By Sydney Panagos, Co-founder of TIPS Chip
The History of Seed Oils in America — How Vegetable Oils Replaced Traditional Fats
A hundred years ago, almost no one in America ate cottonseed oil, soybean oil, or corn oil. Today, those same oils make up roughly 20% of the average American's daily calories. The shift happened fast — within a single century — and the data on exactly how fast is more striking than most people realize.
What did researchers find when they measured 20th-century American fat intake?
In a 2011 analysis published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Blasbalg and colleagues reconstructed U.S. fatty acid consumption from 1909 to 1999. They found linoleic acid intake (the dominant fat in seed oils) rose from 2.79% of total calories to 7.21% — a 158% increase. Per-capita soybean oil consumption alone rose more than a thousandfold over the same window. Traditional animal fats — tallow, butter, lard — declined in roughly inverse proportion.
That isn't a small shift in seasoning. It's a structural rebuild of what Americans ate, accomplished in three generations.
What does this mean in my kitchen?
For me, this really clicked when I looked at how I grew up versus how my grandparents cooked. I actually grew up with vegetable and seed oils. It was just normal — everything in our kitchen used them, and I never questioned it. As I got older and started trying to be more health-conscious, I switched to what I thought were better versions of those same oils, assuming that was the right move. But when I started dealing with what felt like constant allergies, I began looking closer at everything I was eating. That's when I realized my grandparents never had any of these oils in their kitchen to begin with. They were cooking with butter, animal fats, and simple ingredients without overthinking it. The contrast stuck with me. It made me step back and simplify my own kitchen, focusing less on labels and more on ingredients that actually feel real and familiar.
Why do we cook TIPS chips in beef tallow?
When the Blasbalg data shows seed oils displacing the fats humans ate for thousands of years inside a single century, the burden of evidence flips. The default isn't industrial oils; the default is what was on the table before the substitution started. We cook every TIPS chip in 100% beef tallow because that's the fat that lasted across generations — not because it's a marketing angle, but because it's what made sense once we read what actually happened.
What should you watch for on a label today?
If a chip ingredient list contains soybean, sunflower, canola, corn, cottonseed, or safflower oil — even alongside more recognizable ingredients — it's part of the 20th-century shift Blasbalg measured. Reading the ingredient list (not the front of the bag) is the simplest filter. Traditional cooking fats like beef tallow, butter, and lard sat on American tables for a reason; modern seed oils are roughly a hundred years old.
Source: Blasbalg TL, Hibbeln JR, Ramsden CE, Majchrzak SF, Rawlings RR. Changes in consumption of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids in the United States during the 20th century. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 2011;93(5):950–962. PMID 21367944.