Scientific results on which oils to use for pan-frying

I am trying to find out which oils are suitable for pan-frying at high temperatures (when frying steaks or pancakes where smoke points are typically reached). Since there seems to be no agreement and a lot of false information about this in non-scientific sources, I want to consider scientific sources only.

I am more interested in home use, i.e., short pan-frying with little oil (no deep-frying) at higher temperatures (around 200 °C), so many papers researching commercial deep-frying applications (below 180 °C but heated/reheated for multiply hours) seem to be less relevant to me.

So far, I have found two sources that seem to be very relevant to me. Unfortunately, they come to very different conclusions.

In [1], different oils were slowly heated to 205 °C and then retained at this heat for another hour. They used Raman spectroscopy to analyze samples before, after, and at specific temperatures in between.

They concluded that sunflower and canola oils present high thermal stability and are therefore recommended for frying.

Coconut and olive oils showed significant degradation starting at 165-175 °C.

In [2] however, olive oil is recommended for frying because “when different oils were compared, olive oil was considered to be the most stable liquid fat” (p. 665). One source for this is another study of one of the authors [3] where sunflower and olive oils were heated to 180 °C for 5-10 hours. There, sunflower oil showed significantly greater degradation than olive oil (if I interpret the results correctly).

What is the current state of research on this topic? Is this a well researched topic and I just couldn’t find the majority of relevant sources? If not, is there a proper conclusion summarizing these two studies? Is [2] less relevant to me because they don’t use the high heat that occurs in pan-frying? Is the more recent study [1] more relevant because it uses modern techniques to analyze the oils?

Refs:

• [1] Alvarenga, B.R., Xavier, F.A.N., Soares, F.L.F. et al. Thermal Stability Assessment of Vegetable Oils by Raman Spectroscopy and Chemometrics. Food Anal. Methods 11, 1969–1976 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12161-018-1160-y

• [2] Velasco, Joaquín & Dobarganes, M.. (2002). Oxidative stability of virgin olive oil. European Journal of Lipid Science and Technology. 104. https://doi.org/10.1002/1438-9312(200210)104:9/10%3C661::AID-EJLT661%3E3.0.CO;2-D

• [3] Dobarganes, M. C., Marquez-Ruiz, G., & Perez-Camino, M. C. (1993). Thermal stability and frying performance of genetically modified sunflower seed (Helianthus annuus L.) oils. Journal of agricultural and food chemistry, 41(4), 678-681 https://doi.org/10.1021/jf00028a033