This year, there’s been a surprising buzzword in healthy eating – tallow. It hit the news after RFK’s statements that fast-food fries used to be fried in tallow, and now it’s seed oils. To get clear on exactly what seed oils are and why they have been a central issue this year, you can check out Pendulum’s take here.
What Is Tallow?
Tallow and lard are both rendered animal fats. Tallow comes from cows, lard from pigs. Unlike butter, these fats are non-dairy and are directly from the animal. Tallow has an exceptionally high smoke point, making it ideal for high-heat frying.
Tallow’s Popularity:
Many have conflated the difference between tallow as being a better alternative than seed oils (especially for french fries… more on that later) with tallow being healthier than all fats. Seed oils are usually blended, bleached, and processed for shelf life rather than digestibility. Canola is an engineered plant, “CANOLA” stands for “Canada Oil, Low Acid”. It’s designed in a factory for mass production. While research is ongoing on links between seed oils, inflammation, and diseases like colon cancer, we know they are highly processed and molecularly engineered.
Seed oils were marketed as “low-cholesterol” alternatives because they were easier to mass-produce and replace fats like tallow. Before the 1980s, tallow was cheap, and its high smoke point made it ideal for frying. Traditionally, tallow was mostly used for frying, not consumed like butter. Even before McDonald’s used tallow for its fries, it was primarily a restaurant fat, while lard, butter, and shortening were more common in households. Homes that used tallow often rendered it themselves from the farm. In short, tallow was never consumed in mass quantities before french fries.
When seed oils replaced tallow, they also replaced butter and became ubiquitously used in restaurants and home kitchens. Today, imagining “bringing tallow back” assumes it would replace canola oil universally, which was never the case. Replacing canola oil for tallow in french fries would make french fries healthier and taste better, but it would be impossible for tallow to replace everything that we use canola oil for.
The recent uptick in tallow’s popularity has spun into cosmetic uses, been leveraged by keto and carnivore diet brands, and is marketed as a “back to natural” healthy fat. Tradwife culture has promoted it as a moisturizer, and it can now be found in grocery stores next to clarified butter and oils.
Do McDonald’s Fries Matter?
Actually… there’s a little more. Seed oils are not heat stable. Reused oil (common in fast-food fryers) oxidizes due to molecular double bonds reacting to heat. Saturated fats like tallow have single bonds and remain heat-stable. Consuming oxidized oils is linked to higher inflammation and oxidative stress, a precursor to cancer cell formation.
Should Tallow Replace Other Fats? Tallow is the right choice for French fries. Should it replace butter, olive oil, or other kitchen fats? No.
At the time of writing, only Steak n’ Shake uses 100% tallow for its fries. Popeyes used tallow briefly but switched back to canola oil. Smashburger and Buffalo Wild Wings have experimented with mixing tallow with canola oil.
