For most of your life, you probably didn’t think much about beef tallow. Yet these days, the use of the substance as a cooking fat or a moisturizer isn’t just a lifestyle choice. For many of the subcultures united by the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, it has become a marker of identity.
Months before Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was appointed as the US Health and Human Services Secretary, he posted a rallying cry on X to “Make Frying Oil Tallow Again,” singling out seed oils as a key driver of the American obesity epidemic. While it’s true that obesity rates and seed oil consumption have both gone up in recent decades, this is mere correlation. There are countless additional factors—including but not limited to higher intake of sugar and ultra-processed foods, as well as genetics, lifestyle, and socioeconomic considerations—at play in American diets.
Even so, franchises including Steak ’n Shake quickly took note and made the switch. Meanwhile, other chains such as Sweetgreen have since decided to ditch seed oils, in favor of extra virgin olive oil and avocado oil, for their fries and cooked items.
The growing interest in beef tallow symbolizes a handful of larger health and wellness trends, according to Maddie Pasquariello, a registered dietitian in Brooklyn, New York. These include the growing politicization of food, an emphasis on simpler ingredients and fewer processed foods, and the desire to return to “ancestral” dietary patterns. Simultaneously, beef tallow—which is created by cooking down beef fat to separate it from tissues and impurities—as skincare has become big on TikTok, with proponents touting it as a dew-inducing, skin barrier–friendly moisturizer.
But is beef tallow actually any good for your skin or your health?
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