Research

Hormonal

The association between oleic acid (18:1n9) and type 2 diabetes risk is attenuated to non-significance when adjusted for triglycerides and palmitic acid (16:0), suggesting its risk is dependent on overall de novo lipogenesis activity rather than being an independent driver.

While high levels of some fats made by your body are linked to diabetes, the link for oleic acid (found in olive oil) disappears when you account for overall metabolic health markers like triglycerides. This implies that focusing on the broader metabolic context (carb/alcohol intake) is more important than demonizing specific fats like oleic acid.

GoodQualifiesHIGH confidence
Further adjusted for triglycerides (and 16:0 when appropriate) to evaluate associations independent of overall DNL, the associations remained significant for 16:0, 16:1n7, and 18:0 but were attenuated for 18:1n9 (RR = 1.03, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.94–1.13).
Fumiaki Imamura et al. · PLoS Medicine · 2020

Why this rating

Based on the same robust pooled analysis, specifically looking at adjusted models.

Source

Fatty acids in the de novo lipogenesis pathway and incidence of type 2 diabetes: A pooled analysis of prospective cohort studies

Fumiaki Imamura et al. · PLoS Medicine · 2020

DOI 10.1371/journal.pmed.1003102

Meta-analysis · 17 studiesCited 71×
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DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

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