Why Animal Fats Like Tallow, Butter, and Lard Are Healthy

June 4, 2026

If you grew up in the 90s or 2000s, you were probably tuaght that animal fat is dangerous. Butter was replaced with margarine. Beef tallow disappeared from restaurant kitchens. Lard was something your grandmother cooked with before she knew better.

That whole narrative is crumbling. And on the carnivore diet, animal fats aren't just allowed - they're essential. Tallow, butter, lard, and suet are the fuels that make this way of eating work. Here's why they're actually good for you and how to use them.

How Animal Fats Got Their Bad Reputation

The story of how animal fat became the villain is worth understanding because it explains a lot about why people react with shock when you tell them you cook with tallow or butter.

In the 1950s, researcher Ancel Keys published his Seven Countries Study linking dietary fat to heart disease. The study had major problems - he selected data that supported his hypothesis and left out countries where high-fat diets didn't correlate with heart disease. But the idea stuck. Governments adopted low-fat dietary guidelines. The food industry responded by replacing animal fats with vegetable oils and adding sugar to make up for the lost flavor.

Meanwhile, the margarine and vegetable oil industries spent heavily on marketing and lobbying to cement the idea that animal fats were unhealthy and their products were the healthy alternative. It worked so well that even now, most doctors and nutritionists repeat the same advice without questioning the evidence behind it.

The problem is that the saturated fat hypothesis has been tested repeatedly over the last 20 years and it keeps failing. Large systematic reviews have found no significant link between saturated fat intake and cardiovascular disease. The cholesterol numbers that matter most - triglycerides, HDL, and the triglyceride-to-HDL ratio - tend to improve on high-animal-fat diets, not worsen.

Why Tallow Is the King of Cooking Fats

Beef tallow is rendered beef fat, usually from the fat around the kidneys (suet) or the fat trimmed from cuts of beef. It's been the primary cooking fat in Western cuisine for centuries and for good reason.

Tallow has a smoke point around 400-420°F, which makes it excellent for frying and searing. It doesn't oxidize easily the way vegetable oils do at high heat. When you heat seed oils like canola or soybean oil past their smoke point, they form harmful compounds including aldehydes linked to inflammation and disease. Tallow stays stable because it's mostly saturated and monounsaturated fat with very little polyunsaturated fat to oxidize.

Tallow is also rich in fat-soluble vitamins. Grass-fed beef tallow in particular contains vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin E, and vitamin K2 - all of which are hard to get from plant sources. On a carnivore diet where you're not eating plant foods, tallow becomes an important source of these nutrients.

It tastes great too. French fries cooked in beef tallow are famous for a reason. On carnivore, you can use tallow for everything: frying eggs, searing steaks, roasting vegetables-adjacent animal foods, or just adding a spoonful to ground beef for extra flavor and calories. Works great.

Butter: More Than Just a Fat

Butter is unique among animal fats because it's not rendered - it's churned from cream. That means it retains more of the milk components that make it taste and behave differently from tallow or lard.

Butter is the richest natural source of butyrate, a short-chain fatty acid that feeds your gut cells and supports intestinal health. Butyrate is produced by gut bacteria when they ferment fiber, but on a carnivore diet you're not eating fiber. Getting butyrate directly from butter bypasses that whole system and gives your gut the same benefit without needing plant matter to ferment.

Butter from grass-fed cows is also one of the best sources of vitamin K2, specifically the MK-4 form. K2 is involved in calcium metabolism - it helps direct calcium to your bones and teeth instead of your arteries. This is one of the reasons the saturated fat-heart disease link is more complicated than people assume. The dairy fat that raises LDL cholesterol also contains nutrients that help prevent arterial calcification. The body isn't a simple equation.

If you tolerate dairy, butter is a no-brainer on carnivore. If you're dairy-sensitive, ghee (clarified butter with the milk solids removed) gives you most of the same benefits without the lactose and casein. It has an even higher smoke point than butter too, around 485°F, making it great for high-heat cooking.

Lard: The Underrated Workhorse

Lard, rendered pork fat, got the worst reputation of all the animal fats. In the low-fat era it was basically treated as a poison. But lard is actually one of the more balanced cooking fats, and it has some distinct advantages.

Lard has a smoke point around 370-400°F depending on how it's rendered, which puts it in the same range as tallow for most cooking applications. It's slightly softer at room temperature than tallow, which makes it easier to work with for certain uses. The flavor is milder than tallow - some people find tallow too beefy for things like pastries or lighter dishes, but lard is neutral enough to not overpower other flavors.

Nutritionally, lard is high in monounsaturated fat - the same type of fat found in olive oil. About 45-50% of the fat in lard is monounsaturated. It also contains vitamin D, though the amount depends heavily on whether the pig was raised outdoors in sunlight. Pasture-raised pork fat can have significant levels of vitamin D that grain-fed pigs don't get.

Leaf lard - the fat from around the kidneys and internal organs - is considered the highest quality. It's firmer, has a cleaner flavor, and is what traditional pastry chefs used for flaky pie crusts. On carnivore, it works well as a mild cooking fat that won't compete with the flavor of what you're cooking.

Suet and Other Animal Fats Worth Knowing

Suet is the hard fat from around beef kidneys and loins. It has a higher smoke point than regular tallow - around 420°F - and a distinctly clean flavor. Suet is what you want for deep frying because it holds up to prolonged high heat better than most other fats.

Schmaltz (rendered chicken or duck fat) is another option. It has a lower smoke point than beef fats - around 375°F - but it brings a lot of flavor. Duck fat is especially rich and makes for incredible eggs, roasted meats, and even just eating by the spoonful if you need extra calories.

You can also render your own fat at home. Most butchers will give you beef or pork trimmings for cheap or free. Chop them up, render them slowly in a pot or slow cooker, strain out the solids, and you've got a jar of cooking fat that costs pennies. It'll keep at room temperature for months in tallow's case or in the fridge for lard.

How to Use Animal Fats on Carnivore

The practical side is simple. On a carnivore diet, fat is your primary energy source. You want to be getting 70-80% of your calories from fat. That means you're not just cooking with these fats - you're eating them as part of your meals.

Some easy ways to get more animal fat into your diet:

Add butter or tallow to ground beef. A pat of butter on a burger or a spoonful of tallow mixed into crumbled ground beef adds calories and makes it taste better. This is the single easiest adjustment.

Fry your eggs in animal fat. Eggs fried in tallow or butter taste completely different from eggs fried in oil. The fat becomes part of the meal rather than just a cooking medium.

Eat the fat cap. When you buy a ribeye or any fatty cut, eat the fat that runs through the meat. That's where a lot of the flavor and nutrition is. Don't trim it off. If the fat on your steak is too chewy, you might be undercooking it - let it render longer in the pan or finish it with a sear.

Drink bone broth with fat. When you make bone broth, the fat that rises to the top is pure gelatin and animal fat. Stir it back in instead of skimming it off. It adds richness and keeps you full longer.

Use fat as a snack. Some carnivores eat spoonfuls of tallow or butter straight. If you're doing strict carnivore with no dairy, fat trimmings or crispy pork belly can fill the same role.

What About Seed Oils?

This is where the comparison really matters. The vegetable oils and seed oils that replaced animal fats in the modern diet - soybean, canola, corn, sunflower, grapeseed - are highly processed. They're extracted using heat, chemical solvents like hexane, and then bleached and deodorized to make them palatable. They're high in omega-6 polyunsaturated fats that oxidize easily in your body and contribute to inflammation.

On carnivore, there's no reason to use them. Animal fats are nutritionally superior, more stable at cooking temperatures, and they taste better. The only argument for vegetable oils has ever been cost and the now-refuted idea that they're healthier for your heart. Neither holds up.

The Bottom Line

Animal fats like tallow, butter, lard, and suet were dietary staples for most of human history. They were only pushed aside in the last 60 years due to a hypothesis that never held up under scrutiny. On the carnivore diet, they're not just okay - they're the main source of fuel, flavor, and essential nutrients.

If you're new to carnivore and still worried about the fat, start with one change: cook everything in animal fat instead of vegetable oil for a week. See how you feel. Most people notice better energy, more satisfying meals, and no negative effects on their health markers. The proof is in how you feel and what your blood work says.

Your grandmother was right about lard. Time to bring it back.