Despite the public dogma that fats of animal origin, particularly from ruminants, cause human disease (primarily cardiovascular and cancer), the topic has been far from axiomatic within the scientific community. The general hypothesis is more than 70 yr old and, importantly, there are actual studies demonstrating a link between animal fat intake and a specific disease. These reports receive considerable attention from the mainstream media. However, these associations (mostly epidemiological) are based upon differences in relative risk and not absolute risk. If some environmental factor causes disease frequency to increase from 1/100 to 2/100, media report the relative risk difference as being a 100% increase, without providing context of actual disorder incidence. In reality, the absolute risk difference is 1 percentage unit. Appreciating how these 2 simple arithmetic calculations markedly influence data interpretation is key to putting the aforementioned trials into sensible perspective. When evaluated on an absolute risk the increased chance of acquiring a disease in the abovementioned studies is typically below 2 percentage units (a statistical difference most people would presumably consider biologically insignificant). Further, there are a much larger number of scientific articles that do not support the causal relationship between animal fat and human disease. Noteworthy is the fact that these also include some very large and randomly controlled long-term intervention trials. Interestingly, these scientific publications rarely receive media exposure. Since Gary Taubes first eloquently exposed the controversy in 2001 (Science 291:2536–2545), the number of papers disagreeing with the animal fat-human disease dogma has markedly increased. Thus, most scientific evidence does not corroborate the hypothesis that animal fat causes human disease, and in the epidemiological experiments that do, rational people would contextualize if results were presented as absolute risks instead of relative risks. In summary, the perceived link between animal fat intake and human health disorders was always tenuous, but it is becoming increasingly ambiguous and this is especially true with regards to ruminant-derived products.