What Is Tallow? Beef Tallow Benefits, Nutrition, Cooking & Skin Uses

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Warm a pan of beef suet over low heat and the hard white fat slowly melts into a clear liquid that sets back into a creamy block as it cools. That block is tallow, a fat people have cooked with and rubbed into dry skin for a very long time.3 The English word goes back to the 1300s and comes from a Germanic root that perhaps meant "firm, compact material."4

On my list of the top 10 cooking fats, grass-fed beef tallow sits at number seven.5 Extra virgin olive oil holds the number-one spot for everyday cooking. I think beef tallow is fine in small amounts for many people, and in moderation. It isn't an ideal fat source for heart health or for fatty liver disease, though, and for most people it's not ideal in larger amounts. Olive oil is the fat you can use much more liberally. Where tallow earns its place is the hot pan: it's a far better frying fat than reused, oxidation-prone refined seed oil.56

Rethinking the fats in your kitchen? Open the free Anti-Inflammatory Reset protocol (free with your Dr. Axe account; you'll get emails from Dr. Axe and can unsubscribe anytime).

Did you know?

• English has had a word for a maker of tallow candles, the tallow-chandler, since about 1400.4

• In a controlled feeding study, people digested 99.8% of the tallow they ate and 99.6% of the corn oil, so the two fats were equally well absorbed.7

• Fat from grass-finished cattle can look more yellow than fat from grain-fed cattle, a sign of the extra carotenoids it carries.8

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What is tallow?

Tallow is solid at room temperature and melts to a clear liquid in a warm pan. Lard is a different product, rendered from pork, which The Biblio Diet leaves off the table.33

Four kinds show up in stores and butcher shops:

• Leaf tallow: Rendered from the firm fat around the kidneys. In a lab comparison of fat from three parts of Wagyu cattle, kidney fat gave the most oil and the firmest, most oxidation-stable tallow.10
• Trim tallow: Rendered from the fat under the hide and around cuts of meat. In the same study, this fat gave tallow a creamier aroma.10
• Grass-fed tallow: Rendered from cattle raised on pasture, whose beef carries more conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) and omega-3 fat than beef from grain-fed cattle.8
• Mutton tallow: Rendered from sheep fat. It's the tallow used in the skin-cream study covered in the skin section below.11

A short history of tallow

For centuries, "tallow" has named the hard animal fat people rendered for soap and candles.4 In the 20th century, fast-food chains fried in beef tallow blends until 1990, when they switched to partially hydrogenated vegetable shortening.12 That shortening was a major source of industrial trans fat, and in 2015 the FDA determined that partially hydrogenated oils are no longer generally recognized as safe.13

Tallow's comeback today rides the carnivore, low-carb and keto movements, along with the search for an alternative to highly processed industrial seed oils.3

Tallow nutrition facts

Beef tallow per 1 tablespoon (12.8 g) and per 100 g. Source: USDA FoodData Central, FDC ID 171400; per-tablespoon values calculated at 12.8 grams; % Daily Value uses FDA reference values.114

Most of tallow's monounsaturated fat is 18:1 fat, the family that includes oleic acid, the fat that dominates olive oil: about 4.6 grams per tablespoon. Another 3.2 grams is palmitic acid and 2.4 grams is stearic acid.1 The omega-6 linoleic acid that makes up most of the fat in refined seed oils such as soybean and corn oil comes to about 0.4 grams per tablespoon of tallow.16

The vitamins depend partly on what the animal ate. USDA's record for commodity tallow lists 2.7 milligrams of vitamin E, 0.7 micrograms (28 IU) of vitamin D and 79.8 milligrams of choline per 100 grams, and no vitamin A.1 Fat from grass-fed cattle carries preformed vitamin A: USDA measured 36 micrograms per 100 grams in raw grass-fed beef fat.15 USDA's record for tallow gives no vitamin K2 value, and its vitamin K figure counts only vitamin K1.1

What is tallow good for?

How tallow works in your body

Tallow's strengths trace to the particular fats it's made of.

• Few fragile bonds. Only about 4% of tallow is polyunsaturated fat, the kind with several double bonds that break down under heat.1 Polyunsaturated oils heated to frying temperatures form aldehydes and other oxidation products that carry into fried food, and tallow's low share of polyunsaturated fat is the likely reason it held up well in the frying tests below.22

• Stearic acid acts differently. About a fifth of tallow is stearic acid.1 In a controlled feeding study of 11 people, a diet rich in stearic acid lowered LDL 21% compared with a diet rich in palmitic acid, while an oleic-rich diet lowered it 15%; the researchers judged stearic acid as effective as oleic acid, and their measurements suggested the body converts it quickly to oleic acid.23

• Fat carries fat-soluble nutrients. Beta-carotene and vitamins A, D, E and K dissolve in fat, which is why the fat you cook vegetables in affects how much of them you absorb.17

Tallow benefits, ranked by evidence

Ranked by the evidence, the benefits of tallow start with a gentler LDL effect than butter, a smaller triglyceride rise after meals, better beta-carotene uptake, moisture for dry skin and heat stability in the pan.

Other potential benefits

Other benefits researchers are exploring:

• CLA from grass-fed fat. Grass-finished beef carries about 75% more CLA than grain-fed beef per gram of fat, 0.85 versus 0.48 grams per 100 grams of fat in one analysis.8 In supplement trials, which use grams of CLA a day, far more than food supplies, body weight fell 0.35 kilograms on average across 70 trials, and the inflammatory messengers IL-6 and TNF-alpha fell across 42 trials while CRP rose slightly.2627
• Fat oxidation. In a controlled feeding study of 12 adults, tallow and corn oil supplied the same usable energy and didn't change 24-hour energy expenditure; in the group on a lower-fiber diet, the body oxidized 14% more fat with tallow than with corn oil, while the high-fiber group showed no difference.7

Is beef tallow healthy for your heart?

Here's why tallow lands between butter and olive oil. About 19% of beef fat is stearic acid, a saturated fat that raises cholesterol less than the others, so tallow's effect is milder than its saturated-fat total would predict. It still raises cholesterol compared with less saturated fats, and a 1994 review of the beef and tallow research advised people on a cholesterol-lowering diet to limit it.28

A 1991 trial put the fats head to head. Ten middle-aged men spent 3 weeks on each of four liquid-formula diets, in random order, with the test fat supplying 40% of calories. LDL on tallow (155.8 mg/dL) was significantly lower than on butter fat (163.6), cocoa butter came in at 147.7, and olive oil (140.0) came in lowest of all.2

Two more lines of evidence fill in the picture. When 19 young men ate centrally prepared meals for 5 weeks on each fat, beef fat produced lower LDL than coconut oil (though also lower HDL and higher triglycerides) and matched safflower oil on all three.18 And a 2018 network meta-analysis of 54 randomized trials in 2,065 people found that swapping beef fat for butter at 10% of daily calories lowered LDL about 11 mg/dL (0.28 mmol/L). Beef fat's LDL effect wasn't significantly different from the vegetable oils', it ranked third of 13 fats for raising HDL, and five plant oils lowered fasting triglycerides slightly more, by 0.08 to 0.09 mmol/L; the authors recommend unsaturated oils in place of high-saturated-fat foods.25

Over the long term, eating less saturated fat pays off. In a Cochrane review of randomized trials, cutting back on saturated fat for at least two years lowered combined cardiovascular events (all heart and blood-vessel events counted together) by 17% across 12 trials in 53,758 people, though it made little or no difference to deaths.36

After a meal, tallow looks better on triglycerides. In 12 men aged 21 to 24, a single 100-gram load of beef tallow raised blood triglycerides 48% at 2 hours, against 96% for the same amount of corn oil, and the 10-hour total was about a quarter of corn oil's. The trade-off showed up in cholesterol: 10 hours after the tallow load, total cholesterol was 8.1% and LDL 9.3% higher, while corn oil left them unchanged.16

The amount matters too. When 10 healthy adults switched to a very low-fat diet built on lean beef, total cholesterol fell from 228.5 to 182.5 mg/dL (5.91 to 4.72 mmol/L) within a week; as beef drippings were added back in weeks 4 and 5, it climbed to 210.8 mg/dL (5.45 mmol/L).29 Like butter and ghee, tallow is more saturated and will nudge LDL up, so I keep it to small amounts when a recipe calls for it; used that way in a whole-food diet, it's a reasonable, time-tested choice.6

Tallow also didn't make LDL more prone to oxidation, a lab measure of how easily LDL particles are damaged. In 14 adults aged 44 to 78 with moderately high cholesterol, 32 days on a reduced-fat diet built around tallow left LDL as resistant to oxidation as diets built on corn, canola, olive or rice bran oil, though the diets lower in saturated fat produced lower total and LDL cholesterol.30

Beef fat carries a little natural trans fat, mainly vaccenic acid, the ruminant kind rather than the industrial trans fat made by partially hydrogenating vegetable oils; raw grass-fed beef fat holds about 1.7 grams per 100 grams.15 In a pooled analysis of observational studies, industrial trans fat was linked with a higher risk of dying from coronary heart disease (risk ratio 1.18), while ruminant trans fat was not (1.01).31

Watch ApoB, not just LDL. The tallow trials here measured LDL rather than ApoB, the count of cholesterol-carrying particles that tracks heart risk more closely than LDL. If tallow is a regular part of your cooking, ApoB is the number to watch, and if yours is already high or you have heart disease, save tallow for the occasional spoonful and check your numbers.

Is beef tallow good for your skin?

My reasoning: the fats in animals are the most similar to our own, and for really dry skin, I don't think anything works better than beef tallow.3 Plant-based oils such as coconut oil and shea butter are good options too.3

The cream study used sheep tallow blended with walnut oil, some batches treated with enzymes to restructure the fat, and the enzyme-treated versions moisturized more.11

Your face is a different matter for many people. I don't recommend tallow on the face for most people, because facial skin tends to be more sensitive; if you're not prone to acne or redness, you can use it there too.3 A 2025 cross-sectional analysis of tallow skincare claims on social media landed in a similar place in its discussion of the ingredient research, though it didn't test tallow on skin. The authors note that tallow shares its high palmitic and oleic acid content with the skin's own oil, which helps it blend into the skin barrier, while palmitic acid can promote clogged pores and stearic acid suits oily, acne-prone skin less well, so its effects likely vary by skin type.32

Apply a thin layer to dry areas like hands, elbows and heels, and patch-test a small spot first. For topical recipes and more detail, see the guide to beef tallow for skin.

How much tallow should you use?

Here's how that plays out in a real kitchen: tallow gets the hot pan now and then, and olive oil does the daily work.

Tallow in Chinese medicine

Traditional Chinese medicine sorts foods by their energy, and it lands in a similar place. Beef is described as sweet and warming (some texts call it neutral), a food traditionally used to strengthen the spleen and stomach (in plain English, your digestion), build blood and increase qi, meaning your energy.3738 Modern researchers have started testing those labels: in a 2025 lab study in mice, fat extracted from beef produced a "warm feeling" after eating, judged by the floor temperatures the mice chose, while chicken fat produced a cool one.41

The caution is with excess. In this tradition, overeating rich, greasy food, especially alongside a sedentary lifestyle, is the most typical cause of internal "dampness," a heavy, sluggish, congested state, along with "phlegm."3839 Traditional descriptions of fatty liver list that kind of eating among its causes, with patterns of dampness, damp-heat (dampness combined with heat, loosely what we'd call inflammation) and liver stagnation (sluggish flow through the liver).39 Paul Pitchford's classic reference on Chinese food energetics even lists hepatitis, an inflamed liver, among the conditions where beef is avoided.38 These are traditional concepts rather than measured effects, and they point the same way I do: a little tallow, not a lot.

How to cook with tallow

Tallow is at its best when the heat is high and the goal is browning: searing a steak, roasting potatoes and root vegetables, or sautéing greens.3 When a recipe wants a richer or more heat-stable fat, I'll use a small amount of grass-fed ghee, coconut oil or tallow, and for very high-heat searing I also reach for avocado oil.6

I don't deep-fry at home.6 When a restaurant switches its fryer from seed oil to beef tallow, though, I consider that an upgrade in most cases,3 and the lab frying tests in the benefits above point the same way.

Tallow also works as a dairy-free swap for butter. In The Biblio Diet, Jordan Rubin and I call it a great alternative for people with lactose intolerance or dairy allergies.33

How to buy, make and store tallow

On the label. Look for tallow from grass-fed or grass-finished cattle, since grass finishing raises CLA, omega-3 fat and carotenoids in beef.8 Choose unrefined tallow when you can: in a lab study of a refining process, degumming, deacidifying and bleaching tallow stripped out 41.1% of its tocopherols, the natural vitamin E antioxidants, and shortened the time it held out against oxidation.34 Check that the label says 100% beef tallow, since some products blend fats from more than one animal. The principle behind all of it: choose fats closer to the way God made them, less refined, less oxidized and more connected to whole foods.6

Making it at home. Rendering takes a few hours of low heat and very little work:

1. Buy beef fat from a butcher, ideally suet from around the kidneys, from grass-fed cattle.
2. Cut it into small pieces or ask the butcher to grind it, so it melts evenly.
3. Melt it slowly over low heat in a heavy pot or slow cooker, stirring now and then, until the bits of tissue turn golden and stop releasing fat.
4. Strain the liquid fat through a fine-mesh strainer lined with cheesecloth into clean, dry glass jars.
5. Let it cool until it sets, then seal the jars.

Hot fat burns, so work on a back burner and let the pot cool before you move it.

Storage. Keep sealed jars in a cool, dark place or in the refrigerator, and freeze what you won't use for a while. Oxygen, light and heat all speed rancidity, so keep it in dark glass away from the stove, and throw it out if it smells sour or rancid.

How does tallow compare with butter, ghee, coconut oil and olive oil?

On fat profile, tallow sits between the most saturated fats and olive and avocado oils: less saturated than butter, ghee or coconut oil, and far lower in fragile polyunsaturated fat than refined seed oils.6 It sits seventh on my list, and extra virgin olive oil, at number one, is the fat on this list to use freely.5

Fat composition as a share of the fat by weight (saturated / monounsaturated / polyunsaturated), processing and rating from Dr. Axe's cooking oil chart; rank from his 2026 list of the top 10 cooking fats.65

Choose by the job, and let olive oil do most of the work: extra virgin olive oil, used freely, for dressings and everyday cooking; avocado oil for high-heat searing, with tallow as an occasional high-heat option; and coconut oil for baking and medium-heat cooking.56

Tallow side effects and who should be careful

Who should go lighter on tallow?

Tallow, especially in larger amounts, isn't for everyone.3 If you're working on your heart or on fatty liver disease, keep it especially small.

With fatty liver, make extra virgin olive oil your main fat. In a 3-week overfeeding study of 38 overweight adults, an extra 1,000 calories a day from saturated fat (coconut oil, butter and cheese) raised liver fat 55%, against 15% for the same calories from unsaturated fat (olive oil, pecans and pesto) and 33% from simple sugars; the saturated-fat diet also worsened insulin resistance. Tallow itself wasn't tested.40

In the traditional Chinese medicine view, beef tallow is a little more clogging for people with patterns of dampness (heavy, sluggish digestion), phlegm or liver stagnation, and it can slow bile flow and back up the gallbladder.3 If your liver and gallbladder work well, that isn't a problem. If you know your gallbladder is compromised, go easy on tallow and favor fats that are easier on the gallbladder, like coconut oil and small amounts of flaxseed oil and omega-3s.3 For the liver, olive oil is the better choice, since coconut oil was part of the saturated-fat diet that raised liver fat the most in the study above.40

Alpha-gal syndrome

If you have alpha-gal syndrome, the allergy to mammal meat and products that can follow a tick bite, skip tallow and foods fried or cooked in it. The CDC lists products made or cooked with mammal fat, including tallow and suet, among possible triggers, and notes that not everyone with the syndrome reacts to them, so let your allergist's guidance set your list.35 If your throat swells or you struggle to breathe after eating, get emergency care.

The bottom line

Tallow: frequently asked questions

References

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3. Axe J. The Top 1% in Health Do THIS | Best Wellness Trends of 2025. The Dr. Josh Axe Show. 2025.
4. Harper D. Tallow (n.). Online Etymology Dictionary.
5. Axe J. You Were Lied To About Seed Oils! The Truth About Butter, Tallow & Olive Oil. The Dr. Josh Axe Show. 2026 (tallow at number seven, 18:48-19:02).
6. Axe J. Seed Oils: Are They Bad for You? What the Research Really Says. DrAxe.com. 2026.
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8. Daley CA, Abbott A, Doyle PS, Nader GA, Larson S. A review of fatty acid profiles and antioxidant content in grass-fed and grain-fed beef. Nutr J. 2010;9:10. doi:10.1186/1475-2891-9-10. PMID:20219103
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19. Lei F, Zheng M, Zhang T, et al. Physicochemical analysis of beef tallow and its liquid fraction, comparing frying performance with high oleic acid rapeseed oil and rice bran oil. Food Chem. 2025;476:143515. doi:10.1016/j.foodchem.2025.143515. PMID:40015054
20. Zhang X, Wang Q, Yu M, Xiang Q, Xu M, Liu P. Enhancing Repeated Frying Stability of Soybean Oil by Blending With Beef Tallow. J Food Sci. 2026;91(9):e71473. doi:10.1111/1750-3841.71473. PMID:42760792
21. Russell MF, Sandhu M, Vail M, Haran C, Batool U, Leo J. Tallow, Rendered Animal Fat, and Its Biocompatibility With Skin: A Scoping Review. Cureus. 2024;16(5):e60981. doi:10.7759/cureus.60981. PMID:38910727
22. Grootveld M, Percival BC, Leenders J, Wilson PB. Potential Adverse Public Health Effects Afforded by the Ingestion of Dietary Lipid Oxidation Product Toxins: Significance of Fried Food Sources. Nutrients. 2020;12(4):974. doi:10.3390/nu12040974. PMID:32244669
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25. Schwingshackl L, Bogensberger B, Benčič A, Knüppel S, Boeing H, Hoffmann G. Effects of oils and solid fats on blood lipids: a systematic review and network meta-analysis. J Lipid Res. 2018;59(9):1771-1782. doi:10.1194/jlr.P085522. PMID:30006369
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27. Rastgoo S, Shimi G, Shiraseb F, et al. The effects of conjugated linoleic acid supplementation on inflammatory cytokines and adipokines in adults: A GRADE-assessed systematic review and dose-response meta-analysis. Front Immunol. 2023;14:1092077. doi:10.3389/fimmu.2023.1092077. PMID:36911696
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29. O'Dea K, Traianedes K, Chisholm K, Leyden H, Sinclair AJ. Cholesterol-lowering effect of a low-fat diet containing lean beef is reversed by the addition of beef fat. Am J Clin Nutr. 1990;52(3):491-494. doi:10.1093/ajcn/52.3.491. PMID:2393010
30. Schwab US, Vogel S, Lammi-Keefe CJ, et al. Varying dietary fat type of reduced-fat diets has little effect on the susceptibility of LDL to oxidative modification in moderately hypercholesterolemic subjects. J Nutr. 1998;128(10):1703-1709. doi:10.1093/jn/128.10.1703. PMID:9772139
31. de Souza RJ, Mente A, Maroleanu A, et al. Intake of saturated and trans unsaturated fatty acids and risk of all cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes: systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies. BMJ. 2015;351:h3978. doi:10.1136/bmj.h3978. PMID:26268692
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33. Axe J, Rubin J. The Biblio Diet. Hachette Book Group; 2025. ISBN 9781546008439.
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37. Song V. TCM Nutrition: The Nature (Temperature) of Food. AOMA Graduate School of Integrative Medicine blog. March 23, 2017.
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40. Luukkonen PK, Sädevirta S, Zhou Y, et al. Saturated Fat Is More Metabolically Harmful for the Human Liver Than Unsaturated Fat or Simple Sugars. Diabetes Care. 2018;41(8):1732-1739. doi:10.2337/dc18-0071. PMID:29844096
41. Wakamatsu JI, Tan Y, Kato S, Abe H, Kawahara M, Hayakawa T, Kumura H. Evaluation of postprandial thermal feeling in mice using a behavioral thermoregulation analysis: Differences in meat species and their fractions. J Therm Biol. 2025;129:104101. doi:10.1016/j.jtherbio.2025.104101. PMID:40179544

Dr. Josh Axe, DC, DNM, CNS

Doctor of Natural Medicine · Founder, DrAxe.com

Dr. Axe is a certified doctor of natural medicine, clinical nutritionist, and multiple New York Times bestselling author. He has spent 20+ years in clinical practice helping people heal at the root cause and founded one of the most-visited natural-health platforms in the world.

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