The amounts of protein per day is also debated as are total calories, and carb/fat ratios.
And the number of meals per day and the optimal amounts of fasts.
Fat is not returning with a vengeance.
Common sense advice has not changed particularly much over the past twenty years.
There are some things - dietary cholesterol isn't seen as evil (but the foods it's in are).
But other stuff - replacing fat for sugar (replacing a real salad dressing with a low fat (but high sugar) dressing) has always been seen as bad advice.
Of course, if people pay attention to wing-nuts pumping out crank advice then yes, everything changes every week. Peas cause cancer one week, red cabbage causes it the next.
Most people do not need "optimal", they need "good enough". Most people are not at "good enough", they're at high fat, high sugar, high salt, high poor quality foods, low exercise. Someone drinking 4 litres of cola a day and eating a jar of peanut butter on crackers doesn't need to know whether their total calories should be 2,000 kCalorie per day or 2,500 kCalorie per day. They just need to eat less than 7,000kCal per day.
With these sustainable results, it's not going back. Now traditional dietitians seem quite outdated and retrograde (because of their results) in comparison.
I don't know that this is an issue of HCLF vs LCHF diets as much as the previous dominance of HCLF diets though. I'm not a biologist/nutritionist at all, but it seems like HCLF and balanced diets work for some people, otherwise we'd all be obese or constantly hungry. But they definitely never worked for me. We already know that people's bodies differ in how well they process different foods (allergies, Celiac, alcohol flush, etc), so I wouldn't find it too surprising if different people had different ideal macro ratios.
No, definitely false. Dietary cholesterol has definitely been considered a bad thing and for the last 30 years people were told to avoid it, by heart doctors, in the form of avoiding cholesterol in your diet, in that specific terminology. It wasn't just that cholesterol was in "bad" things, the things were bad because they had cholesterol.
"But other stuff - replacing fat for sugar (replacing a real salad dressing with a low fat (but high sugar) dressing) has always been seen as bad advice."
Also complete tripe. Low fat diets have been advocated for decades now without a word given to what the fat was replaced with, because the fat was considered So Obviously Bad it didn't matter, anything was better.
The dietary consensus is in fact undergoing significant change (still in the early phases of penetrating the consensus but I'm pretty sure its inevitable at this point), but this is exactly how I expect the authorities to wiggle out from under the fact they were giving fatally-inaccurate advice for decades... straight-up historical revisionism. We never said cholesterol was bad for you, we never were universally against salt (just for certain at-risk people), we always said many fats were good for you, we certainly NEVER EVER EVER advocated transfats as a healthy alternative to fats how dare you even suggest that we did such a thing, and we have always been at war with Eurasia.
I will not forget.
> Low fat diets have been advocated for decades now without a word given to what the fat was replaced with, because the fat was considered So Obviously Bad it didn't matter, anything was better.
No, this is wrong. Calm dieticians have been suggesting that people cut down fats, but not replace those with weird sugar-foods. You'll be able to point to very many untrained, unscientific, 'clinical nutritionists' who give weird advice. But I've already said that cranks exist and have always given weird advice.
Salt is still harmful, btw.
> The dietary consensus is in fact undergoing significant change
It really really isn't.
"Don't eat too much. Eat less red meat; eat more fruit and vegetables. Reduce the amount of fats, sugars, and salt that you eat. Reduce the amount of processed foods (especially some processed meats). Try to eat more fresh food."
That's been the consistent message for many many years now.
However, I'd challenge you with this. Go back and look at how the cholesterol error was made. It's a instructive microcosm of how we got to having such bad advice about health, where a tiny little sample of the vast multidimensional space of health was taken because we happened to develop a test that could see cholesterol, and we radically, radically over-interpreted the results. (Arguably without even doing the test we could have done right then, which is to directly ask the question of whether eating cholestThen ask if you're really, really sure that's the only time that happened, in our set of health advice that largely was created in the same era (if not a decade or two before) and hasn't changed since. Because I do agree that consensus hasn't changed much over the past 50 years; what I am saying is that change is inevitably coming, and if you know where to look you can already see its shape.
"Salt is still harmful, btw."
There are significant studies that suggest it's only harmful if you already have hypertension. There's also some serious question in my mind about how salt can be harming the population when studies can also show that people actually maintain a very constant level of salt intake and have historically maintained that same salt intake for as far back as we have records that can reasonably answer that question.
"Calm dieticians have been suggesting that people cut down fats, but not replace those with weird sugar-foods."
And I still think this is revisionism. I've been reading recommendations from the government and other sources for my entire lifetime and I've only recently seen anyone making the point that replacing fat with sugar is a bad thing, and it is usually still people not in the scientific mainstream until very recently. (Sure, Atkins said it in the 1970s, but I'm sure you wouldn't count that.) The government has been pushing low-fat everything for a long time. If perhaps the point was being made in some academic journal somewhere, I don't really care, I'm talking about what the general population was told. The idea that low-fat itself might be bad can probably be dated to when it finally broke through that transfats (margarine) was worse than what it was replacing (butter), which was a relatively recent development (~10 years ago), and that's when it finally became politically viable to even ask the question of whether low-fat foods were actually better for you.
And I could quibble further (the badness of red meat is highly dubious from what I can see, fruit's virtues seem oversold), but it doesn't matter. The change is coming, because the advice we've been given for decades is unbelievably awful, "our grandchildren will ask us how we could believe that" awful. It won't stand, and when the authorities try to rewrite history to claim nothing has changed I will not forget that it's not what they told us.
I do not see how natural sea salt is harmful? For ages people had dried salt from the sea to be used in foods as well as cleanser for skin and balsam for hair. Just my 2 cents.
Granted, people overdo the 'carbs are evil' thing.