Beef Tallow, Long a Health Pariah, Rises to the Top of the Food Pyramid

“The new dietary guidelines give federal approval to a fat that has slowly caught on with consumers, even as doctors have warned against it.

 

Beef tallow, a fat that both cardiologists and the federal government told Americans to avoid for nearly half a century, has become an unexpected breakout star in the new federal dietary guidelines.

 

The rendered beef fat has been quietly growing in popularity over the past few years among cooks who like how it crisps fries and doughnuts, beauty influencers who smooth it on their skin and others who favor it for high-fat diets or believe it’s healthier than oil pressed from seeds.

 

On Thanksgiving in 2024, it was thrust onto the national stage. A barefoot Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pulled a turkey from a vat of boiling beef tallow and declared, “This is how we cook the MAHA way,” referring to the “Make America Healthy Again” movement he leads.

 

Four months later, Mr. Kennedy, the nation’s health secretary, showed up at a fast-food chain that pledged to cook its fries only in tallow. This relatively obscure cooking medium quickly became a political symbol for the Trump allies pushing for drastic change to the American food system.

 

Now the federal government has enshrined the fat as healthy. “We are ending the war on saturated fats,” Mr. Kennedy said at a news conference on Wednesday where he introduced new dietary guidelines that will steer national nutrition programs for the next five years.

 

The updated food pyramid he released flips the traditional diagram on its head. It downplays whole grains and moves protein and full-fat dairy to the top, as foods to be eaten most often, along with fruits and vegetables. Beef tallow and butter, which is also high in saturated fat, are name-checked along with olive oil in the guidelines as cooking mediums to prioritize. The guidelines add that “more high-quality research is needed to determine which types of dietary fats best support long-term health.”

 

A collective shudder rose from the nation’s established nutrition and medical communities, which point to studies that show saturated fats can increase the risk of heart disease. The American Heart Association issued a counterstatement advising people to avoid tallow and other high-fat animal products to keep artery-clogging cholesterol levels low.

 

“I’m all for eating whole foods, but these guidelines dismiss 75 years of research favoring diets higher in plant foods,” wrote Marion Nestle, a New York University professor emerita who for decades has been a leading voice in American nutrition policy, in her blog.

 

She and other nutritionists contended that the new guidelines on fat are simply too confusing to follow. Yes, the recommendations prioritize animal fat, but the actual amount of saturated fat you should consume remains the same as in previous guidelines: 10 percent of total calories, which is roughly two tablespoons for someone eating 2,000 calories a day.

 

It would be difficult to keep intake that low and still follow guidelines that suggest eating more dairy and meat, Ms. Nestle said.

 

Jillian Michaels, the fitness celebrity and a supporter of Mr. Kennedy, suggested that the guidance is not so hard to figure out. She advises people to eat mostly polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats like olive oil and foods like fish, nuts and avocados. Saturated fat is perfectly healthy in small amounts, she said.

 

Beef tallow, Ms. Michaels said, “is not the greatest thing under the sun, but it’s way better than refined seed oils.” (Mr. Kennedy and others have denounced seed oils, including canola, soybean and corn oils, claiming they contribute to inflammation and are processed with harmful chemicals.

 

Decades of research has shown that consuming seed oils is associated with better health.)

 

For people who make and sell beef tallow, a golden age has dawned. Consumers spent $9.9 million on food-grade beef tallow in 2025, according to the data company Spins. Jars of it landed on the shelves of Costco this year, and big retailers like Walmart and Target sell it.

 

Fat Brothers beef tallow sells for almost $20 for 14 ounces on Amazon, and business is brisk, said Izzy Pasarow, who started the Southern California company with his brother Felix in April. Sales have grown by double digits every month since, Mr. Pasarow said, with people buying it both for cooking and to use as a moisturizer.

 

“This is a category that got highly politicized all of the sudden, but we looked at the market and saw all these other brands and thought no one was doing it right,” he said. “I think our country went to war against fat, and we’re starting to learn that maybe that wasn’t a good idea.”

 

Beef tallow is made by slowly cooking beef fat to remove moisture and other bits of tissue. Any beef fat can be turned into tallow, but the purest and least beefy-smelling version comes from the fat around kidneys, called suet. Even more prized is suet from animals raised on grass instead of grain, which is what the Fat Brothers and most small-batch producers use.

 

Beef tallow headed Whole Foods’ list of top food trends for 2026. Sales in 2025 were up 96 percent from the previous year, said Brooke Gil, who oversees the animal-fats category for the grocer.

 

“Shoppers continue to explore its different culinary benefits and uses, and appreciate the sustainability aspect of tallow, as it supports a nose-to-tail approach to using the whole animal,” she said.

 

Jenni Harris is a fifth-generation rancher whose father in the late 1990s transformed their small conventional cattle feeding operation in South Georgia to an organic one where cows are raised on pasture. She remembers a time when they had no market for the fat from the animals they slaughtered.

 

“We damn near gave it away,” she said. They started turning it into soap, as their grandmother did. And they discovered it made good candles. But beef tallow was still a tough sell. Whole Foods, which for a time bought their White Oaks Pastures beef, wouldn’t touch tallow products.

 

Interest in tallow started picking up around 2018, she said. It exploded after Mr. Kennedy deep-fried his turkey. Now the farm has barely enough to satisfy both its soap and candle customers and its raw-tallow fans. “I was so excited to see the food pyramid flip,” she said. “Regardless of your political affiliation, what we had wasn’t working.”

 

She thinks tallow’s new recognition is great, but hopes lard, which she prefers to cook with, gets its moment in the sun.

 

“There is always the sexy one and the funny one,” she said. “Beef fat is getting to be the sexy one, but lard is pretty fun.”” [1]

 

1. Beef Tallow, Long a Health Pariah, Rises to the Top of the Food Pyramid. Severson, Kim.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Jan 10, 2026.