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.