Research
Macro partitioning
Replacing dietary saturated fat with refined carbohydrates or sugars does not reduce cardiovascular disease risk and may be neutral or harmful.
Do not replace saturated fats with refined carbs or sugars if your goal is heart health. This substitution does not lower cardiovascular risk. Instead, replace saturated fats with unsaturated fats (polyunsaturated or monounsaturated).
StrongRefutesVERY_HIGH confidence
replacement of saturated fat with mostly refined carbohydrates and sugars is not associated with lower rates of CVD and did not reduce CVD in clinical trials.
Why this rating
Based on multiple randomized controlled trials and meta-analyses.
Source
Dietary Fats and Cardiovascular Disease: A Presidential Advisory From the American Heart Association
Frank M. Sacks et al. · Circulation · 2017
DOI 10.1161/cir.0000000000000510
Meta-analysisCited 1,333×
Read the paper DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10
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- Replacing dietary saturated fat with monounsaturated fats lowers cardiovascular disease risk, although the evidence is stronger for polyunsaturated fats.Good
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