A dietitian who studies how to prevent heart attacks shared 3 healthy food swaps

• Matthew Landry, a dietitian, studies how our diets can prevent heart attacks later in life.
• Landry recommends making simple food swaps to control cholesterol levels.
• Opt for olive oil over butter and chicken over red meat, he said.

A nutrition researcher and dietitian who studies how simple habits can protect our hearts shared three simple food swaps.

Cardiovascular disease is the No. 1 cause of death in the US, but research has found that eating a Mediterranean-style diet and being physically active can help lower the risk. The American Heart Association's dietary guidelines recommend prioritizing fresh produce, whole grains, lean proteins such as fish, and limiting ultra-processed foods and refined sugar.

That may sound like a lot, but Matthew Landry told Business Insider that you don't necessarily need to overhaul your diet to improve your heart health.

Landy, an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine, suggested considering: "how can we make simple swaps with our diet? How can we engage in more physical activity, and do very simple things that all add up to help prevent a heart attack later?"

Here are his three suggestions:

1) Switch from cooking with butter to olive oil

Landry's first swap relates to the type of fat used for cooking. He suggests switching butter or lard for heart-healthy fats like olive oil or avocado oil.

"We're not necessarily changing the food, we're just changing how we're sometimes preparing it," he said.

Animal products and full-fat dairy products like beef tallow, butter, and cream contain saturated fat, which can drive up our LDL or "bad cholesterol levels, Landry said. If a person has too much LDL cholesterol in their blood, it can form a sticky plaque in their arteries, putting them at greater risk of heart disease.

We need fat as part of a balanced diet, but unsaturated fats, found in foods such as avocados, fatty fish, nuts, and olive oil, don't raise our LDL cholesterol nearly as much as saturated fat, he said.

2) Switch from red meat to poultry

There's one finding that keeps cropping up in Landry's research: reducing red meat consumption lowers the risk of cardiovascular disease.

Landry worked on a 2023 study in which 22 pairs of identical twins were assigned either a vegan or an omnivorous diet for eight weeks. It was the focus of a Netflix documentary titled "You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment."

By the end of the study, the vegan twins had lower LDL cholesterol and insulin levels, and had lost more weight, another risk factor for cardiovascular disease, according to the study.

This doesn't mean you have to cut out meat entirely, Landry said, but he recommended swapping red and processed meats, including beef, pork, and sausages, for leaner options like poultry, such as chicken and turkey, or fish, which are lower in saturated fat.

It's also a good idea to add plant-based protein sources to your diet. "Eventually, I would love for folks to even move further than that and start consuming some plant-based proteins, some beans, lentils, tofu, tempeh. Those are great things for our heart as well," he said.

3) Swap white carbs for whole-wheat versions

Fiber is great at keeping cholesterol levels "nice and stable," Landry said, but most Americans don't eat enough. Ninety percent of women, and 97% of men, don't meet the recommended 30 grams of fiber a day, according to the 2020 to 2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The 2025 to 2030 guidelines recommend two to four servings of whole grains a day.

Whole grains such as brown rice, quinoa, and whole-wheat bread are good sources of fiber and can easily replace their white counterparts, which tend to be low in fiber. One cup of brown rice, for example, contains 3.5 grams of fiber, while a cup of white rice contains 0.6 grams.

"We can still have bread, we can still have rice," Landry, said, "but the whole grain version."