So You're Frying with Beef Tallow, Huh?

What fresh hell has Nurgle unleashed on us this time?

The real-life Nurgle is at it again.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Warhammer video game, Nurgle -- or as he’s sometimes called, Grandfather Nurgle -- is the god of disease, decay, despair, and destruction.

From the Warhammer page on Fandom.com:

“Every single human being in the galaxy has been touched by Nurgle’s fetid hand at some point…As Nurgle’s gifts multiply in full-blown pandemics, his power reaches a peak. Whole star systems – even whole sectors – are quarantined as plague runs rife across the stars… his colors are those of rot and ruin, waste and vomit, mucus and pus.”

So, who’s this real-life incarnation of Nurgle that I alluded to? Why, it’s none other than RFK Jr.!

Maybe you think the comparison is too harsh, but you should know that Nurgle has a good side, too. Despite his affinity for spreading pestilence, Nurgle usually began to care for his victims, “…in a jovial manner close to being a grandfather.”

RFK Jr., too, seems to care for the “victims” that will surely suffer from his half-assed beliefs and subsequent actions, but caring hardly makes up for the damage he’s seemingly destined to inflict. Oftentimes the road to nutritional hell is paved with good intentions but in RFK. Jr.’s case, the embankments of the road are composed of soil, rock, gravel, and lots and lots of dumb fuckery.

Alright, enough foreplay.

His latest attempt to “Make America Healthy Again” involves requiring restaurants around the country to replace the seed-based cooking oil in their deep fryers with beef tallow. Again, on the surface, this sounds like it might be a good idea. After all, seed oils, particularly the “hateful 8 (canola oil, corn oil, cottonseed oil, soy oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil, grapeseed oil)” and maybe even peanut oil can potentially cause a whole mess o’ trouble in the body.

Here's the problem, or more accurately, the first of many problems: After the seeds used in making the oils are harvested, they're heated to really high temperatures and that oxidizes the fatty acids. That makes the molecule unstable. So, if you introduce some oxidized fatty acids into your body, they don't act like they're supposed to. They end up damaging vital molecules, including DNA and proteins. If too many are damaged too many times, you run the risk of developing diabetes, cardiovascular disease, arthritis, IBS, infertility, fat-assedness, auto-immune disease, or any of a couple of dozen other maladies.

They can also contain nasty additives. For instance, the chemical hexane is used to extract some seed oils and it sometimes ends up in the final product. Hexane is also used to make leather and roofing glues, so I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say it has no use in your body unless your name is Pinocchio.

Another serious problem is that restaurants often abuse the hell out of them. Most restaurants that offer vast quantities of fried foods can't afford to change their frying oil as often as they should, and once you re-use it more than three or so times, all kind of nasty things happen. You end up with dietary advanced glycation products (dAGEs). And aldehydes. And lipid peroxidation. And often, when you use too high a heat, you "flip" some of the fat molecules and create some of those nasty trans fats.

All this spells trouble for your health, at least over the long run.

So, Nurgle’s thinking is to replace all the nasty seed oils with beef tallow. Unfortunately, beef tallow is the mother lode of mother lodes when it comes to saturated fat and, as you’ve heard, eating too much saturated fat is thought to cause huugeamounts of cholesterol to build up in your arteries. I can see perhaps being dismissive of this aspect of saturated fat because it’s likely not an issue when sat fat makes up less than 10% of your daily caloric intake, but Nurgle, er, JFK Jr. and his minions, are missing something.

I’ll give you a clue as to what it is: What kinds of foods do you typically deep fry (and I’m not talking about the Texas State Fair where they’ll deep fry Twinkies, Oreos, pig ears, women’s undergarments, anything that’s not moving)? Well, off the top of my head, you deep fry French fries, doughnuts, hush puppies, and whatever the fuck corn fritters are, among other foods.

The thing that all those foods have in common is that they’re carbohydrates, in most cases highly processed carbohydrates. Highly processed carbs are bad enough on their own when it comes to jacking up cholesterol, but when you deep fry them in tallow, the cholesterol-elevating effects are additive.

It’s like when Shaquille O’Neal used to alley-oop the ball to Kobe Bryant, only in this case the basketball of cholesterolish plaque, instead of hitting nothing but net and going on to win the 2000 Western Conference Final, lodges in your artery and you die, and if you lived a bad life, you end up playing basketball for The Hades Hellfire Hoopsters and your teammate is a scrappy point guard name A. Hitler.

To be fair, tallow, despite what you might assume, doesn’t contain all that much cholesterol – about 14mg. per tablespoon. Still, it’s the saturated fat -- especially when it’s combined with highly processed carbohydrate -- that’s a bugaboo.

So yes, you might save America from a lot of inflammation and slow poisoning by cutting out seed oils, but you will undoubtedly increase heart disease, perhaps exponentially, by replacing them with beef tallow.

Ah, if only that were all.

Another thing I haven’t heard anyone discuss are the various chemicals that are stored in the fat of animals. The bigger the animal and the longer it lives, the bigger the cesspool of chemicals that gets stored in their fat. Granted, cattle aren’t allowed to live that long, but they’re big mo-fos and as such, they eat a lot of food, food that contains chemicals and many of these chemicals get stored in their fat, some of which is used to make tallow.

Examples include phthalates (chemicals known to be hormonal disrupters), pesticides, dioxins (chemicals that are unintentional byproducts of various industrial processes), and probably a whole plethora of pollutants.

Therefore, when you harvest the fat of cattle to make tallow, you’re inadvertently making Campbell’s Hungry Man Harmful Chemical Soup.

So where does that leave us? To paraphrase Phil Hartman’s Frankenstein’s monster SNL character, seed oil baaaaaaad, beef tallow baaaaaaad, fire baaaaaaad.

The Problematic Solution

In an ideal world where it rains puppy dogs and winning Lotto tickets, we’d fry or deep fry our foods in extra virgin olive oil (EVOO). And yes, yes, olive oil often contains those nasty phthalates so often found in beef tallow, but it’s almost always restricted to olive oils that are sold in plastic bottles, so try to buy EVOO that’s contained in glass.

And contrary to what just about everybody thinks, EVOO’s “smoke point” (the temperature at which an oil starts to smoke and break down) is about 410 degrees Fahrenheit, which is plenty hot to fry foods. I’ve often used it to deep fry chicken and the results are indistinguishable from using peanut or canola oil.

So why isn’t Nurgle suggesting we cast out seed oils and instead use EVOO? For one, he probably doesn’t know any better, but even if he did, the price might be prohibitive, as would EVOO’s availability.

The world already doesn’t have enough olive oil to go around, and unscrupulous manufacturers or distributors are either cutting it with other less desirable oils or flat out selling 100% counterfeit products dyed green to fool presumably non-discerning housewives in Middle America.

As such, I have no solace to give. My granny-shaking-her-finger-at-you advice would be to buck up and use EVOO at home while forgetting about eating restaurant French Fries and hush puppies and the like, but that probably isn’t going to happen. Maybe our only choice is to ride Slim Picken’s beef tallow A-bomb straight to hell. At least our ghosts will be able to say, “I told you so,” to the modern-day Nurgle.

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