Essential Fatty Acids
(EFAs) & Weight Loss

Below is an excerpt from Part Two of

The 2004 Multi-Diet

by Anderson A. Anonymous, M.D., Ph.D.

More On… Essential Fatty Acids

In the modern world, you can eat fat all day long
and still never get near an essential fatty acid..

Background on EFAs

As I’m sure you know by now, the main premise of The Multi-Diet is that if your body doesn’t get the nutritional things it needs to keep you healthy—including the essential fatty acids (EFAs)—it has various ways to “stimulate” you to eat to try to get them. This destroys your diet. (“So-o-o, you don’t vant to eat, ehhh…? Ve haf vays of ma-a-aking you!” )

I have irreverently named this reaction “The Beast”. However, as dieters, we’re not really very interested in the details of how The Beast makes us eat and destroys our diets. We prefer to simply make sure it gets all the things it needs, including EFAs, so that it won't have any reason to pull any of its tricks. This is what understanding the Multi-Diet’s Essential Oil and other Vital Factors let us do.

Functions of Fatty Acids

The fatty acids in fats and oils have two physiological functions:

1.  They can be “burned” for energy.
2. They can be used as “building blocks” for chemical regulators and tissues.

All fatty acids can be burned for energy. But only a few can function as building blocks. Of those that do function this way, your body can manufacture all but two—ALA (alpha linolenic acid) and LA (linoleic acid). These two must come from food—which is why they are called “essential” fatty acids (EFAs). (It is fortunate that there are only two EFAs since this means that while dieting we only have to manage these two—rather than twenty or so. )

You already know you have plenty of the “burnable” kind of fatty acid—because you can go look at all of them in the mirror any time you want. But despite this plentiful sufficiency, it is quite possible that you are still almost starving for the other kind—the EFAs. If you are, you can be sure that The Beast is wide-awake using all of its sneakiest tricks to make you eat too much and (it hopes) get it some EFAs in the process.

In this chapter we first focus on the structural function of fatty acids and then (more importantly) on how to make sure we get the right fatty acids in the right amounts to keep The Beast happy. (For a discussion of the energy-related functions of fat please see More On… Energy Metabolism & Storage.)