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).
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?
[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.
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]
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. :)
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).
[Edit: I looked into it --> Beef uniquely raises ApoB-containing particles in susceptible people + Saturated fat from beef down-regulates LDL receptors].
[Edit 2: Beef tallow is worse than eating beef since it is a concentrated version of what I wrote about in edit 1]
Just from a cursory search, you can find tons of studies supporting this. It is not a controversial statement at all in scientific nutrition and medical fields.
Some studies:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11537864/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33951994/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-30455-9
I think it's significant however that unhealthy plant based diets show increased mortality, so it's important to pay attention to what you eat in any case.
It's also worth keeping in mind conflicts of interest and cultural aspects. I think probably there are strong interests in the side of animal products, although this is partisan in the US (and surely there is some lobbying from the opposite direction as well). Also I think culturally there's strong preference for animal products, in particular meat and beef consumption, almost everywhere. Of course, science is supposed to be resistant to conflicts of interest (and it is usually mandatory to disclose funding conflicts of interest), but not all studies are the same. Those conflicts being mostly in the other direction give me additional confidence there isn't a strong bias from those sources.
Also I always like to mention you should supplement a plant based diet, with vitamin B12 and usually a few other vitamins.
---
Also, for the more literally minded, it's obviously not simply due to the atoms from your food source having come from animals most recently that they're unhealthy, so it's also obviously theoretically possible to produce healthy animal-based foods (if only by transmuting their atoms with nuclear reactions), it's the particular proteins, fats and other compounds typically found tend to interact in unhealthy ways with our system.
But that said it's also very significant (in favor of plants) that animals often suffer a lot in the production of those food products, and whether or not you consume them you have the responsibility to diminish their suffering.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bread varies a lot and yeah we have some terrible breads, I don't buy them but someone must because they keep selling them
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Yet still here we are
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?
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.
Everything I've read says that McDonald's switched globally to vegetable oil in the early 1990s. I think you've misremembered.
