Essential Fatty Acids (EFAs)

The sometimes-current mania for reducing dietary fat at any cost is far too undiscriminating for optimum health. The reality is that you must have the right amounts of the right kinds of fats in your diet or you will get sick. This is because these fats contain compounds called “essential fatty acids” (EFAs), which—just like vitamins—your body must have but cannot synthesize for itself. If you do not get enough of the EFAs, you will first feel generally “out of sorts”, then be in poor health, then get sick, and eventually die. But more importantly for our purposes, without them The Beast will be wide-awake, roaring for food, and ruining your diet.

There are lots of different fatty acids in foods. Most of them provide nothing but concentrated calories and are therefore the enemy of the overweight. But two of them are essential to health and therefore to taming The Beast. These two are therefore among your best friends when you are dieting.

The essential fatty acids for humans are alpha linolenic acid (ALA) and linoleic acid (LA). They are respectively members of the “Omega-3” and “Omega-6” classes of fatty acids. From these two EFAs your body will manufacture other needed fatty acids and also other compounds essential for life and health (e.g. the eicosanoids).

When you are dieting, it is therefore critical for you to have some method of ensuring that you are getting enough of each of these EFAs. Otherwise, your body will wake up The Beast to make you go eat “chocolate cheesecake” or some other “low-calorie” food. (Chocolate cheesecake usually doesn’t have any LA or ALA in it, but as I’ve said before, The Beast isn’t too bright. It’ll just go for the fat! )

The RDI for LA is about 15 grams per day. The RDI for ALA is about 2 grams per day. Consciously including LA and ALA in your diet is relatively easy. You simply supplement your diet with small daily amounts of safflower oil and flaxseed oil. Safflower oil is about 75% LA by weight and flaxseed oil is about 50% ALA by weight.

These oils are excellent sources of these EFAs because they give you the greatest amounts of LA and ALA with the fewest other fat calories mixed in. For reference, a tablespoon (tblsp) of safflower oil contains 10 grams of LA and a teaspoon (tsp) of flaxseed oil contains 2.3 grams of ALA. So tablespoons and teaspoons are convenient measures to use for EFAs. Note: Some people do not particularly like the taste of flaxseed oil. If you are one of them, you will find a list of alternative oils with their amounts of each EFA in Part Two: TABLE 19: EFA SOURCES on page 205.

However good the above oils are, I have recently discovered that there is a natural food that is infinitely superior to them. It is delicious, convenient, easy to find, and has no special storage requirements. I have deferred a complete explanation to Part Two on page 203. You can turn there now or just continue on in this section.

Since EFAs are very important for a very large number of very basic body processes, any deficiency of them will likely mean that The Beast will be wide awake roaring for them---and making you miserable in the process.

As you have already seen, the major premise of The Multi-Diet is that any deficiency of any essential nutrient will wake The Beast, which will then force you to go out on a hunt for food, probably getting you a lot of unnecessary calories in the process. Therefore you must learn enough to herd it towards foods that have more of these essential nutrients and less of those non-essential Calories.

The basic Multi-Diet Essential Oil principle is to make sure you get the right amount of the right EFAs in your food. Beyond that, you reduce total fat as much as possible in order to reduce calories.

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On The Multi-Diet you're not trying to eat "fat-burning" foods, or force your body into some unnatural (and unpleasant) fat-burning state. You are simply managing the factors that control eating, so that you don't get hungry often, and you can stay on your diet as long as you need to.

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To keep The Beast from waking up and demanding to be fed that big slice of chocolate cheesecake:), it is probably more important to consciously manage the Essential Oil Factor than any of the other physical factors. This is not because essential oils are inherently more important than the other nutrients---they aren't. It is because (a) your ordinary refined-food diet may have been very deficient in them, and (b) most people (including most diet-book authors:)) are unaware of this, so they are also unaware of the need to make up the deficiency.

Note that the fats in that "chocolate cheesecake" and most other processed foods may have very little of any of the EFAs in them. Therefore you can easily stuff yourself with fatty foods and still be starving for useable EFAs---depending on how much of what things you happen to eat. (This is the true modern meaning of the term "starving amidst plenty".)

As we've seen, you can easily correct this situation once you understand it. The advances that have made fatty foods so easily available in general have also made relatively unaltered essential oils available. Health food stores (and some supermarkets) usually carry them. They are generally labeled with such terms as "expeller-pressed", "cold-pressed", or "crude".12 They are not as stable as highly refined oils and they can more easily go rancid on the shelf (the store's or yours). So pay attention to the label dates, keep them tightly sealed in your refrigerator, and use or replace them before they get old.

Rule-Of-Thumb for The Essential Fatty Acid Factor

Plan to add one tablespoon (120 Calories, 15 grams) of "cold-pressed", "unrefined", or "crude" safflower oil to one of your meals daily. Add one teaspoon (40 Calories, 5 grams) of flaxseed oil to another meal daily. Avoid all other fatty foods as much as possible, especially foods with added fat. Do not dispense with essential oil in the name of cutting calories---it is a false economy.

You will find a great deal more information on ways to manage the Essential Oil Factor in Parts Two & Three.

An Obnoxiously Blunt Statement - (Read at your own risk ).

Readers with delicate egos may wish to skip the next several paragraphs because I am going to be deliberately and obnoxiously blunt about a certain point. I am doing this because I want you to succeed with the Multi-Diet. But I know that two out of three readers (not you, of course) will fail if I am unable to get through to them on this point. I don't want them to fail. I want them to lose all that fat and keep it off. (And besides, at least one of those two inattentive readers is sure to try to blame me for their failure.) So I am now deliberately raising the decibel level in order to get their attention.

(Beginning of rant.)

You are going to screw up the Essential Oil factor!! Everybody does! I dare you to prove me wrong! You are going to screw it up because for years you have been brainwashed by anti-fat propaganda into thinking that all fat is always evil and you're a bad person if you ever eat any! (To be fair, this is not what the anti-fat crowd really means, but that's what comes across, and bad effects always outweigh good intentions.)

Of course, most fat is exactly as bad as they say it is. But what gets lost in all the ignorant propaganda is that the right amounts of the right fats are your best friends when you're dieting. Try to do without them and all you'll do is convert the Multi-Diet into a Heroic Diet---and then of course it's not going to work!

Exactly how are you going to screw up? First, your brainwashed little mind will tell you that you don't really need essential oils on your diet---after all... "Fat is evil---'everybody says so'---it has all those double-concentrated, super-easy-to-store fat calories". (Yada, Yada.) Second, you'll balk at the idea of putting whole tablespoons of this "debased, immoral foulness" in some meal that you're actually going to eat all of by yourself. Third, you'll cheat and use smaller, ordinary "tablespoons" instead of full sized measuring tablespoons; or you'll "forget" to put them in---and so forth.

These are all forms of ignorant self-sabotage! You need your EFAs in order to lose weight! By all means, eliminate the other fat from your diet if you can, but not your EFAs!

You have now been warned. If you still screw up the Essential Oil Factor, you're just a brainwashed robot and you deserve no sympathy from anyone!

(End of rant.)

There, that was a good rant. I feel much better now. Thank you so much for listening.)

Delicate Egos May Resume Reading Here:)

Keep in mind that only restricting calories makes you lose weight. Properly managing EFAs and the other Vital Factors is what keeps The Beast from interfering while you restrict those calories.

You will find much more information and technique for managing EFAs while dieting together with further discussion of the research and references in MORE ON... ESSENTIAL OIL on page 195 and MORE ON... ENERGY METABOLISM & STORAGE on page 163. If you wish, you may turn to those chapters now or just continue on in this chapter.