During breast feeding, the child pulls 11 grams of EFAs from the mother daily through breast milk.

During pregnancy, the child depletes women of EFAs. Each child gets less EFAs than the previous child, and each subsequent child depletes the mother further unless the mother augments her diet with essential fatty acids.

Depletion of the mother's EFA stores explains why younger children have far more developmental and behavioral problems than older children, especially in large families in which the children are born close together.

Depletion of EFAs during pregnancy also provides a rationale for why women experience far more depression, fibromyalgia, and chronic fatigue, and more inflammatory, autoimmune, and collagen diseases than men. Women suffer these problems from 2 to 15 times more frequently than men do. The depletion of EFAs during child bearing predisposes women to these conditions. Men are not depleted by baby-brain-building in the way that women are.