Heart Disease Risk From Saturated Fats May Depend On What Foods They Come From – New Research By Marinka Steur, University of Cambridge and Nita Forouhi, University of Cambridge via Natural Blaze
Heart disease is a major cause of death worldwide – responsible for some 9 million deaths a year. But it is preventable, and health behaviour changes – such as exercising more, quitting smoking and eating healthier – are often recommended.
One diet change commonly recommended by experts is to eat fewer saturated fats – and instead consume polyunsaturated fats (typically found in nuts, vegetable oils and fish), which are considered healthier. But our new research suggests that instead of only paying attention to the amount of saturated fat we consume, we should also look at what food sources the saturated fat is coming from.
Until now, most research on saturated fats has focused solely on looking at saturated fat and its link with heart disease. But foods contain many different types of nutrients. This is why it’s important to investigate which foods containing saturated fats are linked to heart disease, rather than only considering saturated fat alone. This is what our research set out to do.
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Our research drew on data from the University of Cambridge’s EPIC-CVD study, which looked at the cardiovascular health of middle-aged people in ten European countries. This included 10,529 participants who developed heart disease during the study, whom we compared against 16,730 participants who did not. Participants were randomly selected from the 385,747 participants of the EPIC study to ensure our findings were representative of the whole study population. We also looked at data on their dietary habits as part of our analysis.
We made sure to take into account various factors that may be related to heart disease – such as a person’s age, sex, physical activity levels, whether they smoked or drank alcohol and whether they were overweight or obese. This minimised the chances that our findings about fat consumption and heart disease might actually be explained by these other factors.
We found no overall link between the amount of saturated fats participants consumed and their risk of developing heart disease. But this picture was different when we looked at foods that are typical sources of saturated fats.
We found that people who ate more saturated fats from red meat and butter were more likely to develop heart disease. The opposite was true for those who ate more saturated fats from cheese, yoghurt and fish – which were actually linked to a lower risk of heart disease. These findings are in line with what earlier research has shown about the link between these foods and heart disease. These findings show us that the link between heart disease and saturated fats depends on what food sources it comes from.
