What Are The Healthiest Oils? Udo Erasmus on Fats That Heal Fats That Kill

[00:00:00] Kat Khatibi: Good morning. And thank you so much for being with us here today.

[00:00:05] Dr. Udo Erasmus: Thank you.

[00:00:06] Kat Khatibi: So I did read a little bit about your journey, but for the audience, if you could tell us a little bit about how you were poisoned by pesticides and how you took your health and life into your own hands.

[00:00:18] Dr. Udo Erasmus: Right? So in 1980, my marriage broke up and I was really upset.

[00:00:25] I mean, like really upset. I wanted to kill something. And I, so I took a job as a pesticide sprayer. I had, I had a license to spray pesticides from a previous gardening job, but I took a job as a pesticide sprayer because pesticides kill things. That’s the only reason we make them. And so I sprayed them very carelessly for three years and I got poisoned by the pesticides I sprayed.

[00:00:47] This is like a predictable outcome. Right? What you put out, comes back. And I went to the doctor and I said, so what do you have for pesticide poisoning? And she said, And that day is when it became really clear to me that my health is my responsibility. And if I don’t care about my health and at that point, I didn’t, if I don’t care about my health, well, maybe nobody does.

[00:01:11] And I had background in biochemistry and genetics and biological sciences. And I had taken a year of medicine, which is about disease management, but I was more interested in health. So I had a very good background in biological sciences. And I used that background to go through the research to find it about nutrition and health, nutrition, and disease, because the body’s made out of food and water and air.

[00:01:37] But at that time I was only thinking about bodies made out of food. So if something goes wrong with the body, then what I need to do is I need to raise my standard for building blocks that come from food. And if I raise my standard to a higher level, then within one year, 98% of my body will have been rebuilt to a higher standard because the body’s always turning over.

[00:02:03] It’s not noticeable. We don’t notice it. But if I talk to you a year from now, only 2% of the atoms in your body today would still be in your body. So we are our body’s a major construction site. And if we raise the standard, then we basically rebuild the construction site to a higher standard. That’s what, that’s why healing is possible.

[00:02:28] That’s what healing is, is the rebuilding of the body to a higher standard. But then you got to set the higher standard. You can’t just throw a drug at it. You can do that, maybe short term to deal with symptoms, but you don’t rebuild the body that way. And you have to rebuild the body more in line with now.

[00:02:47] Because everything the body’s made from comes out of nature and the genetic program, we have only works in nature. So every step we take out of line with nature, we end up having a problem in health eventually. So, it’s a good system, right? Live in line with nature. So what does that mean?

[00:03:08] Fresh whole raw organic, mostly plant-based for human. The research on that’s very clear. And then you can look at what you’ve got in your kitchen and your gadgets you have, and everything is say, okay, well, how far am I away from fresh whole raw organic, mostly plant-based. And then you can begin to take steps from where you are in that direction.

[00:03:34] And when you do that systematically, you will rebuild your body to be more in line with nature and health is the natural state. So that’s basically how that works. So I got stuck on oils because they were the most confusing. They’re the most misrepresented, they were contradicted. There was so much contradictory information.

[00:04:00] Like people would say omega six, which is one of these central fatty acids. It’s essential for health. And at the same time, it gives you cancer and kills you. I was like, huh, I have to have this. And it gives me cancer and kills me. And then, and it was looking at that and trying to understand why this contradiction, it doesn’t make sense that got me looking at how oils are made.

[00:04:29] And it turns out oils are the most sensitive of all of our nutrients. They’re damaged by light, by oxygen, by heat, by water and by minerals. So just about everything, recs oils, and they need the most care. And we give them the least care. Cause we throw them in the frying pan. When you throw oil in a frying pan and turn it into smoke, you know, you’re changing something from natural to unnatural.

[00:04:54] And the smoke is carcinogenic there’s research that shows that cooks in restaurants. They spend eight hours in front of the frying pan. They have four times more lung cancer than normal people who only spend maybe two hours in front of the frying pan, right? Like if you’re cooking at home and if you do it for a living four times more lung cancer, because they’re breathing in those fumes, right?

[00:05:18] And so oils are our most sensitive nutrients. They need the most care we give them the least care that has to change. Frying is the worst thing we have ever invented to do to our food. So I say to people, you got a frying pan at home, of course they all do right. Say, well, pull out the frying pan, turn it upside down, hit yourself on the head with it really.

[00:05:40] So that it’s associated with pain and throw that stupid thing out. Frying fried oils, fry, health, fried foods, fry health, you know, you’re taking things when you turn them brown, you changing molecules. And, and when you fry foods, whether it’s starch or protein or fat, all three of them increase inflammation in your body.

[00:06:07] That’s behind many of our degenerative diseases and they increase the risk of cancer, all three independent of the others. So frying is the worst thing we’ve ever invented to do with food and everybody around the world. I travel a lot, everybody around the world. Oh, I love fried food. No, they don’t. We don’t because if you actually scrape that burnt part off and eat it, uh, it’s disgusting.

[00:06:34] It’s scratchy, it’s displeasing. It’s bitter and it’s disgusting. And it kills you.

[00:06:40] Kat Khatibi: I was born in 81 and my parents were told fat makes you fat fat gives you high cholesterol. Fat is the devil basically. And I grew up only having margarine, canola oil, all the toxic oils. That was how I grew up. Somehow I’m still alive, but I’m still having that fight with my parents to get those oils out of the house.

[00:07:07] Cause once it’s ingrained, it’s hard to retrain them. And you’ve been doing this since basically before I was born. And you’re still having to teach people these lessons.

[00:07:18] Dr. Udo Erasmus: Of course. Yeah. And it goes on and on and on. It takes a long time to change a culture because it’s reinforced, right.

[00:07:25] It’s reinforced and it’s easy and you’re used to it and making changes hard. So you have to become inspired. Th the way I look at it is 1979. There was a report written by George McGovern. He was a Senator in the U S a it’s called the McGovern report on nutrition and health. And in that report, they demonized fats and they exalted carbohydrates.

[00:07:52] So they put the carbohydrates at the bottom of the food pyramid, which means that’s what you should be eating the most of. And they put the fats on top, which meant that’s what you should eat the least of. And they did that because McGovern was not a scientist. He was not a biologist. He just took his information from scientists, supposedly from scientists.

[00:08:20] And they basically told them fats are bad. Just like your parents told you, fats are bad. But they didn’t understand that only bad fats are bad and good fats are good. And there’s something that you have to have from fats and that fats don’t make you fat. In fact, when they made that change, they each started eating more carbohydrates.

[00:08:43] So sweets are starches, right? And in 20 years, overweight went from 25 to 60% of the population. So in other words, they ate less fat and became fatter. They ate more carbs and became fatter. And you know, in those 20 years, nobody thought about it. Nobody looked at it, nobody said, Hey, maybe there’s something wrong with the food pyramid.

[00:09:09] Maybe we got the wrong advice here and they did get the wrong advice. And your parents got the wrong advice. And then what happens is the oil industry. So, this is a different story. The oil industry said, wait a minute, they’re cooking their food and water. I’m 79. So I was born in 1942 in the fifties and sixties, cooking meant using water, using hot water to cook your foods.

[00:09:36] And when you used oils that was called frying or deep fry or saute right now, when you say I’m going to go and cook my food, usually people use oil for cooking. So the meaning of the word has changed. And it’s because the oil industry said, look at their cooking, their food in water. If we could get them to use oil, can you imagine how much oil we would sell?

[00:10:02] Oh my God. Think about it. And then they basically bamboozled a generation of mothers to use oils for cooking at a time when most people said, oh, well, the industry would never tell us to do anything that wasn’t good for us. And you know, what kind of BS that is these days, right? Because it’s so much of it’s being been exposed now.

[00:10:23] Right? And so fundamentally, most people get fried foods with mother love. And because it’s with mother love that it’s really hard to change. So what I say to people is look, keep the mother love. She did the best she could. Mother love is awesome. Change. The dirty habit that she was bamboozled into. So you have to separate the love of fried foods with mother love.

[00:10:54] You have to separate those up, right? So love your mother and don’t listen to her, her frying food advice, because she was lied to, And most people don’t have a biochemistry background. And when I, when I started looking into the journals, because I did have the background and I got poisoned and I started reading all of this, it’s like, oh my God, we should be making oils with health in mind.

[00:11:18] And that means you have to protect them from light, from oxygen, from heat while they’re being made. You know, from the time they’re in the seed, through the pressing and the filtering and the filling and the settling until they are in a brown glass bottle, in a box to cut the light out in the fridge, nitrogen flushed.

[00:11:44] So that light oxygen heat hasn’t damaged the oil while it’s being made. And that took a lot. You have to make a really, really, really tight system. And out of that, Came what I’ve done with oils. I literally started a new industry, the industry of making oils with health in mind because the industry was always making oils with shelf life in mind, their interest was look, I can make oil in Vancouver.

[00:12:10] That’s where I live, but I could sell it in Johannesburg and Tokyo and a Cape town. Right. So I have a huge market and that gets me economies of scale and they get, you know, huge. So a hundred is about was about a $60 billion industry. When I started doing the work I did. And so we decided, because I said, I can’t get healthy on oils damaged, like this, that half the pesticides from the seeds and nuts that they’re made from end up in the oil.

[00:12:44] One of the reasons they heat it to frying temperature, cause those walls are fried or heated to frying temperature before they even go in the bottle before. They’re already wrecked 1% damage. Get you more than a million damaged molecules for every one of your body’s 60 trillion cells, 60 quintillion molecules in one tablespoon that is 1% damage.

[00:13:07] That’s huge. That’s huge. And those damaged molecules, they go somewhere in your body and then they, something it’s supposed to happen there with natural molecules can’t happen because they occupied that space. And then they interfere with what is supposed to go on in your body that makes your body work properly.

[00:13:27] Right? So that’s so that’s, I got into it, just, uh, you know, fats was not my interest. I had no interest in fats. When I was at university, we were interested in DNA, RNA protein. You know, that was the hot stuff. When I was, when I went to university fats. Uh, but it turns out that more health problems come from bad fats than any other part of nutrition.

[00:13:52] And more benefits come from getting oils right. Than any other part of nutrition, because every cell needs them. They play so many roles. There are so many different things are made from them in the body, getting your fats right. Is probably the number one thing you need to do. If you want to get healthier, number two would be dumping sugar.

[00:14:15] Right. But number one is fats because they’re so sensitive and they’re so damaged.

[00:14:21] I know you started with flax seed oil and then you added other oils because you became omega three deficient or not six deficient. Sorry.

[00:14:33] No, no, that’s good. You’ve done your homework. This is cool.

[00:14:35] Yeah. So what happened was 1980. I got poisoned. And so I started looking in the research journals 1981. It was established that omega threes are essential. That was known for omega six in 1929, that wasn’t known for omega three until 1981. The year after you got well, the year you got born, actually. Yeah. So you came, you came in at a perfect time.

[00:15:00] And, and, uh, when that it was established, I was already, I already had my heads buried head buried in the journals and I said, oh my God. And what they said was omega three is essential. So what does that mean? Well, it means it is something it’s a nutrient. So it’s all, these are essential nutrients and that’s essential nutrients.

[00:15:22] You can’t make it in your body from anything else. You have to have it to live and be healthy. And therefore you have to bring that in from outside. You have to make sure that enough of it lands in your body. So very important work can be done in the body. Life can do that job. So that’s number one.

[00:15:42] Number two is if you don’t get enough, you cannot stay. Then your health will deteriorate and you will get deficiency symptoms. And those are degenerative in nature and look like some of our degenerative diseases and they will get worse with time. And if you don’t get enough long enough, you die. So we’re talking about serious here.

[00:16:04] This is the, essential building blocks that life requires to build a body that works. And number three, if your health is going down, because you don’t get enough of an essential nutrient, but before you die, you bring enough back in. Then all the symptoms that come from not getting enough are reversed because life knows what to do.

[00:16:27] The moment you take responsibility to make sure that enough of it lands in your body, that life can do its job. 18 minerals, 13 vitamins, nine essential amino acids, and two essential fatty acids fit that. And so omega three was just established to be one of those in 1981. And every cell needs it. 99% of the population doesn’t get enough.

[00:16:56] And then the obvious thing is, oh, there must be lots of things that will get better if you optimize your intake. And I went off like a firecracker and said, oh my God, if we could make oils with health in mind and we could bring them back to the population where 99% doesn’t get enough, we could help so many people we could help.

[00:17:17] So people, I just leaned up like a firecracker and that’s the thing that drove it. I didn’t have any business background, zero business background, but I was on fire. I was on fire for, oh my God. We could help. So many people make life better. And I was born during the second world war. So I know how bad it can get.

[00:17:37] So I’ve always been obsessed with, how can I help? How can I, how can I get people less pain, more joy? That’s what living is about. Right? Well, I’m not here just to be here for myself. I mean, that’s good too, because I do want to enjoy the gift of life that I’ve been given. But when it comes to, what am I going to contribute?

[00:17:59] You should contribute something to living right? To the, to, to nature to the group, to the planet. What do you want to contribute? Anything that makes people’s quality of life better. And then the more, and there’s a thousand ways to do that. So this became my way.

[00:18:16] And we were dreamers. So on fire, we had no money. We had no business back. And, but we did a tour in a van in 1988. So by that time you were seven. And we went to, uh, 35 states, 101 days in the hottest months of the year, July, August, half of September, half of June. Um, I slept on the floor of the van, between the, the steering wheel in the back.

[00:18:48] And my driver had built himself a bunk across the back. We had our, our clothes on a broomstick in the, in the inside the double doors of the van, no air conditioning. Every three days we would walk into a Marriott hotel, like we owned it and then we would go and clean up in the showers and the workout rooms, maybe go for a swim.

[00:19:08] If they had a pool, wash our clothes in the shower, ring them out, go back in the van and keep going. And we literally worked all day and drove all night. Uh, 35 states, 85 cities in 101 days. And we did all of it on raw vegetables because we found if we ate meat, we felt heavy. And if we ate carbs, we kind of fall asleep.

[00:19:33] And so we did the whole thing on raw vegetables. Cause we didn’t have a stove in there. We didn’t have air conditioning. And so we had to keep it simple and it was a most, it was, it was a magical tour. It was magical. It was so fun. And then flax seed oil. Why flex seed oil? Because it’s the richest source of omega threes that is easily available.

[00:19:56] And this was our way of bringing omega threes back into the diet. And within two years, uh, flax oil was the second highest selling oil in the natural foods industry, which is where we were working. So, and that all just came from the enthusiasm, you know, when people get enthusiastic about something, there’s something really attractive about that.

[00:20:17] And I wasn’t saying, let me be enthusiastic. So I’m attractive. I was saying, oh my God, we could help so many people. And I still have that enthusiasm. It is so incredible to be able to do something like, oh my God , I’ve actually got a purpose.

[00:20:32] I’m not just like wondering as, oh, you know? Oh, uh, I don’t know, you know, oh man, I have a purpose. This is cool stuff. Right. And we infected a lot of people. So what happened is flax seed oil is very high in omega three, but it’s quite low in omega six.

[00:20:53] And the guys I’ve worked with started saying, oh, flax seed oil has both is the best source of both essential fatty acids. I didn’t think it was true, but I didn’t have proof. So I said, I’ll do an experiment on myself. So I decided I will only use flaxseed oil as my only source of fat in the diet and see what happens.

[00:21:14] And within two or three months, I had omega six deficiency symptoms, dry eyes, skipped heartbeats, arthritis, like pain in my finger joints, and thin papery skin. And those are classic omega six deficiency symptoms. How do you fix them? Sunflower seeds. Cause they have a lot of omega six and no omega three to get the balance back because you need them both, but they need to be in the right balance too much of one will crowd up the other, too much of the other will crowd out the one.

[00:21:45] And then I was like, oh yeah, I think we need to actually. Make a blend that has both made with health in mind, people were saying, oh, to use flaxseed oil, you’ve got lots of sixes in your diet. Well, they did, but the sixes were damaged by the processing and in a tablespoon had over a million damaged molecules for every one of the body’s 60 trillion cells.

[00:22:12] Oh, you want to change that out? You want to get omega sixes that don’t, that aren’t partially damaged. And so we put the blend together, flax sunflower Sesame seed omega three, omega six, omega six in a right ratio. Emphasize omega3s cause they’re missing there. They’re more missing. Bring in omega six is made with health mind and then add some other things to it that, include, antioxidants and what we call minor ingredients that have major health benefits.

[00:22:45] And so then we developed a blend called Udo’s oil, and it’s in a box because you want to cut the light out. It’s in glass because plastic leaches into oil, and you don’t want plastic in your body. There’s lots of issues. Now, when you put plastic film on food, the plastic will drift into the food in direct proportion to the amount of fat or oil in the food.

[00:23:12] You know, now we have fish and the fish have plastics in their bodies. When you eat those plastics, they end up in your muscles, those plastics, and they interfere because they don’t belong there. So put it in glass, keep it refrigerated. Nobody was refrigerating oils. You what? You know, they were refrigerated ice cream.

[00:23:31] They were refrigerating steaks. You know, they were freezing them actually. But nobody wanted to do that to oils. Even the oils are more sensitive to damage, then ice cream and stakes are, so the idea of giving oils, the care they need was a new, totally new concept.

[00:23:50] Now you’re talking about some of the people that are your listening audience. There is a for instance, with endometriosis, there’s a strong correlation between endometriosis and omega six intake or omega six imbalance.

[00:24:10] And when you give those people, omega threes made with health in mind. So we’re not talking fish oils. They’re quite damaged. But you give them omega threes made with health in mind that is helpful to their condition. Now that’s not the only reason people get fibromyalgia. There may also be other issues.

[00:24:29] It could be B vitamins could be zinc, but th the correlation between too much omega six and not enough mega three is a pretty strong correlation. And I would say to every one of the people who have that, I would say, get omega six is made with health in mind. In other words, you’re not going to use any of those stupid cooking oils that are colorless, odorless and tasteless in plastic bottles.

[00:24:53] You want to get your omega six made with health in mind, and you want to get the omega threes that are missing in most of your diets, right? Will that make a difference? It will make a difference, right? Is that a cure? No, you can’t. You know, you have to know what. The reasons are for having the symptoms.

[00:25:13] And there’s often like 60% of the population doesn’t get enough zinc. That’s an essential nutrient, 80% doesn’t get enough vitamin D and that’s an essential nutrient 99%. Doesn’t get enough omega six. And that’s an essential nutrient. Right? When you want to get in the direction of living in line with nature to get health as your natural state, then you always have to remove what’s toxic.

[00:25:42] Bring in what’s missing. That is essential and make sure digestion works because when digestion doesn’t work, then you’re going to get toxicity created in your digestive tract. And you might not get all your nutrients either. Those are the three main things. Bring in the good stuff, leave out the bad stuff, make sure digestion works, make it, make sure digester works with enzymes, probiotics, fiber, and bitters certain herbs.

[00:26:09] Kat Khatibi: How would someone know if they need to have, enzymes before they eat?

[00:26:15] Dr. Udo Erasmus: Uh, well, if you were to, if you were eating fresh whole raw organic, so the emphasis on raw in raw foods, there are enzymes that when you chew up those foods, well, those enzymes get released and they do 60% of the digestion for you.

[00:26:32] If you don’t do that. And that’s what you were made for, you were made for a diet of raw foods, every other creature in nature eats raw foods, and you never see a squirrel with a frying pan, right? You might see one in a frying pan, squirrels, don’t fry, their foods, deer, don’t fry, their grass, cows, don’t fry, they’re grass either.

[00:26:54] Your digestive system was made for raw foods. If you cook your food, you destroyed those enzymes and your digestive system has to do more than twice as much work as if the rough food is 60% self digesting, then your digestive system was only made for 40% of the job.

[00:27:19] Now you’re making it not do 40, not 80%. Cause that’s double you actually two and a half times its workload and that’ll catch up with you. And when that catches up with you, your immune system gets involved in digestion and then your immune system isn’t as strong as it could be to do all the other things it needs to do.

[00:27:38] Whether you’re talking about colds and viruses and flus, or you’re talking about inflammation or you’re talking about infections or whatever you’re talking about, the immune system has the. Right. And if you tie up your immune system and digestion, then it’s going to be less able to do its other job. So if you cook your food, you need to replace the enzymes you destroyed when the food was cooked.

[00:28:03] And the same thing is true for probiotics. Probiotics came to us on plants in nature. When you cook those plants, you kill all the probiotics. You need to replace them. That’s how you know, and if you’re eating, if you eating mostly mostly plant-based, then you’re going to be getting fiber, but there’s no fiber in animal products.

[00:28:28] So the fiber feeds the probiotics and it also stabilizes blood sugar. And it also keeps you bowel, regular so that you don’t get constipated and you get toxicity from that. And then, the herbs and spices. Are really good for liver function and digestion. And when you do all of those, you pretty much have fixed.

[00:28:50] Most of the things that go wrong with the digestive system, when we live out of line with nature, so anybody who eats cooked foods needs enzymes and probiotics.

[00:29:00] Kat Khatibi: I wanted to ask you about olive oil because olive oil is good, but then it’s still not good because in the U S they allow olive oil to be cut with other oils.

[00:29:11] So should we use olive oil or not?

[00:29:15] Dr. Udo Erasmus: Okay. Yeah, it’s a really good, it’s a really good question. So there are two, always two issues you got to deal with when you’re dealing with oils. One is how much damage has been done to the oil by the. You know, the way it’s being made by industry, the way they make oils.

[00:29:35] And the second is how much omega six does it have in relationship to how much omega three does it have? Because those are the only two things from fats that you have to bring in because they’re essential omega-3 and omega six. So all of oil is made by a different process than most of the cooking oils.

[00:29:59] And it is a less damaging process. So olive oil gets good marks for not being damaged by the process, but olive oil it all has no omega threes in it. Those are, those are too low. At 99% of the population, olive oil is not going to help you. And it only has 10% omega six and all the rest of what’s in all of oil, your body can make out of sugar and starch.

[00:30:27] That’s why they’re not essential. As your body can make it right. So why olive oil is popular is because it’s not damaged by the processing, but it’s missing the other half of it. So olive oil is not as good as an oil that has omega three and omega six in it, But it’s really popular.

[00:30:45] And it became very popular after we began to talk about oils made with health in mind, because all of oil was in that sense made with health in mind. And what happened is the demand for olive oil became much faster, went up much faster than the rate at which all of trees grow.

[00:31:06] All of trees grow really slowly. And so, because there was so much demand, people started cheating. And it’s not just in the U S it’s basically whoever’s making the olive oil. They will cut them with soybean oil sometimes, or with canola oil, sometimes some cheap oil and they won’t say it on the label. So you think you’re getting olive oil, but you’re actually getting oils that have been treated with Draino window, washing acid, bleached and fried before they were made.

[00:31:36] That’s how they made. Right. And, and so you can get cheated. So I have a test that I do if I buy olive oil and I put it in the fridge either it’ll go solid or it’ll get little crystals in it. And that’s kind of the beginning of the, of the solidification of oil process. If I don’t get any little crystals in it, little fleck, the little white flecks, right.

[00:32:05] If I don’t get any crystals in it, then I will assume that it’s diluted with oils that are more liquid than olive oil because canola and soybean oil have more omega six and more omega three. So they stay liquid to a lower temperature. So you throw some of those in all of oil and they all have, I won’t get these crystals in it, then I won’t buy it.

[00:32:32] That’s the only way you can tell, unless you’ve got on a lab and you can actually measure the omega threes and sixes in, but I don’t use olive oil anymore. Partly, partly for that reason. But partly because even if it’s made with health in mind, I can get better oils also made with health in mind.

[00:32:51] Then olive oil, olive oil was, and by the way, olive oil was not used for frying. Traditionally, they cook their food and water. They dumped the water, they added olive oil because when you add oil to foods, you improve flavor. Because oils carry flavors very well. And you improve the absorption of oil soluble ingredients in the food.

[00:33:16] And many of those are very, very health promoting health supporting. So it’s good to have oil with foods to get the best of the nutrients that are in the food. And olive oil was used for that. It was not used for frying, everybody fries with olive oil because the industry as well, you know, they’re going to fry anyway.

[00:33:35] So, and they might as well tell them to fry and all of that stupid from a health perspective or from a customer service perspective, really stupid.

[00:33:45] Kat Khatibi: So know you don’t like frying oil, but, what do you think about air fryers?

[00:33:50] Dr. Udo Erasmus: What do they do?

[00:33:52] Kat Khatibi: It’s just hot air. It cooks it with just hot air.

[00:33:55] Dr. Udo Erasmus: Okay. Does it turn, does it turn brown?

[00:33:58] Kat Khatibi: No, but it gets a little crispy. Well, they is. Is the crispy from drying out or is the crispy before.

[00:34:08] Dr. Udo Erasmus: Yeah. So it depends on how high the heat is. Cause if the heat goes over 160 degrees Celsius, 320 Fahrenheit, if it goes higher than that, you’re doing damage to the molecule. And that’s why I don’t have an air fryer. So I don’t know if it’s frying because in, in marketing, words are used in all kinds of creative ways to make a point.

[00:34:35] But the issue is always, if you’re turning food, you start with the vegetable it’s green. If it starts to turn yellow or brown or black or turn into smoke everywhere along that line, you’re damaging molecules. So that’s what you want to prevent. If your air fryer, doesn’t damage molecule, then it isn’t frying.

[00:34:58] But if it does, and you can, you could bake things like you bake bread. The inside of the bread is steam cause it’s wet. And when it’s wet, you can’t heat it higher than a hundred degrees Celsius. But on the outside of dries out and your oven is maybe 350 or 3 75 or 400 is Fahrenheit.

[00:35:19] Right. But so the crust burns. So the crust is toxic and the inside is not right. So when you’re talking about air fry, if the outside gets higher than a hundred degrees or 160 degrees, then you’re going to do damage to it. The inside will be steamed unless it completely dries out. So as long as there’s water in something same with the steak, you burn the steak on the outside because the oil, the boiling oil dries blows off the water and then it burns.

[00:35:54] But the inside of the steak is actually steamed because it’s still wet. So the best thing to do would be to cut the burned part off and throw it away. In which case you might as well boil it and throw it in the stew. Right. But you will still do some damage, to the food, but not anywhere near as much as when you fry.

[00:36:18] Kat Khatibi: So the fact that I have been throwing away my crust on all my foods and cutting off any burn spot on my meats or vegetables has been good.

[00:36:28] Dr. Udo Erasmus: Exactly. And, and your parents were wrong when they told you that the, that the crest is the best part.

[00:36:34] Kat Khatibi: Yeah. Yes. That’s my husband too. He says the crust is the best part and I’m just like, that’s the burn part.

[00:36:40] That’s the damaged part.

[00:36:42] Dr. Udo Erasmus: The question you have to ask is best for what. And burnt food is an acquired taste. It’s not a natural taste. It’s an acquired taste. You have to have some other payoffs to make that a virtue. And that’s why I think it’s mother loves it.

[00:36:58] That created that.

[00:36:59] So you tell them you have it on, on high authority, but that, that you’re right. And he’s wrong. There might be a more diplomacy diplomatic way of saying that.

[00:37:14] Kat Khatibi: So let’s talk a little bit more about diet, cause I know you lean towards more plant-based but then we hear things like Dr. Gundry says, plants have plant toxins and they build up.

[00:37:24] So in your opinion, do you find that we still need to have more plants? And do we have people who have issues with having a lot of plants? Is it because maybe the pesticides or the water or, the soil is nutrient deficient now monocropping unsustainable farming methods. So what’s going on with the diet,

[00:37:41] Dr. Udo Erasmus: all of that, all of that plays a role and just talking like we are, I don’t know because I don’t, you’d have to be specific a particular place, a particular food and all of that, but in terms of, but what you do need to know is if you want attention in marketing and this is why I’m not as big as I could be is if.

[00:38:07] Say extreme things, then you get attention, right? This is like a, it’s an it’s at least an American thing. Although the whole world is pretty much running that way now. So you say something outlandish and you get people’s attention. I think every fad diet has done that. The blood type diet, and there was the Atkins diet and there was the low fat diet, supposedly killed doctor Pritikin or an, uh, Dr. Nathan Pritikin.

[00:38:38] There’s the Gundry diet. There’s a lectin diet, all of that stuff. I would call it BS except from horses.

[00:38:47] And there’s a lot of pretense. I’ll tell you something about the lectins that I find really interesting lectures. Are proteins that have starches attached to them. So , they’re called glycoproteins and that’s just a protein with starch strings on it. If you take the enzymes that digest protein, it’s called protease protease enzyme.

[00:39:13] You put it on there. It has a hard time digesting the lectins because the starch strings get in the way. But if you put amylase on that lectin, it clips off the start strings. And then the pro protease can digest the protein. Well, guess what? When you eat lectin containing foods, you put them in your mouth, you chew them up and you’re supposed to chew like 30 to 60 to a hundred times.

[00:39:44] Nobody does that, including me. And I know I’m supposed to, but I’m always in a hurry, right. So, but if you actually chew them, Your saliva has, amylases it amylases the starch digesting enzyme. It digests the starch strings. By the time it gets into your stomach where the proteases are waiting for it, or your small intestine where your proteases are active, then the start strings are already off of it.

[00:40:12] That happened in your mouth. That happened before it needed to be digested. But if you Wolf them down, then you might not be able to digest them. So well, that’s, you know, and there’s a guy before Gundry who, who was into lectin. Proteins is one the originator of the blood type diet, which was another fad.

[00:40:36] Totally didn’t work for me, all the things he said, I shouldn’t be eating are the things that work best for me, you know? And then you say, well, why did it while I got into the results with it? Yeah, he took. People off wheat and off dairy, the two foods that cause the most allergies and the most problems and surprise, surprise it worked, but it didn’t work because of the blood type.

[00:40:58] It worked because he took, he took out the two most allergy producing foods, but allergy producing foods, like nondairy non wheat that wasn’t extreme, but saying blood type diet. Oh yeah. That got attention and the same kind of thing. So, so I, I don’t have any, it doesn’t make any Gundry’s diet. I eat all the stuff he says, I shouldn’t be I’m 79.

[00:41:22] And honestly I live like a 30 year old, I take down trees and dig out roots and I’m, you know, I’m in better shape than I was in pretty much all my life. Right. My brain works, you know? I should be having some symptoms. If, what he said is true, but he’s a doctor doctors like to sound like they invented the, everything.

[00:41:49] He didn’t invent any of this. He wasn’t trained in nutrition, but he found a good marketing angle and he sells a very expensive product. You know, first he created a theory that wasn’t true, but that created problem in your mind and your thinking. And then he sells you a very expensive product that, that answers the problem he created in your mind.

[00:42:14] And what is that? What is that? I think, I think they used to call them shysters. Oh boy. Right. No, but it’s a market. It’s a marketing exercise and in marketing you’re allowed to, they call it huffing and puffing. You know, when you’re trying to sell things, you’re allowed to exaggerate. And that the legal term for that is huffing and puffing for the sake of sales.

[00:42:39] So you’re not allowed to outright lie, but it’s okay to have some puff. So, and so you got to take all that with a grain of salt, every, I’ve been at this for 40 years every other year. There’s a new diet, you know? And I looked once , last time I looked in Google over 600 different diets.

[00:43:04] And these, these were weight by the way, weight loss, diets, right? Weight management diets, and, and overweight steadily gone up the whole time. None of those diets have done the job. Right. But people are desperate and then you tell them something, oh, well, maybe that’s, what’s missing in my diet because if you don’t understand how it all works, then you kind of, you become a victim of whatever.

[00:43:31] Oh, well, maybe that’s it because I never, I did this and I did that and I tried that diet and I tried that and I tried this, the only thing you didn’t try is living in line with health because weight normalization is a side effect of being healthy. And, and so then every time a new fad comes along, if you don’t understand that, then he said, oh, well maybe that’s it.

[00:43:54] Oh, that’s it. Oh, maybe that’s it. And it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. But every year there’s a new story. And then the story creates some traction for some people and nothing has changed in the population. And in 1979 we were 25% overweight. Now we’re 65%. And I think we’ve been told 2050.

[00:44:20] It’s going to be 75 and 2070 or something. I don’t remember the numbers exactly is going to be 85% of the population will be overweight and they’ll blame it on fats and fats. Don’t make you fat. In fact, the omega threes actually help you lose weight, but you have to lower your carbs. So you’ll have to, I call it a fuel shift, not a fuel addition, but a fuel shift.

[00:44:45] When you make fats that have omega three and six in the right ratio, in the right amounts in them, they will help you lose weight because the increased fat-burning increased oxidation rate increase, thermogenesis increase, metabolic rate gives you more energy, make you more active. And when you do all that, when all of that happens, that’s really helpful to burning the fats.

[00:45:13] That you store in your body. Yeah. And they’ve mostly come from, you eat more carbs than you burn. Your body has to turn the excess into fats. And then what happens is the body’s really good at doing that. That makes, and then you get low blood sugar, and then you get cravings and your body screaming that you eat or die.

[00:45:39] And then if you used to eating carbs, then you eat a bunch of carbs and you do it pretty quick to bring your blood sugar back to normal. By the time your blood sugar is normal, you’ve eaten more than you needed because it takes time to digest and absorb it. And so your blood sugar goes too high again.

[00:45:56] Then insulin drives it into the cells again. Then it’s turned into fat again, then your low blood sugar again, then you have cravings again, and that’s called the carb addiction cycle. And some people claim it’s eight times more powerful that craving than addiction to cocaine . And some people say it’s only four times as addictive as addiction to cocaine.

[00:46:21] And then it’s got, where can I get my six, well units, a cocaine fixed for some people. And it’s a carb fixed for some, for other people. And the best way to deal with that is fats give you stable energy. You don’t get the blood sugar swings. You don’t get the insulin swings. You don’t get the cravings. You don’t get the mood swings.

[00:46:40] You don’t get what drives that carb addiction cycle.

[00:46:46] Kat Khatibi: So I really wanted to know. Cause I’m curious, what do you eat in a typical day? Can you walk us through every meal?

[00:46:54] Dr. Udo Erasmus: Yeah, I’m not an every meal kind of guy. So what I do a lot, I don’t eat until noon and I don’t eat after 8. So I’ve got eight hours of eating time, and then I’ve got 16 hours of fasting time and that’s becoming pretty popular because what you’re doing is you’re getting all the food you need, but you’re giving your digestive system a rest.

[00:47:21] And then when you give your digestive system a rest and you have a little hunger there, then your body begins to eat the garbage in the, in your body. It’s called autophagy, which means self eating, which means, it’s like, if you’re starving, then is your body, is your body going to, break down the six cells, the weak cells, the dead cells, the debris in your body?

[00:47:47] Or is it going to just eat your brain? Well, no, the body’s pretty smart. I mean, life is pretty smart in the body. It’s not going to eat your brain first. In fact, it’ll eat your brain last. Because the brain is really important to coordinate everything in the body. So what it’ll eat first, maybe it will eat your scabs or your keloids inside your skin or muscles.

[00:48:12] So they self eating is you eat all the garbage and it’s a way to, it’s a way to detox. So this is a good way to eat. Now. We didn’t always eat at eight in the morning and a 12 noon. And at six in the evening, that’s an industrial invention for factory line workers, right? The animals don’t eat like that.

[00:48:35] They eat when they eat, when they’re hungry or they eat when they can get food. Cause sometimes they don’t eat when they’re hungry because they got no food. Right. And we used to, we didn’t have everything organized so that there’s always too much food. That’s the way we live now, right? There’s always too much food around.

[00:48:53] And so you have to be disciplined and do things deliberately that you didn’t have to do deliberately when you were living in nature without human culture. Now I’m not I’m not trying to knock the culture because there’s obviously some things that have made lice convenient, but convenience is a double edged sword, convenience kills.

[00:49:18] So I say to people, listen, every time you hear the word convenient, you should run like, hell, right? When you hear the word challenge, you say, yeah, that’s for me, does challenge builds you? And convenience breaks you down because you become lazy and then you become sloppy and then you become, and then you do things you shouldn’t be doing.

[00:49:36] So you have to be more deliberate now in what you eat and how you live than you ever had to be when we were living in. Again, I’m not, it’s not bad, but you have to change the way you do it. When I was on the farm, I lived on a farm without electricity for two years, no electricity, no radio, no television.

[00:50:00] And we cleared 40 acres by hand and by horse. And we sweated every day and we ate lots of carbs. Cause we burned a ball. Cause we were working hard. We had big muscles. I was had a little bit of extra fat on me with the carbs, but I was never like really fat. And I was in good shape when I came to university in the city.

[00:50:24] No exercise, no, no pulling roots, no carrying rocks, no driving horses, no falling trees, no cutting wood. Right. I have to change because, my father, when he retired. Because he was physically very active when he retired, he started reading his library cause he had collected a huge library. Never had time to read it.

[00:50:46] So he just sat around and read. He literally didn’t change his food habits. He became as wide as he was tall, he’s only five eight . And eventually died of a massive heart attack. When I went to university, I had to change the way I eat because your eating has to be in line with your lifestyle and I do it deliberately.

[00:51:07] So what I do is I eat when I’m hungry in my house, when I’m by myself right now, I have, my daughter and her son, my grandson living here. When I’m in, when I’m by myself, I don’t have bread in the house. I don’t have noodles in the house is all the carbs. I don’t use sugar. I don’t do any of that stuff.

[00:51:30] I have tons of vegetables. I love broccoli and I will eat broccoli with tahini. Tahini is Sesame, uh, ground Sesame seed, ground Sesame seed gives me omega threes. But what I actually do is I get, I buy it by the case. And then I dump the oil to Sesame oil off it. Cause it’s an omega six oil. It’s about 40%, 45% omega six.

[00:51:54] And then the rest is non-essential. I dump off the oil. I put my oil in Udo oil, cause it has, about 45% omega threes. And about 25% omega six, very good ratio. Now I ended up with a really good tahini and that’ll dip my vegetables in them, and sometimes I eat standing up and sometimes I sit on my back porch and sometimes I spend less time at the table than most people.

[00:52:21] And I’m not. If I want to eat really fancy food, I’ll go to a restaurant where there’s a chef who really knows how to cook. I’m not a cook. I have a cookbook it’s called omega three cuisine, but it was put together by a celebrity chef. I just explained to him how not the wreck oils in food preparation.

[00:52:42] It’s the only omega three cookbook on the planet that I know of. I have seeds and nuts in the house. So I literally, I am eating vegetables, fruit seeds, nuts, and I love spices spices. I’ll take an avocado and I’ll put cayenne in it. And then I put a little, cumin in it. And then I put a little tumeric in it.

[00:53:08] Then I’ll put a little green tea on it, sometimes green tea powder, and then I put some clove on it sometimes. And then sometimes I put some black seeds. Black seed comes from middle east, you know it, yeah. It’s like spicy peppery and, and then, I’ll spoon it out of the shell. I leave that’s it like a good meal and I’m 79 when I was 38, I had arthritis in my knees.

[00:53:36] So if I just bent my knees a little, I already had pain. It wasn’t like super, super severe, but it was there. I don’t have anything. Now I have no aches and pains. I’m in as good shape as I’ve ever been in. And, and it’s based on, I eat, most of my food is raw now, and I’m not doing it from a philosophy.

[00:54:01] I’m doing it from what, what feels best for my body. And it’s changed over years. Like I ate more meat when I was. Partly because wives used to it, but we only had meet once a week because we did, when we didn’t have electricity, you couldn’t keep the meat at home. So my father would drive into town and pick up some meat every Friday.

[00:54:22] So when did we’d have some meat and, and then the rest of the time, we had a huge garden. Rest of the time we had vegetables, potatoes, and turnips and carrots and peas and beans. And I mean, we grew all that stuff. Right. And, and I got to say that the research is now clear. If you want the longest healthiest life, you do it on a plant-based whole on a whole food plant-based diet.

[00:54:52] But if you get there, if you’re really doing just whole foods plant based, you have to take a B12 supplement, but some most meat eaters could use this B12 supplement. Yeah. Because animal proteins are no longer a reliable source of B12. And that’s because we feed them different. So the bacteria in the stomach are different or in their digestive tract are different.

[00:55:16] And B12 is made by bacteria in the digestive tract. And so we don’t have the same bacteria. You don’t get to, you don’t get the B12. And I literally, I eat when I’m hungry. I nibble, I have a trampoline, so I work out on that and I have some weights and I have a chiming bar so I’m active.

[00:55:34] I’m not in a gym, but I’m active. I go for walks. I go for runs sometimes like sit down. Cause I live by the ocean, stick my seat in the water for half and hour. And just sit on the beach with my feet in the water, that’s called grounding. Maybe the could be called watery in this case.

[00:55:53] I like being in nature, there’s just something about, we’re part of that. We’re a piece of it. We’re really in it. And I do probably more important than all of that is every day I spend time getting quiet, we call it a stillness practice.

[00:56:12] We get as quiet as you can. You close your eyes, you get as quiet as you can. Get as deeply quiet as you can. You stay there as long as you can. And then you observe what’s in the space, your body occupies, but on an energetic level. No, I’m not looking for my liver and my guts. I’m looking for the energy.

[00:56:36] What does it feel like to be alive? And out of that, stillness comes so much insight. That’s probably where most of my learning comes from now. I’ve read lots of books and I’ve taken lots of courses, but in terms of insight into my own life and how to live in that mostly comes when I get really quiet, there is such wisdom in the body or in life.

[00:57:05] If I have a question instead of running off to Google, especially when they’re personal questions, because Google can get you everything, except yourself, Google gets you, everything except yourself. And then if you get yourself by actually taking time to be present in your life, That’s where your unconditional love that you’re looking for lives.

[00:57:29] That’s where your perfect peace that’s. Sometimes you want peace of mind or peace from mine. That’s where it lives. That’s where you joyous. That’s where your wholeness lives. Something in you never get sick, never dies. Even if you have fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue or whatever, whatever is the thing that’s going on in your body, physically, your inspiration is not effected by that.

[00:57:52] Your life energy is not affected by that and the awareness that is the foundation of your being, not affected. It doesn’t go that deep. These are physical symptoms in the body. They don’t go that deep. And sometimes when you can go deeper into that quiet place, that also helps you heal. Because some of those things come from being disconnected from ourselves.

[00:58:18] Like when you live disconnected for yourself, you don’t have the best life. You have the best life when you’re connected with all of your being. And the goal is to be fully present in all of your being and your surroundings, not lost in thoughts in your head. And we have so many thoughts. And so many of our thoughts are not true.

[00:58:37] All the, the ones that we beat ourselves up with. Somebody the other day I said something, I used the word stupid, and that person went ballistic, and it was like, it all went back into a place in this person’s childhood where people said you’re stupid.

[00:58:58] And that was hurtful then. And at some point you’ve got to disconnect that trigger. I’ve never been stupid. They called me stupid. I’ve never been stupid. So I’m just not buying that anymore. And there’s lots of ideas like that, that we have that, that we’re looking at. You absorb it as a kid, but as an adult, you own it.

[00:59:26] And then as an adult, you have to bring those two into awareness. And if it does that make sense? No, it doesn’t make any sense. We’ll forget that. Cause if you don’t do that, then a lot of those things from childhood run your life and then you become a victim of lies. People told you when you were a kid, or things people told you because they had an agenda.

[00:59:50] They wanted you to do something that was good for them. Not necessarily good for you. And you bought it because at one point you’re too young to be able to say, oh yeah, that’s not true. So you absorb all that stuff. And at some point, so you got to sort it out. So I do that. That’s a work in progress. We’re all works in progress.

[01:00:12] Kat Khatibi: I want to be respectful of your time. But before we go, I wanted to ask you, do you have any hope for the health of the United States in the future? Because we still seem to be getting fatter sicker, no matter all the work that everyone’s been trying to do to stop it.

[01:00:31] Dr. Udo Erasmus: Yes. I see. Hope because what you just said is not true because on the one hand, more people are getting overweight, but it’s always individual in the time when more people are getting overweight, there are individuals who make different choices, and because they make different choices. They’re getting less overweight and they’re getting healthier. And the issue is, if you follow the herd, then you are going to get overweight. But if you decide how you want your life to be, you can have that. Cause everything is possible.

[01:01:09] I think the biggest issue is that we’ve given so much of our responsibility away to institutions and the institutions that don’t serve us certain, they may give you, safety net standards, but the institutions don’t set the high standards. You have to set those yourself.

[01:01:31] And I highly recommend that you set really high stakes. Like standards that you totally can’t live up to because every time, like when you set a standard like that and you commit to it every time you fall short, you notice, and then you notice what it was. And then because you see it, you can change it.

[01:01:52] So that the next time, when you fail, you’ll fail about something else and you learn again and you learn again and you learn again and you keep doing that and keep the standard. Eventually you will reach that standard. And whether that you’re talking about love in a relationship, or you’re talking about eating in a way that gives your body the best chance to be healthy, or you’re talking about, what, knowing God, or if you want to say what I want to live the way the masters live, you can set any standard you want, what is the highest standard set it because within.

[01:02:29] It’s the potential to reach any standard that is humanly possible. You can have big muscles, whatever the thing is, whatever the thing is. But if you don’t set standards, you don’t even notice when you fail. Cause you never set a standard, but so you want to set a standards.

[01:02:48] Okay. Because you came into the world alive obviously, right? You came in alive. Life is the master in your body. Life actually runs everything. If I say to you a Kat, whose body is that? What would you say? Whose buddy is stuff? It’s mine.

[01:03:08] That’s what almost everybody would say. But do you know that? You’ve just told me that you’re not the body,

[01:03:13] right? Because if this is your body, you are not the body. You’re the. So who owns your body? Who are you as owner of your body?

[01:03:27] The good question. Most people would have to say what I don’t really know who is the owner of the body. This is my body and I’m the owner, but I don’t actually know the owner that well. That’s why you do the stillness practice. Cause you get in touch with the owner of the body life. You are life, you are not the body.

[01:03:48] You live. Like you wear the body. You sleep for the body and you eat and the body and you have sex for the body. And you dress for the body. Do you undress for the body? And you get a job to make money for the needs of the body, right? So your body is your project, but you are not the body.

[01:04:04] You are life and life is solar energy and life is also the master. What if you want it to live fully present to the owner of the body that you are to that master it’s within you. All that all you need to do is bring in awareness this way, homework it’s called homework coming home, And the more you do that, the more incredibly your life becomes. You can look at 8 billion people.

[01:04:33] They could all live better and what’s missing. The most what’s missing is we’re missing from our own lives because we’re looking out there and we’re looking into this. And with that, we have opinions on the neighbors. We know more about the neighbors than we know about ourselves. That’s what’s wrong with the world.

[01:04:53] That’s the basic problem that leads to environmental destruction. It leads to political destruction. It leads to relationship destruction, and it leads to health. In order to change those things, something in us has to change. And what in us needs to change is it’s all there. We just have to become present to it, aware of it, and then we feel good and now I feel taken care of.

[01:05:20] And now I can say Kat, how can I help? Because it’s not, it’s not about me anymore. I know what to do to feel cared for. I’ll just go back here. Right? And you do more and more of that. It’s hard when you start just like learning to walk is hard. When you start, keep doing it, keep doing it, keep doing it.

[01:05:41] You get better and better and better and better. I’ve been doing this now for almost 50 years. So now it’s relatively easy for me. And you know what? My life at 79 is better than my life was a 25, a 29 at 30 is when I started taking time for myself. And now it’s not about me anymore. Where can I help?

[01:06:06] What needs to be done? And what’s the biggest splash for good that I can make in the time I have on earth. So that’s what I’m working. That’s part of my diet too.

[01:06:18] I just want to thank you so much for your time today, and I’m going to put everything in the show notes. Is there anything else you’d like to leave the audience with?

[01:06:27] You are awesome in your nature. don’t believe anything else and discover the reality of your awesomeness for yourself. Don’t take it from me either. So do the homework. Enjoy your life. It’s short life is. You know, 14 billion years. I didn’t exist afterwards for 4 billion years.

[01:06:51] I won’t exist. I get maybe a hundred years. I want to make the most of it. I want to be fully present in this gift that I’ve been given.

[01:07:00] Kat Khatibi: So I’m going to put everything about your products and your websites and your social media. Everything will be in the show notes so everyone can learn more about you.

[01:07:09] And again, thank you for your time and this wonderful.

[01:07:12] Dr. Udo Erasmus: Thank you. Thank you.