Does cutting butter help your heart?
The role of reducing intakes of saturated fat in the prevention of cardiovascular disease: where does the evidence stand in 2010?
Not medical advice. For informational purposes only. Always consult a healthcare professional. Terms
Experts looked at many studies and found that swapping butter for oils like sunflower or soybean oil might help your heart, but swapping it for bread or pasta doesn't seem to help much — unless the bread is whole grain. They couldn't say if cheese or olive oil helps or hurts, and eating more saturated fat than sugar doesn't clearly raise diabetes risk.
Surprising Findings
Replacing saturated fat with refined carbs shows no clear benefit for heart disease—even though this was the basis of decades of low-fat dietary advice.
For 40+ years, public health guidelines told people to cut fat and eat more carbs. This review says that advice may have been misguided if the carbs were refined.
Practical Takeaways
Swap one daily source of saturated fat (e.g., butter on toast) with a polyunsaturated fat source (e.g., sunflower seed butter or a handful of walnuts).
Not medical advice. For informational purposes only. Always consult a healthcare professional. Terms
Experts looked at many studies and found that swapping butter for oils like sunflower or soybean oil might help your heart, but swapping it for bread or pasta doesn't seem to help much — unless the bread is whole grain. They couldn't say if cheese or olive oil helps or hurts, and eating more saturated fat than sugar doesn't clearly raise diabetes risk.
Surprising Findings
Replacing saturated fat with refined carbs shows no clear benefit for heart disease—even though this was the basis of decades of low-fat dietary advice.
For 40+ years, public health guidelines told people to cut fat and eat more carbs. This review says that advice may have been misguided if the carbs were refined.
Practical Takeaways
Swap one daily source of saturated fat (e.g., butter on toast) with a polyunsaturated fat source (e.g., sunflower seed butter or a handful of walnuts).
Publication
Journal
The American journal of clinical nutrition
Year
2011
Authors
A. Astrup, J. Dyerberg, P. Elwood, K. Hermansen, F. Hu, M. U. Jakobsen, F. Kok, R. Krauss, J. Lecerf, P. Legrand, P. Nestel, U. Risérus, T. Sanders, A. Sinclair, S. Stender, T. Tholstrup, W. Willett
Related Content
Claims (6)
Cutting down on all fats in your diet—no matter what kind of carbs you eat—won’t make you any less likely to get heart disease over eight years.
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.
If you swap out butter and fatty meats for carbs like bread or rice, it doesn’t clearly help your heart—but if those carbs are whole grains or veggies that don’t spike your blood sugar, they might help a little.
Just because a diet changes one number in your blood, like LDL cholesterol, doesn't mean you can tell if it will keep your heart healthy or not.
We don’t know yet if swapping butter and fatty meats for olive oil and avocados makes your heart healthier or not—there’s just not enough clear proof either way.