Are peanuts bad? (Patreon)

Question from Trong: Are polyunsaturated fats from peanuts and chia seeds just as harmful as the ones found in vegetable oils? I enjoy eating peanuts and chia seeds for the fiber but am not sure if I should continue it.

For context: I’m guessing Trong had this question after seeing a recent video of mine explaining why vegetable oils are bad for health. This is a good question, and I would rephrase it as “How much linoleic acid is OK to have per day?”

So about 26 to 36 percent of the fat in peanuts is linoleic acid (the omega-6 “bad” fat I talked about in the video.) A serving of roasted peanuts (28g, 167 calories) has 14 grams of fat, meaning you’re getting 3.6g to 5g of linoleic acid per serving. The average consumption of linoleic acid by adult men in the U.S. is about 16 grams per day per this paper, though I suspect it to be higher based on Chris Knobbe’s work finding we eat 80g of vegetable oil a day and soybean oil can be as much as 50% linoleic acid and sunflower oil 44-75%. So let’s make a conservative guesstimate that average adults get 16 to 28g of linoleic acid per day.

So how much is “OK” to get per day? Well, the average American’s adipose is somewhere around 21.5% linoleic acid. A healthy pacific islander eating zero vegetable oils has 3.8% linoleic acid. (So they get some in the diet. In fact, it’s impossible to get zero if you’re eating whole foods.) So average Americans are getting 5.6 times the linoleic acid of these healthy islanders. Assuming dietary linoleic acid intake results in a proportional raise of linoleic acid in the adipose, we can make another guesstimate that the pacific islanders were getting 2.9g - 5g of linoleic acid per day.

With all that in mind, peanuts actually provide quite a bit of linoleic acid, and it's one of the reasons I don’t eat much nuts. The other reason is if I have nuts laying around, I can easily eat 500kcal of nuts without realizing it.

So are nuts “bad” ? This is a good question. It seems weird to say a whole food like nuts are “bad” for us, but we’ve all got different bodies. Nuts make me feel a little sluggish and they’re so easy for me to overeat... though my best friend eats plenty of nuts and haven't heard him complain about them.

I suspect I’m also sensitive to the lectins in peanuts because they consistently give me a stomachache which is a shame because I love peanut butter. Then again, it could be the oil.

I bought this book The Production and use of Vegetable Oils in Ptomelaic Egypt, and it was mostly boring accounting of what areas used what plants for oils and in what quantities. The only comment on the health effects of these oils was: Discorides 2.99(121) Sesame is not good for the stomach and causes bad breath; the Egyptians use oil made from sesame.

It would also be interesting to consider how “paleo” nuts are. Did our ancestors have year round access to so much macadamia nuts, peanuts or almonds that they could idly eat them by the handful?