Health Claims

When you replace bad fats and cholesterol in your diet with healthy oils, your overall cholesterol balance improves by about 0.33 points on the ratio scale.

Quantitative

Eating more healthy fats like those in nuts, seeds, and fish is linked to lower bad cholesterol in people on controlled diets.

Correlational

Swapping butter for olive oil doesn’t seem to change bad cholesterol levels in people eating strictly controlled diets.

Descriptive

Eating more cholesterol from foods like eggs or liver is linked to higher bad cholesterol levels in people eating strictly controlled diets.

Correlational

Eating foods with artificial trans fats, like some fried or baked goods, is linked to higher bad cholesterol in people on tightly controlled diets.

Correlational

Eating more saturated fat, like in butter or cheese, is linked to higher levels of bad cholesterol in people eating strictly controlled diets.

Correlational

Cutting out butter and replacing it with vegetable oil lowers bad cholesterol more than just removing artificial trans fats from your diet.

Quantitative

Swapping 2% of your diet’s bad fats (trans fats) for healthy oils like soybean or corn oil lowers your cholesterol ratio more than swapping them for bread or pasta.

Quantitative

When you swap out 5% of the fat in your diet from butter or meat to oils like sunflower or fish oil, your 'bad' cholesterol goes down by about 20 mg/dL.

Quantitative

Taking statins won’t make you more likely to have a bleeding stroke if you’re otherwise low-risk, and even if there’s a tiny chance it might, it still keeps you much safer from heart attacks and clot-based strokes.

Causal

Taking statins slightly raises your chance of getting diabetes by a tiny amount—about 0.1% per year—but it cuts your risk of heart attacks and strokes by much more, over 50 times more, especially if you’re not already at high risk for heart disease.

Quantitative

Taking statins to lower your 'bad' cholesterol by a certain amount can cut your chance of having a stroke caused by a blood clot by about 21%, and this benefit is about the same whether you're already at high or low risk for heart problems.

Quantitative

Even people with a low risk of heart problems can get just as much protection from statin pills as those at high risk — which surprises doctors because they used to think only high-risk people benefited much.

Quantitative

Taking statins — the pills doctors give to lower cholesterol — doesn’t make you more likely to get cancer or die from it, even if your cholesterol is already pretty low.

Causal

Taking statins to lower your 'bad' cholesterol by about 1 point (in mmol/L) can cut your risk of dying from heart problems by 12% and your overall risk of dying by 9%, without raising your risk of dying from other causes like cancer or accidents.

Causal

Taking statins to lower your 'bad' cholesterol by a small amount can cut your chance of having a stroke by about a quarter—even if you're not at high risk to begin with—and it works just as well for low-risk people as it does for high-risk ones.

Quantitative

Taking statins can lower your bad cholesterol enough to cut your chance of needing heart surgery or stents by almost half—even if you're not at high risk for heart disease right now.

Causal

Taking statins to lower your 'bad' cholesterol by a small amount can cut your chance of having a heart attack by nearly half—even if you're not at high risk for heart disease yet.

Causal

If you're at low risk for heart attacks or strokes in the next five years, taking a statin to lower your 'bad' cholesterol by a small amount can prevent about 11 serious heart or blood vessel problems per 1,000 people over five years — and that help is bigger than the side effects you might get.

Quantitative

Taking statins to lower your 'bad' cholesterol by a specific amount can cut your chance of having a heart attack or stroke by about 1 in 5—even if you’ve never had heart problems before and are considered low risk.

Causal

The cells that make both IL-17 and IFN-γ actually went down after stress — meaning the IL-17 causing damage probably came from cells that were already making it, not new ones being created.

Quantitative

The mice lost a little weight from the stress, but not more than they did from just eating a fatty diet — so the plaque bursts weren’t caused by extreme sickness or starvation.

Quantitative

Before the plaque actually burst, 8 out of 10 had bleeding inside them — meaning bleeding happens before the cap breaks, and might be a warning sign.

Descriptive

Over time, the strong fibrous cap covering the fatty core in the artery got much thinner compared to the size of the fatty core — making the plaque more likely to burst, like a weak roof over a big hole.

Quantitative