Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
When people ate less animal fat, their bad cholesterol went down and their belly fat became less inflamed — and heart attacks dropped fast.
Mechanistic
Even though heart treatments didn’t get better in the early 1990s, heart disease deaths still dropped — pointing to diet as the likely reason.
Descriptive
When the balance of omega-3 to omega-6 fats in body fat improves, there are fewer inflammation-causing immune cells — meaning omega-3s may help calm inflammation.
Correlational
Fewer people were obese in the early 1990s in the Czech Republic, and this was linked to less body-wide inflammation and fewer heart disease deaths.
In the early 1990s, Czech doctors didn’t have access to modern heart drugs like statins or new blood pressure medications.
The drug didn’t affect blood sugar or fat levels in the blood, so its benefits aren’t due to improving how the body handles sugar or fat.
Quantitative
When people ate less butter and more plant oils, their overall heart disease risk score — based on good and bad cholesterol — got better.
The mice didn’t gain or lose weight or eat differently with the drug, so the benefits aren’t just because they were eating less or changing their metabolism.
After the Czech government stopped subsidizing butter and fatty meats, heart disease deaths in men dropped dramatically over the next two decades.
There was a hint that the drug might help turn some immune cells into a less inflammatory type, but the data weren’t strong enough to be sure.
More of two specific saturated fats — palmitate and palmitoleate — in fat tissue is linked to more inflammation-causing immune cells in the belly.
The drug didn’t make the fibrous cap around the plaque thicker, so its protective effect must come from other changes, like less cell death or inflammation.
Eating more omega-3 fats — like those in fish and certain oils — is linked to fewer inflammation-causing cells in belly fat.
The drug didn’t lower the mice’s overall cholesterol, so its benefits must come from something else—like reducing inflammation or cell death in plaques.
People with higher bad cholesterol tend to have more inflammation-causing immune cells in their belly fat — for every 1 mmol/L rise in cholesterol, these cells go up by about 18%.
The drug seemed to make more of the CD36 protein visible in the artery plaques, which might help the body clear dead cells better.
When people in the Czech Republic stopped eating so much butter and started using healthier oils, their bad cholesterol levels dropped by 14%.
The drug lowered two key inflammation signals in the blood by nearly half, which may help calm down the body’s harmful immune response in the arteries.
The drug lowered the levels of two proteins in the arteries that are known to break down plaque structure, which might help keep plaques from bursting.
The drug-treated mice had almost half as many dying cells in their artery plaques, which could mean their plaques are less damaged and more stable.
Mice treated with the drug had much smaller dead-cell areas in their artery plaques—almost half as big—which might mean their plaques are less likely to break open.
Giving a special peptide drug daily to mice with clogged arteries helped reduce the size of the blockages by about one-third, compared to mice that didn’t get the drug.
When immune cells from mice eating olive oil and nuts were provoked in a lab, they released less of the inflammatory chemicals than cells from mice eating butter.
Even though mice eating olive oil and nuts had fewer artery plaques, their blood showed more signs of oxidative damage, which is a surprising and complex finding.