If you swap out a little bit of butter or fatty meat for foods like nuts or vegetable oils, you're less likely to have a heart attack or die from heart disease.

If you swap just a little bit of butter or fatty meat in your diet with healthier fats like those in nuts or fish, you might lower your bad cholesterol and reduce your risk of heart disease by a small amount.

Eating more saturated fat—like in butter or red meat—doesn’t seem to make people more likely to get heart disease, based on this big review of studies.

For people who already have heart disease, eating foods high in saturated fats—like butter or red meat—doesn’t seem to make their chances of having a heart attack or dying any higher or lower.

If you swap out butter and fatty meats for oils like olive or sunflower oil, you might slightly lower your chance of having a heart problem — but the evidence isn’t super strong.

If you swap out trans fats (like in fried foods) for healthy fats like those in fish or nuts, your risk of heart disease drops a lot—what you replace it with matters more than just cutting fat.