Major studies don't show it's safe to "gorge" on anything. They do suggest that it's safe to eat butter. Now we need to establish where gorging starts. I eat a half liter of heavy cream, plus an ounce or two of butter for cooking eggs etc. a day. I'm in maintenance, and doing quite well in a lot of ways on this diet. "Gorge" is not a health term, it's a moralistic one. If you want to judge my moral character, you have bigger fish to fry.




That's right, public policies generally do not require the sort of evidence that actually proves anything. This might not mean they should be removed, except perhaps from my consideration when I'm deciding what to eat.

Sometimes it's said that randomized control studies in humans are impractical, because they're unethical. I think there's a big reason--even if you accept correlations between eggs or red meat or saturated fat and various disease as causativie--and causative in the right direction--even after that assumption, the effect size is often so small that a randomized, controlled study is prohibitively expensive. Even in mice, you often have to cheat and design a mouse where a particular dietary intervention has a strong enough effect to measure in a reasonable sized group.