By Sydney Panagos, Co-founder of TIPS Chip
What the Sydney Diet Heart Study Found When Men Replaced Animal Fat With Seed Oil
There’s a famous nutrition study that shares my name — different Sydney, the one in Australia. Researchers there ran a randomized trial in the late 1960s, swapping animal fat for safflower oil in a group of men recovering from a heart event. The results, recovered and re-analyzed decades later, were not what anyone expected.
What did the Sydney Diet Heart Study actually find?
Christopher Ramsden and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health recovered the original data and published their re-analysis in BMJ in 2013. The trial randomized 458 middle-aged men with a recent coronary event to either a safflower-oil-rich diet replacing saturated fat or a usual-care control diet, between 1966 and 1973. The seed-oil group lowered cholesterol by 13.3 percent, exactly as the protocol predicted — and showed a 62 percent higher all-cause mortality rate (HR 1.62), 70 percent higher cardiovascular mortality (HR 1.70), and 74 percent higher coronary mortality (HR 1.74) than controls.
What does this mean in my kitchen?
That study was honestly one of those moments where I had to pause. It goes against what we’ve all been told — that swapping animal fats for seed oils is automatically better. For me, it reinforced something I was already starting to question. I had spent years trying to make healthier choices, choosing products made with seed oils because that’s what we were told to do. But I still wasn’t feeling my best. I remember thinking — what if the swap itself isn’t the answer?
That’s when I really committed to changing how I cook. I stopped using vegetable oils completely and went back to the basics. Butter, beef tallow, simple ingredients. It felt less like following a trend and more like trusting something that made sense. Now it’s how I approach everything in my kitchen — and it’s exactly why I created TIPS. A snack that fits into the same mindset.
Why do we cook TIPS chips in beef tallow?
The trial measured exactly the swap the dietary guidelines recommended for decades — replace animal fat with vegetable oil, drop cholesterol, win at heart disease. The cholesterol dropped. The deaths went up. That outcome is the reason I want a traditional cooking fat in our chips. Every TIPS chip is fried in 100 percent beef tallow, the kind of fat the trial’s control group was eating.
What should you watch for in your own kitchen?
The headline takeaway isn’t that cholesterol is irrelevant — it dropped, as designed. The point is that a single biomarker moving in the “right” direction doesn’t guarantee the outcome that matters. Observational studies in other populations (notably Farvid 2014 in Circulation) have found different patterns for linoleic acid intake, so the picture isn’t fully settled. The Sydney Diet Heart Study is one carefully run RCT in one carefully defined group — and worth knowing about when you decide what to fry in.
Source: Ramsden CE, Zamora D, Leelarthaepin B, et al. Use of dietary linoleic acid for secondary prevention of coronary heart disease and death: evaluation of recovered data from the Sydney Diet Heart Study and updated meta-analysis. BMJ. 2013;346:e8707. PMID 23386268.