535: Good Fat vs. Bad Fat: Cooking Oils Explained

After a personal health crisis in the 1980s, Udo Erasmus went deep into the science of nutrition and came out with a radical revelation: not all fats are bad—in fact, some are absolutely essential for life. In this episode, he shares how essential fatty acids impact everything from brain function to skin health, why most of the oils on our supermarket shelves are doing more harm than good, and what it really means to nourish the body at the cellular level.

If you’ve ever been confused about what’s healthy when it comes to oils, or if you’re on a journey to feel more energized, focused, and well—this one’s for you.

Highlights

• Udo Erasmus, is a health educator and author of Fats That Heal, Fats That Kill, shares groundbreaking insights on the importance of healthy fats in human nutrition.
• Udo emphasizes that good fats—particularly omega-3 and omega-6 essential fatty acids—are vital for brain function, energy, skin health, and overall cellular integrity.
• He explains that essential fatty acids cannot be produced by the body and must come from the diet, ideally from unrefined, cold-pressed oils.
• The modern diet often contains damaged, toxic fats due to processing methods like refining, bleaching, and heating, which compromise health and contribute to disease.
• Udo describes how his personal experience with pesticide poisoning led him to research fats extensively, eventually producing his own line of health-conscious oils.
• He advocates for oils to be stored in dark glass bottles, refrigerated, and protected from light, heat, and oxygen to prevent oxidation and maintain nutritional quality.
• Udo criticizes the food industry's treatment of oils and urges consumers to be more informed about the fats they consume.
• He discusses how fats are foundational for mental and emotional well-being, and that fat deficiency can lead to mood disorders and cognitive decline.
• Udo believes health starts at the cellular level, and by consuming clean, undamaged oils, people can significantly improve their quality of life.
• His mission is rooted in a holistic view of health—nurturing body, mind, and spirit through proper nutrition and conscious living.

Intro:

Hello True Health Seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I am so excited for you to dive into today's episode. I want to make sure you know about the amazing cyber sales that are about to wrap up. They're about to end, but you still have time to jump in and take advantage of these really great savings. So I'll be really quick, I'm going to let you know about them and I'm also going to put the details in the show notes of today's podcast at learntruehealth.com and wherever you're listening from, whether it's Spotify or iTunes, wherever you're listening from, there should be a little area that shows the details, more details, and you click on that and you should see all this information there.

So, number one, we have Analemma, the structured water device that I use daily. I have some interviews about it, interview 498 and episode 508. So go back and check those ones out. If you're , huh, structured water, that sounds interesting. Let me tell you, it is. It increases your gut microbe health. It increases your cardiovascular health. They've done studies and it increases the health of plants, and they actually can see that it increases the output of the mitochondria, so it helps our mitochondrial health. It's really fascinating.

I noticed after the first three days of drinking the structured water that this low-grade depression I had experienced for a few years after losing our daughter. It dissipated. I just noticed it was replaced by this constant low-grade humming of happiness. I'm like, wow, that's really interesting. What an interesting shift to have,  an emotional shift, from integrating something as simple as just taking 90 seconds every time you fill up your water bottle, taking 90 seconds to structure it with the device. You just have a plumber install it into your house, and then all the water coming into your house is structured, or the gardening unit if you are an avid gardener. My plants, my house plants, doubled in size really quickly after I began to use it. I had to move them. I had them by the window, and they grew too big too fast. It was pretty interesting, but the health of these plants went out of control—out of control in a good way, super healthy, when I started using the Analemma structured water device. When it structures the water, it doesn't then go chaotic again. It's really interesting.

So listen to those two episodes, 498 and 508. But right now, until Friday, the 6th of December, we have a special promo code. It's LTH25. So when you go to learntruehealth.com/structuredwater, that's all one word, learntruehealth.com/structuredwater, and then use coupon code LTH25, as in Learn True Health and then the number 25, you're going to get 25% off all of their products. So the whole house unit, the gardening unit, or just the little personal size unit which is affordable.

It's also a really, really cool gift to give at Christmas. So if you have a friend who's a biohacker, into health stuff, this is one of those easy things. It's also a fun magic trick if you have guests over, you have friends over, or you're going over to a friend's house. I love doing it.

I take my little Anilema structured water device and I structure a glass of water and then have a glass of water that's not structured and then I tell them okay, don't look, I'm going to switch them up and only I know which one's structured and I have them sip each one and a hundred percent of the time people can tell a difference. They say it tastes different, it feels different. In my mouth it feels better, it feels like it's easier to drink. It just feels silkier. It's really interesting. I've had friends say this feels like my body's absorbing it better. It's really interesting that you can actually feel the difference and you can even see the difference as you use the device. You stir the device in the water for about 60 to 90 seconds and you can watch the water change viscosity. It actually shifts and changes. It's really interesting. There's a lot of really cool science around it. Go listen to episodes 498 and 508 and get the coupon code LTH25 happening right now for 25% off. They normally do give us a bit of a discount, so use coupon code LTH if it's after Friday, the 6th of December. If it's after that date, don't worry. You can still use coupon code LTH all year long and get the nice discount that they give us. But right now it's 25% off, which is really cool.

My next favorite thing is my sauna. I have my sauna right here. I don't know if you can hear that, but there's a nice wooden sauna in my small office. It's quite a small office, and what's cool about the Sunlighten sauna is it's kind of like a TARDIS. If you ever watched Doctor Who, it doesn't take up a lot of room on the outside, but you sit in it and you're like, wow, this is really roomy. It doesn't look like it's this big.

My husband and I can both fit in the single-person sauna, and it's a three-in-one sauna, meaning it's far infrared, near infrared, and mid-infrared. That helps your body produce collagen, it helps with skin health, it helps with recovery, and it helps with pain and decreases inflammation. The reason why I got it is because I had heavy metal toxicity and I had liver problems. I wanted to detox and get rid of the gunk out of my body through my skin because your skin helps you detox all those obesogens and forever chemicals and microplastics, all the processed crap that is out there, all the chemicals. Your body sweats it out, so I use the Sunlighten and I get rid of it through the sweat. It also has all these other benefits, including cardiovascular health.

I have episode 245. I have several episodes with cardiologists talking about the benefits of the Sunlighten Sauna. You can type in “Sunlighten Sauna” on my website, learntruehealth.com, to find those. Episode 245 is with the creator of Sunlighten Sauna, and she's wonderful. They're giving us such a cool special from now until December 6th—$1,000 off, including free shipping. You can go to learntruehealth.com/sunlightensauna. That's learntruehealth.com/sunlightensauna, and you can purchase it through that, or you can call them and talk to them. They're wonderful people, really great. They also do payment plans. That's how I bought mine, and I was able to do it on a payment plan, making it affordable.

You can have a wonderful sauna, and they even have a personal-sized one that packs up, so you can put it in the closet when you're not using it. That one's also a great choice if you don't have a ton of room. Mine takes up just a very small fraction of my small office, and I love it and highly recommend it. I use it all year round. Wintertime is super nice to get into a hot sauna. It's also very easy to breathe in there, because of the way the near, mid, and far infrared work. You feel hot, but it feels comfortable. It's not one of those saunas where it's 160 or 180 degrees. It's 130 degrees, but it actually is really comfortable to breathe in there and sweat because it's heating your body up on the inside. You also have light receptors, and we talk about that, so it really feeds the body that light that we're missing.

My next favorite thing is the organic mattresses. You will get the best sleep of your life. We got one. I think it's been seven years now, seven or eight years, and I absolutely love the Organix mattress. I am in love with it. I've had three interviews about it. It's wonderful, and they're giving a massive discount. They also have a really great return policy because I think this is the big question—if I'm ordering a mattress online, what if I don't like it? What if I lie on it and I don't like it? They have this amazing return policy, and I think it's something like 180 days. It is a very long time that you are given to try it out. Let yourself get used to it. Give it a few weeks. I fell in love with this mattress. It is absolutely amazing.

My husband and I joke that we don't like going on vacations because we miss our mattress too much. We even had an RV once. We brought our mattress in the RV with us because it's that comfortable. We just don't want to be without it. They're doing a great sale right now, so if you're thinking, oh man, the mattress we're sleeping on is making me stiff every day, by the way, mattresses usually deteriorate after five years of use. Most people are sleeping on a mattress that is in some way unhealthy for their back. It's bent, pushing on their pressure points, and doing more damage to their back. If you're in that position where you're thinking, I really wish I could have a better mattress that's actually healthy for me—20% off the mattresses plus free white glove delivery, that's $2,000 in savings. They also have 30% off bundles with four accessories with free standard shipping, and it just depends on which mattress you're buying.

Go to organixbed.com/learntruehealth. That's Organix with an X, organixbed.com/learntruehealth. You can also give them a call. They're really sweet people. They're really great. I love their bed. I highly recommend it. That sale is ending soon, so you want to give them a call. No matter what time of year, they offer a great discount, a great savings for my listeners. Even if you're listening to this and the sale's ended, they offer a really sweet deal, and it's worth trying because, in the next five years, your mattress is going to start wearing out. Think of your next mattress. Get the Organix mattress and let me know what you think. Every listener that's ever gotten one told me it was life-changing, and it's life-changing for me. It's also fun when other people report to me, saying, oh my gosh, I love my Organix mattress. Check it out—organixbed.com/learntruehealth.

Okay, two more left. Lifespa Ayurvedic Supplements. Learntruehealth.com/Lifespa is now, until December 5th, 20% off site-wide. I love their Ayurvedic herbs, the turmeric blends, and they've got wonderful herbs for digestion. Just check it out. You can listen to my interview, episode 505, about using that ancient wisdom and modern science to help the body heal through these healing herbs. 

Okay, last thing I got to let you know about is the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. That's where I went and got my year long health coach training program. Absolutely love them. Well, they have more than just health coach training they have. So you don't have to become a health coach to go take their trainings. You can go take their trainings if you just want to learn how to balance your hormones or heal your gut or manage your stress. They have these micro classes that are phenomenal and I love the teachers there. You can go to learntruehealth.com/coach and get a free sample class, learntruehealth.com/coach, and right now, they have a 30% off site wide. 

You want to check that out soon because that is definitely going away, that cyber sale. So jump in. If you're like, man, I would love to learn how to correct my gut and take my gut health to the next level, or I'd love to balance my hormones. Just look at they have at least 12 different courses that are super interesting, in addition to their flagship, which is the health coach training program. So a lot of people take the classes just for their own personal benefit or just to add more tools to their tool belt. So you can check that out 30% off right now and use the coupon code LTH to get that discount. So 30% off coupon code LTH. 

Thank you so much for being amazing listeners, sharing my episodes with those you care about. This is going to be one of those episodes you're going to want to share with your friends and family. Share this episode with those you care about, because it is definitely a life changer. So thank you for sharing and have yourself a wonderful rest of this holiday season. 

Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is episode 535.

Ashley James (0:12:14.786)

I am so excited for today's guest. We have kind of a celebrity on our hands today. Udo Erasmus, you've been in this industry for, I think, over 40 years. Back when I was first exploring health on my own as a young adult, I think it was in my late teens. When you're around 18 years old, 19, 20, you start making your own health choices.

I worked summer jobs, so I had my own income, and I gravitated towards the health food store—those really authentic health food stores where you walk in and smell herbs, and that musky herbal smell hits you. I haven't found one of those true health stores in many years, but this was up in Bracebridge, Muskoka, in Ontario, Canada. I walked into the only health food store in 100 kilometers, and I loved that smell.

Right there in the refrigerated section, they had the Udo's Oil 3-6-9 blend. I was newly into discovering what I wanted to do to rebuild my health because I had torn down my health through making really bad choices as a teenager, eating the same way all my friends ate. I was starting to try to reclaim my health, and I found this Omega-3 oil. I ended up making curry dressings with it—not heating it, of course, but making salad dressings with it.

In my mind, I can still taste it. It tastes so good. There was something that just buzzed for me. I don't know if it was that flax oil taste combined with the curry and turmeric, of course, it's a healthy flavor—but my cells started buzzing. Over 20 years later, I can still taste it in my mind, that flavor of me first attempting to get my health back, the beginnings of my own health journey.

Through the years, every time I see your product in the health food stores and grocery stores that I go to, I tend to go to the grocery stores that carry your line because I'm looking for local, organic, and more healthy choices. It always just brings a smile to my face. When I found out I had the opportunity to interview you, I thought that would be really fun.

I think there's a lot of confusion around oil. I've interviewed a lot of doctors, and one of my mentors who helped me so much with my health tells people to stay away from oil. But what he's referring to is cooking oil. When it comes to Omega-3, 6, and 9—flaxseed—he doesn't say stay away from it. He says we have to make sure that it's not exposed to oxygen, that it's not damaged by that exposure to oxygen and light, and that it hasn't gone rancid. Oil, the moment we remove fat from fiber, can begin to oxidize as it's exposed to oxygen.

There are a lot of nuances when it comes to using oils, but I think that the majority of Americans, and those around the world—not just America, but Canada and those around the world—are using oil in an unhealthy way. We definitely still have a nutrient deficiency epidemic going on where we're consuming calories but not nutrition.

I can't wait to dive into this topic with you today about how we can nutrify the body and make sure we're getting enough of the omega fatty acids without damaging our body from the more damaging oils.

Udo, welcome to the show.

Udo Erasmus (0:16:16.928)

Well, glad to be on. It's going to be fun.

Ashley James (0:16:20.134)

Yes, absolutely. I'm really curious about your journey. Take us all the way back to the beginning and what led you to want to create the Udo's Choice brand?

Udo Erasmus (0:16:33.476)

Well, the long story is I was born during the Second World War, and I was a war baby. We were refugees, and I was an orphan for a short time because of all the craziness that is still going on in Europe and the same craziness that goes on everywhere where people don't pay attention to peace and cooperation, and then they drift towards war.

That really formed me to always be asking questions, to question everything, and to try and understand how can you make life better. I started that when I was six. I listened to people arguing, and it just made me really uneasy. I was very, very sensitive as a kid. I listened to an argument, and this thought came and said, there must be a way that people can live in harmony.

This little cocky voice of a six-year-old who doesn't know how complicated everything is—I’m going to find out how. So I was a born scientist, always figuring out how things work. It was also good for security because I was pretty insecure. I never knew what I could trust. Didn't feel safe. 

Science is really good because it gives you predictability and control. So I got into science, and long story short, got into science, then biological science and psychology, then medicine. Only lasted a year because we were told to lie to people. They said a doctor should sound as though he knows what's going on even when he doesn't. We call that lying on the farm.

I thought I was going to learn about health and life and soul and all of that because that's what those words mean—biology, psychology, medicine is about healthcare. Never learned about life, never learned about soul, never learned about health in university. I spent eight years there. Then I left.

Then I took a whole lot of different trade jobs because I wanted to know what it was like to be in the shoes of the people doing those jobs. So I got a lot of practical experience—carpentry, painting, logging, mining, and all that kind of stuff. Eventually, I got married, and we had three kids. My marriage broke up, and I was really angry.

So I took a job as a pesticide sprayer because the only reason we make pesticides is to kill living things. I wanted to kill something. So I took this job, and three years later, I was really careless and I got poisoned by pesticides. At that point, because I had a really good background in biochemistry, genetics, and biological sciences, I got really interested in health. When I went to the doctor and said, what do you have for pesticide poisoning? She said nothing.

So I said, okay, I'm on my own. I used my background to dig into the research about nutrition and health, nutrition and disease, because the body's made out of food. It's also water and air, but I was just thinking food at that time. If the body's made out of food and something goes wrong, then if you raise your standard within one year, you can have rebuilt 98% of your body to a higher standard. 

That's what healing is. That's what healing is. That's why healing is possible because your body is always turning over. The atoms in your body, 98% of the atoms in your body today, will have been removed and replaced if we meet on this date next year. 98%. The body is a major construction site, and you improve the construction by improving the building material.

So I was looking at everything—minerals, vitamins, amino acids, fatty acids. Those are the essential nutrients that the body can't make and has to get from outside. There are 42 of them. I got stuck on fats because it was really contradictory, just like it is now. People saying, don't use C-DOLs, don't use omega-6s. I got a study that said omega-6 is an essential nutrient, which means you can't make it, you have to have it, it has to come in from outside.

If you don't get enough long enough, you die. These are really important building blocks for health and body construction. But if your health is deteriorating because you're not getting enough, and you bring enough back before you die, then all of the problems that come from not getting enough are reversed because life knows how to use them to build a body that works, provided we take responsibility at our mouth to make sure they land in our body so life can use them. That's what essential means.

The very next study I read says omega-6 gives you cancer and kills you. Literally, my head exploded. I was like, wait, it's essential for me to take so that it can give me cancer and kill me? There's got to be something wrong here. You can't have it both ways.

So it was that contradiction that made me say, I must be missing something. This can't be. How can those both be true? There's something going on here. That made me look deeper into how oils are made. I found out that when oils are made, the way industry makes them, and this is true for all of the colorless, odorless, tasteless oils that you buy everywhere, they treat the oil with harsh chemicals, and then they heat the oil to frying temperature for half an hour. So this oil has been fried before it goes in the bottle, before they put it on the shelf for you to buy. 

In that process, they treat them with sodium hydroxide and phosphoric acid, which are very corrosive—base and acid—then they bleach them with bleaching clays and deodorize them to get rid of the bad odor that develops. They do that at frying temperature for half an hour.

So about half to one percent of the molecules of the oil are damaged by the processing. That was news. So I called the Oil Chemist Society, which is the umbrella organization for the oil industry, and said I want to talk to a researcher. They put him on the line, and I said to him, when you know that the way you process oil does damage to it, why do you do that?

He said, well, one of the reasons we deodorize the oil—that's the high-temperature process for half an hour—is we can get rid of half the pesticides in the oil. My head exploded again because I got poisoned by pesticides, so this is not good news. I didn't even know at that time that there were pesticides in oils. Most people probably don't because they don't think about it.

So I'm thinking to myself, what do you mean, the other half of the pesticides stay in the oil? I didn't say that to him, but I said, why don't you start with organically grown seeds? Then you don't have a pesticide poison problem that you need to deal with.

I got a long silence at the other end of the phone. I waited. I don't know, it might have been only three seconds, but it seemed like three hours.

Then he got back to me, and he was really angry. He said, I don't know what your problem is. The oil is 99% good. It's only 1% damaged. If you got 99% on an exam, you'd be damn happy, wouldn't you? He just went on a total power trip.

So now I'm back in my office thinking, well, it's only 1%. Maybe I'm overreacting. I decided we had a saying in science when I studied it. When in doubt, do the math.

Numbers don't lie, right?

So I said, okay, if I have a tablespoon of an oil that is 1% damaged by the processing, how many damaged molecules will be in that tablespoon?

I want to ask you that question because most people don't have a basis for making the estimate.

Ashley James (0:25:14.528)

I don't know how many molecules are in a tablespoon or a teaspoon of oil.

Udo Erasmus (0:25:21.264)

Exactly. And so give it a shot because you'll see why this is going to be very useful.

Ashley James (0:25:26.800)

Okay, ten million.

Udo Erasmus (0:25:31.076)

Okay, good job. 10 million has seven zeros, right? Okay. Would you like to know the actual number? You would have to add a six in the front and then you would have to add another 12 zeros. So it's 60 quintillion damaged molecules, which amounts to more than a million damaged molecules for every one of your body's 16 trillion cells in one tablespoon of an oil that is 1% damaged.

Now, people use two to four tablespoons a day. There's pesticides in the oil. There's plastic in the oil because oil swells plastic, and plastic leaches into oils quicker than into water. Then if you use the oil for frying, you have to multiply that number by another three to six times because in the frying pan, you damage the oil further by oxygen, light, and heat all at the same time. Then you do that for 30 years.

So you have to multiply that by another 11,000, the number of days in 30 years. That's how many damaged molecules that did not exist in nature you introduced to your body in those 30 years. Then the research says this damage increases inflammation and the risk of cancer. Then you get something and you say, I don't know why I got that. I always ate good.

Because you never knew that, because the industry has never given that airtime.

Nobody talks about the damage done by processing. So then out of that comes, we use these oils to do research—these damaged oils, the 1% damaged oils, right? Then we get negative effects in some of the research. Then instead of blaming the negative effects on the damage done to the oil by processing, people who haven't done all their homework blame that on the seed oils or the omega-6s. Then they go around and say, don't use seed oils, don't use omega-6s.

Now, there's a lot of people saying that. None of those people have ever talked to me, and I have not been hiding. They make assumptions about what I'm doing that are completely off the wall. Then all the people who don't know either hear what somebody says who's loud. There's some very big loudmouths in the industry. They make noise, and then everybody who hasn't done their homework will parrot them.

That's why right now everybody's saying don't use seed oils, don't use omega-6s. There haven’t been any books about them. Over the 40 years that I've been doing this work, there have probably been 15 books like that. Right now, there are several books like that, and they're making a lot of noise. 

Fundamentally, you have to say these guys are blaming the oil for what should be blamed on the damage done either by processing or by food preparation because we wrecked them ourselves in a frying pan. None of these people have done their homework to look into why they're getting these negative effects. There's other issues too. We've lowered our omega-3 intake down to 1 sixth of what people got 150 years ago, and we've raised our omega-6 intake at least double, but maybe even 10 times as much as what people got 150 years ago. And so the balance between those two, they're both essential. You have to have them.

The balance between them has to be right because they compete in your body. The body converts them into a whole bunch of really important molecules. But they use the same enzyme system to do that. So if you get too much of one, it will crowd out the other. Then you'll become functionally deficient in the one that's being crowded out.

It's called function deficiency, which means you have it, but it ain't doing the work because it's being crowded out. It's being prevented from doing its work by the other one that you have so much of. If you have too much of the other one, then it'll crowd out the one. So they both have to be in the right ratio.

Ashley James (0:30:18.118)

I want to slow down for people who don't know what EFAs are, what essential fatty acids are. We've mentioned essential fatty acids. You use the word essential, and you said there are nutrients the body needs. There are 90 essential nutrients. We need omega-3 and omega-6. Those are the EFAs, essential fatty acids. The body can convert, if it has enough omega-3 and 6, it can convert to 9. I know you've got 3, 6, 9 as the EFAs. I'd love clarification on that because this is my understanding.

Udo Erasmus (0:30:50.078)

Essential fatty acids are two, omega-3 and omega-6. They're called alpha-linolenic acid—that's the omega-3—and linoleic acid—that's the omega-6. Out of those, the body makes a whole bunch of derivatives that we call essential fatty acid derivatives. Those include EPA and DHA that you find in fish oil and krill oil. 

Fish oil is seriously damaged because those omega-3 derivatives are even more sensitive to damage by light, oxygen, and heat than the plant-based essential fatty acids themselves. The body makes omega-9 out of sugar and starch. The body can make saturated fats out of sugar and starch. So those are not essential. That's why they're not called essential.

Ashley James (0:31:39.539)

Got it. Essential because the body isn't deficient in it because those are something that's going to be in your diet no matter what, so it's not something you can become deficient in.

Udo Erasmus (0:31:49.075)

Well, no, no, no, no, no, it's not like that. It's that the body can make them out of other stuff. Essential, essential, yes, essential, exactly. Essential means that your body can't make it from anything else. So you have to get that thing from outside.

Ashley James (0:31:56.538)

Okay. So if the body can synthesize it, it's not as essential? 

Udo Erasmus (0:31:59.731)

Exactly. Essential means that your body can't make it from anything else. So you have to get that thing from outside.

Ashley James (0:32:08.566)

Vitamin C, like, cats, goats, and wolves can make their own vitamin C, and their body makes vitamin C. They'll never have scurvy. They're not going to be deficient in vitamin C. They don't need to get it in their diet. We can't make vitamin C. It's an essential vitamin. We have to get it from our diet.

Udo Erasmus (0:32:25.572)

Correct. And I was just going to say that plants don't need essential fatty acids because they can make them from scratch. They make them out of carbon dioxide and water. That's all you need, right? Carbon dioxide and water to make fats and plants make them from scratch. So we depend on plants to get them because we can't make them.

Ashley James (0:32:47.578)

Yes, and that's an important point because a lot of times people think, well, I get it from my salmon, but the salmon don't make them. The plants the salmon eat or the smaller fish. The smaller fish eat the algae, so the algae is a plant, and the plants in the ocean, and then the smaller fish eat that, and then the bigger fish eat them, and so on. The animals don't synthesize these omegas, they get them from the plants. So let's skip the middleman, go straight to the plant.

Udo Erasmus (0:33:20.790)

Yes, there are some fish that can make EPA and DHA out of alpha-linolenic acid, out of the plant omega-3. Those are usually plant-eating fish. The carnivorous fish get them from their diet. It's algae at the bottom of the food chain that make EPA and DHA. The krill eat the algae, the little fish eat the krill, and the big fish eat the little fish. The EPA and DHA made by plants work their way through the entire food chain by getting eaten by different creatures. The plants actually are the foundation of most of the fish oil too.

Ashley James (0:34:14.487)

There are other essential nutrients. You talked about minerals, vitamins, and amino acids, but you settled on oils because there's so much controversy and confusion. I want you to explain what the body does. Why is this so important?

What does the body use these oils to make, and why is it so important that we make sure we get the healthy forms of oil and not the unhealthy forms of oil? We don't want to gunk up the system. You said if you eat the wrong kinds of fat, you end up starving your body of the healthy fats because it uses up the same enzymatic system. So what does the body need this fat for?

Udo Erasmus (0:35:06.763)

Okay, so let me go through that. Eighteen minerals, thirteen vitamins, nine essential amino acids that come from proteins, and two essential fatty acids are the forty-two essential nutrients. Again, you can't make them; you have to have them. They have to come in from outside. If you don't get enough for long enough, you die. If you're missing any one of these and you bring them back in adequate quantities while your health is deteriorating from getting too little, then all those problems will be reversed because your body knows—or life knows—how to make a body that works, provided you optimize your intake of all the essential nutrients that it requires, that life requires to make your body workable. So that's the essential nutrients.

I was looking at all of that, but I got stuck on oils because of the contradictions. There was just so much misinformation, confusion, and I felt I needed to know it to get healthy. So what the body does with the essential fatty acids—once you have alpha-linolenic acid and linoleic acid, undamaged, made with health in mind, in the right ratio—your body makes derivatives from both of them. Some of them are hormone-regulating substances called eicosanoids or prostaglandins, prostacyclins, thromboxanes, and leukotrienes, and they regulate cell activity on a moment-to-moment basis from conception to demise. These are super important in the regulation of functions in all of your cells. 

Not only that, the body also, especially out of omega-3s, makes substances called resolvins, which are very powerful anti-inflammatories. Resolvins resolve inflammation, meaning they make inflammation go away. Also, protectins, which are antioxidants that protect your cells from damage done by free radicals. Then there are maresins, which play a role in immune function, and endocannabinoids, which play a role in mood regulation.

If you get your fats optimized—your intake optimized—and you get the essential fatty acids in the right ratio, they've been shown to increase IQ by three to nine points. They are required for mineral transport in your cells. They make your skin soft, smooth, and velvety because together, when you get them right, they form a barrier in the skin against moisture loss, which makes your skin soft, smooth, and velvety. If your skin is dry, you need more oil. You need more oil in winter than in summer because people notice their skin gets drier in winter. This happens because you burn more of these oils for heat in winter. Brain function—they're super important in brain function.

If you take the dry weight of your brain, which means your brain with all the water pulled out of it, more than 60% of what remains is fat and it's omega-3 and six derivatives. DHA is the omega-3 derivative and arachidonic acid is the omega-6 derivatives. And those are part of brain structure and brain function.

Let's see what else. They are super important in vision. The retina has a lot of DHA in it. That's the omega-3 derivative, and those are important for vision. Important in sperm formation. Super important in pregnancy because when a woman is pregnant, she needs to build  two brains. She needs to maintain her brain, and she needs to build a new brain in her womb because there's so much fat in the brain, if a woman isn't getting enough omega-3—and 99% of the population does not get enough omega-3 for optimum health—what happens? Women who don't get enough omega-3 in their diet, the child will take them out of her brain because nature says the child is the future, and mom is the past.

So if we have to sacrifice mom for the kid, or the past for the future, then we will do that. And so that's one of the reasons why women get baby brain after they have a kid, or they get depression. And they've shown that every child depletes the mother further. Each child gets less than the previous child.

That's why they think the oldest children, on average, have the highest IQ, and IQ goes down with birth order. And they also think it's why women get two to fifteen times more depression, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, collagen, inflammatory, and autoimmune diseases than men do. They think the depletion of essential fatty acids, particularly omega-3, that is the reason why women get those conditions so much more often.

So they say it's super important for a woman to have enough essential fatty acids in her diet, both for her own health and for the health of her children. So it goes on and on. It makes your hair and your nails grow better. They'll grow about 25% faster if you optimize your intake.

We've worked with athletes. If you give them a tablespoon per 50 pounds of body weight per day of the blend that we did the study with, which is Udo's Oil, within a month—within 30 days—if they did their sport to exhaustion, their performance improved by 40 to 60 percent on average.

Then we took them off the oil to see what would happen, and they lost that extra edge. Then we put them back on, and they got the edge back.

Then we were going to take them off again one more time, and they quit because they liked the energy they were getting—because they were competitive athletes. And so that ended the study. So we ran it, and we saw it twice—how taking the oil improved their performance, and going off the oil made their performance decrease.

Especially in endurance sports, you want to run those. You want to do those on oil because if you carb load for a marathon, for instance, the carbs will only get you 20 miles, and a marathon is 26 miles. The person who did the most miles run in 24 hours—which was, I think, 152 miles—that's six marathons. One guy did that in 24 hours. He did that using that oil.

Let's see, what else do they do? They're good for bone strength because they inhibit the bone breakdown cells. They help people build muscle faster. They increase stamina, but they also speed healing to a third to a half the time.

They decrease inflammation very consistently. When people have joint pains, they get benefits from it.

They increase energy metabolism and oxygen turnover. That's what gets you most of your energy, and your mitochondria. So they're super important for mitochondrial function.

And if you damage the oils—and this is why the idea of making oils with health in mind is a big deal. The industry doesn't do that. But when you damage the oils, the damaged molecules never existed in nature. So they'll go where these oils are supposed to go in your body, and wherever they take up space in your body, they interfere with what's supposed to be going on there.

And because they're everywhere—in your cells, in your cell membranes, in your organelles, and as an energy source—they're everywhere in your body. So they interfere with everything when you damage them. And 1% damage gets you more than a million damaged oil molecules for every cell in your body.

That's a lot of cells. That'll change gene expression in the direction of disease. That's what oils do.

The essential fatty acids also regulate gene function—probably 10% of the genes. So that’d be 2,300 genes. And when you damage the oils, you regulate gene expression in the wrong direction.

So, I don’t know, have I missed any part of the body?

Ashley James (0:44:56.246)

Yes! Every cell wall in the entire body is made of this healthy fat.

We have to think about the body—the body, as you said, makes the brain. It makes the myelin sheath, which is the insulation of the nervous system.

Udo Erasmus (0:45:12.322)

Yes, yes, yes. It's part of it. It's not the whole thing because you get saturated fats and monounsaturated fats in your membranes, in your myelin sheath as well. They play a very important role in all of that.

Ashley James (0:45:24.022)

Well, without it, it's incomplete. The body can't make healthy myelin if we're deficient in the omega fatty acids. Then the cell wall. So if you think about how, you said, if you're consuming the standard American diet, or even if you're just trying to consume a healthier version of the standard American diet, and maybe you're eating out once a week, and you're still eating some processed and packaged foods, you're going to be eating canola oil and safflower oil and some other soybean oil, whatever, all these oils, they're damaged. These damaged oils, if it is a million damaged molecules, we're going to put aside, we're just wiping aside the fact that there is a tremendous amount of manmade chemicals in these oils, plastics, hormone-disrupting, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, obesogens, all that stuff, we're just going to put that aside.

Also, these chemicals drastically negatively impact the immune system and cause cancer. So we're just going to put that aside. Just let's talk about, let's say you're being health conscious and you focus on organic. It's organic canola oil. Okay. Well, still it goes through this process that they do when they make this canola oil or whatever, soybean oil, all these seed oils. Even I want to bring up avocado oil, but I'm going to finish this thought first, and that's that you have a cell, and I'm imagining one of your 37.2 trillion cells in your body. I'm just imagining one beautiful, brilliant cell in your body. Maybe it's a heart cell, maybe it's a liver cell, but the cell is really important. Here we have the membrane that the body needs to make. Make the membrane, and it needs to make the membrane, which is the outer shell of the cell, to protect the cell, make it healthy, keep it healthy. To keep a cell healthy, it has to be able to have those healthy receptors that it can take in the groceries and it can bring out the garbage.

Cells that can't take in the groceries and bring out the garbage, and cells that can't have insulin attached to it and other hormones attached to it because the cell wall is damaged or inflamed because for every cell, there's a million damaged oil molecules floating around that it's trying to build. I love that you said construction site, because that's how I describe the body too. The body shows up every day and the workers show up to build the body. But if you don't bring the materials to the work site, the body is just going to build whatever you give it. It's going to try to build healthy cells. If you give it McDonald's, you're building the Homer Simpson of a body. You're building the stupidest, the worst health possible because you gave it, you gave it silly putty instead of lumber to build your house.

Udo Erasmus (0:48:18.698)

Yes, or you sent the workers to the construction site without the tools they need to do the construction.

Ashley James (0:48:25.834)

They just don't. They showed up, and the materials weren't there, and the tools weren't there. So you have the cell, and then there's the unhealthy fats. Back in episode 475, I had Dr. Patrick Vickers on. He has a cancer clinic, and he specializes in more holistic lifestyle medicine for supporting people who are choosing to go that route. A lot of times, unfortunately, people go the cut, burn, poison route, and it didn't work. Then they're a Hail Mary, they go to his clinic. But it's better to clean the body up first before you get that diagnosis.

He talks about how important it is to choose the right kind of omega-3. He actually talks about flax oil and that flax oil has the correct charge that when you make a cell, when you make the cell membrane, and you give it, for example, unadulterated flax oil, it's never been heated, it's raw, hasn't been exposed to oxygen, really healthy flax oil, that it has the correct charge that the cell pulls in nutrients, but that the unhealthy fats have the opposite charge and they repel nutrients.

I know I'm not being very scientific in my description of my memory of his explanation, but can you speak to that? I'd love for you to maybe explain that in a deeper sense.

Udo Erasmus (0:49:46.246)

Yes. So, okay. So one thing I forgot to mention, the essential fatty acids, especially the omega-3 that's too low in 99% of the population, also makes hormones work more effectively at the cell receptor level. They increase the speed at which the transfers of the hormones are done to have their regulating effects in the body.

Also, that means when a person gets older and their glands become less efficient, they still maintain normal function for longer because with the essential fatty acids, the hormones just function better at the cell receptor level. That's actually a pretty big function. 

The issue of the right and wrong fats, I want to say it differently than the way he said it.

They're part of the structure of the membrane. They also, by the way, improve the absorption of oil-soluble nutrients, and they enhance flavors of foods. So it's another good reason why you want to have oil in your food. But you don't want to fry them. You want to add them to foods after they come off the heat.

By the way, flax oil was the first oil I developed in 1986 after I developed a method for making oils with health in mind.

That's really my claim to fame. I developed a method for making oils with health in mind so that light, oxygen, and heat don't damage the oils while they're being pressed, filtered, settled, and filled. Then we put them in glass bottles and put a box around them to cut the light out, and they're in the refrigerator. So we're giving oils that need the most care, the care they need.

What we usually do with oils, the most sensitive nutrients, we throw them in the frying pan. So we actually give them the least care of any of our nutrients.

Ashley James (0:51:54.252)

Well, you and I don't throw them in the frying pan, but the average person uses oil to cook. I've been cooking oil-free for 13 years. I have so many friends ask me, how do you do that? They'll come over to my house and watch me cook dinner. They're like, how do you do that? How do you cook with no oil?

It's so easy. Back when I started doing it 13 years ago, there weren't a lot of YouTube videos teaching you how to cook with no oil, but now they're everywhere. Just Google oil-free and then whatever recipe or oil-free cooking on YouTube. There are tons of recipes, but it's super, super simple.

You can cook, yes, you can. I sauté, I get a good caramelization on my onions. I sauté, it's just a medium heat, and then you can add a spoonful of water at a time, and then you stir. There's just a way of getting the right heat, whether you're using cast iron, stainless, or ceramic, getting the right kind of heat.

I don't use any kind of nonstick. I'm sure there are listeners who've never heard this before. You want to throw out, humanely recycle, or donate your nonstick pans. Anything that says nonstick or nonstick coating is incredibly unhealthy. It's better to use stainless steel, cast iron, or certain types of healthy ceramics that don't off-gas negative things.

Udo Erasmus (0:53:18.639)

Yes I tell people, get your frying pan, turn it upside down, hit yourself up the side of the head with it, then throw that stupid thing out, go back to cooking in water, and add oils to the food after it comes off the heat source. 

Ashley James (0:53:34.375)

Yes, or you could put it in a salad, or for the people who are athletes, they probably were just taking spoonfuls of it, drinking it right out of the bottle.

Udo Erasmus (0:53:44.781)

I don't recommend that because oil is usually with foods, but there are lots of people who take it by the spoon. I tell you why I don't recommend it. Occasionally, somebody will get in touch with me and say, I don't like the taste of your oil. I say to them, okay, how'd you take it? Well, I take it off a spoon. So then I say, when was the last time you took cooking oil off a spoon? I never do that. Well, why are you doing it with mine? Oils will never taste like ice cream.

Ashley James (0:54:14.057)

That's funny. I mixed it with a little bit of curry powder, and it was the most delicious thing ever. I can imagine putting it on a potato would be really good. But if you're putting it on hot food, isn't that hurting the oil, or does it matter? It's all going to the same place, your stomach.

Udo Erasmus (0:54:30.263)

Well, yes, the idea is you put the oil in the food just before you eat it. The heat of the food is not enough heat to do damage. When you do high temperature without oxygen and light present, if you do frying temperature, you actually turn the oil into trans fatty acids. But the heat of your food when you can eat your food, when it's cool enough to eat, you don't create trans fatty acids from that heat.

All you do is speed up the rate at which light and oxygen damage the oil molecules. That's why you put it on before you eat it. You don't let it sit around. You don't keep it. You could make a soup and have oil floating on top of the soup, and you could keep it on the stove, and the oil would be damaged by the light and the heat.

So you don't want to do that. You cook your food in water, then you take it off and put it in what you're going to serve it in. Then you put the oil on, then you serve it, then you eat it.

Ashley James (0:55:41.339)

The concept is that this is you're supplementing with a nutrient that your body is missing. But it's derived from food. It's a food source. So I'm going to be a little bit controversial and ask, cause this is what I, when I coach my clients, I say, try to get your healthy fats straight from a whole food source. Take flax, eat flax, chia, and eat some healthy seeds.

So I'm just going to be a little controversial and ask, why take Udo's oil? Why not just eat flax seeds or chia seeds?

Udo Erasmus (0:56:14.988)

I have the perfect answer for you. People have said to me, we should just eat whole foods and we shouldn't do oils because that's how nature did it. Nature knows best. So then the question becomes, well, is optimum health nature's mandate?

You can argue that. Here's how I looked at it. Nature wants you healthy enough to grow up. It wants you healthy enough to have kids. It wants you healthy enough to take care of the kids until the kids don't need you anymore. When the kids don't need you anymore, nature doesn't need you anymore. So you might be 40 at that point.

If you want to cheat nature and live longer, then you might have to high-grade some of the essential nutrients. In order to test this thought, somebody saying, nature knows best, nature mandates longevity, so you do it with whole foods, I did a test on myself. I was in California for the summer, and I decided to get all of my oil from whole foods. So I was taking five tablespoons of flax and about three tablespoons of sunflower and sesame seeds. That gave me the same ratio that we have in the oil. But I was getting it only from whole foods, and I couldn't eat more seeds than that because flax will actually absorb water and swell to six times its size. So my five tablespoons or 30 tablespoons, that's a meal.

Then I had my other three tablespoons. So I was getting the oil from that. Even in summer, when I need less oil than in winter, my skin was getting dry from just doing whole foods. So my deal is, listen, I'm not saying you should all take my oil and stop eating seeds and nuts. Seeds and nuts are good foods. Eat them. But if your skin is still dry, then add the oil to that.

In winter, I couldn't even do it in summer. Some people might be able to because people's metabolism is different. But I couldn't even do it in summer. In winter, I need about four tablespoons. In summer, two to three. Even in summer, I couldn't keep my skin from drying out. If your skin is dry, you need more oil. You need more of the right kind of oil because skin gets it last and loses it first because it has super important functions in your heart, your liver, and your brain. 

They get priority on the oil, and only when you have enough in all of those organs does it make it to your skin. So skin gets it last and loses it first. It's a good way to measure optimum. If your skin is soft, smooth, and velvety, you got enough. You don't need any outside gunk. People who use oil that way have remarkably beautiful skin. There are a lot of people in the beauty industry and the acting industry that use the oil just because it's really helpful for beauty as well as health.

Ashley James (0:59:49.524)

You brought up that the skin gets the nutrient last and loses it first because this is what I observed. I've been doing health coaching for 13 years, and I was mentored by two amazing naturopathic physicians and worked underneath them for the first few years with clients. What we observed was that when we took someone who was sick, for example, a heart condition or liver condition, and then we gave them all the essential nutrients and got them eating a healthier diet, their hair, skin, and nails did not improve immediately. It would be three to six months before they began to see any improvements in their hair, skin, and nails. It was consistent that we'd always see this. I thought that was interesting in how what they described to me was that the body does triage work.

The body is so intelligent. It's this beautiful, innate intelligence. I love how God made us, that the body is not stupid. I mean, we're stupid. We think we're smarter than our body. We go out and eat McDonald's. I always pick on McDonald's, but honestly, if it has a drive-through window, don't go there because there's no place that's serving you homemade soup and steamed broccoli through a drive-through. If they were, I would be the first in line.

There's zero healthy food you are going to find. I like that Wendy's has baked potatoes. When you try to build your body—and I love, I love—I almost started crying when you said at the beginning, you go, the body is made out of food, raise your standards. That is the most impactful thing out of over 500 episodes that anyone has ever said. You just summed up what true health is in one phrase.

So what we have is we're going around thinking we're smart, thinking we're smarter than the body, and the body does this beautiful triage work. So when you start giving it the essential fatty acids, it's going to repair the heart first. It's going to repair the brain first. It's going to repair the vital organs first, and then the leftovers afterwards are going to go to the hair, skin, and nails. Skin's an important barrier to our health, but it's not beating our heart. It's not doing the work of the liver, the heart, or the things that are keeping us alive right now.

So when all the vital organs have been fully saturated, have been fully bathed in these nutrients, then the leftovers get to the skin. The skin is this amazing mirror of what's going on. When your skin starts to get better, that means all the other organs got it too, got all those nutrients too.

With skin, I like to talk about how there's skin on the outside of the body, but think about all the skin on the inside that we don't see. Our lungs are made of epithelial tissue. Our entire digestive system, from our lips all the way to the other end, is made of epithelial-type tissue. So if you have this kind of dermatitis or you have rashes and inflammation and scratchy, itchy skin on the outside just imagine what's going on the inside.

I've actually had a client. We 100% reversed her out-of-control adult-onset asthma by increasing her omegas, increasing her omega fatty acids. That is the true testament to increasing your healthy omega-3 and, as you said, the healthy ratios of three, six, and nine. 

The body didn't have a deficiency in drugs. The body had a deficiency in the raw building blocks. When we get those raw building blocks back in, then the body can come back into balance. But if you go to an MD, we have to remember they've been trained by the pharmaceutical company. The pharmaceutical companies developed their education over the last 100-plus years.

Udo Erasmus (1:03:48.618)

Yes, they write the medical curriculum, and they basically train doctors to be drug pushers. But no one has ever died of a pharmaceutical drug deficiency. The body in nature was always made out of food, water, air, and light. That's it. There were no drugs.

How did the plants stay healthy? How did the animals stay healthy? Because the plants made the protective molecules. When you eat the plants, you get the protection that the plant made for itself. They didn't know that it protects you as well.

We came out of nature. We're still part of nature. That's never going to change. We are never going to be adapted to get better health from unnatural molecules than from natural molecules. That's crazy.

Going to say something about the skin. Dry skin—skin gets it last and loses it first. Yes, the reason why the skin gets it last is that you can live with dry skin, but if your liver, kidneys, or heart dried out, you'd be history. So you can live with dry skin. That's why the skin gets it last, and that's why the body dies from the outside in, in that sense.

Optimizing intake is so easy to measure. How does my skin feel? Skin feels good. Yes, I noticed the cold weather came. My skin is dry. Okay, take a little more oil. It's always by that that we measure optimal intake.

Ashley James (1:05:39.512)

Now, not all fat is created equal. We've sort of scratched the surface of that. But there are people who are doing the carnivore diet, which I'm just going to say, if we really look at the history of dieting, it is a recycled Atkins diet. Every 20 years or so, we kind of recycle this concept of low carb, low carb.

We also have in the diet movement, again, at least 10,000 diet books out there. It's just madness. I really love the book How Not to Diet by Dr. Michael Greger because it's not a diet book. He goes through about 5,000 studies, and it is wonderful. I've spent months going through this book. I'm still not done because it is so detailed and so wonderful, but it's all about, let's look at the science. Don't listen to fads. Let's look at the science and let the science do the talking.

Let's also compare the science when the science doesn't make sense. When there are two opposing studies, let's go deeper. That's what he does with that book. I had him on the show a few years ago, and a really good book to dive into—is Proteinaholic by Dr. Garth Davis. Wonderful, very cathartic for me to go through. It cleared up a lot of misunderstandings around the diet industry.

There are some people who are finding that, for example, keto, Atkins, restricted paleo, low-carb paleo, and now carnivore are all very similar. Majorly restrictive, not 100% restrict, anything to do with plants, and eat 90 to 100% animals. They're getting a lot of fats. They're getting a lot of animal fats. They're cooking sometimes on high heat—think barbecue or roasting—these animal fats.

Because you're an expert in understanding fats from the nutritional standpoint, what's the difference between an animal fat—taking a steak and maybe cooking it on a somewhat high heat with butter and getting a nice caramel, how you can get those heterocyclic amines and acrylamides going with the high heat—so eating that, or eating that bacon and those eggs, cooking, maybe getting the eggs a little crispy, getting the bacon a little crispy.

So you're eating that fat versus a cold-pressed organic flax oil that hasn't been adulterated by heat, oxygen, or light. What's the difference to the body?

Udo Erasmus (1:08:20.196)

Well, first of all, if you get your fat from steak, it's mostly saturated and monounsaturated. Steak is not a good source of essential fatty acids. A cow has some essential fatty acids in her brain, but you're not eating the brain. You're eating the muscle. So that's not a good source of essential fatty acids.

The thing is, you can live without saturated fats because your body can make them and the monounsaturated because your body can make those, the omega-9s, your body can make those. 

To me, the carnivore diet and the high-protein diets, I know some people who claim that that's all they eat and that's what keeps them healthy and that's what cured them of some problems they had. I don't argue with that. If it gives you results, go for it. But I'd like to talk to those people who claim to do that.

First of all, I'd like to see if they're really doing that. The second thing is because people lie about stuff too. The second thing is I'd like to see them in five years or 10 years or 20 years because it might be for a short time that might actually be useful and could be therapeutic for certain people with certain conditions. But long-term sustainable, I have some doubts. I know I can't do it.

But I don't argue with results. If they're getting results, good for you. People are different in how well they metabolize protein and how well they metabolize fats and how well they metabolize carbs. I would say that the keto diet doesn't work long-term sustainable, mainly because they don't pay attention to the essential fatty acids. Because all the keto diets, and even the coffee fat diet, yes, what are they using? They're using butter, which is mostly saturated, monounsaturated, and then they're using coconut oil, and it's a fraction of it.

Those fats are okay, but not instead of essential fatty acids, because essential fatty acids are the only thing from fats that you have to have. So you need to give that priority. Once you've optimized your intake of the essential fatty acids, undamaged and in the right ratio, then you can add other fats, and they just become fuel for you, but they're not required.

If you look at nature's mandate for creatures that eat fresh, whole, raw, organic, local, and probably for human beings, more plant-based than animal-based. That wasn't true everywhere in the world because where they had herds of buffalo, they ate a lot of meat. But generally speaking, the high-animal food diets are not associated with longevity.

Ashley James (1:11:35.411)

The important point is how our ancestors ate. Why do we think that how we ate 2,000 or 5,000 or more years ago is somehow better? Maybe because they didn't have McDonald's then, but that doesn't mean that they were living longer or they were living with less disease.

Udo Erasmus (1:11:56.710)

Well, the Inuit had a pretty short life, and they were eating pretty much just meat diets. But in those meat diets, the animals had a little bit of vitamin C in them, but they had no plants. So they probably died of strokes and heart, burst blood vessel strokes. Well, vitamin C is very important to make your connective tissue strong. So they died from scurvy basically. What is a diet that works? When we were subsistence living, we were just starving half the time. You had to learn to be able to digest whatever you got.

Plants were easier to get than animals because animals run away or they fight. When the hunters had only rocks to hunt with, they came home without meat most of the time. So then if they came home without meat, they ate vegetables because vegetables don't run away, they don't fight, so they're easy to hunt down and kill.

So you have to take into consideration what life was before we became food affluent.

Now what we do is we're stupid. 70% of the food that people eat in North America is ultra-processed food.

Ashley James (1:13:26.186)

It's not even food. It's so weird. You look at the packet. I dare you to bring your reading glasses. I'm sorry I'm calling you guys out. My husband has to wear reading glasses now. I have needed glasses since I was 16 to see long distances. I am so grateful that I can see close up because I am the label reader, and I challenge you, if you need to bring a magnifying glass with you to the grocery store, just attach it to your purse or whatever, attach it to your keychain, bring it into the grocery store with you. If anything you put in your cart has more than one ingredient, for example, this is a bag of broccoli. I don't need to check the ingredients. It's broccoli. So single-ingredient foods, you don't have to check anything.

In a package that has more than one ingredient, look at the ingredients. If you don't know what that is, if it's monosodium glutamate and hydroxy, lalalala, and just these weird words, if there are weird words that your eight-year-old can't pronounce when they're reading the label, don't put it in your cart. Why are we eating things that we don't know? These are like Latin words. They're not describing broccoli in Latin terms. These are chemicals that were made in a factory.

Why do we think that's okay to give the workers in our body, to give the carpenters these building blocks that the body doesn't know what to do with? The body's like, what is this? It kind of looks like that, but it doesn't function like that. Okay, well, we're going to put it there, and then the house falls down.

Udo Erasmus (1:15:08.393)

I'm 82, so I should be an old guy who's drooling onto his lap. I'm not. But I pretty much have gone gradually in the direction of fresh, whole, raw, organic. I eat most everything raw. Not everything. I eat lots of seeds and nuts.

So I don't just use oil, I use seeds and nuts, but I tank up with the oil. I actually mix it in tahini, my oil in tahini. I dump the tahini oil, and then I put a ton of spices in it like cloves, and you were talking about curry, cinnamon, and cayenne. I have all kinds of herbs and spices because they are nature's medicine.

Some of those spices—turmeric, cloves, amla, garlic, I use them all the time. Some of those spices are anti-inflammatory, anti-cardiovascular, anti-cancer, anti-diabetes, and antioxidant. I mean, they have so many health-giving properties.

Antiviral, antimicrobial, antibacterial. I mean, honestly, dare the medicine. I only came to that much later than I came to oils. But my God, I have lots of energy, and I still work all day, and I have these conversations all the time, and I'm still doing research, and I'm actually writing two books—one on the nature of human nature and the other one on total global sacred sexy health.

Ashley James (1:17:19.935)

My gosh. I want you to come back on this show. Got to have you come back, and we got to talk more about your books.

Udo Erasmus (1:17:28.071)

Yes, based on nature and human nature. It's always from health is based on nature and human nature. If you live out of line with nature, you're going to not do well. If you're going to live out of line with your nature, you're not going to do well. That's where illness comes from. It's being out of line with nature and or your nature. We've been here for 200,000 years.

We still do not have a teachable field of health because our healthcare is actually not healthcare. It's disease management misrepresented as healthcare. So when I was in medical school for that one year, I went to the Dean because we were only learning about disease. I went there because it's healthcare. I want to know what health is. Because if I know what health is, I know what to do to help somebody get healthy.

Seemed a pretty good way to spend your life, getting people healthy. I said to him, what is health? He said, we don't know, we're working on it. But they're not working on it because they're always focused on disease.

Ashley James (1:18:35.283)

Because that's where the money is. There's no money in making and keeping people healthy and preventing disease. I grew up in Canada. I know you're in Canada. It's socialized medicine. My gosh, there are people in America that want socialized medicine. I got to tell you, both systems are broken and on purpose. In Canada, the whole system is how do we save the most amount of money? So they might reject certain procedures.

For example, anytime I had an accident growing up that we suspected a break. Once I broke my growth plate in my ankle when I was 12 or 13 years old, and I think I was about 12, I had to get some x-rays. I got two x-rays, two only. In Canada, you only need two x-rays. Anytime they suspected a bone break, because I was a very active kid, being active, so of course I fell down, I got bumps, I injured myself, and I bounced back really fast. I got a lot of x-rays as a kid. I just loved being physically active. I was hanging upside down on the monkey bars and doing all the stuff. So anyway, the point being, anytime in Canada that we thought it was a break, it was two x-rays only, never three, never more than three.

Came down to the States. I was in my early twenties. I tripped in a gas station. It was really weird how all the hoses were everywhere and I didn't see the hose. I tripped.

I felt really bad, twisted my ankle, and thought, for sure, this is a broken ankle. It's so painful. This is in the States now. They took me to the hospital. I lost count of how many times they took x-rays. It's just an ankle. I grew up going, two x-rays. One, you get the top side, and you get the side. That's all you get. They must have taken over 12. I was like, what is going on?

Then it occurred to me, okay, America's for-profit system, they're going to profit off of how many x-rays they take of my foot. It's not about getting the appropriate amount. It was really the 12th one that we figured out it wasn't a break. In Canada, it's how can we save money, also not necessarily serving the person because they're looking at cutting costs. Neither system helps you because they're not putting you first.

Udo Erasmus (1:20:56.146)

I think there's another issue. Okay, so we have socialized medicine in Canada, and in the U.S., some people want socialized medicine. But the thing is, it's not healthcare. It's all disease management.

We don't need socialized disease management. We need healthcare. If it was real healthcare based on a definition of health that is practical and can be put into action, then I think socialized medicine that keeps everybody healthy and when somebody gets some big problem, everybody helps to make them healthy again. I'm comfortable with that. It's a socialist thing.

But honestly, there are certain things. Education is kind of socialist anyway. But I'm good for certain things that everybody gets covered. But it's got to be the truth. It can't be some bullshit that parades as truth. When disease management is called healthcare, you're getting lied to by the people who do disease management.

Ashley James (1:22:07.758)

When the drug companies are the ones that can lobby, and I've seen, I don't know a ton about politics, but I loosely watch it. I remember when Bill Clinton came in and his wife, Hillary, tried to do something good around children's health and getting the school lunches healthier. She tried.

Then all of a sudden, all the lobbyists came in. How dare you try to take pizza and chocolate milk? How dare you reduce sugar and candy from the diet of these school children? It got vetoed. I saw it happen again and again. I know Michelle Obama tried to do it, and every single presidency, they try with good intentions.

Someone tries to lower the sugar that's being sold to children in the school lunches, and the lobbyists come in and make sure that all the sugar stays in there. We're not serving our population. We're not actually helping our population because we allow for corporations where profit comes first over health.

Why do we have to have commercials for food? That's something that I brought up. You'll never see a commercial for broccoli, right? Broccoli is so good for you. No, it's always “milk does a body good.” We have been lied to. I grew up taking in this information without question, without a critical faculty to block it. Children take in this information, and they go through the aisles trusting that what's in their cereal box is good and what's being served to them—this ultra-pasteurized milk is good. What's being served to them in the schools is healthy when it is absolute garbage. It's destroying their health. 

The same goes for our healthcare system when we can't know the truth about our health because there's lobbying. That's why we have to come to the podcast and listen to interviews like this with guests like you to start Learn and question. We can't trust what we're fed by the media and by the government because the corporations that profit from us buying what they sell and profit from us staying sick are going to push that information. 

Tell me about how we can dive deeper with you. You have your website. I wanted to ask also, do you have any recipes? Because you talked about what you do with tahini and your Udo's Choice Oil. The Omega oil, and you mix it with your tahini and add some seasoning. Do you have recipes on your website? Do you have other books that you'd recommend? What other kind of resources can we start to go down this rabbit hole with you?

Udo Erasmus (1:25:07.500)

I have a book that's called Omega-3 Cuisine: Recipes for Health and Pleasure. I worked with a chef to put that together. He did most of the work, actually. But he made recipes using Udo's oil. I think there's 140 recipes, and only one doesn't use Udo's oil.

So that book is the only book I have that's easily available. I kind of just tinker in the kitchen. It's play. The only advice your mother gave you that you should not follow is “don't play with your food.” Because if you don't play with your food, how are you going to find out what works for you and what doesn't work for you?

So play with your food. If you mix two spices and it doesn't work, your tongue will let you know. Then you won't do it twice.

Ashley James (1:26:13.436)

Don't give up; I think that's really important because I love the Instant Pot. It's my favorite kitchen appliance. I think my second favorite is the Vitamix. I've been using Vitamix since I was eight years old. We had the original one growing up in our household.

I love my Vitamix. We had the metal one. I don't know if it was the very first Vitamix, but it was the 80s version. I remember making soups in it. I just loved it. I love playing with it, but I have a Vitamix today and the Instant Pot. I love the Instant Pot. I tell people, get it, try it.

So many people come back to me and say, I burned something once and I just gave up. I burned things too when I started, but I didn't give up. It's okay, you just find different recipes. Try it. Just start with something simple. Try making lentils. Go find a recipe. Make lentils, just do something simple, and then you can build from there. 

I've made the coolest stuff in that Instant Pot. For me, I'm multitasking, and then I walk away from the stove, and all of a sudden, I smell burning. No, I forgot we were cooking something on the stove. With the Instant Pot, that doesn't happen because you set it and forget it, then you've got a meal.

At one point, I had three Instant Pots back when we had a bigger kitchen, a bigger house. I had three Instant Pots. I did most of my cooking because I had a whole grain in one or a starch, I should say, because I do sweet potatoes, potatoes, yams, brown rice, white rice, millet, quinoa. I'd pick a starch, so I'd rotate all the different kinds of starches.

Then I'd have a protein in the other. It could be any kind of bean or any kind of lentil. Again, dozens of varieties, so it never gets boring. Then the third, I would quickly steam some kind of vegetable or sauté some kind of mixture of vegetables.

Then I would have some kind of topper. You could mix some Udo's oil with some tahini, lemon, garlic, cayenne, and ginger and call that good, or add a bit of curry powder and call that good. There are all kinds of different things that I'd top it with. That was it. That was called bowls.

We would open up the Instant Pots and have some kind of topping. Maybe the topping was just salsa. I do a three-day fermented pico de gallo. The recipe's in my book I'm Addicted to Wellness. I'll send you the recipe if you want. It's amazing. But I would top it with something like that. It was the easiest way to cook dinner. Usually, what I would do is make enough for lunch and dinner. You don't get bored of it, especially if you have a few options for toppers.

But that was it. All you have to do is have a smoothie or some fruit for breakfast, then throw things in the Instant Pot, and you've got lunch and dinner. Then you've got some leftovers to travel with the next day if you're leaving the house. It was the simplest way. I ended up losing 80 pounds doing that. It was the quickest, easiest way to cook in the kitchen. I didn't have to use my brain. It didn't take up a lot of energy, yet the whole family loved it, and it was super nutritious, super dense nutrition. I didn't have to buy packaged foods. 

So there's a way that you can figure out how to cook that serves you, but you have to be willing to burn a few things. You have to be willing to play in the kitchen. That doesn't taste good? Okay, I'm not going to do that again. It's okay.

Don't let that failure dictate your future. Let it motivate you to find the flavors that are good together. I was prone to burning things in the kitchen until I dialed it in. You can too. It's just a matter of playing. I love that you said that. It's funny—my son does that. He plays in the kitchen. He invents things.

Udo Erasmus (1:30:10.986)

Cooking is like learning to walk. When you were a little kid, first you were just rolling on your stomach, then you turned over on your back, then you got on all fours, then you started to stand up, and you fell down. You didn't quit. So cooking is like that. You're going to fall into schnoz.

I saw one of the television cooks. She made something on the show, then she tasted it and said it didn't taste good, and she just dumped it in the garbage. On the show!

Why is there so much variety in taste? Well, it's for your entertainment. Nature is so kind to you that you can play with it. Play with it. Different people have different preferences in taste. You figure out what is yours.

In India, everybody has a different curry recipe. Every family has their own curry recipe, and some of them are really very different from each other.

Ashley James (1:31:23.062)

So true. You'd mentioned that you're 82. I just want to say that my mother-in-law, my dear mother-in-law, and we moved to live close to her. We were a three-minute walk from her house. She is turning 82 today. So I'm just wishing her a happy birthday. We're actually, after this interview, going to go and spend the rest of the day with her. But I just love that you guys are the same age, and that I'm going to have her listen to this episode because I want her to hear wisdom.

I'm definitely going to gift her a bottle of your 369, the Udo's 369. So the only product I think I've ever used of yours is the Udo’s, the Omega blends, but you have different products. What are your most favorite that you have observed make the biggest difference in people's lives?

Udo Erasmus (1:32:22.738)

Well, after I did oils, I said, okay, what's next? I went to digestion because everybody's got stuff going on with the digestive system. So how do you make it work? Digestive enzymes, probiotics, fiber, and bitters. That was the next thing that I looked at.

I work with digestive enzymes and probiotics, and take them every day. Even though I eat raw food, I still take enzymes because even people who eat just raw foods found that when they took enzymes with their raw food, they worked better for them than if they did the raw foods without enzymes.

Raw foods already have enzymes in them that do part of the digestion for you. So that's why it's good.

Ashley James (1:33:04.890)

I like what you're pointing out is that there are two ways of thinking. One way is don't think at all, just go eat McDonald's, and then you live to maybe 65, have a heart attack, die.

I tell my listeners, if you want to be a statistic, look at what people are dying from, look at how, and before they die, look at the quality of their life.

I have a friend whose husband is in his early 40s. This year, he suffered a heart attack and then he just broke his hip. He's in his 40s. He also has unmanaged diabetes and he's miserable. He's miserable.

The doctors were really scared. They're saying, you're not recovering. You're acting like someone in your 80s or 90s, someone really sick. You're a very healthy 80-year-old. This man never took care of himself and he has a food addiction, unfortunately. But this is what's happening to those who are just not thinking—the unconscious.

Udo Erasmus (1:34:08.152)

Yes, well, when I was 38, I got poisoned by pesticides. That was 38. Literally, if I walked around a city block, I had to sit down and rest. I was an 80-year-old at that point. I had arthritis in my knees. I got no problem with any of my joints. I'm 82 now. What came from it when I got poisoned, that was my wake-up call. So I started paying attention and put things into practice over the course of a few years.

Now I pay attention to what my body tells me and what I know about how nature works. I'm 82 and I have no pain in my elbows, no pain in my shoulders, no pain in my knees, no pain in my hips. You can be 82 and not have any degenerative conditions, any pain, or any inflammation.

I have lots of energy. Still do gardening jobs. I take trees down. In the city where I live, I have quite a bit of—it's a co-op that I live in. I do quite a bit of the gardening whenever it's needed.

Ashley James (1:35:19.358)

Love it. So the three schools of thought around food. Don't think about it. Just eat the way everyone's eating and basically suffer the way everyone's suffering. Get on a bunch of drugs. That's the unconscious people or the people who say my doctor knows what's best.

Udo Erasmus (1:35:32.551)

Or the people who think that suffering will open the door to heaven for them and  maybe we shouldn't close the door on them.

Ashley James (1:35:40.357)

Well, I think there's something to learn from our suffering, but I think we need to make better choices because suffering is optional. The second choice is, well, I should eat as close to nature as possible because that's the key. Your third choice, and I love this idea, is to eat as close to nature as possible and then optimize it. You bring in the enzymes, bring in the minerals and the vitamins, bring in the things that optimize. The bricks are the food, and the mortar is the addition of everything we can do to optimize. To call it biohacking, I'm sure you've heard that term, but optimize without adding too much that it then hinders the body.

I have a friend who for years had to avoid gluten only to find out she wasn't allergic. She had highly allergic reactions. She finally figured out it wasn't the gluten; it was the folic acid, the man-made synthetic folic acid that she was incredibly allergic to. She can eat wheat berries, for example. Organic wheat berries have zero health problems, but if she ate some fortified bread, which most flours are fortified with, even gluten-free flours, they're fortified with folic acid, then she'd become very unhealthy. We have to take into account that if we're adding things, even if we're buying processed food that has additives, even though it's quote-unquote fortified, it can be fortified in a way that's not helping you. 

Udo Erasmus (1:37:15.493)

Yes, and some gluten sensitivities, some wheat sensitivities are actually from the glyphosate that they put on the grains.

Ashley James (1:37:23.369)

Exactly. Yes, we have to understand that sometimes there are things in the product that aren't necessarily on the label, like glyphosate. They're not going to disclose how much Roundup is in your flour, or there are anti-caking agents, like bromine or bromide. They don't necessarily disclose that because it's an industry standard.

In ice cream, when you buy ice cream from the store, there is a food-grade antifreeze that they add to ice cream. That's why, have you ever made your own homemade ice cream and you put it in the freezer and it's rock solid? You're hammering it with a spoon, and you have to leave it out on the counter before you can scoop it. Whereas if you go to the grocery store, even out of a deep freezer, and you start scooping ice cream, even if it's coconut ice cream, it's going to immediately turn into this beautiful scoop. It doesn't freeze. That's because they put food-grade antifreeze.

Well, I don't want to eat food-grade antifreeze. That doesn't sound like something my body 5,000 or 10,000 years ago went through, like the garden of Eden, picked an apple, and then drank some food-grade antifreeze with that. The body doesn't know what to do with all this crap. We're basically trash pandas. If you think about how we treat our body, we're dumpster diving. The cells of our body are, what, are we in a dumpster? We're just dumpster diving, just random chemicals. But this is how we eat.

If we come back to eating as close to nature as possible and then supplementing, I love that you talked about enzymes and bitters. I love bitters. I love how my body reacts to bitters in such a positive way because it gets that liver and the pancreas going, gets the digestive system activated. I love that you brought up enzymes.

I've helped so many clients get their digestion back simply by adding enzymes and then getting in the minerals and adjusting the diet. Then everything comes back online. A lot of times, heartburn goes away because it was a lack of the body's ability to make pepsinogen and excrete pepsinogen. So when you get everything back online, then the heartburn goes away.

Udo Erasmus (1:39:32.175)

Yes, well, how it goes. It's health. Health is the result of living in line with nature and your nature. When you get out of line, it shows up. When you get back in line, you get your health back. It's not that complicated.

Ashley James (1:39:45.451)

There's a big craze. We talked a little bit about how the MCT oil, that's coconut oil, is fractionated, and it's not a great source of omega-3s, but avocado oil.

Udo Erasmus (1:39:57.387)

There's no omega-3s in it at all.

Ashley James (1:39:59.463)

Right. So avocado oil has come on the market the last few years, and now everyone's saying that's the new olive oil. You got to cook with your coconut oil. Can you speak to what avocado oil is and why we shouldn't be cooking with it? In general, why we shouldn't be taking in avocado oil?

Udo Erasmus (1:40:17.939)

We shouldn't be cooking with oils because oils cook at a high temperature. You burn the food. The burnt is toxic. So if you burn carbs or you burn protein or you burn oil, all three of them get you increased inflammation and increased risk factor independent of each other. Okay. So overheating food is bad for you.

So fried oils fry health. That's my slogan. Fried oils fry health. You go to a football game and you chant, fried oils fry health, fried oils fry health, fried foods fry health, fried foods fry health. That's why I say to people, bang yourself on the head with your frying pan and throw that stupid thing out because it's going to kill you. Frying is the worst thing we've ever invented to do to food as long as we've been on the planet. It is the dumbest thing we've ever invented if health is the goal.

Obviously, then people say, I love the taste of burnt food. No, you don't. If you scrape that burnt stuff off of the food you burnt and you eat it, it's bitter, scratchy, acrid, and it tastes disgusting. When you fry your foods, usually, how do you get the taste into those burnt foods? Well, you add spices that are mostly from vegetables.

I think it's really dumb. Raw is nature's mandate. If you cook in water, you already lose something.

If you fry, you not only lose some of your nutrients, you actually create poisons that never existed in nature. So frying is the worst. Then head in the direction of frying less, cooking more. Cooking, by the way, when I was a kid, meant in water. Now when we say cooking, we usually mean in oil. One was called frying and deep frying—that was with oil.

Cooking was with water. It's now that when you say cooking, it includes frying. So go from frying to cooking in water, and then go from cooking in water to more raw. Make sure it's not contaminated because if it's contaminated, you have to cook it, or you should throw it out. 

Ashley James (1:42:46.702)

What do mean by contaminated?

Udo Erasmus (1:42:48.343)

Bacteria

Ashley James (1:42:50.819)

How do you choose what you cook and what you don't cook and what you eat raw?

Udo Erasmus (1:42:58.295)

What I do is I get organic and I wash it under water. If I have broccoli, I eat my broccoli raw. I dip it in the tahini, and I run it under hot water. So it gets a little bit of heating that actually improves its nutritional value. A short, short heating. And if it's organic and I've washed it under hot water, I've never had a problem with contamination. But if you have—especially meat—when the cows stand in their own feces and urine in a feedlot and only get corn for food, and then they get antibiotics and pesticides and other gunk that they put into the animals, then the meat is very easily contaminated. So meat is more of an issue for making sure that it's not contaminated.

Ashley James (1:44:07.701)

There's an amazing documentary to watch on Netflix called Poisoned: The Dirty Truth About Your Food. It came out last year. I saw it with my family, and we were in shock. It's really, really worth watching. I know it sounds kind of depressing, but it was actually really interesting.

Udo Erasmus (1:44:24.437)

It's always better to know than not to know.

Ashley James (1:44:27.243)

Absolutely. I've never had food poisoning from vegetables. I mean, knock on my sunlight and sauna. It's made of wood here. But in my past, I've had food poisoning from seafood or pork. I eat plant-based now, and it's been years. Again, I'm going to praise God that I have not.

I am staying healthy. I'm not having food poisoning, but yes, there's always a chance. They talk about some spinach being taken off the market or something, and you have to wash your food. There are ways of doing it. I did an interview a few years ago with a woman who sells these, and I bought one. It's great. I use it. You can make your own ozone water safely and then rinse your plants in ozone water.

There are different things you can do. I kind of do what you do—I rinse my foods, and then that's it.

Udo Erasmus (1:45:28.995)

Yes, and again, the spices that I use with the food help also, right? Yes.

Ashley James (1:45:34.331)

True, because when you think about India, there's definitely a medicinal reason why the food is so spicy there. There’s such depth of flavor, and so many medicinal spices. Is that because they're antimicrobial? So should the meat have some bacteria overgrowth, you're combating it with that. It's kind of like if we were to take antibiotics every time we ate some food. You ate some pork, and then you took some drug to counteract the potential bacteria or the bacteria's toxins.

But instead of going drug-based, I'm so glad that pharmaceutical companies haven't figured that out yet—how to insist that we need to take some drug every time we eat meat to prevent food poisoning, because you know they would, because they love to sell you some kind of drug every day.

But that's what India does, right? They use all these wonderful spices that enhance.

Udo Erasmus (1:46:30.073)

Yes, and India never built the hygiene that we built in the West, so they're much more prone to it, but they live,  they don't have outbreaks of food poisoning, and why is that? Because of the way they prepare their foods. It's simple. It's lentils and dal and lots of vegetables and lots of spices. Turmeric is probably the world's best spice. It's in the ginger family. So turmeric and ginger are huge. 

So avocado, my view is to eat the avocados. Try and get them organic if you can. The oil is very popular now. I think they make it out of rotten avocados, and there are no standards for it.

There are standards for oils, but they're bad standards. If you read the research, standards have been suggested for avocado oil, but the avocado oil industry has not set standards. 

Ashley James (1:47:44.730)

Do they still do the thing that you talked about where they heat it for half an hour and add chemicals to it? Can you talk about that?

Udo Erasmus (1:47:50.206)

Yes, yes, well, it's the same with all the oils. They treat them with sodium hydroxide, which we know as Drano in our house. That's what we burn the clogged sink pipes with. So sodium hydroxide, then phosphoric acid, which is used to clean windows commercially. Then we bleach them with bleaching clay. So then they go rancid and smell bad. Then we have to deodorize them or de-stinkerize them because they smell bad.

Then you have an oil, colorless, odorless, tasteless. You can't tell what it came from because all the flavor molecules of whatever made the oil, whatever seed or nut made the oil, the flavor molecules are gone. The color molecules are gone. Colorless, odorless, tasteless. Then they say, yes, and you can use it for frying. So it's already wrecked, and now you wreck it more. So I eat avocados pretty much every day.

I really love them. I never use the oil. I don't have, actually, the only oil I have in my house is my oil. Because I know what's in there. I know what it is. I know the quality. I trust the quality because literally, nobody takes care of oils the way we do. And it's just, why is that? Because they need the oil. If you want a really good oil, you need to care for it, to protect it from light, oxygen, and heat. In glass, in a box, in the fridge, in the factory, in the store, in the fridge, in the fridge at home, and you basically use it on foods after they come off the heat.

Ashley James (1:49:32.825)

You have three different oil blends. Can we talk about the difference between the three? Also, I don't know if this is a patented process, but could you walk us through what you can share? Could you share what you do differently that other supplement companies don't do? For example, do you do it in a nitrogen chamber? Do you process? I understand there's probably some proprietary information, but get into the details of what you can share. What makes Udo's Oil different from other supplement companies?

Udo Erasmus (1:50:03.501)

When I realized how much damage is done to oils after I got poisoned, I said, I can't get healthy on oils like that. We should make them with health in mind because the industry makes the oils with shelf life in mind. Oils by nature have a short shelf life because they're super sensitive to damage by light, oxygen, and heat. So they figured out if they take out parts of it, they can stabilize the oil.

Then they nitrogen flush it. Everybody does that. So you don't have oxygen in the headspace in the bottle in the oil because the oil will react with the molecules and make them rancid. The industry did that. I said, well, I can't get healthy on damaged oils. We should make them with health in mind. How do you do that? Well, if they're damaged by light, oxygen, and heat, you have to make sure that no light, oxygen, or heat or high temperature is— I can explain that in a second— gets to the oil from the time it's close to the seed in nature's packaging, which is pretty good. They found flax seeds 5,000 years old in caves in Switzerland, got those oils out, planted them, and they grew into flax plants. 5,000 years. So nature's packaging is pretty good.

So from the time it's in nature's packaging through the whole process until it's in the brown glass bottle, nitrogen flushed with a box around it in the fridge, no light, no oxygen should be able to get to the oil, and the heat needs to be low. The reason for that is that you have to get to 160 degrees Celsius or 320 degrees Fahrenheit before the heat damages the oil and starts creating trans fatty acids. Then exponentially makes more of them as the temperature goes up from there. So you want to keep it below 160, and we actually do it somewhere between 60 and 80 degrees Celsius. But no light and oxygen is present, so you're not doing damage with that heat.

So fundamentally, what you have to do is produce a really, really tight system. The industry doesn't do that because what they say is, we can make a mess at the front end and then clean up the mess with chemical processing at the back end. We said, why don't we not make a mess at the front end? Then we don't have a mess to clean up at the back end. Why don't we start with organically grown seeds? Then we don't have to heat the oil to frying temperature to get rid of half of the pesticides.

Ashley James (1:53:02.310)

And the seeds, I'm guessing the seeds are raw, they're organic, but they're also raw, right?

Udo Erasmus (1:53:07.116)

Well, they're always raw.

Ashley James (1:53:09.818)

They're not roasted?

Udo Erasmus (1:53:12.509)

No, hell no, hell no. No, God. No, no, they have to be raw. They have to be fresh, raw, organic seeds. Then you put them through the thing, but you have to have it so tight that no light, no oxygen, and no temperature over 100 gets to the oil anywhere in the process.

That requires a very tight system. So my claim to fame, I'm in the Canadian Health Food Association's Hall of Fame for starting the industry of making oils with health in mind. It requires that kind of tightness simply because the oils are so sensitive to damage done by light, oxygen, and heat. So I created that.

We started making flaxseed oil because omega-3s are too low in 99% of the population. Then I became omega-6 deficient in flax oil because it has a lot of omega-3, not enough omega-6. That's what prompted me to make the blend because you have to get the balance right, and that's important.

Ashley James (1:54:21.845)

Would you say though that people who are still eating meat, if they want to add your oil but they're still eating meat, are getting a lot of Omega-6? So you don't strictly sell flax-only oil? With someone who's still eating, maybe they're eating more whole foods, but they're incorporating eggs, chicken, meat in their diet, they're getting more Omega-6. Is your blend going to help them?

Udo Erasmus (1:54:51.327)

The Omega-6s in meat, they're not in beef, they're not in sheep, they're not in goats because those animals actually knock down the Omega-6s and Omega-3s in grass and turn them into saturated, monounsaturated, a little bit of trans fatty acids. So that part is not true. Pork will have Omega-3s in it, but only if you feed it a source of Omega-3s because pork doesn't make Omega-3s, neither do the other animals. Chicken, most of the Omega-6s in chicken are in the skin, most people throw that out. The meat itself doesn't have a lot of Omega-6s in it. 

Ashley James (1:55:39.453)

So what in the average American diet is omega-6?

Udo Erasmus (1:55:43.389)

Most people get their omega-6s from all the cooking oils. They all have omega-6s in them. They all have omega-6s. A few of them have a little bit of omega-3. Most of them just have omega-6s. Most of the oil that people are saying is coming from the foods is actually coming from the oils they fry them in. That's another mistake that the people who say no omega-6s, no seed oils are making. They're doing half the homework. They're not doing all the homework. So they're blaming things on the oils that should be blamed on the damage done to them. They’re even inaccurate about the source of omega-6. It's mostly from seeds, nuts, which people don't eat that much of, but mainly from oils.

So, in that sense, they're right if you say don't use those oils. But they're wrong when they say that omega-6s cause cancer and kill you because omega-6s are essential nutrients.

Ashley James (1:56:52.312)

What's causing cancer? So it's correlation, not causation, because what's causing the cancer is eating the burnt meat. When you say burnt, it's more caramelized. They go, ooh, that char on the meat.

Udo Erasmus (1:57:06.788)

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. When you turn it from green to yellow, from yellow to light brown, from light brown to dark brown, from dark brown to black, and from black into smoke, you're doing damage to it all the way along.

Ashley James (1:57:19.270)

So getting that char, that caramelization on the meat is the acrylamides, the heterocyclic amines, or even the potatoes.

Udo Erasmus (1:57:28.876)

Yes, then the industry says, what do they call it? We're something in the flavor. We're frying in the flavor. No, you're not. You're burning the damn meat. You're turning the meat into poison and you're poisoning yourself with the poisoned meat.

Ashley James (1:57:46.352)

Yes. So the correlation between high omega-6 and cancer is the high omega-6 cooking oils, cooking in high heat, and especially cooking meat in high heat, but also certain vegetables in high heat, potato skins, frying potatoes.

Udo Erasmus (1:58:05.358)

Yes, the burnt part is burnt. Yes. But anything, you can get cancer. You can get cancer from thinking stupid too, from negativity and depression. So anything that knocks down the immune system. But in the physical realm, any molecule that doesn't belong in the body, that isn't natural to nature, could. They don't all, but could interfere with the immune function because the immune function goes in there and says, what the hell is this? Then it swells, it lowers circulation to try and isolate while it's trying to figure out, can't figure out what to do about it because we don't have genes to break down burnt oils. Then it figures it out, figures it out, and you get chronic inflammation, chronic circulation problems, and chronic lack of oxygen.

And that's what cancer cells like. So any molecule that is not natural could have some effects like that. They don't all do that, but any of them could. And the ones that are burnt clearly do—acrylamides and all of those molecules. Those are being isolated and studied, and we know that they cause cancer.

They've done studies, they've given them to animals, and they cause cancer in animals. So we know a lot about that, but we're not acting on it and doing what we ought to be doing, which is don't do that to your food and don't eat food that's been done to.

Ashley James (1:59:50.164)

I think a really important thing to remember, and I love your perspective because you've been around the block long enough to have observed this shift.

Udo Erasmus (2:00:03.068)

Is there an F in that word you just said? No, no, shift. Yes, take the F out and then it may be more accurate.

Ashley James (2:00:14.680)

Well, it's definitely gone down the toilet the last 30 years. I have this unique perspective. Hey, we're a family show. Okay. So I have this unique perspective where I remember life before, and I guess living in Canada kind of happened a little later, fast food wasn't as big of a deal. When I moved to the States in 2005, 2006, I was a kid in a candy store. Couldn't believe how much accessibility there was to fast food. It was definitely a shift. It wasn't on every single city block in Canada, it was down when I moved down to the States. If we go back in time, and of course you remember this, but I think we need to learn from that wisdom of time.

There was a time when food wasn't convenient and fast, where we had to think ahead when it came to cooking because we really had limited processed food. Most of our food was whole food. Also, if you think about it now, they call it organic versus conventionally grown. I hate that Orwellian marketing.

Udo Erasmus (2:01:35.422)

When I was a kid, organic was not even a term. All the food was organic.

Ashley James (2:01:41.410)

Our old food was organic and that was conventional. They're using the term conventional to make poisoned food sound good. It's ridiculous.

Udo Erasmus (2:01:51.816)

Yes, just like they do in medicine. Conventional healthcare is the doctor and the pharmaceuticals. They call the other one alternative healthcare. No, no, no, no, no.

Ashley James (2:02:02.492)

Alternative medicine or complementary medicine. No, this was the original medicine and what you're doing is chemical crap, right? 

Udo Erasmus (2:02:07.427)

Exactly. So, even the way the words are being used, we're being lied to and being misled.

Ashley James (2:02:14.503)

We have to start to question our own belief system because we've been raised in the milieu of marketing.

Udo Erasmus (2:02:24.109)

Yes, or you look at nature, how was it in nature? If you ever see a squirrel with a frying pan, then this is a natural process. You might see a squirrel in a frying pan, but you're never going to see one with a frying pan, cooking its nuts. 

They invested in food companies and they took their same scientists, whose entire job was how to make us addicted to things. They took food scientists to figure out how to make processed food addictive, creating these cheap oils, using the cheapest ingredients to make the largest margins, and they don't care if they're hurting us. If you open a package, you have to think this was made in a factory. This didn't come from the farm. It came from a factory. So opening a package, and if there are ingredients you don't recognize, these are man-made chemicals that food scientists were paid to figure out how to trigger your dopamine receptors and make you highly addicted to these foods and snacking.

The disease epidemic we've seen, since the 90s, has taken off largely because we are just now, instead of buying cigarettes, we're buying from the same companies, but you're doing a pack a day, but it's Doritos instead.

Udo Erasmus (2:04:43.729)

Yes, there's two problems. They're lying, and we're not thinking. Those are the two problems. I always go back to nature. What was it like in nature before we got civilized? How does nature work? Nature's mandate for every creature: fresh, raw, local, that's it. That's a stand. That's nature's standard for health.

For the creatures that eat in nature, fresh, whole, raw, organic, local, and then probably seasonal, sun-ripe. For us, probably more plant-based than animal-based, and you can argue some of that, but you can't really argue that in nature every creature except the animals we feed got all its food fresh, whole, raw, organic. You can't even argue that. Why is it? Why? with all creatures in nature, are we the only creatures that supposedly can be healthy frying the hell out of our food? Or frying the heaven out of our foods?

Ashley James (2:05:57.205)

We're the only animal that cooks our food. One of my mentors, and he helped me recover my health. I had type 2 diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue, chronic infections. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome, and I was infertile. He helped me reverse all my health issues.

Udo Erasmus (2:06:12.020)

You were 80 pounds overweight, right?

Ashley James (2:06:14.062)

I had a lot more health issues going on. I had liver disease. I had a lot of stuff going on, but the major thing is that he helped me clean up my diet. He got me on some supplements, cleaned up my diet. That perspective of the foods and how we've been raised to think about food really needs to shift.

I want to ask about two more things. I want to go to olive oil because I feel people are thinking, well, isn't olive oil healthy?

This mentor that I had, one of the first things he had me do is cut out all cooking oils, 100% no cooking oils, not even a drop of cooking oils, even olive oil. He said, eat the olive, don't eat the olive oil, and for many reasons. Then he had me stop cooking in high heat. It's kind of crazy to think that we're the only animal that cooks food on a regular basis.

Can you think of the last time, not you, but the listener, when's the last time you ate a fully raw meal? I'm not saying you have to be 100% raw, but very few of us choose to eat a percentage of our foods raw. Eat a cucumber, eat an apple, eat some sprouts. Eat a tomato, have some just raw, like what you do with the wonderful broccoli. just eating it raw. I love it that way. I love dipping broccoli into a dip and eating it and preserving the enzymes in it.

Most people go years without eating a fully raw meal or adding some raw foods to their meal because they just don't think about it. We've been raised in a system, so we have to start to question the system we were raised in.

Udo Erasmus (2:08:06.738)

So what happens is if you eat your food raw, there are enzymes in the food that when you chew it properly, they will do on average 60% of the digestion of the food for you. It's from 10 to 90% depending on the food. So 60%. If you cook it, you destroy those enzymes. Now your digestive system has to do more than twice as much work.

Because now that 60% that the enzymes self-digest, your body has to deal with it. Your body was made for raw foods coming out of nature. So you more than double the load on your digestive system. Then your immune system has to get involved. Your immune system is not as free to go after its other jobs, knocking out cancer cells and dealing with viruses and bacteria.

So you've put a huge load on your digestive system. There are some people who say all disease starts in your digestive tract because of that. Fundamentally, if you're going to cook your food, then replace the enzymes you destroyed when you cooked the food and replace the probiotics that you killed when you cooked the food. In nature, creatures get their probiotics on plants.

That's where a cow gets them, on the grass. There's probiotics on it. So the cow doesn't need to take a probiotic supplement as long as it eats raw grass. If you kill the probiotics and you destroy the enzymes when you cook, you need to replace them. Otherwise, you put a load into your digestive system that it can't handle, and that will catch up with you. That's why people have so many digestion problems.

Then you add fiber for bowel regularity and stabilizing blood sugar and feeding the probiotics. Then you add bitters that help with digestion and liver function. The liver deals with a lot of what you absorb from digestion. That solves most of the digestive problems.

I said, people who eat mostly raw foods still get benefits from adding enzymes to it. Now they're getting more enzymes than they would have gotten in nature. They say that works better for them. This is just about taking steps to get back in line with how it was in nature before we got civilized.

Ashley James (2:10:44.706)

We have to remember, we have to start to question everything we've been taught, at least test everything we've been taught. We've been marketed to that olive oil is healthy. They talk about how the Mediterranean diet is the healthiest diet. They say it's because they drink a lot of olive oil. Can you talk about that?

Udo Erasmus (2:11:03.182)

No, it's not. The Mediterranean diet is healthy because there are lots of good vegetables in it. It also comes from a time—the Mediterranean diet wasn't invented yesterday. That's a long historical tradition. So their meat was cleaner, because they weren't fattening them up with grains and they weren't shooting them full of probiotics, antibiotics, pesticides, and hormones.

In Europe, they tend not to do things as crazily as we do in North America either. They're a little bit more, and maybe it's the culture, because they have that culture. They still remember some of that stuff. So olive oil is good because it's not damaged by the processing. If it's an extra virgin olive oil and they're not lying about it. I'll tell you why I say that in a second. So that's a good thing. Because there are two issues. One is you got to get the essential fatty acids undamaged in the right ratio and you need to get them both. The other issue is you need your oils undamaged. While extra virgin olive oil, if it's really extra virgin, hasn't been damaged by processing because they squish the olive, it comes out of the flesh of the olives and it floats off on water, and they don't put it through the chemical feast.

The chemical feast or the heating. That's right. So it's good from that perspective. But from the perspective of essential fatty acids, it has no omega-3s in it or less than 1%. It only has 10% omega-6. Those are the two essentials. 80% is monounsaturated, and your body can make that out of potatoes. So you don't need that. The other 10% is saturated, and again, your body can make that out of potatoes.

Ashley James (2:13:01.356)

The medicinal benefits—just eat actual olives. Because they talk about the flavonoids and all that. They're throwing most of that away. That's in the water. If anything, they should be selling olive water and let us drink the stuff they throw away because that's where the flavonoids and the medicinal stuff—it's in there.

Udo Erasmus (2:13:21.583)

Yes, you would get more of that, although you will get them in extra virgin unrefined olive oil. You will get some of those benefits. So that's okay. 

Ashley James (2:13:31.119)

But you can't heat it, and you have to make sure there was no oxygen and it was stored in a glass bottle with zero oxygen.

Udo Erasmus (2:13:37.255)

Well, that mostly is not so bad. You get a little scratchy taste that can be from rancidity or free fatty acids. But the other thing is that hasn't gotten as much attention is that olive oil became very popular 20 years ago and the demand for olive oil skyrocketed. But olive trees grow really slowly.

So what happened is the demand exceeded the supply. So what many olive oil makers started to do is they started to dilute the olive oil with canola or soybean oil and then called it olive oil. Then you're talking about all the processing damage again. The way you find out, the way I do it, is if you get a bottle of olive oil and you stick it in your fridge, it should go solid or it should at least form crystals. But even it should really go solid. If it doesn't go solid, there may be something else in it.

Ashley James (2:14:49.870)

I noticed that recently at the local health food grocery store called PCC, the Puget Sound Co-op down here. PCC probably, because your products are there. Well, the next time you come down to give talks, I want to shake your hand and give you a hug. So here with PCC, the local grocery store, healthy grocery store, they, I'll read, sometimes I'll look at the, it looks healthy packaged food. They'll make it there in-house.

I'll be looking at a lentil soup. I'm so I'll grab the lentil soup and I'm reading the ingredients to see if I want to take that home if I'm really busy. I noticed, because if it says oil, I won't buy it, but I noticed it used to just say olive oil and I put it back on the shelf. I'm not buying it. Okay. So, because sometimes once in a while they do oil-free stuff. Then I picked it up lately. It says olive oil, canola oil.

Right after olive oil or it says olive oil blend and then in brackets it says olive oil, canola oil, something else. I'm like, are you kidding me? They're cutting costs, but they're at least putting it on the label. I noticed that that canola oil was being wrapped up in and they call it an olive oil blend, which sounds so innocent. They're just cutting corners.

Udo Erasmus (2:16:05.146)

Yes, right. By the way, the olive oil is pretty expensive and canola oil is really cheap. So they're doing it for that reason as well. I think that started because there was a supply issue because a lot of people started talking about olive oil being a good oil, and the deal was it's because it's not damaged by the processing, but they didn't make that clear.

Ashley James (2:16:30.682)

Well, it's going to get damaged when you start cooking with it. People use olive oil, they start cooking on high heat. They're going to create the negative health effects because they're cooking with olive oil.

Udo Erasmus (2:16:43.570)

If you're cooking with oil or fat, if you use hard fats, saturated fats, coconut butter, that kind of stuff, you get less damage, but you still get damaged because you're still burning the food. So you're still turning, making toxic molecules. But the more omega-3 and 6 you have in an oil, the more damage is done in the frying pan to that oil. So the more toxic those oils become. So if you're going to be stupid and fry, then use the hardest fat you can find and use the shortest time possible. But my view is people say, well, what can I fry with? Yes, that's the Russian roulette question. You want to know what you can get away with. You don't get away with anything. So when they say, is there a good oil to fry with? No, but there's a less bad one.

So the saturated fats are less bad, but they're not good. And if they're rich in omega, no, of course, because you're not getting the omega-3s and 6s. You're not getting the omega threes particularly.

Single most omega-3 deficiency, the single most widespread nutrient deficiency of our time. 99 % of the population does not get enough for optimum health.

Ashley James (2:18:05.140)

That's from both ends because they're not consuming things that are high in omega-3 and healthy omega-6, but they're also eating other types of fats that are then preventing the body from absorbing and using healthy fats.

Udo Erasmus (2:18:27.416)

Yes, can get function deficient from having too much omega-6.

Ashley James (2:18:30.492)

Functional deficient. So that's why you want a supplement with the omega-3 and the omega-6 blend, but at the same time, you need to decrease or eliminate the other types of fat, the processed fat, like canola oil.

Udo Erasmus (2:18:45.098)

Yes, we tell people to get off those oils because they're toxic. So you want to get your omega-6s also made with Health & Mind. So when we do the blend, the omega-3s are missing. So we're bringing the omega-3s in, made with Health & Mind. We're saying to people, get off those cooking oils and get your omega-3s also made with Health & Mind. We're doing both in the blend.

Ashley James (2:19:11.574)

You have three blends. Can you explain?

Udo Erasmus (2:19:15.986)

Yes, I use the basic one, 369. The second blend has DHA in it. There's some research that says that people over 50 or maybe pregnant women might be able to benefit from having DHA pre-formed.

Ashley James (2:19:35.722)

Especially women and men too, they notice they have lower progesterone or estrogen or testosterone, DHA is that wonderful precursor that the body can use to help balance that out, as well as support the brain.

Udo Erasmus (2:19:57.336)

DHA is not DHEA, DHEA turns into testosterone and progesterone and DHA is an omega-3 essential fatty acid derivative.

Ashley James (2:20:10.342)

So the body can make DHEA from omega-3?

Udo Erasmus (2:20:14.574)

No. The body can make DHA from alpha-linolenic acid. DHEA is a precursor. It's a steroid precursor for testosterone. They're completely different things. The body does not make DHEA out of omega-3s.

Ashley James (2:20:33.850)

Got it. It does make it out of cholesterol. And the body needs healthy fats to make cholesterol. Is that correct?

Udo Erasmus (2:20:42.152)

No, the cholesterol is made, you can make cholesterol out of sugar.

Ashley James (2:20:46.688)

I want to have you back on the show because I love that topic because a lot of people, they’re told they have to take cholesterol medicine. Why didn’t your doctor tell you that you can balance and get a healthy balance from diet?

Udo Erasmus (2:21:01.720)

The problem with cholesterol is? Your body can make cholesterol out of two carbon fragments and then you can get those from fats and you can get those from carbs. But the body can't break it down once it's made. So if you don't have enough fiber to escort it through the liver, through the gallbladder, into the gut, into the toilet, then up to 94% of the cholesterol can get reabsorbed and you lose your exit mechanism. Then you get stressed, that increases cholesterol production and between not enough fiber and stress is the most simple, probably the most widespread reason for why people have high cholesterol.

Ashley James (2:21:44.463)

Yes, start eating more plants and see what happens.

Udo Erasmus (2:21:47.959)

It's always about being out of line with nature. Okay. So now the second blend has DHA in it. That's for older people. I don't use it because they say that your brain shrinks after 50. I don't think my brain is shrinking. I'm letting my body make the DHA itself but I make sure I take enough oil for that to happen.

Then the third one is called high lignan and that has some seed material in the oil. They don't let the seed material all settle out. That was a copy of something somebody else did. They gave you less oil and charged you more for it because they said they got lignans in it. But if you want lignans, just eat the flax seeds, grind the flaxseed up and eat the flax seeds. So I use the basic blend.

It's the least expensive and it does the job. Yes, don't take it off a spoon, mix it in foods. It enhances flavors and improves the absorption of oil-soluble nutrients.

Ashley James (2:23:02.435)

And we just have to remember that not all fat is created equal, not all oils are created equal, and that we're using a food extract basically as a nutrient that we're highly deficient in.

Udo Erasmus (2:23:13.577)

Yes. By the way, it's not a supplement. It's a food oil. You use Udo's oil instead of the cooking oils, but you don't cook with it. You use it. You use it in food preparation and you take about a tablespoon per 50 pounds of body weight per day in winter and maybe a half to two thirds of that in summer. You need more in winter than in summer.

Ashley James (2:23:39.513)

It has been such a pleasure having you on the show. I really want to have you back, especially to talk about your books and just to go deeper with you. I just think it's really important that we understand the nuances of nutrition and that we start to question everything we've been taught. Because if you're not happy with your health, and a lot of people aren't, 70% of adult Americans are on at least one prescription medication. That means at least 70% of the population is unhappy with their health.

Udo Erasmus (2:24:06.983)

That's the same percentage that's eating ultra processed foods, isn't it? It's the same number of people who are overweight and obese. I wonder if that means something.

Ashley James (2:24:21.259)

So there's a lot of complexity, but there's also a lot of simplicity in that. You've definitely cleared up some things today. Coming back to nature and being willing to start to question our own belief system around food. Don't have diet dogma. I think it's really important. I even say that—don't have diet dogma. Start to question how you eat and also just begin to make certain changes, start to add and take away. Get closer to nature and then notice what happens and check out Udo's Oil. Your website, the link to your website is going to be in the show notes of today's podcast.

Udo Erasmus (2:24:58.315)

Yes, udoschoice.ie and udoerasmus.com are my two websites. But I'm on Facebook and Instagram and I got a YouTube channel and I mean, I'm not hard to find.

Ashley James (2:25:08.321)

Yes, we'll make sure all the links are in the show notes of today's podcast at LearnTrueHealth.com. Thank you, Udo. It's been such a pleasure having you. I can't wait to have you back.

Udo Erasmus (2:25:17.663)

Okay, let's do it. Thanks Ashley.

Outro:

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