The Repercussions

You can see the repercussions of 35+ years of pseudo science in just this one little sign hanging in a burger joint.

First - the assumption that the best health measure has to do with cholesterol, specifically, that it be "reduced". Well, you can't live without the stuff, and "low" cholesterol is associated with early mortality just as high cholesterol is associated with early mortality.  But if you lower cholesterol, it does not mean you will live longer, and if you have low cholesterol, it does not mean you aren't going to die of heart disease.

Interestingly, peanut oil is a poly unsaturated fatty acid, or PUFA, and supposedly "healthy" because eating these oils reduces total cholesterol.  However, there's never been a study which proved that "lowering" cholesterol by dietary intervention reduces mortality.  It's all just a guess, and one that looks less useful by the day.

There are as many reasons to believe peanut oil is unhealthy as there are to believe it is "healthy."  Peanut oil is the best substance available to produce atherosclerosis in lab animals. Peanut oil, like all PUFAs, oxidizes easily, meaning it is rapidly degenerated in the body to a useless bit of garbage, or worse.  Peanut oils are part of the reason we are estimated to eat a 20:1 ratio of omega 6 to omega 3 fatty acids, which is another red flag for our health.  Lastly, it appears that cells which are over-built on PUFAs are also vulnerable to oxidation by reactive oxidation species (ROS).  ROSs are the reason everyone things we should be eating a bunch of anti-oxidants, which is to say, they are bad, and apparently high consumption of peanut oil and other omega 6 fatty acid laden foods (for example, industrial seeds oils and corn "oil") gives us defective and easily oxidized cell membranes.  

Paleo man ate many different things, but he never had a chance to eat a 20:1 ratio of omega 6 to omega 3 fatty acids - no one did until perhaps 50 years ago - and that alone might make it prudent to be very wary of peanut oil consumption until proven otherwise.

Sadly, pseudo science left us vulnerable to the belief that man-made industrial food chain products like peanut oils were safe and staples of the human diet like lard/tallow were not.  The repercussion - reverso world.