The campaign against saturated fat was itself spearheaded by the vegetable oil and processed food industries. I remember hearing a series of CBC radio broadcasts about this a number of years ago, and the role played by these industrial interests in shaping a pseudo-scientific nutritional consensus was striking. All that nonsense about how eggs will kill you, etc. etc., which was foisted on the public for a generation, was propaganda.

It seems the ship is now slowly being righted. The OP looks like a great example of this. I wonder how much mainstream attention it will pick up.

Edit: one interesting thing I remember from that radio series, which does not often get mentioned, is how much fear people had about heart disease in the 1950s and 60s. The meme of the seemingly-healthy middle-aged man who suddenly drops dead of a heart attack no longer has the power it once did. (Other fears have taken its place.) But in the early days of the campaign against saturated fat, this fear was widespread and highly exploitable, and it was deliberately and very successfully exploited. (This, at least, was what the radio program argued, credibly to me at the time. I'd like to hear it again.)

Also supported by the NIH. Why is it that Dairy is a conflict of interest, and the NIH isn't? These researchers may have trouble every getting an NIH grant again. People don't realize the kind of influence that our government funded research system has on the outcome- it is perhaps the main reason why the result of this study might be surprising to someone.

Overall the dairy industry would probably greatly benefit from a recognition that saturated fat is healthy. However, the economics of Dairy with fat/saturated fat is actually kind of strange. On the one hand, dairy ends up getting demonized. But on the other hand everybody buys low-fat milk and low-fat cottage cheese. This lets the re-use the most valuable part of the milk (cream) at low costs for butter, ice cream, etc. Even though those foods have been demonized too, people will always want to eat ice cream.

"Also supported by the NIH. Why is it that Dairy is a conflict of interest, and the NIH isn't?"

Because "Overall the dairy industry would probably greatly benefit from a recognition that saturated fat is healthy."

Again, I'm not saying the research is invalid. It would benefit everyone to accurately know what's healthy, what's not, and what doesn't matter so much.

And yes, of course, an industry that sells saturated fat should know as much about saturated fat as possible. But this is the world, and it makes sense to treat such a study and its participants with healthy skepticism.

An addendum to your last point: people want to eat REAL ice cream.

The only time I've heard of a non-dairy ice cream actually being called good by anyone but a health-freak was coconut based (incidentally, not coconut flavoured).