Eating too much saturated fat might increase your risk of dying from any cause, especially cancer — the more you eat (up to a point), the higher the risk, according to big studies that followed people for years.

Eating foods with saturated fat, like butter or meat, doesn't seem to raise your risk of heart disease or dying from it, based on the studies reviewed.

Even when researchers accounted for how many total calories people ate or how much other fats they consumed, the link between saturated fat and heart disease still didn’t show up.

People who eat more saturated fat, like butter and fatty meats, seem to die more often from heart disease and breast cancer, but this might just be because other things—like lifestyle or diet—are actually causing the difference, and the science isn’t very strong.

Eating saturated fat doesn’t always make you more likely to get heart disease or diabetes—it depends on what foods contain the fat and what you eat instead of it.

Eating foods high in saturated fat, like butter and red meat, doesn't appear to raise your risk of heart attacks, strokes, or other heart problems, according to a big review of long-term studies on thousands of people.