Nick Anderson blogs ...

Before the boom in processed foods most people ate sufficient pristine, vibrant, polyunsaturated essential fatty acids (linoleic acid and alpha-linolenic acid ) to meet most of the body's needs. This is no longer so, and our health is almost certainly suffering. It is important to restore good levels of the two essential fatty acids into our daily diet. The body uses various mixes of linoleic acid and alpha-linolenic acid for many purposes. They are, for instance, the body's fats of choice for the maintenance of the membranes of (i) the body's ~37 trillion cells, and (ii) the (sometimes thousands of) energy-producing organelles called mitochondria inside every cell. A key function of the cell membrane is cell oxygenation, which it does by facilitating the diffusion of oxygen from the bloodstream into the interior of the cell. A key function of...

For the last six months we have put in a lot of time learning everything there is to know about fatty acids.  Here is the first posting ...  Within the fields of academic biology, medicine and nutrition the adjective ‘essential’ is used in three different ways. There is the common usage of '‘must have’ or ‘cannot do without’ this or that nutrient if one wants to achieve good health. Many fatty acids are deemed 'essential ' or 'singly essential' in this sense. Academic biologists, doctors, researchers and nutritionists sometimes use the adjective 'essential' as a shorthand for 'this nutrient cannot be made by the human body'. There are two fatty acids considered 'doubly essential' - alpha-linolenic acid (ALA) and linoleic acid (LA) - in that: we cannot do without them if we want to achieve good health they cannot be made by the human body For many people the adjective 'essential' is also a synonym of the adjective 'p...