Trying To Embrace Beef Tallow As A Health Food

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published February 24, 2025] 2025

They've flipped the script on us again.

If I didn't have a character limit, this column would be 10,000 words and titled Totally absolutely never going to believe anything medical science says again and this time I really mean it!

I'm just tired of embracing whatever comestibles and supplements that are being currently touting only to have them announce a decade later that that stuff will kill you.

In 1973, Woody Allen presciently released the movie Sleeper about a health food store owner whose body was accidentally cryogenically frozen and who wakes up 200 years later in 2173 to find that the real health foods are tobacco and red meat. The doctors who unfreeze him are dismayed to learn that he consumed the likes of wheat germ and organic honey. "What?" they exclaim. "No deep fat, no steak, no cream pies, no hot fudge?"  subsequently observing that "these were thought to be unhealthy [in 1973] - precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true."

Guess what, folks. It s 2173. We just got there 148 years early.

If you've been alive for a while, you've endured flipflops between the health benefits (or lack thereof) of margarine vs. butter, eggs, shrimp, carbs, saturated fats vs polyunsaturated fats vs monounsaturated fats etc.

But for most of my life, saturated fats were always the bad guy. I put extra virgin olive oil on my salads, and if I fried anything, it was with a heart-healthy canola oil. Eggs were limited to two a week, and shrimp to, like, never. When I think about all the guilt I felt eating even the smallest amount of butter - which by the way tastes so much better than margarine - I feel pure dietary rage.

So I was frankly astonished a decade ago with the sudden popularity of coconut oil. I started seeing it more and more frequently as an ingredient in recipes, and even Dr. Oz was flogging it as a health food that allegedly fights illness-causing viruses and bacteria, aids in thyroid and blood sugar control, improves digestion, and improbably as it sounds to me, increases the good HDL cholesterol despite its 12 grams of saturated fat per tablespoon. Surely even a bacon cheeseburger dipped in a hot fudge sundae can't have 12 grams of saturated fat per bite?

I've never had a primary care doctor who didn't caution that artery-clogging saturated fat puts you on the fast track to counting worms. Still, since a whole display case of coconut oil had magically appeared in my local supermarket, and Dr. Oz said it was OK, I decided to add a jar to my basket. But I only got five steps before the chest pains started and I put it back. It's like Mao waking up one morning and exhorting the Chinese to embrace democracy. I just didn't think I had enough life expectancy left to embrace coconut oil as a health food.

But it has just gotten a whole lot worse. Now our new Secretary of Health and Human Services is telling us to jettison all those formerly-healthy seed oils (canola, corn, sunflower, safflower, etc.) and substitute beef tallow. Wasn't it considered a huge breakthrough for public health when all the fast-food restaurants were persuaded to dump beef tallow for polyunsaturated oils? We could order the large fries and think of it as a vegetable.

Beef tallow, by the way, is the fat that surrounds a cow's kidney. Yum-mo! It can be used as an ingredient in cosmetics as well as in cooking and in products like soap and biodiesel. I'm not sure any of these things is exactly whetting my appetite or making me want to slather it on my body.

In a post that seems eerily right out of the Woody Allen movie, Robert Kennedy Jr. wrote on social media several months ago: '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? 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.'

Sorry folks, I have been so indoctrinated in my life against beef tallow (and coconut oil) that there is no way I am ingesting either. I'd probably end up dying from a reverse placebo effect: in my heart (literally and figuratively), I believe it will kill me.

But it's gotten even worse than that. Now alcohol is under attack. As in any alcohol at all. What happened to all those heart-healthy polyphenols in red wine that help protect the lining of blood vessels in the heart? The tide has turned and it's about to put Happy Hour under water.

Indulging in alcohol in moderation was once considered harmless, and, as noted above, possibly healthy, and may have well been why my kids survived to adulthood. That divorced working mom gig was a bear. I'm definitely glad they didn't come up with this anti-alcohol news while I was in college as it would definitely have impacted my college experience. The night finals were over we were going to go out for iced tea?

But now alcohol is toxic. Any amount. I'm increasingly glad I'm old.

So what are we weary health-oriented consumers to think?

As a senior citizen, here's my conclusion: Eat whatever you want because it'll come back into favor again sooner or later. I promise. And not to put too fine a point on it, but you've got to die of something.

So bring on the Krispy Kremes (which, by the way, are cooked in seed oils.) And thank you, Woody.

 

 

 

 

Two Many Languages

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published February 17, 2025] 2025

There are just too many foreign languages these days and I'm really having trouble keeping up.

Recently, for example, I wrote a whole column about not speaking coffee. It truly is a linguistic entity all its own and it s a huge social disadvantage to live in a place with so many good coffee houses and not be fluent. Or even be able to get by.

Of course, the main reason I haven t learned it is that I don't drink coffee so I've never frequented coffee places enough to really master spoken Coffee. When I do go, the menu scares the daylights out of me. The milk options alone are terrifying. I think that if you factored all the possible combinations and permutations of coffee drinks, the number would be in the bazillions.

But the problem with spoken Coffee is that it is a language with an unbelievable number of dialects. For example, there's the Frappuccino-Macchiato dialect from the Sucrose region of Italy. Only serious linguists and/or pre-diabetics really understand it.

But that's only the beginning.

I no longer speak light bulb either. The dialect I learned involved standard screw-in light fixtures in denominations of 15, 60, 75, or 100 watts. Now the lightbulb section at the hardware store has become so daunting that even bringing the empty box from the last bulbs doesn't help. Waaaayyy too many options in lighting levels I don t begin to understand.

I definitely do not speak remote. It's so easy to press the wrong button and mess up your TV beyond belief. The problem is: which wrong button was it? And you don't dare press any more buttons in case you mess it up even more. In my defense, remotes truly can be rendered irreparable as we learned when they were inadvertently left within the reach of our then-toddler grandchildren. Even my husband who has a degree in reactor physics from Cal Tech was unable to restore them to functionality.

And while we're on the subject of grandchildren, that's another language I'm struggling to master: grandchild. My first clue that we had a language barrier was when I showed them the phone nook in my 1947 house, a feature of the era. They wanted to know, "but where did you plug in the charger?" More recently I told them I was going to tape a show. They looked at me, puzzled. "So what do you mean, tape?"  The idea that something called a video tape would be involved in one's media viewing was too hilarious for them to contemplate. Why would one use that if you could just stream it (a term I have only recently begun to understand.)

Overall, I just don't speak technology in its many, constantly proliferating dialects. You learn one and there s an upgrade and you re back at square one. Just when you've mastered version 15.2.3, version 15.2.4 comes out and renders you illiterate, and you re thinking, OK, time for the ice floe. I think about the ice floe more than is probably healthy.

The irony is, I actually like languages. I've studied six besides English (Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Swedish) and was once fluent in one of them (Portuguese) after a year living with a non-English speaking family and going to a Brazilian high school. I love the idea of being able to communicate with someone in a different language. Understanding at least the rudiments of another language gives you a lot of insight into how the people of that culture view the world.

One of the aspects that especially fascinates me about foreign languages is what other cultures have words for. When we lived in Sweden and visited the Sami (Lapplander) area above the Arctic Circle, I was interested to learn that the Sami language, not surprisingly, has hundreds of words for ice and snow, and at least a thousand for reindeer, not only in size, color and shape of the animals but their behavior as well. We're talking serious specifics here. There's an actual word for a bull reindeer with a single whopper-sized testicle (busat). I guess if you re walking behind them for a few hundred miles on the otherwise-sceneryless tundra, you'd have plenty of opportunity to notice. And, of course, create a name for it. Entertainment is where you find it.

Our reindeer-adjacent vocabulary is pretty much confined to caribou, moose, Rudolph, Dancer, Dasher, Comet, Prancer, Vixen, Cupid, and Blitzen. The Sami would be appalled at our lack of imagination.

At one point a few years ago, however, while trolling for column material, I decided to try to look up the difference between all the baffling types of topographical depressions we have in the U.S.: vale, dale, dell, glen, glade, basin, hollow, trough, ravine, gorge, canyon, hollow, gulch, coulee, gully, arroyo, etc. etc. Maybe not as many terms as the Sami have for ice and snow, or certainly reindeer. They just don't need them. But we apparently do.

So these kinds of languages I can still embrace. But needing a whole specialized language for food stuffs and lighting fixtures and phones is more mental bandwidth than I have. Or ever want to.

 

 

Fires And More Fires

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published February 3, 2025] 2025

The recent fires in Los Angeles became especially personal when our younger son, daughter-in-law, three grandchildren and two dogs were forced to evacuate their home, their neighborhood surviving thanks to the incredible efforts of fire fighters. Prior to their evacuation, our son had sent us videos of tanker planes dropping red fire retardant overhead. Waaaay (waaaay) too close.

An unexpected bonus of the evacuation, however, was a shopping excursion with my 15-year-old granddaughter for a belated birthday gift. At a boutique in downtown La Jolla, the young sales woman overhead us talking about the fires and the family's evacuation.

"So,"  queried the young sales woman, "what was the first thing you took?"

My granddaughter didn't hesitate. "The Dyson."

The young salesgirl nodded. "That's what I would have taken too."

I was puzzled. "The vacuum cleaner?"  I said.

They both looked at me like I was from another planet.

For those of us who are truly are from a different generational planet, a Dyson (same company as the vacs) is the Lamborghini of hair dryers, and it was my granddaughter's most coveted Christmas gift only two weeks earlier. Not gonna let that go up in flames! Definitely not an item you'd find on the hair care aisle at CVS where I bought my hair dryer.

I queried my hair stylist on this and she reported that the one she was using on me at that very moment was, in fact, a Dyson. (They come in different price ranges, from "really expensive"  to "even more expensive.") Among other features, they're apparently very light weight, quiet, and dry hair much more quickly and with less damage. Definitely worth the money for a hair stylist, or a 15-year-old with lots of beautiful long hair.

Over a beverage at Peets, my granddaughter gave me her fire zone code so that I could keep up with the status of the fire in her neighborhood. Apparently all the kids know the fire zone codes of their friends. I guess this is a reality if you live in Southern California. And now I even know mine! And have Watch Duty and Genasys installed on my phone.

Feeling utterly helpless about the whole fire situation with my son's house, I was motivated to bring out my collection of rosary beads (gifts from my Catholic grandparents) both generic and saint-specific which I only press into service in cases of dire emergency. Catholic saints have been an integral part of my Judeo-Catholic-Protestant family. (I brought my menorah up to LA in December since Christmas Day was also the first night of Hannukah.) If it looks like a saint can help, well, I'm all for it.

Some years ago, as I agonized about a family member's impending cancer surgery, a Catholic co-worker mentioned that in her hometown, when one needed divine assistance, one would hang rosary beads on the clothesline and invoke the saints' help. I wasn't sure why a clothesline but who was I to argue how saints like to work? The surgery went better than could possibly be expected.

So presumably, if saints can do health, they can do houses? As I've done before, I had to sub in my orange tree since we're zoned against clothes lines. The lawn maintenance guys who were just arriving looked at me a little nervously. But they did adhere to my admonitions to please watch the leaf blowers!

My son's house is still standing. And OK, I'm willing to give the heroic fire fighters the credit. But sometimes you need all the help you can get.

The recent Gilman fire here in La Jolla in some ways afforded the community the gift of a trial run of a much-worse fire. A+++++ for the fire fighters. F minus (add 5 minuses) for traffic control. It seemed clear after this event that La Jolla's evacuation plan is "Die in place."  (Select one: (a) house (b) car.) Telling people to evacuate with no plan or even actual route to leave seems pretty futile. Given La Jolla's significant elderly population (of which we are two), the Pacific Palisades exhortation to L.A. people who were stuck in their vehicles to "run for your life" is not going to be very workable. We're not sure we'd even try to get out of La Jolla in any direction in our car. 

Olof and I have been pondering our own escape plan. Not to give too many details, but it involves life jackets. And preferably low tide and daylight. And if luck were shining upon us, a leftover panga boat.

Now here's an idea. What if the panga boat guys were alerted when there was a fire here? If they thought there was money smuggling people in, imagine what they could make taking people out. This could usher in a new mutually-beneficial era of international relations. I'm just thinking outside the box. And if I had a wildfire right behind me, there is no box I wouldn't be willing to think outside of.

Of course, in any urban area such as La Jolla that already has major traffic issues under the best of circumstances, one has to ask the deeply worrisome question: is there realistically any way to evacuate people? Even if you could get them out to I-5 (and good luck with that), the freeway would be gridlocked as well.

But it would nice to at least have an actual community plan for which the default is not being cremated in your car. I am (really really) hoping recent events will inspire one.