Have you heard of the beef tallow trend? An ingredient that was common in mid-century kitchens is now a hashtag on more than 74,000 TikTok posts, and it’s being used for more than just food.
Is this healthy?
This week, Walter Willett, nutrition and epidemiology professor at Harvard University, discussed the rising popularity of this animal product with KCBS Radio news anchor Holly Quan. He called it a “very worrisome” development.
“Clearly, if you want to live a long and healthy life, we have a massive amount of evidence from many different sources that loading up on beef tallow and going back to what people were consuming in the 1950s and 1960s would be a very bad idea,” said Willett. “We’re actually living a lot longer – about 10 years longer than we were back at that time – and the rates of heart attacks and death from heart attacks have gone down, by almost 80%. So, a lot of that is probably due to the switch from beef tallow to seed oils, in fact.”
Before we dive deeper into their conversation, let’s get to know beef tallow a bit better.
In an article last summer, Mayo Clinic outpatient pediatric dietitian and gastroenterology specialist Lori Russell explained that this “whiteish substance that is solid at room temperature,” is made by removing, simmering and clarifying the fatty tissue surrounding the organs of cows. Tallow can be made from other “ruminant” animals that chew cud, including buffalo and sheep.
Russell said that tallow is typically used for cooking at high temperatures, such as deep frying and roasting. It shares similarities with lard, which is sourced from pigs and is often used in baking due to its milder flavor.
The reason why beef tallow is trending in the wellness sphere has to do with its unique composition, said Russell. Not all fats are the same, and one key delineation is between solid fats like beef tallow and coconut oil versus liquid fats such as olive oil and peanut oil. Solid fats are mostly saturated fat, while liquid fats are primarily non-saturated fat. In particular, the saturated fat is known as stearic acid.
“Stearic acid appears to not raise cholesterol in the same way as other saturated fats,” said Russell. Additionally, she said that tallow contains some monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, which are considered healthier.
However, Willett said beef tallow isn’t really a significant source of polyunsaturated fats due to the way that grass is digested by cows.
“Beef tallow is a problem both for what it has and what it doesn’t have. It definitely has a lot of saturated fat in it, but what most people don’t recognize is that it has almost zero of the beneficial polyunsaturates, the really essential polyunsaturates,” he said.
Polyunsaturated fats include omega-3 and omega-6 fats and they can be found in salmon, vegetable oils, and some nuts and seeds, according to the National Library of Medicine. Notably, along with the beef tallow trend, there has been criticism of vegetable and seed oils.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is one of the people that has rallied against seed oils. In an X post from last October, he wrote about both beef tallow and seed oils. He also mentioned a major moment in U.S. beef tallow history – when McDonald’s stopped using it to make its French fries.
“Fast Food is a part of American culture. But that doesn’t mean it has to be unhealthy, and that we can’t make better choices. Did you know that McDonald’s used to use beef tallow to make their fries from 1940 until phasing it out in favor of seed oils in 1990?” said Kennedy. “This switch was made because saturated animal fats were thought to be unhealthy, but we have since discovered that seed oils are one of the driving causes of the obesity epidemic. Interestingly enough, this began to drastically rise around the same time fast food restaurants switched from beef tallow to seed oils in their fryers. People who enjoy a burger with fries on a night out aren’t to blame, and Americans should have every right to eat out at a restaurant without being unknowingly poisoned by heavily subsidized seed oils. It’s time to Make Frying Oil Tallow Again.”
In 2017 Malclom Gladwell’s “Revisionist History” podcast explored McDonald’s shift away from beef tallow with a trip to the top food R&D lab in the country. Steak n’ Shake, another fast food chain, recently announced that it was doing the opposite – it switched from seed oils to beef tallow to fry its fries and onion rings.
The same month that Kennedy posted about beef tallow on X, Massachusetts General Hospital said that seed oils can be a beneficial part of a healthy diet when used in cooking. Dana Olstad, a nutrition expert who teaches at the University of Calgary’s Cummings School of Medicine, also questioned Kennedy’s claim that cooking in vegetable oils is unhealthy, according to Newsweek, and Willett said research supports a diet that includes plant oil.
“We’ve known for 50 or 60 years that they reduce blood cholesterol levels,” he said of plant oils. “And more recently, we’ve been learning that those seed oils have many other benefits, in addition to reducing heart attacks through lowering blood cholesterol level. For example, we recently published a story, based on many decades of follow-up, that people who consume more seed oils actually had lower risk of dementia, and the benefits of seed oil seemed about equal to those of olive oil.”
Still, Willett did mention that some research has linked seed oils to inflammation, while others have linked them to a reduction in inflammation. Audacy has also reported on research that linked seed oils to chronic inflammation.
In addition to eating beef tallow, some social media influencers have also advocated using beef tallow as a moisturizer. Dr. Angelo Landriscina, a board-certified dermatologist, award-winning scientific researcher and medical writer who is active on TikTok listed this trend as one to leave in 2024.
“Beef tallow specifically has some issues – an animal product like this is going to have wide variability,” based on the animal that it comes from,” he explained. That means there isn’t necessarily consistency from batch to batch.
So, to our original question – is beef tallow healthy?
As Gladwell noted in his podcast, beef tallow can make French fries taste pretty special, and being happy is generally healthy. However, using it as skin cream comes with risks, according to Landriscina.
Russell said in her article that moderate consumption can have some benefits, but she also noted that excessive saturated fat consumption still linked to poor heart health and said beef tallow should be used sparingly as a cooking oil. Willett agrees. He told KCBS Radio he’s afraid people will harm themselves if “they’re replacing healthy unsaturated fats in their diet with beef tallow.”