The below is from Eliezer Yudkowski's book "Inadequate Equlibria."

"Some babies have digestion problems that require direct intravenous feeding. Long ago, somebody created a hospital formula for this intravenous feeding that matched the distribution of “fat,” “protein,” and “carbohydrate” in breast milk.

"Just like “protein” comes in different amino acids, some of which the body can’t make on its own and some of which it can, what early doctors used to think of as “fat” actually breaks down into metabolically distinct elements like short-chain triglycerides, medium-chain triglycerides, saturated fat, and omega-6, omega-9, and the famous “omega-3.” “Omega-3” is actually several different lipids in its own right; vegetable oils with “omega-3” usually just contain alpha-linolenic acids, which can only be inefficiently converted to ecosapentaenoic acids, which are then even more inefficiently converted to docosahexaenoic acids, which are the actual key structural components in the body. This conversion pathway is rate-limited by a process that also converts omega-6, so too much omega-6 can prevent you from processing ALA into DHA even if you’re getting ALA.

"So what happens if your infant nutrition was initially designed based on the concept of “fat” as a natural category, and all the “fat” in the mix comes from soybean oil?

"From a popular book by Jaminet and Jaminet:

> ""Some babies are born with “short bowel syndrome” and need to be given parenteral nutrition, or nutrition delivered intravenously directly to the blood, until their digestive tracts grow and heal. Since 1961, parenteral nutrition has used soybean oil as its source of fat. And for decades, babies on parenteral nutrition have suffered devastating liver and brain damage. The death rate on soybean oil is 30 percent by age four. In a clinical trial, of forty-two babies given fish oil [after they had already developed liver damage on soybean oil], three died and one required a liver transplant; of forty-nine given soybean oil, twelve died and six required a liver transplant. The death-or liver-transplant rate was reduced from 37 percent with soybean oil to 9 percent with fish oil."

"When Jaminet and Jaminet wrote the above, in 2012, there was a single hospital in the United States that could provide correctly formulated parenteral nutrition, namely the Boston Children’s Hospital; nowhere else. This formulation was illegal to sell across state lines.

"A few years after the Boston Children’s Hospital developed their formula—keeping in mind the heap of dead babies continuing to pile up in the meanwhile—there developed a shortage of “certified lipids” (FDA approved “fat” for adding to parenteral nutrition). For a year or two, the parenteral nutrition contained no fat at all which is worse and can kill adults. You see, although there’s nothing special about the soybean oil in parenteral nutrition, there was only one US manufacturer approved to add it, and that manufacturer left the market, so…

"As of 2015, the state of affairs was as follows: The FDA eventually solved the problem with the shortage of US-certified lipids, by… allowing US hospitals to import parenteral nutrition bags from Europe. And it only took them two years’ worth of dead patients to figure that out!

"As of 2016, if your baby has short bowel syndrome, and has already ended up with liver damage, and either you or your doctor is lucky enough to know what’s wrong and how to fix it, your doctor can apply for a special permit to use a non-FDA-approved substance for your child on an emergency basis. After this, you can buy Omegaven and hope that it cures your baby and that there isn’t too much permanent damage and that it’s not already too late.

"This is an improvement over the prior situation, where the non-poisonous formulation was illegal to sell across state lines under any circumstances, but it’s still not good by any stretch of the imagination. Now imagine trying to explain to a visitor from a relatively well-functioning world just why it is that your civilization has killed a bunch of babies and subjected other babies to pointless brain damage."

"“It’s not that we’re evil,” you say helplessly, “it’s that… well, you see, it’s not that anyone wanted to kill those babies, it’s just the way the System ended up, somehow…”"