How Beef Tallow Made a Comeback | Hacker News Reader

How Beef Tallow Made a Comeback

nytimes.com

3 pointsbookofjoe9 comments

My takeaway from all the data I've seen is that the health effects between different refined oils is minimal. On the other hand, the difference in taste is significant, so I'm glad to see the better tasting fats getting a comeback.

Also how it handles heat/polymerizes. I don't particularly think tallow is that great tasting but its great on cast iron.

>“Saturated fat is very dangerous,” said Dr. Martha Gulati, the director of preventive cardiology at the Cedars-Sinai Smidt Heart Institute in Los Angeles. As a doctor who treats patients trying to avoid heart disease, she said, she can’t get behind the “beef tallow is healthy” trend.

>Even if you look at the vitamins beef tallow contains, Ms. Yu said, they’re not present at “significant” enough levels to make a big difference in your health.

>Over many decades of research, scientists have found that people who favor sources of unsaturated fats (like vegetable oils) over saturated ones (like butter or lard) are more likely to have healthier hearts.

It's your body.

All of those variations occur within plant-based oil sources, too. Coconut oil has significantly more saturated fat than lard or tallow, and unclarified plant oils have non-trivial micronutrients, while clarified plant oils have nearly none. Meanwhile, whole fruits and vegetables have such high levels of micronutrients that the amount in unclarified plant oils is meaningless, in comparison.

Also, how do you define favoring certain foods? People that make an express attempt to eat healthy eat the foods that they hear are healthy. If a few of those foods have no effect on health, or even a negative effect, favoring those foods will still correlate positively to better health outcomes, as long as the rest of the advised food is healthy.

Compared to the health effects shown in research on how much food to eat, especially how much whole foods vs added refined fats and sugars, the effects of one refined oil verses another makes little difference.

I'll take the major health benefits I get from limiting my intake of refined oils, but don't see any value in bothering with the clinically insignificant, and possibly statistically insignificant, benefits of only eating the less tasty refined oils, when I do eat them.

This is one of those times it's probably good to remind people that the way the tallow comes in is often in chemical tankers. They'll make it to the agricultural docks sooner or later among their rotation between chemical plants when they get here.

You're depending on the integrity of the ship's personnel as to how well they cleaned the vessel compartments overseas before loading the tallow, when the odds are extremely high that the previous cargo in one or more of the tanks was quite toxic.

Yum.

The same applies for plant oils though. Only high value oils like olive oil are commonly shipped packaged and debulked.

You can get beef fat for real cheap and render it yourself. I get a quarter beef each year and do it myself, I don't even make a dent in it. I've probably got 25lbs in my freezer from prior years.

I live near a rail yard, and there's a surprisingly high number of ADM tankers running through the yard. It's my understanding that they usually contain vegetable oil or corn syrup.

What I find most disconcerting is when I see milk trailers on the road. I've also seen Purina carry pet food ingredients in tankers, with a label that says "inedible" right under "pet food".

https://archive.ph/G4YaC

Reply on news.ycombinator.com