"The US Department of Agriculture, along with the agency that is now called Health and Human Services, first released a set of national dietary guidelines back in 1980. That 20-page booklet trained its focus primarily on three health villains: fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol. Recently, research has come out strongly in support of dietary fat and cholesterol as benign, rather than harmful, additions to [a] person's diet. Saturated fat seems poised for a similar pardon. 'The science that these guidelines were based on was wrong,' [said] Robert Lustig, a neuro-endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco. In particular, the idea that cutting fat from a person's diet would offer some health benefit was never backed by hard evidence."