I made it a few years ago. Tallow is trendy (and thus expensive), but you make it by rendering suet which is basically a throw-away product at butcher shops. Lots don't even bother selling suet, which is a pain. Rendering was just slow-cooking and removing the little pieces, then you're left with candle wax you can cook with.
I thought the candle wax consistency was a coincidence, but it was the main way to make candles for most of history. It tastes pretty good but has a strong smell when cooking (or burning as a candle, presumably).
If I understand it correctly, tallow is made from beef or mutton. The same principle can be applied to pork fat -- and presumably any other herbivore? -- to create lard. Which is is also delicous for fries.
Yes, the difference is that tallow is solid at room temperature, so great for preservation. I was planning on making pemmican with it, but slicing, drying, and pulverizing hundreds of tiny strips of meat seemed like a lot of work.
Yeah I bet, but with Americans you never know, I've seen people pour melted processed butter across popcorn, so when it comes to what Americans, I've learned to always ask rather than assume.
Brad Marshall[0] makes a case for the benefits of stearic acid (C18:0), which is predominant in beef tallow and cocoa butter. It acts as a beneficial metabolic signal that promotes mitochondrial fat oxidation, higher energy expenditure, and leanness—counteracting the obesogenic effects of polyunsaturated fats (PUFAs), especially linoleic acid.
We all know there has been a replication crisis across many different disciplines of science. I think that the set of things we actually know about nutrition and health is a lot smaller than the experts think.
However, the problem is that the public has also come to that conclusion. The public has gone on to decide "that means my incredibly weakly-evidenced idea is just as good as the expert opinions" which does not follow and is often disastrously wrong.
So I'm also sympathetic to the idea that the saturated fat picture is more complex than a blanket ban suggests. But I know better than to treat things like Brad's arguments as anything other than "interesting hypothesis" as opposed to "something we actually know about nutrition."
The public are presented with things that are weakly evidenced as scientifically proven. After all, the one study that says something is good or bad for you was published in a peer-reviewed journal and the university PR people blogged about it and the newspapers reported it uncritically.
A lot of experts are very bad at differing between different levels of evidence and probability: "my personal (if expert) opinion", "a consensus in the field" and "backed by reasonable evidence" and "proven" are very different but all often get presented the same way.
Experts are usually very good at differentiating between levels of evidence. The process of becoming an expert tends to thoroughly educate a person in just how little they actually know.
The problem is that a bunch of talk about weak studies and probabilities and personal thoughts is not what grabs attention. The few overconfident loudmouths end up being the ones everybody hears from. And you don't even need to be an expert, you just need to sound like one.
If you're a nutrition scientist who really knows their stuff and knows how to talk to people so that they understand just what is really known and how well it's known, how in the world do you compete with someone like RFK Jr.?
>but it seems like a really good high flash point oil.
On what basis? Using the list of smoke point table someone else linked[1], tallow does indeed have a high smoke point, but it's unclear how it's better than many other oils in that list (peanut, sunflower, soybean) which are far easier to procure.
Most people do not live near "beef operations". Moreover processing tallow is part of procurement. If you value your time at the prevailing minimum wage, it's pretty hard to beat a gallon of vegetable oil for $10.
The entire concept of "lived experience" is, bluntly - absolute bullshit. You take all the worst aspects of both conscious and unconscious biases as well as anecdotal 'evidence', and wrap it up in the fact that the average person is simply not capable of objectively analyzing themselves[0], and you end up with people saying that demonstrably false things are true simply because that's how they [incorrectly] interpreted their "lived experience," or how their "lived experience" supports their decisions. This last part is particularly true with politics and nutrition, where people make decisions not based on objective data but based mostly on how they were raised and what they like.
I can spend decades eating junk food and lose weight as long as I work out long enough and hard enough. My "lived experience" tells me that junk food is fine simply because it hasn't killed me yet.
[0] 80-90% of people describe themselves as an "above-average" driver.
> [0] 80-90% of people describe themselves as an "above-average" driver.
What shape is the distribution of driving ability? It seems entirely plausible that most drivers are decent and a smaller population are bad enough to pull the mean down well below the median.
Taking one fatty acid out of a complex fat like tallow and therefore extrapolating that "tallow is good for you and everyone" is a huge mistake.
Does Brad Marshall mention that Palmitic acid is the dominant fatty acid in tallow? And since Palmitic acid is the most abundant SFA in the U.S. diet, can we draw a conclusion that it may partially play a role in poor health outcomes?
PUFA suppress lipogenic gene expression so I do not know where anyone is getting that polyunsaturated fats have and obesogenic effect. [1]
Fallacy of composition. It does not logically follow that given Palmitic acid is the most abundant SFA in the US diet (objectively true), and given the US diet directly leads to poor health outcomes (very likely but not proven at least not to the level of the prior claim), that Palmitic acid contributes to poor health outcomes. It's entirely possible Palmitic acid is great for you and if we had less we'd be doing even worse. The statements are simply not connected at all.
I was replying to someone who was suing the fallacy of composition.
But if you really want to talk about fallacies, why is no one talking about how genetics can determine who these fatty acids are good and bad for? making blanket recommendation for a specific food without knowing someones genetics and heritage is foolish. But do a search for nutritional genetics on HN....nothing.
Someone on this thread is able to speak to the argument that has been made about beef being specifically the worst animal meat to eat due to its ability to raise inflammation in the system. I had one of the top level specialists on the planet saying that people with high cholesterol should only eat beef once a year due to its ability to raise inflammation in the circulatory system.
Wouldn't beef tallow be along the same line? It's seems contradictory that beef tallow is the next greatest thing yet also ramping up inflammation internally. I can't square the circle here (I haven't done a deep dive though).
That is quite interesting to me as someone who is suffering from CIRS (chronic inflammation from toxic mold exposure). The prevailing wisdom in CIRS circles is that an ideal diet is nothing but unprocessed fresh grass fed beef and berries and greens. From what I've read, tallow doesn't oxidize as quickly as other oils and it has almost no linoleic acid (omega 6) which can create eicosanoids and crowd out omega 3s.
Food products are so complex that it’s unlikely there’s anything we eat that could be called strictly “good” or “bad”. I would say that fixation on some vague and nonspecific issue like “inflammation” is probably a red flag for the quality of the information at hand. What inflammation exactly? In what people? Under what conditions? It surely varies widely by individual and interacts with other elements of diet, genetics, activity, and environment.
I was looking for duck fat to roast some potatoes in. The store didn't have it but they did have beef tallow. I gave it a shot. Worked great. I'd get it again
I would make Foie Gras Torchon which is Foie Gras that has been cured like gravlax and then wrapped in a cheese cloth (hence the name) and cooked slowly in duck fat, confit.
I would end up with a 1/2 gallon of foie gras infused (normal) duck fat.
Decided to make french fries using it. It was the best fries I have ever had.
butter burns more easily, unless clarified. for things like chips/fries i've always found goose or duck fat to be best, but high end UK chip shops swear by beef lard.
That’s really the purpose of beef tallow. It starts at suet, which both butcher shops I frequent consider a waste product, then you chop or grind the suet, render it down for around eight hours and use it for cooking. It adds flavour where there wasn’t flavour or where the existing flavours didn’t pair as well with other foods.
It works really well with certain foods. As an example, poutine is quite popular now. A classic poutine calls for a brown sauce, which is a gravy made with equal parts beef and chicken stock. If you cook the fries in beef tallow, you get the full depth of the brown sauce.
Or if someone you really like is coming over for a steak and some beers make steak frites. Blanch the fries first, let them dry completely, deep fry them, let them cool and then when the steaks are cooling, put some tallow in the cast iron, let it flash and then drop your fries in to fry them a final time.
This concludes this week’s episode of Cooking with Greg where I impart food knowledge that tried to kill me. Tune in next week when I talk about more of the reasons I had a heart attack in my late thirties. :)
It's kind of mentioned in the article, but I'm more comfortable cooking with lard than either tallow or oil based on the current evidence. Avoiding UPF is probably the most important factor though.
Pretty much all, if not all, cooking oils/fats when heated past the smoke point create this problem.
Avocado oil has a smoke point of 500F, which is what I use for high heat cooking. By contrast lard is only 370F, which means it supplies less flexibility than avocado oil.
Lard is a different mix of the oils from the others. Much less saturated fat than tallow (but still a lot). You can look up the proportions if you want to.
sadly one of the most frustrating things is that everyone groups saturated fats in one big group. there is lots of evidence that only specific types of saturated fats actually cause CVD, in particular some specific configurations of palmitic acid. the other saturated fats are not nearly as problem causing.
UPF as in ultra-processed food? UPF designations are farcical; they're a modern formally-ratified instance of the naturalist fallacy. There are attributes of ultra-processed foods that are bad, but it's not the ultra-processing that makes it so; it's a very "correlation is causation" situation.
The fundamental problem with UPF isn't the nutritional qualities of the food. It's the _process_ itself. UPF is basically derived from A/B testing food continuously to making it (a) highly consumable and (b) low cost. Repeat that process over decades and thousands of times and you get overconsumption of shit food.
I think you mean highly palatable. Hyperpalatability is a real problem. But that's not intrinsic to "ultra-processing"; there are lots of reasons to "ultra-process" foods that aren't about maximizing caloric input.
I mean, that's not as far as I know an actual commonly-used metric but it's closely enough aligned with hyperpalatability that I think the distinction doesn't matter.
Those atoms were made in supernova, but the molecules themselves probably didn’t. It’s like saying "my car was made in a supernova" because it’s made of atoms. Sure…
I listened to Malcom Gladwell talking about how McDonald’s switched from beef tallow, and decided to try the double fry method using tallow for myself.
Deep frying your fries in beef tallow is an absolutely incredible experience, each bite is so rich and satisfying. We definitely lost something in the switch.
Maybe. Tallow is more expensive so they are probably happy to charge less for fries to the majority that wouldn't pay extra for it. Keeping two different sets of fries is more headaches than they are likely to want to have.
Just go back to beef tallow fries. Even if it’s more expensive, the marketing could bring back more customers.
Worst case, they could increase the cost, and people would probably still pay it, given the current hype around tallow and people’s love for the former tallow fries.
I don't work for McDonald's, much less in any of the departments that would make this decision. I'm speculating, but I still stand by my claim that they won't do this: they need to arrange supply lines before they can make that switch - which would take years, the tide could change at any time in those years. That is why continue to stand by my claim, but I'm not an insider and so if they do something different - it won't be the first time I predicted the future and turned out wrong.
I remember Kentucky Fried Chicken tasting really really good as a kid. Their fries, too. We used to go bananas when my parents would bring home a bucket.
Then something changed in the 90s. I've been told it was a switch from frying in beef tallow to using vegetable oil.
As an outside observer of this beef tallow trend, it looks to me a lot like a fad driven by some internalized machismo: "It's not proper food if it's not from a dead animal." While this is not unique to the US, apparently believers of this in the US reached a critical mass enough to make it public policy.
I don't doubt that one can find health benefits in beef tallow. But I also vividly remember ads in the 80s and 90s that promoted the health benefits of seed oils and margarines, which years later proved to be cherry-picked facts. So, I'm skeptical on whether we have the same thing happening, only now it is beef tallow that is promoted by cherry-picking studies.
And frankly, RFKs "new pyramid" is at least misguided, if not worse. Bread and grains at the bottom of the pyramid make no sense. In mediterranean countries (e.g. Italy, Greece, Spain) bread and pasta are on the table in ample quantities every single day. And guess who has longer life expectancy than the US.
Aren't Americans the kind of people who will cut the fat and gristle out of their rib-eye and leave it on the plate? And it was like a thing of pride to not eat the fatty part because look how rich we are ... Now they suddenly all into slurping beef tallow. What?
There are 342 million Americans. Don't try to treat them all as a unified group. There are Americans who cut the fat, there are Americans who eat it.
What has changed is we have learned that fat isn't as bad as it was made out to be - it doesn't seem to have as large an effect on health as thought 40 years ago. That doesn't mean it is healthy - though some take it that way.
It was once observed that vegetarians being healthier than others could be explained almost entirely by vegetarians being less likely to smoke - something studies generally didn't even try to control for and so we don't know if that observation is true. There could be some other unknown factor in play as well that because it is unknown we can't control for it.
I think it has more to do with disliking the mouth feel/texture of fat and gristle than because we are so rich. But by all means feel free to gnaw away at that bone in the ribeye for the calcium if you're so worried about getting 100% of the all possible nutrition from a ribeye steak.
Seems like Americans are into making up food theories instead of just eating with common sense and moving your body with legs instead of cars sometimes.
> As an outside observer of this beef tallow trend, it looks to me a lot like a fad driven by some internalized machismo: "It's not proper food if it's not from a dead animal."
Well, it's a response to the green/eco push for making do with protein from insects and plants only and that it's bad and wrong to have nice things because global warming and sustainability.
It's not a "something died for this so therefore it's better", it's "stop commanding me to not have nice things".
This is my vibe too. There is a huge masculinism effort across not only the Trump administration but broader society. Just look at the number of "cereal, but for MEN" products that have cropped up in the last couple years.
Relatedly, it is crazy to me that people don't see the value in gender studies as an academic field when so much of the past couple years has revolved around gender.
Gender studies as a field is absolutely riddled with gender bias. I view it with scepticism because I don't think it will treat my gender or my sex fairly, not because I think there's no need for it.
The "X for MEN" trend, for example, exists in the context of decades of "X for WOMEN" products. The Man Shake (TM) is a product that only exists because Slimfast (TM) has already convinced the world that meal replacement shakes are for women.
I can see why The Man Shake is stupid, but I don't understand how Slimfast was any better. Nor do I understand why The Man Shake is masculinisation but Slimfast isn't feminisation. Nor why one should be seen as exploitative advertising targeting insecurities, while the other is an intentional political effort.
A lot of guys are very insecure because they’re overweight and sedentary and have a desk job (instead of working manual labor). And since the US is all about making your consumption your identity, the “x is masculine” marketing is like shooting fish in barrel.
i dont think it takes machismo to say that frying in animal fat is tastier than frying in whatever the hell constitues canola oil , as well your american breads and pastas are probably significantly less healthy than the european equivalent
Looking at dry pasta from Europe and the US, they seem pretty much the same, except the US pasta is more likely to use enriched flour; not sure what makes that less healthy.
Bread varies a lot and yeah we have some terrible breads, I don't buy them but someone must because they keep selling them
it was a bit doubtful that the recipe for pasta could vary so much , although i do see on the net that america is fond of jar pasta sauce over tomato cans (not pasta exactly but intrinsically linked) ... perhaps this down promotion of carbs is a knock on effect from years of the keto diet being mainstream
It's not healthy in the least, but attempts to help fans understand why it is so are met with resistance due to ingrained biases and skepticism of the establishment.
The pushback against "institutional nutrition" has been a long time coming and is honestly welcomed as health and nutrition science have evolved from the days of telling us to avoid all fat and offering consumers "low calorie" processed foods that didn't do our bodies much good.
In the same way the bacon craze of the 2000s was a successful marketing effort from pork farmers, cattle farmers (and their lobbying groups) are now having a moment with beef and subsequent beef products. Good nutritional science has been pointing to many fats (but not all fats) actually being good for our diet, contrary to those old institutional guidelines, but there's a lot of nuance around adding fats back to a person's diet. Many aren't making the distinction between saturated vs unsaturated fat as well as UDL and LDL cholesterol that ends up in our bloodstream (one of those is not good for us!).
But in an era of memes, misinformation, and context collapse good luck trying to have that more complicated discussion with people when the nutritional aspect is brought up (the book is closed on the flavor debate of course, it's delicious)
It's probably still better to avoid eating french fries regardless of what they're fried in. That would probably lead to better health outcomes regardless.
Unless you're claiming that it tastes better, then sure, beef tallow is pretty tasty.
If you are eating french fries once or twice a year they probably are not bad for you (by enough to matter, and perhaps even good if they give some micro nutriant you are not getting elsewhere). And then by all means eat them friend in beef tallow because that tastes better.
If you are eating french fries twice a week - which seems to be common - they are bad for you. Clean up your diet, eat a larger variety of food.
> Is beef tallow a better option for a cooking fat? I think it is.
Better compared to what? Better than refined canola? Probably. Better than good quality, cold-pressed vegetable oils? Probably not. It's not great for heart health.
> Canola and other seed oils are made using toxic solvents which are not full removed from the final product.
This is simply untrue. Independent bodies all over the world regularly test commercially available oils for toxic solvents. While the solvent Hexane is indeed commonly used in the extraction of refined vegetable oils, it is later removed in the refining process.
For example Stiftung Warentest, an independent consumer advocacy organization tested 23 rapeseed oils available in German supermarkets and they all came out clean [1].
A few years earlier, they tested 25 "specialty oils" and found traces of Hexane in only one of them - but still way below the EU threshold of 1 mg/kg. [2]
Here is a study from Japan that tested a bunch of vegetable oils and came to the conclusion that none of the products contained dangerous levels of Hexane. The maximum amount the researchers found was 42.6 µg/kg (again way below the EU threshold) - but in most samples the amount they found was so low they couldn't even get a reading or they didn't find any Hexane at all.
Besides, for cold-pressed oils, no solvents are used at all.
These studies are done to rebuff claims by people whose cohort largely overlaps with those who believe that homeopathic medicine is legit. It's not gonna change squat in their minds.
Sydney heart diet study: Seed oil group had something like 62% higher death rate.
Minnesota coronary experiment: replaced saturated fats with seed oil, cholesterol dropped, but for every 30 mg/dL drop risk of death went up something like 20%.
Several recent meta analyses also indicate no real benefit migrating from saturated fats to seed oils. The only silver lining I have seen is there is some evidence replacing them for people who have had a coronary event already. So, no, I don't think the evidence supports "seed oils do much better" in a general sense.
I don't have time to look into the sydney heart study but I know for the minnesota experiment they, not knowing how bad it was at the time, used margarine with high trans fats as the replacements. Also had a huge 95% drop out rate
Actually on a quick check the sydney study looks to be the exact same
Look at a meta review. There are a ton of these studies and the overwhelming evidence is that saturated fat is associated with CVD and ACM, PUFAs are not.
Compared to hydrogenated margarine that was pushed a couple of decades ago before we learned about trans-fats? Of course.
If you use it when cooking for guests, you should disclose that you're using it (especially for non-meat dishes) because it may add extra fat that they're not OK with or consider inappropriate for personal dietary consumption (they're vegetarian, don't eat beef products, whatever).
I have a friend for whom we can't use anything that has sunflower oil in it, which is _really hard to avoid_ in surprising ways (there are spice blends that I use which have a bit of sunflower oil in the mixes).
Omega ratio matters most taking total intake of 3 and 6 into account. Since tallow is overwhelmingly saturated fat, it's a moot point what the ratio is. The remedy to low omega-3 is just to consume more dominant EPA/DHA and even ALA sources. Omega 6 won't fly off the charts except through consuming lots of packaged boxed foods and ultraprocessed foods, which overwhelming use vegetable oils like soybean or sunflower (North American fat consumption has skyrocketed over a century mostly owing to these foods). Even if you consume some nuts or seed oil now and then, just consume fish or a supplement.
Arguably the "healthiest" cooking oil is olive oil. If we're looking at just the fatty acids though, replacing SFA with PUFAs is a stronger predictor of lower CVD and all-cause mortality.
Tallow is still higher in long chain SFAs than vegetable saturated fats, which are less healthy than short and medium chain SFAs (but neither is as good as PUFAs).
That sort of overwhelms the omega ratios. As I understand it, both fish oil and (fresh) flax seed oil are still better than tallow.
With RFK's dismantling of good science, politics can't be put aside, as his reasons are essentially "because I said so".
Our own health department has completely removed objectivity from their process. It doesn't matter if they say something right or wrong now, they've completely lost our trust.
He's almost the perfect example of the colloquial stereotype of "Dunning Kruger Syndrome", which is why he's so dangerous.
I've made this example before, but it bears repeating.
I know absolutely nothing about chemistry, medicine, or healthcare policy. I am wholly unqualifed to be in charge of anything involving healthcare. Suppose that, despite all reason, I am appointed into a HHS secretary anyway. This would be bad, but because I know that I know nothing, my potential for damage is actually pretty limited. I would have to defer a lot of decisions to advisors, who would likely be doctors and chemists and data scientists. I probably wouldn't make a lot of "progress", and I would likely more or less just maintain the status quo, but I probably wouldn't make things much worse.
RFK Jr. is the worst, because he doesn't know any more about health or medicine than I do, but because he's read a bunch of idiotic blogs and Facebook pages he thinks he knows better than the entire medical establishment, and because he thinks he knows everything he feels qualified to start cutting funding for American medical research and blame everything on people not eating enough beef fat.
People have been (understandably) focusing on Trump's descent into authoritarianism, but it's possible that that gets somewhat fixed once he's out of office, but I think that the damage that RFK Jr. has done to our medical research establishment might be irreparable. He is uniquely dangerous.
Now, everyone trying to fix the medical establishment is immediately called an anti vaxxer, science denier, etc.
At some point it was inevitable that we get someone who can shrug these labels off because they do not have a scientific reputation that can be killed with these labels.
My point is, again, we are in this situation because sane attempts to fix things has not worked. To an extent that people will literally try anything.
> everyone trying to fix the medical establishment is immediately called an anti vaxxer, science denier, etc.
That's because the thought leaders who are fed up with the medical establishment are gaining traction by spreading anti-vax and science denial ideas and not calling out specific medical establishment (other than "big pharma is a boogie man!"). So, it's hard to take their position seriously (even though, I too and anti medical establishment)
> Now, everyone trying to fix the medical establishment is immediately called an anti vaxxer, science denier, etc.
Well they keep showing up with shitty unverified claims...are we supposed to treat their shitty claims as valid just because they're against the grain?
It's also good to keep an eye on the graft. It's funny how pretty much every big personality in the alt-med space has totally awesome products to sell you that Big Science won't let you know about.
If your “fixes” for the medical establishment include spreading unsubstantiated fear mongering about vaccines and science denial then you would be right to be classified as an anti vaxxer and a science denier.
I think you might be missing the posters point. He agrees with you on nearly every point you are making. He is however expanding on that saying that the problem is something of a self-own by the combination of science, science reporting, and science driven policy. Trust was so thoroughly lowered that there was almost no avoiding an event like Trump/RFK. It can be true that 1. RFK is not qualified and is likely to make things worse. 2. This is partly the responsibility of the establishment for squandering the trust that the public put in them.
I think he's actively lying with this to have some amount of plausible deniability.
If you look at pseudoscience "alternative health" treatments on YouTube, they always have some disclaimer saying "This is not medical advice, I am not a physician, please consult your doctor", and then immediately go on to tell you about how injecting yourself with ozone or drinking paint thinner will cure all your diseases. I think it's just a legal disclaimer, not like they are actually aware that what they're doing is bullshit.
Not to be flippant, but we know that the answer to that is "No" because of Betteridge's Law of Headlines[1].
I haven't read the article ("too hard, didn't care"), but as a foodie:
- in certain food circles, it never went away
- industrially, McD's in at least North America used beef tallow as one of the par-frying oils for their fries well into the 21st century -- which caused a stir amongst vegetarians and Hindu who had assumed that the fries were vegetarian (I remember stories here in Canada in 2002-2003)
- beef tallow is now fascionable, which accounts for the reactionary resurgence for something that never really went away
- the science is very clear that the new guidance from RFK's worm-eaten brain is junk
- the science is also very clear that while saturated fats like beef tallow are bad for you compared to olive oil and seed oils, they're better than hydrogenated fats and trans-fat products that were pushed on the world for a couple of decades a couple of decades ago
Beef tallow is a net good inasmuch as it helps ensure whole animal use, but that doesn't make it healthy or suitable for all diets.
If you are deep frying, for e.g. french fries, any cooking oil that is solid at room temperature can keep them from being greasy. This includes beef tallow, but also coconut oil for a vegetable-based oil.
For some foods the being-solid-at-room-temperature property can be important for texture.
I have no disagreement with this and I think I said as much.
But the premise of the original article (that beef tallow ever went away, which is required for a comeback) is deeply flawed, and the fascionable junk science from RFK is the dumbest possible reason to use beef tallow.
Just don't expect me (a vegetarian) to eat anything that has beef tallow, and expect me to be very pissed off if I later learn a restaurant or food manufacturer uses beef tallow without disclosing it, because that's taking choice away from me.
Evidence for the negative effects of omega 6s and specifically seed oils is at best fuzzy and conflicting, plenty of studies have found little to no difference. Research on the subject is as best inconclusive.
I expect that, to the extent there's a problem, it's that they are an additive to most packaged/ultra-processed food products which can be non-satiating, and therefore boosts overall consumption of fats and calories. Sugar of course is another component.
id recommend you look into the omega 6 to omega 3 ratio , the tldr is that the ratio of omega 6 to 3 is way out of balance in the modern western diet , from my viewpoint this has been spurred on by oils such as soy and canola which are very high in omega 6
I won't bother as I'm vegetarian, which means that I really don't care the "supposed" benefits (which likely pale compared to the ingestion of long chain saturated fats present in beef tallow, as opposed to the short and medium chain saturated fats present in coconut oil). Beef tallow is irrelevant to me except for restaurateurs or food manufacturers who use it without disclosing it. (One should disclose its use in any case. For people who avoid pork, knowing that your product contains "beef lard" instead of "whatever lard was cheapest this week" matters, because they can't do "pork lard".)
But the reality is that there's insufficient science for the promotion of beef tallow in RFK's health treason. For large groups of people it's off limits due to personal dietary restrictions (religious or animal product avoidance) and would be contraindicated for anyone who currently has cardiovascular diseases involving high cholesterol.
Use beef tallow, don't use beef tallow. I don't care unless I'm possibly eating food that you have prepared or manufactured (because I don't want rendered animal fats in my food). But don't pretend that it's a health food. It isn't, but can still be eaten in moderation by anyone who _doesn't_ mind beef products in their food.
Not sure how you got that from anything I’ve written, because it’s not what I said.
What I said is the FDA shouldn’t be promoting junk recommendations as if it were gold-standard science.
There are good scientific reasons to avoid animal fats in one’s diet. There are no good scientific reasons to add them back to one’s diet.
In moderation, they aren’t harmful and may indeed improve the flavour or texture of certain dishes when had in moderation. I personally love making butter sage gnocchi or ravioli (it doesn’t work as well with olive oil), but I only make it every couple of months.
Beyond everything else, we know that replacing animal protein with plant protein is a good way to improve health. But it’s not accessible or acceptable to everyone. It’s also not necessarily a good use of some land — land that might be perfectly suited to raising goats is poor for growing crops for human consumption.
I'm not vegan, but ovo-lacto vegetarian, so B12 deficiency isn't anything I've ever had to worry about.
With appropriate fortified foods (synthesized bacterial sources adding B12 to nutritional yeast, plant milks, etc.), vegans don't need to worry about it either.
A quick bit of research suggests that as much at 16% of meat eaters have B12 deficiency, so it's a systemic problem.
Right. They used solid blocks in the 1990s, but it was vegetable oil not beef tallow. Of course to make vegetable oil a solid block they had to make it a trans-far which is worse than saturated fat (as we now know, but didn't then). In the late 1990s they switched to a liquid oil, though I don't know how what it was (I suspect it still had a lot of trans fats, but I don't have information on the composition). I quit just after that, but I think they switched the fat used again in the early 2000s to something that was pure vegetable oil.
I thought the candle wax consistency was a coincidence, but it was the main way to make candles for most of history. It tastes pretty good but has a strong smell when cooking (or burning as a candle, presumably).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pemmican
I'm afraid to ask but regardless: you use the lard as a replacement for oil when frying/cooking fries, or as like a condiment/sauce/something?
Yeah I bet, but with Americans you never know, I've seen people pour melted processed butter across popcorn, so when it comes to what Americans, I've learned to always ask rather than assume.
[0] https://fireinabottle.net/every-fire-in-a-bottle-post-from-t...
EDIT: I'm sympathetic to Brad's argument and I'm concerned that RFK Jr's incompetence will interfere with ongoing research in this area of metabolism.
However, the problem is that the public has also come to that conclusion. The public has gone on to decide "that means my incredibly weakly-evidenced idea is just as good as the expert opinions" which does not follow and is often disastrously wrong.
So I'm also sympathetic to the idea that the saturated fat picture is more complex than a blanket ban suggests. But I know better than to treat things like Brad's arguments as anything other than "interesting hypothesis" as opposed to "something we actually know about nutrition."
The public are presented with things that are weakly evidenced as scientifically proven. After all, the one study that says something is good or bad for you was published in a peer-reviewed journal and the university PR people blogged about it and the newspapers reported it uncritically.
A lot of experts are very bad at differing between different levels of evidence and probability: "my personal (if expert) opinion", "a consensus in the field" and "backed by reasonable evidence" and "proven" are very different but all often get presented the same way.
The problem is that a bunch of talk about weak studies and probabilities and personal thoughts is not what grabs attention. The few overconfident loudmouths end up being the ones everybody hears from. And you don't even need to be an expert, you just need to sound like one.
If you're a nutrition scientist who really knows their stuff and knows how to talk to people so that they understand just what is really known and how well it's known, how in the world do you compete with someone like RFK Jr.?
Lived experience is definitely weak evidence because it is riddled with bias. This is why we have blinded studies.
On what basis? Using the list of smoke point table someone else linked[1], tallow does indeed have a high smoke point, but it's unclear how it's better than many other oils in that list (peanut, sunflower, soybean) which are far easier to procure.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Smoke_point_of_cookin...
Yeah, but lived experience shows that a lot of people do.
I can spend decades eating junk food and lose weight as long as I work out long enough and hard enough. My "lived experience" tells me that junk food is fine simply because it hasn't killed me yet.
[0] 80-90% of people describe themselves as an "above-average" driver.
What shape is the distribution of driving ability? It seems entirely plausible that most drivers are decent and a smaller population are bad enough to pull the mean down well below the median.
Does Brad Marshall mention that Palmitic acid is the dominant fatty acid in tallow? And since Palmitic acid is the most abundant SFA in the U.S. diet, can we draw a conclusion that it may partially play a role in poor health outcomes?
PUFA suppress lipogenic gene expression so I do not know where anyone is getting that polyunsaturated fats have and obesogenic effect. [1]
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65613-2
But if you really want to talk about fallacies, why is no one talking about how genetics can determine who these fatty acids are good and bad for? making blanket recommendation for a specific food without knowing someones genetics and heritage is foolish. But do a search for nutritional genetics on HN....nothing.
Wouldn't beef tallow be along the same line? It's seems contradictory that beef tallow is the next greatest thing yet also ramping up inflammation internally. I can't square the circle here (I haven't done a deep dive though).
Totally different chemical classes for your body to respond to.
I would end up with a 1/2 gallon of foie gras infused (normal) duck fat.
Decided to make french fries using it. It was the best fries I have ever had.
Nonetheless, I would never eat like that today.
That last one is not necessarily a bad thing. You haven’t truly had popcorn till you’ve had beef tallow popcorn.
It works really well with certain foods. As an example, poutine is quite popular now. A classic poutine calls for a brown sauce, which is a gravy made with equal parts beef and chicken stock. If you cook the fries in beef tallow, you get the full depth of the brown sauce.
Or if someone you really like is coming over for a steak and some beers make steak frites. Blanch the fries first, let them dry completely, deep fry them, let them cool and then when the steaks are cooling, put some tallow in the cast iron, let it flash and then drop your fries in to fry them a final time.
This concludes this week’s episode of Cooking with Greg where I impart food knowledge that tried to kill me. Tune in next week when I talk about more of the reasons I had a heart attack in my late thirties. :)
How is lard meaningfully different than tallow or vegetable oil? Being animal fat, isn't it approximately the same as tallow?
Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3t902pqt3C7nGN99hV...
I prefer lard because it's slightly lower in saturated than tallow, and doesn't alter taste so much.
Avocado oil has a smoke point of 500F, which is what I use for high heat cooking. By contrast lard is only 370F, which means it supplies less flexibility than avocado oil.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Smoke_point_of_cookin...
What this matters isn't clear of course.
Whereas beef tallow smells of roast beef.
> Bread grows on trees, apparently
I guess I'm old now, because I remember when it was a big deal that McDonald's switched from using tallow.
Deep frying your fries in beef tallow is an absolutely incredible experience, each bite is so rich and satisfying. We definitely lost something in the switch.
Just go back to beef tallow fries. Even if it’s more expensive, the marketing could bring back more customers.
Worst case, they could increase the cost, and people would probably still pay it, given the current hype around tallow and people’s love for the former tallow fries.
This would then be used for frying etc.. I imagine my parents would have used it when they were young for "dripping" sandwiches.
Maybe this was just a UK thing?
Then something changed in the 90s. I've been told it was a switch from frying in beef tallow to using vegetable oil.
It's just disgusting now.
I don't doubt that one can find health benefits in beef tallow. But I also vividly remember ads in the 80s and 90s that promoted the health benefits of seed oils and margarines, which years later proved to be cherry-picked facts. So, I'm skeptical on whether we have the same thing happening, only now it is beef tallow that is promoted by cherry-picking studies.
And frankly, RFKs "new pyramid" is at least misguided, if not worse. Bread and grains at the bottom of the pyramid make no sense. In mediterranean countries (e.g. Italy, Greece, Spain) bread and pasta are on the table in ample quantities every single day. And guess who has longer life expectancy than the US.
Saturated fat looks good when you replace trans fat
Red meat looks to be neutral when you eeplace refined grains
Doesn't mean there aren't better options though
What has changed is we have learned that fat isn't as bad as it was made out to be - it doesn't seem to have as large an effect on health as thought 40 years ago. That doesn't mean it is healthy - though some take it that way.
It was once observed that vegetarians being healthier than others could be explained almost entirely by vegetarians being less likely to smoke - something studies generally didn't even try to control for and so we don't know if that observation is true. There could be some other unknown factor in play as well that because it is unknown we can't control for it.
Well, it's a response to the green/eco push for making do with protein from insects and plants only and that it's bad and wrong to have nice things because global warming and sustainability.
It's not a "something died for this so therefore it's better", it's "stop commanding me to not have nice things".
Relatedly, it is crazy to me that people don't see the value in gender studies as an academic field when so much of the past couple years has revolved around gender.
The "X for MEN" trend, for example, exists in the context of decades of "X for WOMEN" products. The Man Shake (TM) is a product that only exists because Slimfast (TM) has already convinced the world that meal replacement shakes are for women.
I can see why The Man Shake is stupid, but I don't understand how Slimfast was any better. Nor do I understand why The Man Shake is masculinisation but Slimfast isn't feminisation. Nor why one should be seen as exploitative advertising targeting insecurities, while the other is an intentional political effort.
Bread varies a lot and yeah we have some terrible breads, I don't buy them but someone must because they keep selling them
The pushback against "institutional nutrition" has been a long time coming and is honestly welcomed as health and nutrition science have evolved from the days of telling us to avoid all fat and offering consumers "low calorie" processed foods that didn't do our bodies much good.
In the same way the bacon craze of the 2000s was a successful marketing effort from pork farmers, cattle farmers (and their lobbying groups) are now having a moment with beef and subsequent beef products. Good nutritional science has been pointing to many fats (but not all fats) actually being good for our diet, contrary to those old institutional guidelines, but there's a lot of nuance around adding fats back to a person's diet. Many aren't making the distinction between saturated vs unsaturated fat as well as UDL and LDL cholesterol that ends up in our bloodstream (one of those is not good for us!).
But in an era of memes, misinformation, and context collapse good luck trying to have that more complicated discussion with people when the nutritional aspect is brought up (the book is closed on the flavor debate of course, it's delicious)
Is beef tallow a better option for a cooking fat? I think it is.
Unless you're claiming that it tastes better, then sure, beef tallow is pretty tasty.
If you are eating french fries twice a week - which seems to be common - they are bad for you. Clean up your diet, eat a larger variety of food.
Better compared to what? Better than refined canola? Probably. Better than good quality, cold-pressed vegetable oils? Probably not. It's not great for heart health.
Canola and other seed oils are made using toxic solvents which are not full removed from the final product.
This is simply untrue. Independent bodies all over the world regularly test commercially available oils for toxic solvents. While the solvent Hexane is indeed commonly used in the extraction of refined vegetable oils, it is later removed in the refining process.
For example Stiftung Warentest, an independent consumer advocacy organization tested 23 rapeseed oils available in German supermarkets and they all came out clean [1].
A few years earlier, they tested 25 "specialty oils" and found traces of Hexane in only one of them - but still way below the EU threshold of 1 mg/kg. [2]
Here is a study from Japan that tested a bunch of vegetable oils and came to the conclusion that none of the products contained dangerous levels of Hexane. The maximum amount the researchers found was 42.6 µg/kg (again way below the EU threshold) - but in most samples the amount they found was so low they couldn't even get a reading or they didn't find any Hexane at all.
Besides, for cold-pressed oils, no solvents are used at all.
[1] https://www.test.de/Rapsoel-im-Test-1816151-0/
[2] https://www.test.de/Gourmet-Oele-Fast-jedes-zweite-ist-mange...
[3] https://openaccesspub.org/experimental-and-clinical-toxicolo...
Sydney heart diet study: Seed oil group had something like 62% higher death rate.
Minnesota coronary experiment: replaced saturated fats with seed oil, cholesterol dropped, but for every 30 mg/dL drop risk of death went up something like 20%.
Several recent meta analyses also indicate no real benefit migrating from saturated fats to seed oils. The only silver lining I have seen is there is some evidence replacing them for people who have had a coronary event already. So, no, I don't think the evidence supports "seed oils do much better" in a general sense.
Actually on a quick check the sydney study looks to be the exact same
Olive oil? Peanut oil? No and (mostly) no.
Compared to hydrogenated margarine that was pushed a couple of decades ago before we learned about trans-fats? Of course.
If you use it when cooking for guests, you should disclose that you're using it (especially for non-meat dishes) because it may add extra fat that they're not OK with or consider inappropriate for personal dietary consumption (they're vegetarian, don't eat beef products, whatever).
I have a friend for whom we can't use anything that has sunflower oil in it, which is _really hard to avoid_ in surprising ways (there are spice blends that I use which have a bit of sunflower oil in the mixes).
Arguably the "healthiest" cooking oil is olive oil. If we're looking at just the fatty acids though, replacing SFA with PUFAs is a stronger predictor of lower CVD and all-cause mortality.
That sort of overwhelms the omega ratios. As I understand it, both fish oil and (fresh) flax seed oil are still better than tallow.
With RFK's dismantling of good science, politics can't be put aside, as his reasons are essentially "because I said so".
Politics aside, the omega6:3 ratio and PUFA content of tallow is favorable.
That changes my perception from "maybe that's a good point" to "spammers should die painfully."
I've made this example before, but it bears repeating.
I know absolutely nothing about chemistry, medicine, or healthcare policy. I am wholly unqualifed to be in charge of anything involving healthcare. Suppose that, despite all reason, I am appointed into a HHS secretary anyway. This would be bad, but because I know that I know nothing, my potential for damage is actually pretty limited. I would have to defer a lot of decisions to advisors, who would likely be doctors and chemists and data scientists. I probably wouldn't make a lot of "progress", and I would likely more or less just maintain the status quo, but I probably wouldn't make things much worse.
RFK Jr. is the worst, because he doesn't know any more about health or medicine than I do, but because he's read a bunch of idiotic blogs and Facebook pages he thinks he knows better than the entire medical establishment, and because he thinks he knows everything he feels qualified to start cutting funding for American medical research and blame everything on people not eating enough beef fat.
People have been (understandably) focusing on Trump's descent into authoritarianism, but it's possible that that gets somewhat fixed once he's out of office, but I think that the damage that RFK Jr. has done to our medical research establishment might be irreparable. He is uniquely dangerous.
I think you have missed the part about why we are in this situation.
People are absolutely fed up with the medical establishment. There is no way to twist this.
Now, everyone trying to fix the medical establishment is immediately called an anti vaxxer, science denier, etc.
At some point it was inevitable that we get someone who can shrug these labels off because they do not have a scientific reputation that can be killed with these labels.
My point is, again, we are in this situation because sane attempts to fix things has not worked. To an extent that people will literally try anything.
That's because the thought leaders who are fed up with the medical establishment are gaining traction by spreading anti-vax and science denial ideas and not calling out specific medical establishment (other than "big pharma is a boogie man!"). So, it's hard to take their position seriously (even though, I too and anti medical establishment)
Well they keep showing up with shitty unverified claims...are we supposed to treat their shitty claims as valid just because they're against the grain?
It's also good to keep an eye on the graft. It's funny how pretty much every big personality in the alt-med space has totally awesome products to sell you that Big Science won't let you know about.
Yet still here we are
If you look at pseudoscience "alternative health" treatments on YouTube, they always have some disclaimer saying "This is not medical advice, I am not a physician, please consult your doctor", and then immediately go on to tell you about how injecting yourself with ozone or drinking paint thinner will cure all your diseases. I think it's just a legal disclaimer, not like they are actually aware that what they're doing is bullshit.
I haven't read the article ("too hard, didn't care"), but as a foodie:
- in certain food circles, it never went away - industrially, McD's in at least North America used beef tallow as one of the par-frying oils for their fries well into the 21st century -- which caused a stir amongst vegetarians and Hindu who had assumed that the fries were vegetarian (I remember stories here in Canada in 2002-2003) - beef tallow is now fascionable, which accounts for the reactionary resurgence for something that never really went away - the science is very clear that the new guidance from RFK's worm-eaten brain is junk - the science is also very clear that while saturated fats like beef tallow are bad for you compared to olive oil and seed oils, they're better than hydrogenated fats and trans-fat products that were pushed on the world for a couple of decades a couple of decades ago
Beef tallow is a net good inasmuch as it helps ensure whole animal use, but that doesn't make it healthy or suitable for all diets.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
For some foods the being-solid-at-room-temperature property can be important for texture.
But the premise of the original article (that beef tallow ever went away, which is required for a comeback) is deeply flawed, and the fascionable junk science from RFK is the dumbest possible reason to use beef tallow.
Just don't expect me (a vegetarian) to eat anything that has beef tallow, and expect me to be very pissed off if I later learn a restaurant or food manufacturer uses beef tallow without disclosing it, because that's taking choice away from me.
I recommend reading the article.
Source for Americans needing more omega-6-fatty-acid intake?
> seed oils
Do we have evidence around seed oils? Or is this the new homeopathy?
I expect that, to the extent there's a problem, it's that they are an additive to most packaged/ultra-processed food products which can be non-satiating, and therefore boosts overall consumption of fats and calories. Sugar of course is another component.
But the reality is that there's insufficient science for the promotion of beef tallow in RFK's health treason. For large groups of people it's off limits due to personal dietary restrictions (religious or animal product avoidance) and would be contraindicated for anyone who currently has cardiovascular diseases involving high cholesterol.
Use beef tallow, don't use beef tallow. I don't care unless I'm possibly eating food that you have prepared or manufactured (because I don't want rendered animal fats in my food). But don't pretend that it's a health food. It isn't, but can still be eaten in moderation by anyone who _doesn't_ mind beef products in their food.
So you’re proposing that the FDA should promote a vegan diet to cater to the lowest common denominator?
What I said is the FDA shouldn’t be promoting junk recommendations as if it were gold-standard science.
There are good scientific reasons to avoid animal fats in one’s diet. There are no good scientific reasons to add them back to one’s diet.
In moderation, they aren’t harmful and may indeed improve the flavour or texture of certain dishes when had in moderation. I personally love making butter sage gnocchi or ravioli (it doesn’t work as well with olive oil), but I only make it every couple of months.
Beyond everything else, we know that replacing animal protein with plant protein is a good way to improve health. But it’s not accessible or acceptable to everyone. It’s also not necessarily a good use of some land — land that might be perfectly suited to raising goats is poor for growing crops for human consumption.
With appropriate fortified foods (synthesized bacterial sources adding B12 to nutritional yeast, plant milks, etc.), vegans don't need to worry about it either.
A quick bit of research suggests that as much at 16% of meat eaters have B12 deficiency, so it's a systemic problem.
Everything I've read says that McDonald's switched globally to vegetable oil in the early 1990s. I think you've misremembered.