Health Claims

If you get a quarter or more of your daily calories from added sugars—like soda, candy, and pastries—you’re about three times more likely to die from heart disease than someone who gets less than 10% of their calories from sugar.

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Eating a lot of added sugars, especially fructose, might raise your blood pressure over time—studies show an average increase of about 7 points for the top number and 6 points for the bottom number after eating lots of sugar for at least two months.

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Eating foods that spike your blood sugar quickly might be linked to a higher risk of heart failure in the first few years, but that link seems to fade over time—maybe because your body adjusts or doctors catch problems earlier.

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Eating more fiber doesn’t change whether foods that spike your blood sugar increase your risk of heart failure in middle-aged and older Swedish women.

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For middle-aged and older Swedish women, eating foods that raise blood sugar quickly doesn’t seem to affect heart failure risk any more for overweight women than for women who are normal weight — the risk is about the same in both groups.

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Eating foods that raise blood sugar quickly doesn’t seem to increase the risk of heart failure in middle-aged and older Swedish women, based on a study that found no clear link between the two.

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In older Swedish women, eating lots of foods that spike blood sugar might be linked to more heart failure hospitalizations or deaths, but the evidence isn’t strong enough to be sure.

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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.

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Eating fish that contains saturated fat might actually help protect your heart — for every little bit more saturated fat you get from fish, your risk of heart disease goes down by 13%.

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Eating more butter — even just a little more — might raise your risk of heart disease a bit compared to getting the same kind of fat from other foods like cheese or fish.

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People who eat cheese with saturated fat might actually have a slightly lower risk of heart disease, which is surprising because saturated fat is usually thought to be bad for the heart.

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Eating more red meat — which has certain types of fat — might raise your chance of getting heart disease by 7% for every extra 1% of your daily calories that come from those fats.

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People who get their saturated fat from yogurt instead of other foods might have a slightly lower risk of heart disease, even if they eat the same amount of fat overall.

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We don’t have strong enough proof to say whether eating less saturated fat makes heart attacks, strokes, or heart disease deaths more or less likely — the studies we have aren’t very reliable.

Causal

If you swap out butter and fatty meats for foods like nuts, seeds, or bread and rice, you might lower your risk of heart problems—but we’re not sure if swapping for olive oil or chicken makes a difference.

Causal

When people eat less saturated fat, their cholesterol levels go down—and when cholesterol drops, they have fewer heart problems. This suggests that lowering cholesterol is the main reason eating less saturated fat helps the heart.

Mechanistic

If you eat less saturated fat for two years or more, it probably won’t make you live longer or stop you from dying of heart disease — at least not in countries with lots of food and healthcare.

Causal

If adults in developed countries eat less saturated fat for at least two years, they’re probably less likely to have heart attacks, strokes, or need heart surgery—about 1 in 56 people would avoid one of these events over four years.

Causal

Not all plant foods are the same for your heart—eating things like whole grains and nuts may help lower your risk of heart disease, but eating sugary drinks and white bread might raise it.

Correlational

People in Greece who eat mostly healthy plant foods like vegetables, fruits, beans, and whole grains tend to have lower heart disease risk—even when you account for things like how old they are, whether they smoke, or how much they weigh.

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Eating a plant-based diet doesn’t seem to make Greek adults more or less likely to get heart disease, no matter if the plants are healthy or not—because the data is too fuzzy to tell for sure.

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If Greek adults eat more unhealthy plant-based foods like white bread, soda, sweets, and fried potatoes, they’re 34% more likely to develop heart disease for every small increase in how unhealthy their diet is.

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People in Greece who eat lots of healthy plant foods like whole grains, fruits, nuts, and vegetables over 10 years are much less likely to get heart disease than those who eat very little of these foods.

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Among all the foods studied, only eating fish and tofu/soy products showed a clear link to fewer heart problems in people with heart disease — even after accounting for everything else they ate.

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