Okay, this is for all my friends who warned that my low-carb diet would kill me: A new study has found that eating higher amounts of fat doesn't increase cardiac risk for women.

The Harvard University study of thousands of women over two decades found that those who got lots of their carbohydrates from refined sugars and highly processed foods nearly doubled their risk of heart disease, according to an Associated Press report.

At the same time, those who ate a low-carb diet but got more of their protein and fat from vegetables rather than animal sources cut their heart disease risk by 30 percent on average, compared with those who ate more animal fats.

The findings were reported in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine .

So what do you think, dear readers? Are you willing to give low-carb living a whirl?

-- Amanda Barrett, amNY.com