Children personify perverse appetites. Babies eat their own feces and drink bleach without prompting. They turn up their noses at insipid muck called baby food, and give then credit for that. It is with parental sighs of relief that most kids take to peanut butter as though it were ambrosia. Loaded with protein, calories, and micronutrients, peanuts keep kids alive while TV advertising bulldozes salt, sugar, starch, and grease down their throats.
Doctors savor the perverse amusement of inserting things into patients' fundaments. Whether gynecological or prostatic, it is medical allegory that 40+ feet of intestine reveal all secrets through the vigorous palpation of the final four inches. When a couple of rubber-clad fingers prove inadequate to cower patients, there is sigmoidoscopy and the silver bullet. Health care providers (how they despise HMO-awarded appellations!) know they are getting warm when the patient screams through his sedation.
There was 1950s scandal when a ubiquitous fungus infesting poorly dried peanuts, Aspergillus flavus, was discovered to excrete aflatoxins. Aflatoxins are remarkably potent liver carcinogens and poisons. Aflatoxin B has an oral LD50 in ducklings of 0.364 mg/kg. A kid could be expunged by a fluffernutter, either dying before your eyes or having his liver explode into a tumorous oozing putrescence. Aflatoxins were not as politically malleable as later tetrachlorodibenzodioxin or the Greenhouse Effect, but they did get the population dancing. (For all the millions of tons of contaminated peanut butter ingested prior to FDA-mandated scrutiny, the total 60 year epidemiological effect re hepatocarcinoma has been... zero.)
With Baby Boomers edging into their 60s, doctors across this great nation are slipping on latex gloves to professionally luxuriate in zealous rectal spelunking. Sigmoidoscopy and colonoscopy in search of intestinal polyp or diverticulum branded with the dreaded C-word (CANCER!) are trendy diagnostics. Mountains of peanut butter ingested as a child - aflatoxic or State-sanctioned - appear to be the fundamental source of hyperplastic (overgrown) and neoplastic (C-word) colonic epithelium. There is nothing you can do about it.
We turn to Gastroenterology 114 44 (1998), "Peanut Ingestion Increases Rectal Proliferation in Individuals with Mucosal Expression of Peanut lectin Receptor." The song is sweet: "Thomsen-Friedenreich blood group antigen (galactose beta-1,3-N-acetyl galatosamine alpha-) acts as oncofetal antigen in colonic epithelium with low expression in normal adult epithelia but increasing to fetal levels of expression in hyperplasia or malignancy. Peanut lectin is among the commonest dietary lectins that bind this antigen." 36 adults did serious ankle-grabbing pre- and post-peanut ingestion that a half dozen British doctors could wrest myriad tissue slices from where the sun never shines.
How large a danger does extemporaneous peanut consumption pose to normal individuals? "Peanut ingestion caused a 41% increase in rectal mucosal proliferation in individuals with macroscopically normal mucosa." Whoa! This is not some Enviro-whiner Protection Agency pogrom where parts-per-billion inhalation of sparrow farts extrapolated across the entire population of planet Earth over a century result is a statistically significant possible increase in morbidity in descendants of Armenian taxi drivers. Oh no! We are talking 41% tissue overgrowth throughout your insides in the here and now, as easy as accepting a packet of roasted goobers from a flight attendant.
The direct impact of this definitive study is obvious. Doctors throughout the First World are giddy with fantasies of fisting every man and woman who owns up to an intimate tryst with Mr. Peanut. It is a long road to hoe, and MDs are going to thread their quantitative and qualitative inquiries up a heretofore sacred ten feet of gut in search of that evil 41%. Is Fleet Pharmaceuticals a publicly traded corporation? Invest!
Unlike fictive, nugatory, and notional health threats such as a drop of chloroform detected dissolved in a thousand metric tons of drinking water, real health hazards do not carry much cachet with the FDA. There is little money to be porkbarrelled into decades-long rat feeding studies if the vermin all turn tumorous bloated belly up in the first three months. News conferences, press releases, and national paranoia painted with a broad brush wither in light of discrete reproducible fact. Do you want your government funding hundred million dollar stuff a high school kid could do equally well as a science project?
Suffer your Brussels sprouts and stinky cruciferous vegetables. Eat your nine portions of grain and other roughage-rich food groups each day. Pound down the oat bran. Nothing will save you from lethal carcinogenic colonic assault by the lowly peanut.