I guess another way to put it is "I don't know what the truth is" is somewhat inconsistent with "there's no harm in cutting back on". For instance, if someone

I guess another way to put it is "I don't know what the truth is" is somewhat inconsistent with "there's no harm in cutting back on". For instance, if someone said "drinking water decreases your sodium levels", and you said "there's no harm in cutting back on water", you'd be making a mistake. I also think the full verdict is still out on what "heart healthy" means. In your specific case, it could be family/genetic disposition to high blood pressure/cholesterol, environmental factors, or diet. If it is diet, and you were eating more than the average person's amount of red meat, fried foods, and saturated fat, perhaps it will help you to cut back on those things, but you would need to do that for a while and keep everything else constant and see if things improved. If you weren't eating "lots" of those things to begin with, it's not clear reducing them further would make a difference. I think this is why nutrition is so hard, it's almost impossible to really control all the variables and our objective measurements are lacking. For instance, "high cholesterol" doesn't tell you anything about the size of the cholesterol. High blood pressure may just run in your family. It's really hard to determine the effects of our diet.