By Sydney Panagos, Co-founder of TIPS Chip
What I Learned About Saturated Fat After Reading 73 Studies
I grew up being told saturated fat was the villain. Butter was risky. Beef tallow was reckless. The conventional advice was clear: cut animal fat, replace it with vegetable oils, live longer. So when I started researching what goes into our chips, I expected the science to back that up. It didn’t.
What did the 2015 De Souza meta-analysis actually find?
Researchers at McMaster University pooled 73 observational studies and published the results in BMJ in 2015. Across all of them, saturated fat showed no statistically significant link to all-cause mortality (RR 0.99), cardiovascular disease (RR 0.97), coronary heart disease (RR 1.06), stroke (RR 1.02), or type 2 diabetes (RR 0.95). A relative risk of 1.00 means no effect; everything they measured sat right on that line.
That doesn’t prove saturated fat is harmless — observational data can’t prove causation. But for a nutrient we were told for fifty years was the main driver of heart disease, finding zero signal across 73 studies is striking.
What does this mean in my kitchen?
For me, this didn’t start with a study. It started with how I was feeling. I thought I was doing everything right, buying healthier options and cooking with vegetable oils because that’s what I was told was better. When I started digging deeper into ingredients, I realized how often seed oils showed up in everything I was eating. I remember going through my kitchen and throwing out bottles of vegetable and canola oil. It felt like a big shift, but also a really simple one.
I went back to cooking with butter and beef tallow. Ingredients that actually felt familiar and real. Now my kitchen is a lot simpler. Fewer ingredients, less processing, and foods I can actually recognize. That shift didn’t just change how I cook. It’s what led me to create TIPS.
Why do we cook TIPS chips in beef tallow?
Traditional cooking fats — tallow, butter, lard — sat at the center of human diets for thousands of years. When I looked at what the modern meta-analyses actually say, the case for replacing them with industrial seed oils stopped making sense to me. We cook every TIPS chip in 100% beef tallow because that’s what I want in our own kitchen. The chip is the proof-of-concept for that conviction.
What should you watch for in your own kitchen?
The De Souza meta-analysis flagged one fat category as genuinely harmful: industrial trans fats (RR 1.42 for coronary heart disease). Ruminant trans fats — the naturally occurring ones in dairy and grass-fed beef — showed no association (RR 0.93). The line worth watching isn’t saturated vs. unsaturated. It’s traditional vs. industrial. Plain butter and plain tallow aren’t the same category as hydrogenated industrial fats.
Source: De Souza RJ, Mente A, Maroleanu A, et al. Intake of saturated and trans unsaturated fatty acids and risk of all cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes: systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies. BMJ. 2015;351:h3978. PMID 26268692.