A new study suggests that if people eat healthier fats, there might be more than a million lives saved every year, Philly reports.
The study was published online Jan. 20 in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
The researchers said the focus should not be on cutting fats altogether, but rather on reducing unhealthy fats such as saturated fat and trans fats and replacing them with healthy fats, such as polyunsaturated fats.
"Our findings highlight the importance of ending America's fear of all fat. We estimate that nearly 50,000 Americans die of heart disease each year due to low intake of vegetable oils," said Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, senior study author and dean of the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy in Boston.
However, the study did not find a cause and effect relation between risk of death from heart disease and types of fat consumed.
For the study, Mozaffarian and his team of researchers used diet information from 186 countries. They analyzed research from previous studies on people to see how eating certain fats affects heart disease risk.
Death rate information was collected from a 2010 study.
The researchers concluded that more than 700,000 deaths worldwide each year, or about 10 percent of heart disease deaths, were attributed to eating too little healthy omega-6 polyunsaturated fats.
People from different countries reported different patterns of fat consumption. Deaths from trans fats are declining in Western nations. However, the United States and Canada were still in the top four nations for heart disease deaths attributed to trans fat intake.
