A not-insignificant variety of TikToks intention to persuade the viewer that beef-tallow moisturizer won’t make your face odor like cow. The sweetness influencers who have a tendency to look in these movies—often clear-skinned girls rubbing tallow into their face as they element their earlier dermatological woes—describe the scent as “buttery” or “earthy” or grass-like. A lot of them come to the identical conclusion: Okay, even when the tallow does odor somewhat bit, the sleek pores and skin it leaves behind is effectively price it.
Beef tallow (as each a moisturizer and an alternative choice to seed oils) is certainly one of many cow-based merchandise which have crowded the wellness market up to now 5 or so years. Beef-bone broth is a grocery-store staple. Demand for uncooked milk has grown, regardless of quite a few circumstances of sickness and warnings from public-health officers that ingesting it may be deadly. In sure circles, uncooked cow organs—coronary heart, liver, kidney—are prized superfoods. Goal and Walmart promote dietary supplements containing bovine collagen (a protein present in cowhide and bone) and colostrum (the wealthy liquid that mammals produce for his or her new child offspring); they promise more healthy pores and skin, a happier intestine, and stronger immunity, and are available in flavors corresponding to watermelon lime, lemon sorbet, and “valiant grape.” You should buy cow-placenta capsules for postpartum therapeutic, or powdered bull testicle for testosterone assist. The slightest interplay with clean-beauty Instagram can fill your feed with advertisements for beef-tallow lip balms, cleaning lotions, sunscreen, and deodorants. (One model even affords creamsicle-flavored beef-tallow private lubricant, which is at the moment out of inventory on-line.) Influencers reward tallow for clearing their zits and eczema—and supply low cost codes so you’ll be able to expertise the identical.
Even the federal government’s latest public-health messaging has veered towards the bovine. Throughout his tenure as well being secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has championed cooking in beef tallow (which he says is more healthy than seed oils) and ingesting uncooked milk (certainly one of many gadgets that he claims are suppressed by the FDA). Casey Means, President Donald Trump’s nominee for surgeon common, additionally helps uncooked milk; she has recommended that People can determine whether or not a given bottle is secure to drink by trying the dairy farmer within the eye and petting his cow. Means and Kennedy have largely averted partaking with the various public-health specialists who reject their views. However in Might, after months of such critiques, Kennedy took pictures of uncooked milk on the White Home to have a good time the discharge of the “Make America Wholesome Once more” report.
Woo-woo, it appears, is changing into moo-moo. America has entered its cowmaxxing period.
Like most wellness choices, cow merchandise are marketed with obscure well being claims which are just about not possible to verify or deny, corresponding to “deeply nourishes and helps the pores and skin barrier,” “activate mobile well being,” and “helps reminiscence.” One of many many guarantees of the Ancestral Dietary supplements Starter Pack of organ-based capsules is solely “vitality.” (The corporate additionally features a disclaimer that the FDA has not reviewed stated vitality advantages.) Advocates of those items are usually extra particular of their reward. Uncooked-milk lovers declare that unpasteurized milk accommodates bioactive chemical compounds that enhance human well being. In a single video, a lady drinks uncooked milk that’s been within the fridge for greater than a month; she claims it’s safer to devour than store-bought pizza or salad and that it reduces charges of eczema, fevers, and respiratory infections. One smooth-skinned influencer, who says she hasn’t washed her face in two years, claims that beef tallow is “bioidentical” to the sebum produced by human pores and skin. (It’s not, as a result of it’s from cows.)
A few of these merchandise are extra possible to offer advantages than others. Bone broth is certainly wealthy in collagen (which, when produced by the human physique, strengthens hair and pores and skin). Whey powder, made out of leftover cheese water, does comprise protein. However only a few research assist the concept consuming extra collagen strengthens hair and pores and skin. Whey protein can assist construct lean muscle, however the physique can solely take in a lot at a time. Some dermatologists say tallow can strengthen and hydrate the pores and skin; others say it clogs pores and needs to be averted. Different merchandise will be downright harmful: Simply this week, Florida officers introduced that 21 individuals fell sick after consuming contaminated uncooked milk.
At the least a part of the enchantment of cowmaxxing is the cows themselves: The merchandise evoke the pastoral superb of a cow grazing freely within the plains, milked lovingly by human palms. It’s a picture that’s been embedded in American tradition for hundreds of years. Take into account how Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was no stranger to the cruel actuality of farm life, described cow-raising in Little City on the Prairie: “Heat and candy, the scent of recent milk got here up from the streams hissing into the rising foam, and it combined with the scents of springtime.” It’s sufficient to influence a microbiologist to drink uncooked milk.
In Twenty first-century America, cows nonetheless summon pictures of fields and clover and large blue sky, sufficient to set off the human tendency to imagine that what’s pure is “essentially good,” Courtney Lappas, a biology professor at Lebanon Valley Faculty, instructed me. Her analysis has proven that some People want pure over man-made merchandise even when the previous is described as objectively worse—a phenomenon her colleague Brian Meier has referred to as the “naturalness bias.” This tendency, which is prevalent throughout cultures, possible leads individuals to imagine that unprocessed cow-based merchandise are secure and wholesome, she stated. Tallow, some skin-care lovers declare, is a more healthy, safer different to standard moisturizers, which supposedly comprise poisonous chemical compounds. The branding of such merchandise, too, leans into the notion that pure is greatest: Fats Cow Skincare markets its tallow cosmetics as “pure skincare, powered by nature”; Coronary heart and Soil sells capsules of “nature’s superfood” (that’s, organ meats). Different manufacturers invoke nature by the prehistoric, with names corresponding to Primal Harvest, Primal Kitchen, Primal FX, Primal Being, and Primal Queen. Ancestral Dietary supplements’ advert copy reads: “Placing Again In What the Fashionable World Left Out.”
America’s present well being panorama is the proper setting for cowmaxxing to thrive. The naturalness bias is deeply ingrained in Kennedy’s MAHA marketing campaign, which goals to enhance public well being by returning to a extra pure way of life. In Kennedy’s view, beef tallow is superior to seed oil as a result of it’s much less processed (some individuals even render it at residence). The carnivore and tradwife actions embody an analogous message, selling the consumption of uncooked cow organs and making butter from scratch. You could not know what’s in store-bought merchandise, the considering goes, however you do know what’s in tallow: pure, unadulterated cow fats.
And but most trendy cows dwell in a decidedly unnatural atmosphere. Nearly all of U.S. cattle are fed genetically modified crops, and a few genetically modified cows are allowed to be offered as meals. Many cow-based wellness merchandise bear the label “grass-fed,” which suggests cows that had been raised on pastures relatively than feedlots. However the label will not be strictly enforced, and it doesn’t essentially prohibit farmers from giving cows antibiotics or hormones. There’s no assure {that a} cow whose colostrum is harvested to be offered by a tradwife on Instagram had a contented, bucolic existence. To not point out that colostrum, whey, and placenta don’t come out of the cow within the type of powders or capsules.
The unfold of science misinformation, together with professional issues concerning the state of public well being in america, have left many People understandably confused about whether or not standard science and Western medication will be trusted in 2025. Attending to the underside of, say, the seed-oil controversy requires partaking with thorny scientific debates that reference inscrutable analysis papers; embracing the pure and ancestral by choosing tallow is an attractively simple-seeming different. “It brings with it a way of purity or wholesomeness that’s fascinating proper now,” Marianne Clark, a sociologist at Acadia College who research wellness traits, instructed me. On this sense, cowmaxxing will not be a lot a well being endeavor as it’s a non secular one, its promise downright biblical: Cowliness is subsequent to godliness.