Fat Chance
Inside RFK Jr.’s Quixotic Crusade to Make Beef Drippings Great AgainFat Chance
There’s something absurd about watching America’s health czar — a man whose family name once meant Camelot — sitting in a Florida strip-mall burger joint, evangelizing about beef fat to fat Sean Hannity. But that’s exactly where we found Robert F. Kennedy Jr. this past March, waiting for his order at Steak ‘n Shake, discoursing on the virtues of tallow with the fervor of a man who’s discovered the Rosetta Stone of American decline.
Welcome to the wellness wars, 2025 edition, where the battle lines are drawn over which type of fat should submerge your frozen potato strips. On one side: the health establishment with its peer-reviewed studies and cardiovascular outcomes. On the other: Kennedy and his army of MAGA influencers, carnivore diet devotees, and anyone who’s decided that American fast food’s real problem is insufficient rendered cow organs.
According to Kennedy’s Instagram screeds — yes, the Secretary of Health and Human Services conducts policy via social media — America’s obesity epidemic can be traced to 1990, when McDonald’s abandoned beef tallow for vegetable oil under pressure from Phil Sokolof, a Nebraska businessman who’d survived a heart attack (LiveNOW from FOX, 2024). Never mind the exploding portion sizes or the proliferation of drive-thrus. The real villain is canola oil.
The Gospel and Its Discontents
Kennedy’s pitch is seductive: Our grandparents fried everything in animal fat and nobody had peanut allergies. Then Big Food pushed industrial seed oils, and America became diabetic and obese. Return to tallow and we’ll all be vital again. It’s a narrative with cultural resonance. In certain internet precincts, avoiding ‘The Hateful Eight’ seed oils — canola, corn, cottonseed, soybean, sunflower, safflower, grapeseed, rice bran — has become political identity. Laura Loomer made a pilgrimage to Steak ‘n Shake to pronounce the RFK’d fries ideologically sound.
There’s one problem: Scientists who study dietary fats think Kennedy is peddling dangerous nonsense. Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, who runs Tufts University’s Food is Medicine Institute, calls the seed oil panic ‘really a distraction’ (NPR, 2025). Dr. Alice Lichtenstein, who holds an endowed chair at Tufts, is more direct: switching from plant oils to animal fats would be ‘detrimental’ to public health (Yahoo, 2025).
The scientific consensus is actually boring. Study after study, including a meta-analysis of 310,602 people published in Circulation, shows that replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat reduces heart disease risk (Yahoo, 2025). Beef tallow is roughly 50 percent saturated fat. It raises LDL cholesterol. LDL cholesterol clogs arteries. Clogged arteries kill people. This is not controversial among cardiologists.
The American Heart Association recommends limiting saturated fat to 5–6 percent of total calories — roughly 13 grams daily for someone eating 2,000 calories (Yahoo, 2025). A serving of tallow-fried fries contains 5–7 grams of saturated fat, nearly half the daily limit. Add a burger and you’ve exceeded your entire day’s allowance. The AHA and 17,000 physicians from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine have issued consumer warnings about beef tallow specifically because of cardiovascular risks (Yahoo, 2025).
Kennedy’s argument rests on folk epistemology: if something is ‘natural’ and ‘traditional,’ it must be better than something industrial. Never mind that beef tallow rendering at commercial scale is every bit as industrial as seed oil production, involving chemical refining with alkaline solutions (WRAL, 2025). Never mind that ‘natural’ doesn’t mean ‘healthy’ — arsenic is natural.
When Steak ‘n Shake announced it would switch to beef tallow — ‘RFK’ing’ their fries in branded political theater — it seemed like Kennedy’s vision was reality. Except, whoops: Steak ‘n Shake’s suppliers were still pre-frying everything in vegetable oil before freezing and shipping (NPR, 2025). The tallow was essentially a second fry, a theatrical flourish. The fries Kennedy praised on Fox News had been swimming in seed oil for most of their existence.
The Measles Problem and Market Opportunism
Here’s where Kennedy’s enthusiasm becomes sinister. Days before his Hannity appearance praising fries, Kennedy suggested poor nutrition contributed to a Texas child’s measles death — the first in the U.S. in a decade (MSNBC, 2025). ‘It’s exceedingly difficult for measles to kill a healthy individual,’ he claimed. Before vaccines, measles killed approximately 500 American children annually, many previously healthy (MSNBC, 2025). The virus doesn’t check dietary history. Kennedy’s suggestion that nutrition can protect against measles — followed by celebrating fast food — reveals the true depth of his understand of viral and nutrition science.
As one expert stated: ‘If people are eating more hamburgers and more French fries, even though they’re now in tallow instead of seed oil, more people are going to die’ (NPR, 2025). Meanwhile, manufacturers are ecstatic. They can charge premium prices for ‘seed oil-free’ products. The Seed Oil Free Alliance — a real organization — certifies restaurants as free from allegedly toxic oils (Food Navigator USA, 2025). Jonathan Rubin, the alliance’s founder, reports that ‘consumers are connecting seed oil avoidance with health, quality and trust’ (Food Navigator USA, 2025). Translation: We’ve found another way to make people anxious and sell expensive alternatives.
There’s irony in watching a Kennedy — trust fund intact — lecturing working Americans about traditional food choices while class dimensions go unremarked. The people who can afford Whole Foods and grass-fed beef tallow don’t need Kennedy’s advice. The people eating regularly at Steak ‘n Shake — working families for whom fast food is affordable protein — aren’t getting more nutritious food. They’re just getting different fat in foods that shouldn’t be dietary staples regardless.
NYU nutritionist Lisa Young observed bluntly: ‘People are blaming the seed oils when that’s not what’s toxic. It’s the sugar and salt in the junk food’ (Yahoo, 2025). But addressing America’s sugar consumption would require confronting the corn industry and soft drink manufacturers. Much easier to rail against seed oils, which lack multi-billion-dollar lobbying.
What Science Actually Recommends
Lost in beef-fat boosting is the actual dietary pattern with the most robust evidence: the Mediterranean diet, heavy on olive oil, vegetables, whole grains, and fish. Olive oil — extracted from fruit flesh, not seeds — has been ‘researched extensively’ and shows benefits for heart disease, diabetes, and obesity (MDLinx, n.d.). It’s consensus nutrition science. But olive oil lacks Kennedy’s culture-war appeal. It’s not ‘traditional’ American food. It doesn’t stick it to the establishment. It’s just good for you. How pedestrian.
The Circulation meta-analysis found that substituting just 5 percent of calories from saturated fat with linoleic acid — an omega-6 polyunsaturated fat in seed oils Kennedy opposes — was associated with 9 percent lower coronary heart disease risk and 13 percent lower coronary heart disease deaths (Yahoo, 2025). This creates perverse irony: the fats Kennedy promotes as healthier alternatives are ones decades of research show increase cardiovascular risk when replacing unsaturated fats.
Kennedy’s focus on cooking fats diverts attention from dietary changes that would most benefit Americans: eating more vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and legumes while reducing ultra-processed foods, added sugars, and excessive sodium. These changes have far more robust evidence than any claims about tallow versus seed oils. Food scientist Bryan Quoc Le summarizes established science succinctly: ‘Seed oils contain unsaturated fats that lower LDL cholesterol and protect against heart disease, while beef tallow contains mostly saturated fat which in contrast raises LDL cholesterol’ (Food Navigator USA, 2025).
Americans already consume more saturated fat than recommended — average intake around 11 percent of calories, nearly double the AHA’s guidelines (Yahoo, 2025). Adding more through increased tallow consumption would further elevate this excessive intake. For individuals with existing cardiovascular risk factors — high cholesterol, hypertension, diabetes, family history — the risks are even more pronounced. These populations benefit most from reducing saturated fat, not increasing it.
Kennedy’s tallow crusade taps into nostalgia for a past that never existed. The 1950s and 60s, when beef tallow reigned, weren’t a golden age of health. People died of heart attacks younger. Cardiovascular disease was the leading killer then — we’ve just gotten better at keeping people alive longer. Jessica Randhawa, who runs The Forked Spoon recipe site, remembers her grandparents using tallow and finds comfort in familiar ingredients (Food Navigator USA, 2025). That’s legitimate — cooking is cultural, emotional, tied to memory. But personal preference doesn’t make tallow healthier, any more than nostalgia for lead paint makes it superior to modern alternatives.
The real drivers of poor American health are documented: too much processed food with added sugars and sodium, enormous portions, sedentary lifestyles, communities designed around cars, limited access to affordable produce, stressful jobs leaving little time for cooking. None are solved by switching from canola oil to beef tallow. But addressing them would require confronting powerful industries and changing labor practices — actual policy work rather than social media posturing.
There’s tragic poetry watching RFK Jr. — nephew of a martyred president, son of another, scion of America’s most storied political dynasty — reduced to shilling for fast food chains on cable news. The Kennedy name once meant public service and sacrifice. Now it means Instagram videos of deep-frying turkeys and promoting dietary fads most scientists think are dangerous. Donald Trump promised Kennedy would ‘make America healthy again’ (LiveNOW from FOX, 2024). What we’ve gotten is a masterclass in using government authority to promote personal hobbyhorses while ignoring scientific consensus.
In the end, the beef tallow wars aren’t about nutrition science. They’re about authority, about who decides what’s true, about whether credentials and evidence matter more than vibes and grievance. Kennedy has made his choice, betting that Americans trust their gut more than peer-reviewed research. Given current discourse, he’s probably right. Which should terrify anyone who thinks public health policy should be based on science rather than social media trends and culture war positioning.
But at least the fries taste good. Kennedy says so. And who are you going to believe — a Kennedy, or some boring scientist with decades of cardiovascular research?
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References
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