Fig. 3.

Data from Burr’s 1930 paper demonstrating that linoleic acid is an essential fatty acid. Lipids that contain linoleic acid, especially linseed oil, corn oil and poppy seed oil which have a high percentage of linoleic acid, and methyl linoleate, stimulated the growth of rats when added to the fat-free diet, whereas coconut oil which is highly saturated and methyl stearate did not. While methyl oleate also stimulated growth in this study, subsequent work did not substantiate this finding (see Fig. 4). Each line represents data from a single rat, and the time interval in days is indicated by the size of the double-headed arrow at the bottom of each figure. Reprinted with permission from (2).