J
j.
Guest
On an interview (link), he claims that his book talks about the supposed proof that some fatty acids are essential.
In case anyone has the book, could you transcribe or mention a bit about the supposed proof, especially what he means when he says the babies would "do okay" and "not okay".
is Ray Peat correct to assert that unsaturated fatty acids are not essential? And you can find the information about that on Ray Peat’s site.
Paul: Yeah I don’t think he’s correct as a biological matter but as a practical matter he might as well be correct because the amount of polyunsaturated fats that you need is extremely low, if they’re well balanced then .5% of energy is enough. If they’re unbalanced you might need 1% of energy. And so that’s as far as developing any kind of pathology. In our book we discuss how difficult it was to prove that there was any human need for any of these omega-6 or omega-3 fats, and they didn’t actually prove it until they put these infants on skim milk diets which had no fat at all. It turned out that the infants would do okay if they had skim milk and lard, but not okay if they had skim milk only. Ray argues that the symptoms of an omega-6 deficiency are very similar to symptoms of a vitamin B6 deficiency and the diets that were deficient in fat were also B6 deficient and that could be the explanation. I don’t think that’s a likely explanation if the problem was cured by lard which doesn’t have B6 so far as I know. But like I said as a practical matter almost every food you buy in the supermarket is in the neighborhood of, every meat has at least 3% polyunsaturated fats, every oil has about that much. It’s basically if you’re eating real food, actual things that used to be plants and animals then it’s impossible to develop any of these polyunsaturated fat deficiency conditions. So as a practical matter he’s right, you shouldn’t think that the fact that some are called essential and some aren’t is meaningful in any way, it’s not. It doesn’t tell you anything about whether you should try to eat more of them or less of them.
In case anyone has the book, could you transcribe or mention a bit about the supposed proof, especially what he means when he says the babies would "do okay" and "not okay".