It’s creamy. It’s a type of saturated fat. And according to a slew of lifestyle and wellness influencers, it’s “good” for your body and skin.
Beef tallow, the fat that remains after meat is boiled, has become the latest craze to gain momentum online, with some creators touting it as a skin care product and others calling it the healthier alternative to “seed oils” like canola and safflower oil.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has also promoted tallow. While eating fries and a burger at a Steak ’n Shake during a Fox News interview last week, he praised the restaurant chain for cooking with the fat rather than with vegetable oil. (HHS and the White House did not respond to NBC News’ request for comment.)
Both the diet and skin care worlds are popular social media niches that can quickly cycle through trendy ideas that range from reasonably effective to bizarre. The infatuation with tallow appears to be one of the few times their content focuses on the same product.
But some dermatologists and nutrition experts said they do not recommend incorporating high levels of beef tallow into diet or skin care regimens. On skin, one dermatologist said, tallow could cause acne rather than eliminate it. For cooking, some nutritionists said beef tallow may even be worse than seed oils.
“Beef tallow deserves neither a health halo nor devil’s horns,” Dariush Mozaffarian, director of Tufts University’s Food is Medicine Institute, said in an email.
Tallow touted as an oil alternative
In mid-January, Steak ’n Shake announced it would pivot to cooking french fries with beef tallow.
In his interview at one of the chain’s locations, Kennedy said Americans “are poisoning ourselves, and it’s coming principally from these ultraprocessed foods.”
“President Trump wants us to have radical transparency and incentivize companies like this one to switch traditional ingredients for beef tallow,” he added, before biting into a double cheeseburger and french fries.
He has also previously praised cooking with tallow, sharing an Instagram post in November of him making “tallow turkey” for Thanksgiving.
Kennedy’s belief that using tallow could help “Make America Healthy Again” echoes a claim that has spread on social media about seed oils. Many believe because seed oils are often found in processed foods, like chips and packaged desserts, animal fats like tallow and butter are healthier. TikTok videos discussing users’ reasons for avoiding seed oils have amassed hundreds of thousands of views. (A spokesperson for TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.)
But Lisa Young, a nutritionist and an adjunct professor at NYU, said the oil itself is not necessarily the problem.
“People are blaming the seed oils when that’s not what’s toxic,” she said. “It’s the sugar and salt in the junk food that they’re using.”
Compared to tallow, seed oils are thought to be “better fats,” according to Young, because they are unsaturated. Saturated fats, by contrast, generally come from animal products and have been shown to raise cholesterol, which in turn can increase the risk of heart disease.
Tallow is “probably healthier than ultraprocessed foods high in starch, sugar and salt — but it’s less healthy than olive oil, soybean oil, canola oil or fats from nuts or avocados,” Mozaffarian said.
Many seed oil skeptics point to a ratio of two types of fatty acids in the oils — omega-6 and omega-3 — which they say is linked to inflammation. But Christopher Gardner, the director of nutrition studies at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, previously told NBC News that levels of particular types of unsaturated fats are a trivial concern when it comes to evaluating how healthy a food item is.
“This is not an important issue. This is not killing anyone. The french fries might be. The fast food might be,” Gardner said. “But the oil that you fry the french fries in is not the top concern in the country right now.”
Young similarly cautioned against thinking of any fat source as healthy.
“I think that if you have a little bit of either beef tallow or a little bit of seed oils, it’s not going to be a problem,” she said. “The problem is when you do it in excess, and when people think something is good for you, they think more is better.”
The risks of rubbing tallow on skin
TikTok videos about using beef tallow on skin — which have been circulating on the platform since as early as last year — often show users applying the product as a moisturizer and acne treatment, and touting the results.
“Within two weeks, my acne was gone. My skin was just looking so much younger, bouncier and more glowy,” said one user in a video posted in May that has since been viewed over 1 million times.
Some influencers say in their videos that they make beef tallow from scratch. Others say they bought it premade or promote products in which beef tallow is an ingredient.
However, a 2024 review of about 150 published papers on beef tallow as a cosmetic product did not definitively find benefits for skin. The review found that using beef tallow irritated some people’s skin but had no negative effect on others.
Sophie Greenberg, a dermatologist at Tribeca Skin Center in New York City, said beef tallow functions similarly to vaseline or coconut oil — its fatty properties hold in moisture.
“It will be greasy on your skin, but it will lock in whatever else is underneath,” Greenberg said. “Best-case scenario, if you have really dry skin and your skin barrier needs something to occlude it, it would be helpful.”
Still, she suggested using one of the other products instead and said beef tallow “could cause some acne breakouts.”
“It’s not something that I’m recommending in my practice,” she said.
For those who want to experiment with beef tallow, Greenberg recommended sticking to products that include it as an ingredient alongside traditional skin care products like beeswax, jojoba oil, glycerin and hyaluronic acid.
Connie Yang, a dermatologist at the P Frank MD practice in New York City, said some people are drawn to tallow because they see it as more natural than some other ingredients found in skin care products.
“Natural is not always better,” she said. “Things like poison ivy are natural — does not mean it’s good for your skin.”
Randi Richardson
Read More