After decades of continuous low-fat moralizing, people naturally assume that eating fat is always bad for fat people.

But is eating fat really always bad for fat people? The short answer is a definite "No". This is one of those gross oversimplifications that cause far more problems than they solve.

Certain kinds of dietary fat are absolutely vital for absolutely everyone - even fat people. Other kinds just provide useless Calories that most of us would never miss. However, to use this fact to lose weight, you need to know which kinds of dietary fat are vital and in what amounts. Then you can make sure you get enough of the vital fats and safely eliminate the other fats and avoid their useless Calories.

The vital fats contain compounds known as "essential fatty acids" (EFAs). These EFAs are just like vitamins. Your body must get a regular supply of them from food because it cannot make them from anything else - and they are essential to life and health.

In fact, a lack of enough of the EFAs is one of the main causes of weight gain. Why is this so?

The general mechanism behind almost all weight gain is that whenever your body runs low on any nutrient it needs to keep you healthy, it triggers hunger as its signal to you that it wants you to eat food that will replenish its supplies of whatever you're getting low on.

However, when this happens, if you go eat foods that don't have very much of whatever you actually need, but do have lots of Calories, your body will naturally use whatever it gets of whatever it needs - and store the Calories as fat.

Then it will quickly run low again on whatever nutrient you didn't get much of - and trigger hunger again as soon as it does. This fattening process can repeat continually - often unnoticed - for years.

Obviously, you won't ever be able to lose much weight if you allow any such pattern to develop.

Fortunately, it's easy to disrupt the pattern. To do so, you simply ensure that you eat food with enough of all the things your body needs to stay healthy - except Calories.

With Calories, you make sure your body doesn't get enough. Then it pulls its energy requirements out of its ample fat stores, but still has no reason to trigger diet-destroying hunger or food cravings because you're not letting it run low on anything it needs.

In modern societies this kind of dieting is not hard to do - once you learn how. You simply use easily available nutrition information, concentrated natural foods, and ordinary generic vitamin and mineral supplements to make sure you get enough of everything you need - without those darn Calories.

It's easy to apply this idea to the essential fatty acids.

There are two known EFAs. These are alpha linolenic acid (ALA) and linoleic acid (LA). Your body must get them from food because it cannot make them from anything else. Whenever it runs low on either of them, it triggers hunger and eating as I've described.

Fortunately, getting enough of each of these EFAs is easy - you just take small daily amounts of safflower oil and flaxseed oil. (There are also several other ways).

Safflower oil is about 75% LA by weight and flaxseed oil is about 50% ALA by weight. Therefore these oils are very concentrated sources of the EFAs. (They have relatively few other fat Calories mixed in.)

Safflower and flaxseed oils are usually easily available in supermarkets and/or health food stores. They are the most concentrated sources of the EFAs.

How much of each of these oils do you need to get the right amount of the two EFAs that you need? Not much. About one tablespoon of safflower oil per day provides about the right amount of LA (10 grams). About one teaspoon of flaxseed oil per day provides about the right amount of LNA (2 grams). For reference, a tablespoon of any vegetable oil contains about 120 Calories and a teaspoon contains 40 Calories.

You should make sure you somehow get enough of the essential fatty acids. This is the only way to prevent your body from triggering the diet-destroying hunger that is always caused by a lack of them.

In my next article, we'll discuss another class of substances that make you fat when you don't get enough - but which are also easy to manage when you've learned how.

-Anderson A. Anonymous, M.D., Ph.D.- Copyright © 2000 Hamilton/Wolcott Publishing

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"Dr. A." is a nutrition researcher who has deliberately chosen to publish anonymously.

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