For nearly fifty years, the official advice on beef tallow was simple: don't.
In January, the federal Dietary Guidelines for Americans put it on the list of fats to cook with, right next to butter and olive oil. The same document that sets the rules for school lunches and federal nutrition programs now names rendered beef fat as a fat to prioritize.
Our position hasn't moved, so we'll file this one under corrections. Eat the butter. Cook in the tallow. Leave the seed oils on the shelf.
Here's why, including the part where the cardiologists disagree with us.
What actually changed
Three things worth knowing about the new guidelines:
- Butter and tallow are named as fats to prioritize, alongside olive oil.
- Seed oils aren't mentioned at all. Not endorsed, not warned against. For a federal nutrition document, silence is a statement.
- The saturated fat cap stayed put at 10% of calories. On a 2,000-calorie day, that's about 22 grams. A tablespoon of tallow is roughly 6 of them.
That last point matters, and we'd rather you hear it from us. This isn't a permission slip to eat tallow with a spoon. You cook your eggs in butter. You sear the steak and roast the potatoes in tallow. You don't drink it. (We're not Saladino. We like a salad.)
The public got here before the government did. Whole Foods named beef tallow its top food trend for 2026, and in one industry survey 28% of Americans said they already avoid seed oils.
How seed oils got into everything
"Seed oils" usually means the industrial ones: soybean, canola, corn, cottonseed, sunflower, safflower, grapeseed and rice bran.
Making tallow takes one step. You render beef fat and strain it.
Making most seed oils takes a factory. The seeds get crushed, the oil is pulled out with a chemical solvent (usually hexane), and then it's refined, bleached and deodorized, because the crude version smells bad and goes rancid fast. What reaches the grocery shelf is clear, odorless and very cheap.
Any cooking fat that has to be deodorized before people will buy it is telling you something.
That price is the whole story. Researchers who tracked the American food supply from 1909 to 1999 found that per-person soybean oil consumption rose more than a thousandfold over the century, and linoleic acid (the main fat in most of those oils) went from under 3% of our calories to over 7%.
Nobody's grandparents demanded that change. A commodity found a market, and the market was your kitchen, then your snacks, then the fryer at every restaurant you've ever eaten at.
We call this industrial substitution: a cheaper input quietly replaces the one people used for generations, and the reasons why it's fine get written afterward.
"But my cardiologist says…"
Let's be honest about the other side, because it's not nothing.
The American Heart Association's 2026 guidance still recommends soybean, canola and olive oil over butter and tallow. Their core argument is that saturated fat raises LDL cholesterol, and swapping it for polyunsaturated oil brings LDL down. They're not making that up. Trade butter for soybean oil and your LDL number will probably drop.
Our problem is with what happens after the number drops.
Two of the biggest trials that tested this swap head-to-head, back when the advice was first being written, went partly or entirely unpublished for decades. When NIH researchers recovered the data:
- The Sydney Diet Heart Study (1966–73) followed 458 men who'd already had a heart event. The group told to replace animal fat with safflower oil died at higher rates than the control group: 17.6% versus 11.8% from all causes.
- The Minnesota Coronary Experiment (1968–73) randomized more than 9,000 people, half of them onto corn oil in place of saturated fat. The corn oil group's cholesterol went down. Their death rate didn't.
In fairness, these are old trials, the Sydney group was eating a lot of safflower oil, and cardiologists point to other studies that came out the other way. Smart people are still arguing about this.
Here's where we land. When the best case for an ingredient is a lab number, and the trials that measured whether people lived longer sat in a drawer for forty years, we'll take the fat humans cooked with for a few thousand years.
The heat problem
Smoke point gets most of the attention, and to be fair, refined seed oils do fine there. (Refining is how they got high smoke points in the first place.)
The better question is stability. Polyunsaturated fats have more double bonds in their structure, which is chemistry for "breaks down more easily." Heat them, and they oxidize faster than saturated and monounsaturated fats do. Tallow is mostly saturated and monounsaturated, which is why it holds up in a hot cast iron pan and keeps for months in a jar with nothing added.
A restaurant fryer full of soybean oil running eight hours a day is the opposite of that.
What we actually do
This takes a few swaps in the kitchen you already cook in. That's it.
- Eggs and pancakes: butter.
- Steak, burgers, roasted potatoes, anything hot and fast: tallow.
- Salad dressing: olive oil. It's pressed from a fruit and has been in kitchens about as long as kitchens have existed.
- Store-bought dressing, mayo, chips and granola bars: flip them over. The seed oil is usually in the first five ingredients.
Buying tallow is easy now. Look for grass-fed from a butcher or a local farm. Or ask for beef suet, render it low and slow on a weekend, and you'll have months of cooking fat for a few dollars.
You're not going to eliminate seed oils, and you don't need to. You'll eat at a buddy's cookout and the chips will be fried in canola. That's fine. One great cheeseburger beats a thousand mediocre ones, and most of your meals happen in your own kitchen anyway. Control that.
Same logic, other side of your skin
You can guess where this goes.
The same swap that happened in your fryer happened in your lotion. Most drugstore moisturizers are built on the same refined crop oils, picked for the same reason: they're cheap. We wrote about that in Seed Oils Left Your Kitchen. Check Your Lotion.
Cohld Grass-Fed Tallow Balm is the version we'd want on our own hands: grass-fed tallow first, five ingredients total, a label you can read in one breath. It's built for post-shave tightness, knuckles cracked from yardwork, and January.
The government caught up on the kitchen. Your bathroom cabinet can catch up too.
