Why people say beef tallow is healthier (it's prob not)

The new top health official in the United States is praising a fast food chain. Why? For switching from seed oils to beef tallow. Is beef tallow actually healthier? Absolutely not. I'm not even going to hold you in suspense there. For most people, no. Beef tallow is not going to be healthier. Why are people saying otherwise? Well, that's what we're going to talk about in just a moment. Beef tallow is still good stuff. It's tasty and it does have some vitamins and minerals, though generally in insignificant amounts. Nonetheless, people even use it for skin care. Tallow might have some legitimate uses for skin care, but there are better, less pore clogging options on the market, such as those offered by Geology, sponsor of this video. Geology makes simple, effective dermatologist grade skin care routines customized for your unique needs. I'm an old man. I don't really have, you know, acne anymore and uh I don't even really care that much about wrinkles, but I spend a lot of time outside and I don't want to get skin cancer or look like a handbag. So, I follow this very simple little routine that Geology made for me. The bottles tell me what to do and in what order. There's a face wash. Then, let's see what I got. I got a little under eye treatment for the sensitive skin under the eyes. And then there's a there's a day cream. Oh, there's the day cream. The day cream uh you has a little bit of uh sunscreen in it and other good things in there for me. The folks at Geology pride themselves on making products that actually do stuff with simple dermatologist approved ingredients. And I have to say, lovely scents. Very manly. At least uh my products are. And yeah, I think I look pretty good for 43. Let Geology design something for you. 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There are several documented cases of pool filter induced transerectyl evisceration. And McDonald's really did fry their fries in 93% beef tallow until 1990. This was, of course, the part of the '9s that was actually still the 80s. No Nirvana yet. New Kids on the Block were at the top of the US charts with Step by Step. Christy Alley was still the new lady on Cheers. And sugar industry funded pseudocience from the 1960s had metastasized into a broad cultural obsession with dietary fats, particularly saturated fats. A lot of saturated fat is legitimately bad for you in lots of ways. But people back in the part of the '9s that was still the 80s believed that saturated fat was the root of all dietary evil. Boomers were growing up and getting fatter than any previous generation. While at the same time, their parents got old and started dying from heart disease and stroke, which really freaked the boomers out. and dietary saturated fat seemed like a satisfactory explanation for all of the above, not least because it really is a partial explanation for all of the above. Saturated fat absolutely contributes to cardiovascular disease and to obesity. And around this time, boomers started projecting their own body shame onto us, their millennial children. I'm not bitter about it. Why do you ask? Anyway, the boomers didn't actually want to change their lifestyle. They didn't want to do brutal manual labor like their parents did or suffer food shortages like their parents did in the depression or walk most places the way that their parents did. The boomers had achieved the good life of cheap, abundant, tasty food, jobs where you mostly sit in a comfy seat all day, and cities where you literally have to drive everywhere. Yeah, it was the good life. And yeah, they got fat and their cholesterol went up because that's what the good life generally does to most people. Urbanizing Chinese people are figuring this out rapidly as we speak. Rather than give up the good life, American boomers of 1990 were attracted to another proposition. Just give up the saturated fat. That's all you have to do. Give up your butter for margarine. Give up your ice cream for fro yo. Give up your beef for chicken. Make these modest sacrifices to the gods. And you shall receive their favor. You'd take that deal, right? I'd take that deal. Unfortunately, margarine was made with trans fat, and trans fat turned out to be the worst fat of all for your health, which is why it's now banned. And while cutting saturated fat has been found time and time again to improve people's health outcomes, you're mostly just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic if you're still eating way too many calories and not getting any exercise. Sounds similar to any of the unproductive dietary panics that we have nowadays. Well, this panic in the part of the '9s that was still the 80s resulted in McDonald's bowing to public pressure and with much fanfare proudly announcing that they would henceforth fry their fries in 100% vegetable oil. a certain kind of guy on the internet just loves to say, "Oh, there's no such thing as vegetable oil. It's really seed oil." And of course, that is true if you go by the culinary definition of vegetable, which is a fleshy or leafy plant part that is not normally used in sweet dishes. That's the culinary definition. But the people who named vegetable oil vegetable oil were going by the scientific definition of vegetable which is of or relating to plants. A vegetable is just any plant part. And by that definition, seed oils are inarguably vegetable oils. I don't deny that marketing people likely were involved in the decision to call them vegetable oils. But regardless, McDonald's was proud to advertise that their fries were now made with 100% whatever you want to call mostly rape seed oil from Canada. It's been real weird for an elder millennial such as myself to see this coin completely flip in just the first half of my lifetime. Now, dudes on the internet comment on pictures of McDonald's fries and say, "Yum, seed oil," parenthesis derogatory. Fry my potatoes RFK style in beef tallow. That's what'll make America healthy again. No, no, no, it won't. French fries are awesome, but unless you need a whole lot of calories, fries will never be a health food. And what even is beef tallow anyways? Well, like so many things, there's a broad definition in common use and at least one more narrow definition that's in use by like food industry people. The broad definition of beef tallow is any cattle fat that you melt down, filter to get out all the chunkies and impurities, and then you let it solidify into a waxy white solid that turns back into a liquid at high temperature. and you can cook with it. The narrow definition of tallow is the same, but it specifies that the fat is mostly from the big hard bits that form around the animals major organs, particularly the digestive system. All ruminant animals tend to acquire such fat deposits, which are particularly important for supporting the uniquely long and complicated digestive process that ruminants use to digest grass. This visceral fat, this intraabdominal fat tends to go toward tallow because it's not part of the side of beef that you're sending down the production line to be processed into steaks and such. It's fat that you just grab out of the animals like midsection with the organs. It comes in these big hard chunks that you can easily tear out and just toss onto another product line to be melted down for tallow. Sew it is another word for this kind of fat. Though sometimes people use sew it specifically in reference to the fat around the kidneys. Another reason why sew it or the uh intraabdominal fat of ruminants is good for making cooking fat is that it's particularly high in saturated fatty acids. Generally higher in saturated fat than even lard from pigs. It's also got a fair bit of uh monounsaturated fat and very little polyunsaturated fat. The more saturated a fat is, the more single bonds it has between carbons in the chain. The more double bonds you have in the chain, the less saturated it is. The less stable it is, the more prone to reacting with oxygen it is, oxidation, rancidity, other things. Saturated fats keep for a long time without going rancid. And assuming you've refined out all the impurities, you can get them really hot and keep them hot for a long time before they start to break down and get all nasty and burnt tasting and even worse for your health than they were before. Plus, especially if the animal ate mostly grass, tallow is going to have a lot of aromatic short- chain fatty acids that are the product of rumination and they impart a beefy potentially even like gy flavor to anything you cook in it. People have long cooked potatoes in beef fat or chicken fat or duck fat just for the lulls, just for the flavor. You will get no argument from me against that practice. Bring me all the bougie ass duck fat fries in the land. Extra points if they're finished with truffle oil. Yes, I know truffle oil doesn't taste like truffles. No, I don't care. Anyway, you will get an argument from me if you go around telling people or if you or at least implying that if you switch your fries from seed oil back to beef tallow, then that magically transforms French fries into a health food. I'm not trying to hear that. And I will tell you why. The overwhelming scientific consensus reflecting the overwhelming results of some of the biggest longest health studies ever done is that saturated fat is generally worse for you than unsaturated fat. Beef tallow generally worse for you than seed oils. That doesn't mean seed oils are good for you. It's still pure liquid empty calories. And seed oils are both cheap and flavorless. So they are the fat of choice for most junk food and junk food is definitely bad for you. So maybe you could indict seed oils on a RICO charge. Guilt by association. There is also particular concern that these unsaturated seed oils will break down more rapidly in restaurant deep fryers, particularly deep fryers operated by 20-year-old fast food employees who don't take a whole lot of pride in their craft. When you don't change your fry oil often enough or when you let it get too hot, you actually convert some of the fats into trans fats and also into polyyclic aromatic hydrocarbons which might cause cancer. How fry oil actually gets treated in the wild as it were is a somewhat underststudied topic because it's really hard to study. Side note, I got a weird craving for a Whopper the other day. So, I went to the Burger King for the first time in a long time. And no shade on the good people of Burger King. It's a wonderful restaurant. But the fries on this particular day tasted like they had been cooked in straight motor oil. It tasted like they had dropped a rubber glove in the fryer and it just melted in there. abused fry oil is a thing that has been studied, but we still don't know that much about what really happens in practice. There is a reason to think that saturated fats like beef tallow might hold up a little bit better in practice because they're more stable being saturated, but that research is very much in its infancy. We don't even really know what these high heat chemical products do to people. In contrast, a ton of evidence indicates that saturated fats are way worse for your circulatory system. And most of the arguments that seed oils are particularly like toxic is simply bunk according to like all of science. These arguments against seed oils are being made by like a tiny tiny group of fringe figures. Some of whom are real doctors, but a lot of those doctors are not actually specialists in this topic they're talking about. They have about as much schooling in this stuff as I do, which is to say very little. There is some legit scientific discussion about the high levels of omega6 fatty acids in seed oils. Some test tube and animal studies indicate that lots of omega-6 can have inflammatory effects in the body, but that's all really preliminary and speculatory as applied to humans. The human studies that we have are pretty conclusive in showing that people who eat more seed oil and less saturated fat live longer and suffer less cardiovascular disease. Could the scientific establishment be wrong? Absolutely. happens all the time. But if you care what I think, I think there's no particular reason to suspect that this is one of those times. It's really just a handful of crackpots on the internet with books to sell who push this narrative about seed oils and this narrative about the science on seed oils being in the pocket of industry. The seed oil industry also had a huge interest in selling trans fats, shortening, margarine, but that didn't stop scientists from finding that trans fats were awful for you and ultimately getting them banned. The meat industry is hugely powerful in the US and they would love for science to find that saturated fats are actually really good for you. That's not what science has shown. If the meat industry could buy all the research they want to see, they would and they have in some limited ways. And yet here we are with the same basic scientific consensus. The system isn't perfect, but it has worked time and time again. Look at the scoreboard. Science has way more W's in its column than any of its competitors. Seed oil critics love to go on about hexane, which is a solvent that's used to extract oil from the seeds. And it is legit acutely toxic stuff, but saying that seed oil has hexane in it is like saying that my potatoes have shovel in them because I used a shovel to get them out of the ground. Yeah, there might be some trace metal on the potato from the shovel. And yeah, there might be some trace hexane left in the oil after they've taken it out through a industrial distillation, but like we're talking about almost zero, well within ignorable levels. Hexane does pose an occupational health hazard to the people who work with it at the factory, and it does pose an environmental health hazard to the people who live near the factory. And that's something that always gets me pretty angry in these conversations. People obsess about tiny insignificant levels of pesticides or whatever on their food, but they don't give a about the like chronically or acutely toxic doses that are going into the poor farm laborers. It's like Teflon pans. Your pan is not going to hurt you, but it may hurt the people who live down river from the factory, and that's what we should be worried about, not our own petty bgeois consumerrist health anxieties. But anyway, there's a reason that most of this proalo anti-seed oil discourse happens in the manosphere. Indeed, people who study this have traced the current seed oil panic back to a particular Joe Rogan episode from 2021, an interview with Paul Saladino, a psychiatrist who has gotten professionally internet famous by making extremely fringe, often self-contradictory health claims about the carnivore diet. He said on Rogan, "There are no nutrients in plants that you cannot get from animal foods." This is of course an objectively and meaningfully false statement. Even people like the psychologist Jordan Peterson who have particular sensitivities to phytochemicals and thus they have to eat a mostly meat diet, even those people will generally admit that they take supplements or at least eat a little bit of fruit here and there to get, for example, vitamin C. If they didn't do those things, they would have died from scurvy a long time ago. There's a reason this discourse came out of the manosphere. This is a hypothesis of mine. It's not something that I know or can easily prove. It's an idea for your consideration. I think the embrace of beef tallow is mostly about proving one's manliness in these new and confusing times that we manly men live in. Meat is inherently the product of violence. Even the most humane use of the captive bolt gun is still a violent act. Meat also reminds us of days gone by when we like to imagine that we men would go out and do the dangerous work of hunting. Hunting also functioning as practice for war. Meat is also an excellent source of protein and you legit need to eat a whole lot of protein if you want to be a big strong jacked man. You also have to lift a lot and a lot of dudes forget about that second part. They just eat the steak, which will not make you jacked all on its own. But anyway, meat makes us feel manly. And in these times when gender roles are readjusting for new and different economic and social conditions, a lot of us men just need to have our gender affirmed, as it were. And there's lots of gender affirming care available at a steakhouse. Machismo and fascism are intertwined phenomena, no doubt. And I do think that there is a neofascist impulse behind the beef tallow thing. This is where you see a lot of women getting in on the action, too. Fascism says that we in the inroup, we deserve to take anything that we need or want, even if it's particularly harmful to those in the out group. A meat-based diet is by far the most resource inensive diet that anyone is likely to eat. It takes so many more acres of farmland, so many more gallons of water. It contributes way more to global warming. It produces so much more gross and dangerous runoff from the farms and the ranches. Lots of foodborne outbreaks tied to vegetables are actually the result of animal runoff getting on the vegetables. The meat industry is particularly dangerous and unpleasant to work in. I'm not talking about the guys out on their nice ranches. I'm talking about the packers on the line at Cargill. It's dangerous, gruelling, inhumane work. Meatackers get sick a lot. They suffer a lot of repetitive stress injuries. And this work is done significantly in the US by immigrants who face more legal peril than ever these days on top of their many other hardships. I say all of this as a guy who eats meat sometimes. People don't want to hear this. They fear that they will be socially or even legally pressured to give up meat eating. And so they create this moral pretext for meat eating. I have to eat beef tallow because it's actually the only fat that's fit for human consumption. What am I, a seed eating bird? Never mind that most humans who've ever lived have survived mostly on seeds. Grains being seeds and grains being the foods that enabled our species to flourish in numbers. Actually, let me adjust my claim here a little bit. I'm not sure why these pseudocientists push the whole beef tallow is healthy claim. They may have diverse reasons, but I am pretty sure that the reason so many of us buy this lie is that we want a moral pretext for meat eating because we like meat. It's part of our ancestral culinary and agrarian culture. And it makes us feel manly in a time when we really need to feel manly. And then we lash out at the scientists because that's what irresponsible people do when they don't like the message. They kill the messenger. Or at least they defund the messenger, which is what's happening now in the United States on the scale of a national suicide. to comment on the broader make America healthy again movement of which the beef tallow thing is a part. I will say that it is really really tempting to believe that we can fix all our chronic health and health system problems with individual consumer level choices. We want to believe that if we just eat healthier and exercise then we won't need expensive health care. We want to believe this because it gives us a sense of control over our own lives. And it gives us a moral pretext to abandon sick, poor people to their fates. Hey, if you hadn't eaten so many snack cakes and played so many video games, you wouldn't have gotten cancer, kid. This one's on you. Hurry up and die so that only the strong may multiply. Like all of the most dangerous lies, this one is partially true. Eating healthy and getting exercise and ample sleep and minimizing stress and maintaining close social support networks. These things absolutely do improve your health odds, but they are easier said than done, especially if you're poor, and they do not fully protect you from cancer or heart disease or measles or anything else. The other tempting thing about a diet and lifestylebased national health plan is that it is cheap, or at least it's cheap for the government. Providing adequate health care access to poor people so they can go to the doctor when they're sick before the problem gets way worse, that's expensive. Regulating businesses to maintain healthier, safer workplaces for low-wage workers, that's expensive. Paying people higher wages so that they're not constantly stressed out and depressed over money. That's expensive. Building walkable cities that poor people can afford to live in. I'm not even sure if that's really expensive, but it is a thing that people really don't want to do for some reason. The things that actually work are hard. Wagging your finger at people about their diet is easy. So naturally, that's what we're doing in the US this season. There is one problem from the perspective of the current US administration. It derives much of its political support from poor people who eat like crap. So how do you square this circle? You tell them that you can keep eating like crap as long as you do one simple trick. Beef tallow instead of seed oil. You know, the thing about gravity is you can choose to believe that it doesn't exist for a long time, right up until the moment you go splat. Nobody is going to get healthier by eating the new beef tallow fries at Steak and Shake, which our nation's new top health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., went on Fox News to promote because they had RFKed the fries. If you don't catch up to reality, reality eventually catches up to you. And here's the reality. There are a lot of reasons why people in the US and other highly developed countries are experiencing growing levels of chronic illness. And not all of those reasons are bad. Medicine is way better than it used to be. So lots of conditions that used to kill people can now be managed as chronic conditions. This is a good thing. Food is cheap, abundant, and delicious. This is a good thing. More chronic conditions are being identified instead of just going unnoticed. This is a good thing. People are living way longer than their grandparents and great-grandparents did. This is a good thing. Though when you get old, you still generally get sick and you need a lot of healthcare. We have a lot of old people in our society now because we have been successful. Health care is more expensive than ever. In part because of obscene industry profitering, but also in part because doctors can do way more for you now than they used to be able to do. This is a good thing that they have more ways to treat what ails you, but more also costs more. These are what any grown-up should be able to identify as good problems to have. The scientific term is diseases of affluence. Good problems to have are real problems that require real solutions, but they are definitionally better than the alternative. I'm really not sure what's up with RFK Jr. I don't feel that I have a read on what motivates him. Donald Trump is easy to read. He has a textbook case of narcissistic personality disorder, NPD. We don't talk about that enough. His personality disorder is the root cause of his erratic and otherwise harmful behavior. Trump's behavior actually becomes far more predictable if you view it through the lens of his NPD. If I owned a big company that was like really affected by Trump's constantly changing policies, I would hire a psychologist with NPD expertise to advise me about what to expect. Trump is easy to read because he exhibits a very well understood personality disorder. RFK, I have trouble reading. Does he really not understand the concept of good problems to have? Or is all of his absurd disinformation a smokeokc screen for a much darker pro- eugenics agenda where he hopes to purge the species of weakness despite having any number of chronic health problems himself. Maybe it's just all a grift. These are lies that a lot of us want to believe. And so he is simply selling us the slop that we want to buy because he is a political entrepreneur as my friend Vlad Vexler would say. I don't know. I do know this. Unless you have some particular sensitivity to seed oils, you are not going to make yourself healthier by RFKing your fries. The overwhelming majority of available evidence indicates that beef tallow will be worse for your health than seed oils. The only diet that we know for sure improves your health is a balanced, varied diet that doesn't feed you way too many calories. It's weird to me how all of the technofuturists believe that there is a technological solution to every problem and yet somehow not the very human tendency to overeat. We have a technology now that fixes the human tendency to overeat. It's called GLP-1 agonists and related drugs. The new incretin mimedics. These drugs work. They're proving safe. They reduce consumption, which is good for us as individuals, and it's good for the overextended planetary biosphere that keeps us alive. The drugs are expensive because they're new and still covered by patents. The drug companies legit need to recover the enormous cost that they put into developing and testing these new drugs. But if I were RFK Jr., I would say to big pharma, hey, we want to make GLP-1 agonists available to every American who wants them. We're going to deliver you 100 million new customers. Can you maybe give us a bulk discount? I think that conversation would go pretty well for everybody in the room. And just to show you that I'm not a shill for big pharma, I will also tell you that I would be 100% fine with just nationalizing the patent for OMIC on the basis of a public health emergency. I'd be down with that, too. President Trump is clearly enjoying his GLP1 drugs. He's looking trimmer every day, despite the fact that uh self-restraint isn't really his strong suit. I'm sure even his supporters would acknowledge that much. All the damn elites are losing weight now. An outcome that I predicted on this channel when Ozmpic first got approved for weight loss. If it's good enough for them, ought to be good enough for the rest of us, right? People going to overeat. It's what evolution programmed us to do to survive the lean times. A simple effective appetite suppressant is a simple effective solution. It is a needed update to our human software, as I heard uh Scott Galloway call it the other day. And guess what? Even if you have a great diet, there's still a good chance you're going to get really sick because nature doesn't care how virtuous you are or which inroup you think you belong to. There's forces out there that want to kill you, and one day they will succeed. Such is life. Anybody who tells you different is a liar with something to sell. Thanks for letting me try to sell you on my ideas. They are hardly unique to me. I just laid out some very, very mainstream If all the smartest people in the world tend to come to similar conclusions on certain topics, maybe that should tell us something. Don't kill the messenger, even if you really, really don't like the message. Make good choices. Talk to you next time.