sculthorpe, James J DiNicolantonio, Fergal Grace, Harcombe et al. 2015, Open Heart: RCT Evidence Behind the 1977/1983 Dietary Fat Guidelines