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.