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- The American Heart Association has released new dietary guidelines to support heart health.
- The guidelines recommend a diet rich in fruits and vegetables that emphasizes plant-based proteins.
- At the same time, the organization advises limiting saturated fat, red meat, and alcohol.
The American Heart Association (AHA) on Tuesday released new dietary guidelines to support heart health, emphasizing plant proteins over meat and limiting full-fat dairy, ultra-processed foods, and saturated fat. The recommendations provide a framework on how to eat to reduce the risk of heart disease, which has been the leading cause of death in the U.S. for more than a century. Here's what you need to know.
What to Eat (and Avoid) to Support Your Heart
About every five years, the AHA updates its nutrition guidance based on a complex review of new research, explained Alice H. Lichtenstein, Dsc, FAHA, volunteer chair of the AHA's writing committee for the new guidelines, and senior scientist and leader of the Diet & Chronic Disease Prevention Directive at the Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University.
The authors of the new guidelines summarized their findings in nine key points:
- Adjust energy intake and expenditure to achieve and maintain a healthy body weight. Simply put, try to balance how much you eat with how active you are each day.
- Eat plenty of vegetables and fruits, and choose a wide variety. Fruits and vegetables contain essential nutrients for your heart. Eating them in their whole form, rather than juice, also provides much-needed fiber.
- Choose foods made mostly with whole grains rather than refined grains. Some common whole grains include whole wheat bread, oats, brown rice, and quinoa.
- Choose healthy sources of protein. The guidelines recommend eating more plant-based sources, such as beans, lentils, nuts, and seeds, rather than meat.
- Choose sources of unsaturated fats in place of sources of saturated fat. For instance, cook with plant oils—such as olive oil and canola oil—instead of animal fats, like butter or beef tallow.
- Choose minimally processed foods instead of ultra-processed foods. Ultra-processed foods are highly manufactured and often contain added sugar, high sodium, preservatives, and additives.
- Minimize intake of added sugars in beverages and foods. Diets high in added sugar have been consistently linked with poor heart health and higher cardiovascular disease risk.
- Choose foods low in sodium and prepare foods with minimal or no salt. More than 70% of the sodium Americans eat comes from packaged foods or restaurant meals.
- If alcohol is not consumed, do not start; if alcohol is consumed, limit intake. In short, the less alcohol consumed, the better.
What's Changed
The nine main points are largely the same as the last recommendations from 2021. But the new body of evidence has led to a few important changes. "While it wasn't a major overhaul, the slight shifts aligned with the current understanding of healthy eating guidelines and the majority of clinical research," said Lisa Moskovitz, RD, founder of The NY Nutrition Group and author of The Core 3 Healthy Eating Plan, who was not involved with the new recommendations.
1. Plant Proteins Take Priority Over Meat
Protein is an essential component of a heart-healthy diet, but most people still consume more protein from meat than from plants. While the AHA's previous guidelines simply recommend plant proteins, the new guidance actually says to switch from meat to plant sources, because plant proteins "are higher in unsaturated fat than saturated fat, and rich in fiber, an under-consumed but important nutrient," Lichtenstein told Health.
For animal proteins, the guidelines still recommend fish and seafood—as these lean proteins are also rich in omega-3s—but the authors advise against red meat, which is high in saturated fat. According to Alison Steiber, PhD, RDN, chief mission, impact, and strategy officer at the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, current evidence seems to suggest that “increased consumption of red meat—particularly processed meat but also just regular red meat—indicates an increased risk of cardiovascular disease.”
It's worth noting that this guidance departs from the federal government's 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which encourages the consumption of red meat. “When you’re trying to reduce or prevent cardiovascular disease, you have a little bit of a different emphasis," explained Steiber, who was not involved in the new guidelines. “You want to dramatically reduce saturated fats and increase fiber and micronutrients.”
2. A Broader Emphasis on Unsaturated Fat
While the last AHA guidance on unsaturated fat focused specifically on cooking oils (recommending olive oil over butter, for example), the new guidelines more broadly recommend foods high in unsaturated fat over those rich in saturated fat. Eating more saturated fat can raise your LDL cholesterol (the "bad" one), which increases your risk of heart disease and stroke, Lichtenstein explained.
The extent to which saturated fat affects your heart health has been contested—with some research finding little to no impact for people with low heart disease risk—but the AHA found stronger evidence to back up its recommendation. Moskovitz chalked up the controversy to overlapping risk factors, which can make it difficult to isolate the effects of saturated fat alone.
"Saturated fat can raise bad LDL cholesterol, but high LDLs do not independently determine heart health or cardiovascular disease risk," Moskovitz told Health. "Risk factors are a combination of blood lipids, inflammatory markers, genetics, lifestyle habits, etc."
3. A Recognition of the Full-Fat Dairy Debate
The health impacts of dairy, especially on your heart, are also up for debate. Full-fat dairy is high in saturated fat, but emerging research has found no adverse heart health effects from high-dairy diets, regardless of fat content.
The research is still ongoing, “but it certainly seems to indicate that dairy saturated fat should not be lumped in with, say, red meat," Steiber said. The 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, for instance, specifically recommends full-fat dairy.
While it's still up in the air, the AHA stuck with its recommendation for low-fat and fat-free dairy, which has less saturated fat than full-fat options. But for the first time, the guidelines recognized the debate.
"While still recommending low-fat and fat-free dairy products as a preferred choice, [the AHA] recognizes that the recommendation is not without controversy and will continue to be monitored as new data become available," Lichtenstein said.
4. A Stronger Push to Limit Ultra-Processed Foods
Similar to the AHA's last dietary guidelines, the new recommendations also advised against eating ultra-processed foods. "The major concern with this trend is the strong evidence base linking dietary patterns high in ultra-processed foods to multiple adverse health outcomes, including overweight and obesity, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and all-cause mortality," Lichtenstein said.
What's different in the new guidelines: calling for a shift in the marketplace to offer healthier options. "We also need to understand the population needs foods that are accessible and affordable," Steiber said, noting that processed foods tend to be less expensive than whole foods. The hope is to have an "increased availability of minimally processed options wherever people buy or eat food," Lichtenstein added.
5. Potassium Is a Bigger Focus For Blood Pressure
Beyond reducing your sodium intake, the new guidelines now recommend getting more potassium as well to help manage blood pressure—as high blood pressure (hypertension) is the No. 1 preventable health risk for cardiovascular disease, Lichtenstein said.
In your body, excess sodium can make you retain water, increasing your blood volume and raising blood pressure. Meanwhile, potassium helps your body excrete sodium in urine and relax blood vessels, bringing down blood pressure.
“Sodium and potassium sort of work like teeter-totters. They’re best in balance," Steiber explained. "But more potassium can have very beneficial blood pressure impacts.”
6. A Stricter Stance on Alcohol
The effects of alcohol on heart health have also been debated, especially when it comes to red wine. Red wine contains antioxidants like resveratrol, which are thought to help lower cholesterol and blood pressure, but no research has established a cause-and-effect link between drinking alcohol and better heart health.
While previous AHA guidelines allowed one to two drinks per day, the new recommendations take a tougher stance and do not specify a safe drinking amount. "When it comes to alcohol consumption, the more you can avoid it, the better," Moskovitz said, explaining the new guidance. "It appears the research is leaning in favor of cutting it out completely for optimal heart health protection."
As research is still ongoing, the recommendations don't ban alcohol entirely for heart health. But for the first time, the guidelines recognize that no amount of alcohol is safe for the risk of certain cancers, including oral, esophageal, breast, liver, and colorectal cancers, Lichtenstein said.
Plus, “we know that binge drinking, chronically high intakes of alcohol can indicate many worse outcomes for weight, mortality, cancer, cardiovascular disease," Steiber added.
