On March 31, the American Heart Association released its new guidelines for how to follow a heart-healthy diet. The group updates its advice every five years to reflect the latest data on how diet and nutrition affect heart health. And while most of the advice will sound familiar, some of it conflicts with the recently updated federal dietary guidelines.
The heart group continues to endorse eating more fruits and vegetables, limiting alcohol, consuming less salt and sugar, and reducing (or ideally eliminating) ultra-processed foods. But its latest guidelines recommend shifting away from eating meat—a stronger position that goes beyond replacing red meat with leaner types like chicken or fish, as its past guidelines have advised. The guidelines also suggest replacing saturated fats from animal sources with fats from nuts, seeds, and non-tropical plants.
“We intentionally say ‘shift’ to more plant-based sources of protein, because we know that plant-based sources are, generally speaking, healthier,” says Dr. Amit Khera, professor of medicine and director of preventive cardiology at UT Southwestern Medical Center and vice chair of the committee responsible for the report.
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That advice clashes with the federal dietary guidelines, which highlight the benefits of red meat and “prioritizes” eating more protein, including from animal sources. And while the federal guidance recommends limiting consumption of saturated fats to 10% of daily calories—a longstanding benchmark echoed by the heart group’s new advice—U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that “we are ending the war on saturated fats” when announcing the guidelines. There is common ground, however: The federal dietary guidelines emphasize eating healthy fats from “whole food sources,” and while they mention meat, they also endorse fish, nuts, seeds, and avocados.
Alison Steiber, chief mission impact and strategy officer at the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, says that one reason for the differing approaches is that the two sets of recommendations are intended for different groups of people. The heart group’s guidelines are stricter on certain nutritional elements—such as fat and sodium, since both are major contributors to high blood pressure—because they are focused on reducing the risk of heart disease. (High blood pressure is a risk factor for heart issues.) But because the federal dietary guidelines aim to lower the risk of chronic disease in the general population (including heart disease), the two guidelines are mostly aligned, she says, with differences on how extensively they support nutritional changes related to more heart disease-specific risk factors.
Khera says the intent of the latest American Heart Association guidelines is to help people benefit from healthier hearts throughout their lifetime; the guidelines are meant for families to follow with young children as well. “Heart disease begins in childhood, so we need to start [healthy diets] early in life,” he says. “About 60% of children don’t eat healthy diets, and one in five children in the U.S. are obese. This is for anyone from age one onward, and for the entire life course—not just for when somebody is older.”