Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
Eating more plants like vegetables, fruits, nuts, and beans may help protect your heart because they give you more good nutrients and less of the bad fats that can harm your heart.
Correlational
Eating mostly plants like vegetables, fruits, beans, and whole grains may help lower bad cholesterol, blood pressure, weight, and body inflammation in adults.
People who eat more plants and less meat tend to have a lower chance of having heart attacks, strokes, or dying from heart problems.
It doesn’t matter as much how much fat, carbs, or protein you eat—what really matters is whether the foods you eat are healthy or processed.
If people eat less fat—down to just 20% of their daily calories—but still eat lots of white bread, pasta, and sugar, it doesn’t make heart attacks any less common over eight years.
Causal
Eating too much sugar over a long time can mess up how your body uses insulin, which then causes high blood pressure, bad cholesterol levels, and raises your chance of heart disease.
Mechanistic
If you swap out meat and butter for beans, nuts, and olive oil, your body will have less inflammation, better cholesterol levels, and a lower chance of getting heart disease.
If you eat less saturated fat (like butter or fatty meat) but still eat lots of white bread, sugary snacks, or refined carbs, it probably won’t make your heart any healthier or lower your risk of heart disease.
Eating healthy foods like vegetables, fruits, nuts, and whole grains—no matter if you're eating fewer carbs or less fat—may lower your risk of heart disease by about 13–15% and help keep your blood fats and inflammation in check.
Whether eating low-carb or low-fat is good for your heart doesn’t just depend on how much fat or carbs you eat—it depends on what kind of food you choose. Eating whole plants like veggies and beans helps your heart, but eating processed meats or white bread can hurt it.
Eating a lot of sugary and refined carbs like white bread and soda may raise a woman’s chance of getting heart disease by almost double, even if she doesn’t have other common risk factors like high blood pressure or smoking.
If you swap out fats in your food for sugary carbs like white bread or pastries, your blood sugar spikes higher after meals, which can make your body produce too much insulin over time—and that might raise your risk of heart disease.
Eating more saturated fats, like those in butter and red meat, raises the bad cholesterol in your blood, which can build up as gunk in your arteries over time.
Even though people are eating less cholesterol than they used to, more people are dying from heart disease — so something else in our diet, like sugar (fructose), might be the real culprit.
Eating too much fructose (like in sugary drinks) might create more harmful gunk in your body than regular sugar, which can damage your blood vessels and lead to heart disease.
Eating too much fructose, like the sugar in soda and candy, may leak harmful substances from your gut into your blood, which can irritate your liver and contribute to clogged arteries.
Eating too much fructose over a long time can mess up how your liver responds to insulin, and that comes before your whole body becomes resistant to insulin—making your heart more at risk for disease.
Eating a lot of fructose—like the sugar in soda and sweet snacks—can cause your liver to make more fat and pump it into your blood as triglycerides, which may increase your risk of heart disease.
Eating too much fructose—like the sugar in soda and candy—can raise a substance in your blood called uric acid, which may damage your blood vessels, raise your blood pressure, and cause body-wide inflammation, all of which can lead to heart disease.
People on low-carb diets saw their blood pressure drop a little bit more than those on low-fat diets, which might help their heart health.
Quantitative
If you're overweight and eat less fat for four weeks, you might lose more muscle than fat compared to someone who eats fewer carbs — even if both diets help you lose weight.
If you're overweight and have high 'bad' cholesterol, eating fewer carbs for four weeks might help lower your bad cholesterol and improve your overall cholesterol balance better than eating low-fat, high-carb foods.
If you're overweight and eat fewer carbs instead of less fat for four weeks, you might lose more body fat—even if you lose the same amount of total weight as someone on a low-fat diet.
If you're overweight and eat fewer carbs instead of less fat for four weeks—without counting calories—you might lose about 8 pounds more than someone on a low-fat diet, and it might be because you're losing more body fat.