Most vegetable oils are linoleic. It is only recently that high oelic cooking oil has become a thing. I'm not aware of how prevelant it is in china. And of course olives and avocados are not vegetables. The study actually represents what vegetable oil is pretty well. The data go back to when HO vegetable oils were not a thing, and I speculate they are still not a thing in china, though I may be wrong. The title is still a bit mksleading given that the study is more specific than the conclusion but I think you are overstating the dgree to which that is the case.
The most abundant fatty acid is sesame oil is linoleic acid, it is not a HO vegetable oil, so it will be degraded during frying much more than HO oils or than animal fat.
So the study has not compared vegetable oils in general as food, in comparison to animal fat, but it has compared sesame oil used in high temperature cooking vs. animal fat.
This is significant because pristine vegetable oils are expected to be a healthier food than animal fat, while vegetable oils that have been strongly heated are expected to be a less healthy food than strongly heated animal fat.
Therefore any study that compares vegetable oil with animal fat must make very clear which of the 2 cases have been studied.
Not true. Omega 6 is worse than animal fat even not fried. It just isn't part of the study.
>it is not a HO vegetable oil
Like I said, "HO vegetable oil" is not really a thing in the first place. At the very least it's reasonable to not include it in the plain meaning of vegetable oil.
First, most vegetable oils belong to one of two groups that have very different health properties: vegetable oils where the dominant fatty acid is linoleic acid and vegetable oils where the dominant fatty acid is oleic acid.
Second, there are two ways of using a vegetable oil, with very different health implications. The vegetable oil can be added to food after cooking, when the food will no longer be heated to high temperatures, or the vegetable oil can be used during cooking, for frying and similar procedures.
This research study has compared sesame oil, where the dominant fatty acid is linoleic acid, with lard. It is not very clear how the oil and the lard were used, but it seems that they were used mostly for frying and similar high temperature procedures.
Between the 2 kinds of vegetable oils, the healthier are those where oleic acid is the dominant fatty acid. Moreover, for any vegetable oil, the healthy way to use it is to only add it after cooking, so that it will never be exposed to high temperatures.
The resistance of fat to high temperatures increases with the proportion of saturated or almost saturated fatty acids, so it is maximum for animal fats like lard or butter, lower for high-oleic vegetable oils and it is minimum for the oils where the dominant fatty acid is linoleic acid. Depending on the temperature and the time of exposure to that temperature, any kind of fat will be degraded partially, more or less, depending on its heat resistance.
So for frying, there is no doubt that the healthiest is to use lard or butter, less healthy is to use high-oleic sunflower oil or olive oil or avocado oil, and the least healthy is to use classic sunflower oil, corn oil, soy oil or sesame oil, like in this study.
So there is no surprise about the results, they are exactly as expected and well known.
The various kinds of fat must be used for appropriate purposes. When misusing them, any kind of fat may be unhealthy.