Feeding rats a diet super high in fat leads to fat building up in their livers after 16 weeks — kind of like what happens in fatty liver disease. Scientists saw this through lab tests, scans, and...

Eating too many carbs and calories — especially from sugary or processed foods — is what mainly causes fatty liver, not eating fat. Cutting out carbs or going on a carnivore diet might help reverse it.

Feeding rats a diet super high in fructose for 4 months doesn’t really hurt their liver overall, even though a few tiny signs of fat buildup show up under a microscope.

In mice, eating a super high-fat, very low-carb diet causes fat to build up quickly in the liver — way more than with other diets — which could be harmful.

If you have a bigger waist, eating more processed foods might be more strongly linked to fat building up in your liver.

Eating a lot of ultra-processed foods, like packaged snacks and sugary drinks, might be linked to more fat building up in the liver among adults in the U.S., according to a liver scan measure. People who eat the most of these foods tend to have higher liver fat levels, even when other health habits are taken into account.