If you swap out a little bit of butter and fatty meats for healthier fats like nuts and fish oil, you’re less likely to have a heart attack or die from heart disease — it’s not about eating less fat, but choosing better kinds of fat.

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 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.

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.

There’s a hint that eating more saturated fat might raise the risk of dying from heart disease, but the data is too messy and uncertain to say for sure.

Eating more or less of different kinds of fats—like butter, olive oil, or vegetable oil—doesn’t seem to change your risk of heart disease, no matter what you eat instead of them. What matters more might be where the fat comes from, like whether it’s in cheese, nuts, or fried food.