We Got Healthy Fats Wrong - The Truth About Omega-3s Seed Oils and What Your Body Actually Needs with Udo Erasmus | E169

I got poisoned by the pesticide they sprayed. And at that point, the doctor said, we don't have anything for pesticide poisoning. And at that point I realized, oh my God, my health really is my responsibility. And because I had the background, I started reading about health and nutrition, disease and nutrition, learning everything I could in that arena. And out of that came, realized that oils are the most damaged of our food products.

Welcome back once again. I'm super excited to have today's guest, Udo Erasmus. With a name like that, you know, it's going to be great. Actually, Erasmus was a great Greek scholar from like the 3rd century.

So, it's Greek for worthy of love.

Oh, well, there you go. So, it's a name that's been around for a long time. So, after a brief introduction, we'll just hop into it. We're going to talk all things fats. Brain health, and a lot of interesting things that you all have not heard about in the past. So I think this is going to be a very enlightening conversation today. So after the introduction, we'll hop into it. Udo Erasmus is a legendary health educator and founder of Udo's Choice, a global wellness brand that transformed the way people think about fats and holistic health. He's the creator of the machinery and method for pressing oils with health in mind, not shelf life, and is internationally recognized as an expert on omega fatty acids. The author of the bestselling book Fats That Heal, Fats That Kill. And it's an interesting, it's a very in-depth read. So if you want to read it, it's amazing, but it's very, it goes through a lot of chemistry of how fats work and et cetera. Very good read. His upcoming book, Your Body Needs a Neural Change, which further challenges myths about fats and modern nutrition. With a background in biochemistry, genetics, nutrition, and a master's in counseling psychology, the author blends science with the soul. His 10-step model for total health goes beyond diet and addressing emotional wellness, purpose, and inner peace. And he's delivered over 5,000 presentations, been featured on 3,000 interviews, spoken in 30 countries. How many languages do you speak? Just out of curiosity.

Just two.

Just two. Oh, just two. Okay. Just two. Who appears on—

English, German, and petit peu French.

Oh, what? That's three. He appears in Eating Our Way to—

2.1.

2.1. Yeah. He also has been on the stage with Tony Robbins and Deepak Chopra. So I want to start with the introduction like this. What if the key to lifelong health and happiness weren't found in a pill, but already existed inside you? Today's guest, Udo Erasmus, legendary health educator, omega fat expert, and founder of Udo's Choice, will talk about this. He's inspired millions worldwide with his 10-step model for health, soul, body, nature. So get ready to rethink about everything you know about health and wellness. Welcome to our show today.

Thank you for having me on.

Yeah. So many of my listeners haven't heard of you, don't know who you are. So could you tell us a little bit about your story, your journey? Because literally your health, like you being sick yourself, got you off the beaten path, which is kind of my story, my daughter's story, and actually the story of a lot of my patients. So let's just start there, like your beginnings, so to speak.

Yeah. Well, my beginning really was I was born during the Second World War and before I was 3, I was a war baby, then a refugee, and then an orphan. So that's where I started. And fundamentally, every institution failed us. We lost everything other than the clothes we were wearing, the body we were in, and the life in the body. So my focus was always what is true, what I can count on, because I couldn't count on what I thought, what most people think they can count on. You know, you believe your institutions, uh, not one of them will, will go with you when you most need them. And so I was always trying to figure out how does everything work, because then you get a certain amount of security from it. Because I was very insecure as a little kid. And so that's really where I started and why I've been having a lifelong quest for what is true. And how do things work? Born scientist, broke so many things when I was a kid trying to figure them out. Got in a lot of trouble and ended up in science and then biosciences because I, you know, as a kid, I was looking around to say, well, what can I trust? Well, the one thing that is like amazing on this planet is it's got life on it. And so I, then I wanted to know everything I could about life. So I went into biology, but in biology, you don't study life. You study form and function. I wanted to know what life is. So long story short, I went through biochemistry. I left university. I dabbled in psychedelics briefly and eventually got to a point where I said, where I learned that what I'm looking for is within me. And what we are all deep down looking for is already within each one of us. And then I got into quiet stillness practice and meditation because how are you going to know what is a human being if you never spent time quietly observing the human being you are? And then out of that came lots of insights. I mostly work from insight these days. And, uh, in 1980, I got poisoned by pesticides because I sprayed them. My marriage broke up. I wanted to kill something. Took a job as a pesticide sprayer, super careless. At 38 years old, I walked barefoot over lawns I sprayed with weed killers. And the skin peeled off the bottom of my feet. So I figured I better wear rubber boots. But I did a summer job. I did it in a bathing suit. The wind would drift the spray on my back. People saying, aren't you worried you'll get poisoned? I said, nah, I'm immune. I wasn't immune in 1980. I got poisoned by the pesticide they sprayed. And at that point, the doctor said, we don't have anything for pesticide poisoning. And at that point I realized, oh my God, my health really is my responsibility. And because I had the background, I started reading about health and nutrition, disease and nutrition. Learning everything I could in that arena. And out of that came, realized that oils are the most damaged of our food products, both by frying, but even by the way industry makes the oils. They damage them when they make them. So they're damaged before they go in the plastic bottles that we get our, that we buy our oils in. And I said, well, I can't get healthy on oils that are damaged. We should make them with health in mind. So I developed a method for making oils with health in mind. Mind, which requires a very tight system that protects oils, which are the most sensitive of all of our nutrients, sensitive to damage by light, by oxygen, by heat, that protects them by protecting them from those three damaging influences. And out of that came flaxseed oil, made with health in mind, and then a blend which is better balanced than flaxseed oil. And in 2005, I got inducted into the Canadian Health Food Association Hall of Fame for starting the industry of making oils with health in mind.

So let me go back just a little bit because I think there's some really important details in what you said about, okay, oils. You know, people forget that many of these pesticides are actually petroleum distillates. Food dyes are petroleum distillates. I mean, literally, petroleum distillates make up most of what's in our modern world. You got this poisoning and you figured out somehow, let me use healthy fat to clear it, clean out these dirty toxic fats, et cetera. But there's a lot of devil in those details, right? Could you explain a little bit like that transition and how much, like what you actually did, how much healthy fat, how much did it actually take to get the toxins out? Because the way you said it, I took a tablespoon of healthy oil a day and I got better. Like, I think there's a little more to it than that.

Yeah. Okay. So I'm not gonna answer your question, but I know what, where we need to go. What I found out when I started doing my studies and I was looking at minerals and vitamins and amino acids and fatty acids and everything about essential nutrients that the body can't make but has to have, 'cause that's the corner store of physical health, right? If you can't make 'em, but you have to have 'em, you gotta bring 'em in from outside. I got stuck on oils because it was confusing. So on the one hand, I said, omega— I read a study, said omega-6 is an essential nutrient. What does that mean? You can't make it. You've got to have it. You've got to get it from outside. If you don't get enough, your health will deteriorate. It will get worse with time. And if you don't get enough long enough, you die. This is like really important stuff. And if you bring back the a missing essential nutrient while you're going down, but before you die, then all of the problems you get from not getting enough are reversed and you get your health back because life knows how to make a body that works. The only responsibility you have is to make sure that you bring in all of the essential nutrients in optimum quantities and avoid all the poisons. That can interfere with the function. So, and the next study I got said omega-6 gives you cancer and kills you. So it's like, it's essential and it's gonna kill you. It's like, you know, it just drove me nuts. And so I said, okay, I must be missing something because I'm not assuming that the researchers are lying one side or the other. I'm assuming I'm missing something that will bring that together, how it can be essential and kill you at the same time. And I started looking about at how oils are made. And in order to give them a long shelf life, the industry treats them with harsh chemicals like sodium hydroxide and phosphoric acid, then with bleaching clays to take out the color molecules that absorb light, which then damages the oil. And when they've done that, the oil goes rancid. And starts to smell bad. So then they heat it to frying temperature for about half an hour before it goes in the bottle, before you buy it, to blow off the rancid molecules. And I said, and then in that process, a half to 1% of the molecules are damaged by the processing, by the industry. And so then I called them and said, Why do you do this when you know it does damage to the oil? And the guy they put on the line said, well, we do it. One reason we do it is because we can get rid of half of the pesticides in the oil. And in my head, I'm going, oh, the other half of the pesticides is it. I didn't even know at that point that there were pesticides in oils. Because when I took my lipids course at university, master's degree course, they never talked about any of that practical stuff. So I said, oh my God. And I saw, I didn't say that to him. I said, well, why don't you start with organically grown seeds? Then you don't have a pesticide problem you got to deal with. And he had no answer and he got mad at me. I don't know what your problem is. It's only 99% damage. It's only, it's 99% good. It's only 1% damage. And if you got 99% on an exam, you'd be damn happy, wouldn't you? Like he was really mad. And the truth is I used to get 100% in some of my exams because I was really good in the topics that I was really interested in. So I wasn't impressed with the 99%. But then I said, okay, well, if it's 1% damage, how many molecules are we talking about? Right? Because devil's in the details, right? So I figured out if you have a tablespoon of an oil that is 1% damaged, How many damaged molecules am I going to introduce into my body if I eat that tablespoon of oil? Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm guessing— 1% damaged.

I'm guessing billions.

Yeah. How many billions?

Probably 3 and 10.

3 and 10. Okay. Let's say 10. Okay. Because we want to give you the benefit of the doubt. So billion has 9 zeros, right? A thousand million billion. 9. Your estimate is 10 zeros too short. It's actually a 6 followed by 10 zeros. So your estimate is 60 billion times lower than it actually is. Now, the reason why I ask the question is most people don't know how to calculate that. But when I do this question, and I do it in live lectures and I do it on podcasts, You know, I never get anybody guessing less than, more than a billion times too low the damage that they're introducing to their body. That's something to think about. Yeah.

I think one of the things as well as we look at—

So it's 60 quintillion damaged molecules in a tablespoon of oil, 1% damaged, and that's more than a million damaged molecules for every one of your body's 60 8 billion cells in that 1 tablespoon. We use 2 to 4 tablespoons a day, ballpark, right? We have pesticides in the oil. We have plastic in the oil because plastic leaches into oil quicker than into water. When we fry them, we have to multiply that number by another 5 to 10 times. And then you do that for 30 years and you should be shocked if you're not completely messed up. Health-wise.

I mean, what surprises me is the fact that we can have these partially plasticized fats, which is the way I think about it. You know, plastic is you take oil, you turn it to solid, you take corn oil, you turn it to margarine, you turn it— and that's kind of part of the process. And if you have this throughout your body, what I'm amazed by is that a mother can bottle feed their kid with rancid oils. They can eat it in the food system for decades. I'm amazed by how long it takes for people to get sick. And then how quickly they get better once you change that. That's what just blows my mind. Cause I'll see people that are sick for decades, kids with autism, people with, you know, with traumatic brain injuries. And it's amazing how quickly people's bodies start healing. Yeah. You give them the right stuff, even though they've been consuming stuff for decades. Like, what are your thoughts about that? That paradox of it takes a while to get sick, but you get better quicker. Does that go to some of the stuff you talked about, about the body's healing ability? Or what do you think that has has to do with?

Well, here's the thing. What I figured, part of what I figured out is if you want to get healthy, how do you do that? You raise your standards. That's it, right? If you're sick and you want to get healthy, you got to raise your standards. Why does that work? Because every year, 98% of the atoms in your body are removed and replaced. And that means if you, if you're sick and you raise your standard within one year, You can have rebuilt 98% of your body to a higher standard. That's why healing is possible. If the body wasn't always turning over, healing would not even be possible. So the point is that if you stop putting in garbage or missing the essential building blocks, when you fix that neglect, within 1 year, 98% of your body will end up with it in a higher health standard. And health, by the way, was, was invented by life in nature and is the result of living aligned with nature and your nature. So in nature, there were no pesticides, pharmaceutical drugs. You know, there's nobody dies from a pharmaceutical drug Deficiency. That should tell you something, right? And then all of the technologies that we've developed that are all out of line, that are about— not about healthcare. We don't have a healthcare system. It's a disease management system. Symptom suppression, crisis intervention, life support system, and monitoring our downhill road to the graveyard. That's what our so-called healthcare system is. Does. Is there a place for it? Yes, there is, but it's not healthcare. Healthcare comes from looking at what are the principles and the components of health that were all created by life in nature and living aligned with those, because life knows how to make a body work, provided we do that little thing of living in line with nature and our nature.

A quick favor. If Made for Health has given you even one idea worth trying, hit subscribe right now so the next one finds you automatically. And thousands of listeners already trust this show to cut through the noise. Add your voice to Apple, Spotify, or wherever you're listening. So could you go into some details about the process of making these healthy oral products? Because I think, you know, compared to the typical process? I don't think people understand the idea of deodorization, um, hexane extraction of orals, you know, and that's not even talking about things being expeller pressed and heat versus the way some of the things you do, which, which you have this very small cylinder versus the big cylinder. I mean, I think people don't realize that all the nuances of that. Could you kind of go into some of the weeds with that? Yeah. 'Cause I think that just fascinates me.

Okay. So let me go one step backwards. If you eat seeds and nuts and they're organic, in those seeds and nuts are the fats and the oils and the omega-6s and the essential fatty acids and all the stuff that we are now saying, don't use seed oils, don't use omega-6s. Complete BS. Because when you eat the seeds and nuts that contain them, That's actually associated with longevity. You live longer when you eat them, not shorter. Okay. Now, but they're in a natural state. We're not talking about roasted nuts. We're not talking about fried nuts. We're not talking about pesticide-filled nuts. We're talking about nuts in their natural state, which would be organic. So they're associated with longevity. How come when we take the oil out, That's supposed to give us cancer and kill us prematurely. Well, it has to be something in the processing. And if you wanna blame something in the physical world on physical disease, processing would be what you need to blame. All the different things that we do to foods that change them, that take out nutrients and that add, you know, unnatural substances. That's where the problems come from. So you talk about deodorization. Deodorization is the process where you heat the oil to frying temperature for about half an hour to get rid of half of the pesticides and blow off some of the stinky molecules that are rancid. So the industry does that to just about all oils unless they're unrefined. Okay. If you, you, they're treated with sodium hydroxide and phosphoric acid to remove substances that are healthy, that are natural, but that shorten the shelf life of the oil. So they take 'em out. They bleach the oil because color molecules in oils that make oils yellow or sometimes even green. They absorb light. The light then damages the oil by free radical production. And then the free radicals cause chain reactions because free radicals are single electrons and electrons like to be paired. So if it's a single electron, it'll go steal an electron from a pair. And then that's a free radical. Then it steals one from something else. And that goes 30,000 times on average before the pairs of electrons settle down again. So an enormous amount of damage is done by light. Oxygen does a lot of damage, although that's probably the least. It makes it rancid. It doesn't taste good, but it's not gonna— it's— that's not what kills you the most. And then if you use high temperature, You turn, you twist the molecules into trans fatty acid. And everybody now knows that trans fatty acids are not good for health. Walter Willett and his group at Harvard blew the whistle on the trans fatty acids in the early 2000s, I guess. So, and what you need to do is you need to put, the other thing is omega-3 and omega-6, the essential fatty acids that you can't make but have to have. They're very sensitive to damage by light, oxygen, heat. See, minerals, you can flip them on a shelf and 5 years later take them off the shelf and they won't be damaged. They won't be changed. You can't do that with oil. Omega-3s are 5 times more sensitive to damage than omega-6s, which is why we've lowered their intake in the past 150 years down to 1/6 of what we got in 1850. 50 at 175 years, right? And we've doubled, tripled, quadrupled, maybe even 10 times our intake of omega-6s. Why the industry likes omega-6s more than omega-3s? Because omega-3s are 5 times more problem to work with, to keep fresh, to keep from being damaged, right? And so what we did is when we decided to create flax oil because 99% of the population does not get enough omega-3s for optimum health. And so if we could make flax oil, which is the richest source of omega-3s that's easily available to us, if we could make those with health in mind and bring them back to the people, it was like, oh my God, we could help almost everybody. And there's something that feels really good in your heart when you help. Just like something doesn't feel good in your heart when you hurt people. I got so excited. I said, oh my God, we could help almost everybody. That was the drive, the enthusiasm for helping just about everybody that drove that project. And so that's how I got, you know, I lived out of a suitcase for 15 years, 6 to 9 months every year, just going around and telling the story. And, you know, providing people with an option for getting oils that are actually made with health in mind. And then we would tell them, but you can't use them for frying because when you fry an oil, then you damage it excessively by both light, well, by, by light, oxygen, and heat all at the same time. We do, we protect these oils and make them with health in mind. You need to use them with healthy fat. So you add them to foods after they come in off any heat source. And you— and oils are good with food because they improve flavors, but they also enhance the absorption of oil-soluble nutrients in our foods. Yeah.

I think a lot of people don't realize like fat-soluble nutrients, particularly vitamin E that comes from a lot of Different nuts, obviously.

Yeah. EDAK. Yeah. But then tons of antioxidants that are oil soluble and anti-inflammatories are oil soluble. And they will, like the lycopene, the pigment in tomatoes. You know, they say you should cook tomatoes before you eat them. No, you don't have to, but you need oil with them. Because when you eat the tomato with oil and you chew it properly, like you're supposed to do, then the lycopene is absorbed in the oil because it's all soluble.

Well, I know that right now we're gonna get, we're in tomato season here in Virginia and a nice tomato with olive oil on top and a piece of mozzarella.

Mm.

Tastes a little soft. It just tastes so good. It tastes so good.

I, I, I, I, I'm on the, I'm on my way.

Super crazy yummy. So let's, let's, let's transition a little bit to, um, your new book, Your Body Needs Neural Change. You know, am I, you know, I trained under Patricia Kane, you know, years ago with the whole idea of lipid medicine using healthy fats. You know, I did my training under Dr. Haman and Shoemaker with the whole mold chronic inflammatory response syndrome. Literally one of the terms they used was an oral change, like literally to remove toxins from our body.

Yeah.

I want to talk about that a little bit. Cause I don't think people realize it's when you get toxins built up, it's literally like that nasty, dirty oil from your engine. If you've ever seen it before. Builds up, it gunks our arteries up, it affects our mitochondria, it affects hormones. And if you're not consuming on a regular basis healthy fats, you're gonna have a system that's really messed up. So I kind of interesting to think the, just the title, Your Body Needs an Oil Change. Yeah. Can you talk about that a little bit?

So yeah, so Patricia Kane did not know about our work, and so she was missing a part of the story, although she knew a lot about oils. So she was missing part of that story. So Where were we going? You asked me.

Well, talk about the whole idea of doing an oil change, basically.

Oh yeah, so your body— that's the whole idea. Your body needs an oil change just like your car. You take out the dirty oil and you replace it with clean oil. When you put in the clean oil, it makes the engine hum. When you leave the dirty oil in it, it doesn't work as well. One of the main reasons for oils or fat intake is that they're the most efficient or not efficient is not the right word. They're in some ways the best fuel. Carbs, you make your blood sugar go up and down, and then you get insulin problems and, and diabetes problems and overweight problems. They turn on fat production and turn off fat burning. Well, the omega-3s turn on fat burning and turn off fat production. Actively. So, and, and they increase metabolic rate and oxygen consumption, the omega-3s, and you increase metabolic rate and you increase energy production. We worked with athletes who, after 30 days of using a tablespoon of this oil made with Health in Mind, the blend that we work with, per day, mixed in food, spread out over the course of the day. When they did their sport to exhaustion, after 30 days, their performance went up by 40 to 60%. Because now you're getting really clean fuel. And when you use that much oil, some of it is used as fuel. It is the most powerful fuel, natural fuel that you can get. And it goes into the mitochondria and gets burned there by, by beta oxidation, and the carbons are fed into the Krebs cycle. And then you make the energy, that's the energy you go on. What happens is you end up, it takes you longer to get tired, to build up an oxygen debt. You recover more quickly. Your injuries heal in a third to half the time. Your joints don't hurt. This is all with athletes. So we did. You slept, sleep better. The boxers told us their reflexes were sharper. And what else do you need as an athlete? Oh, skin was nicer. Because when you get both essential fatty acids in the right quantities, they form a barrier against the loss of moisture, make your skin soft and velvety. And, um, That's pretty— so the idea now, so when you take, when you damage the oils, they'll go into your mitochondria and they'll gum up your mitochondria. Because they, you know, in the body, everything is architecture. You know, 3-dimensional architecture, right? So wherever a molecule goes, it will occupy space., and it is supposed to do something in that space. If it's a molecule that doesn't belong in the body, that would include the pesticides, the pharmaceutical drugs, the industrial chemicals, damaged food molecules. When they go in a space, they occupy space, but they can't do the job. So they interfere with what is supposed to be going on there. And that's why you need to live in line with nature. Not in line with industry. That's why damaging food molecules, and that's why processing that damages food molecules is the single most damaging thing we do to ourselves in nutrition. We should be like the rest of the creatures in nature, be eating fresh, whole, raw, and organic. That's nature's standard for all the creatures that eat. And then of course it was also local and mostly, mostly seasonal. And for human beings, probably mostly plant-based as well. Because when we only had rocks to hunt with, the hunters came home without meat a lot of the time because the animals run away or they fight. And when they didn't have meat, then they ate vegetables because they're easy to hunt down and kill. They don't run away and they don't fight. Right? So, we, you know, in subsistence, we survived on those kind of diets. Mostly plant-based, fresh, whole, raw, organic. And every step we've taken away from that has cost us something in health. And we're to the point now that our kids are born sick. That we make them stick with our drugs and our pesticides and our, our, our neglectful use even of vaccinations. So there's a lot of problems that are side effects. We don't admit to them, but they're side effects of living out of line with nature and our nature. And there's no way that you can fix that. You know, there's not gonna be a cure for cancer except getting back in line with living in line with nature and your nature. You know, so the idea of the, the magic bullets, you know, that just drives the same crazy industry that is out of line with nature. It will never bring us the results that we're looking for. And why there's so much illness is because we haven't been paying attention for a very long time. And every, every generation it gets a little worse.

So for about 50 years, the mantra in our country was avoiding fats, you know, the food pyramid, fats are bad, fats are bad, fats are bad. We literally flipped that around, you know, January of this year and now fats are back, but seed oils are bad.

Yeah.

Seed oils are bad. So what are, you know, there's different myths that are out there. Okay.

Can I tell you, RFK, RFK has been misinformed by people who have not done their homework.

Well, I want to talk about—

And there's some very high-profile people who are in the group that hasn't done their homework. And what's interesting is I've been doing this for 40 years. I fixed the problem 40 years ago. Not one of the people who disses oils and seed oils and omega-6s, not one of those people has ever talked to me.

Well, I want to talk about these myths because, you know, it's the devil's in the details. Like, Yes, fat is bad for you if it's the wrong kind of fat, and fat's good for you if it's a good fat. You know, omega-6s, if you burn them and pesticide-ridden and all is bad for you. But if it's clean omega-6s and omega-3s, like literally essential, I mean, ALA, which is the essential omega-3, is the primary protectant of your cell membranes from oxidative stress. And so people don't realize that it's like this crazy ridiculous antioxidant healer membrane protector. So talk about a couple of the myths that— maybe the myths that bug you the most that you'd like to fix. Let's correct those errors right now. What would you say the top myths right now, things that we think are right, they're just plain wrong. I call them blind spots currently about fats.

Okay. So the first one is fats are bad. No, good fats are good and bad fats are bad. And there's both, right? And that's why the book is called Fats That Heal, Fats That Kill. There's literally two opposite stories on fats. And so what you want to do is you want to bring in, you want to figure out which are the fats that heal and bring them in. And you want to figure out which are the fats that kill and keep them out. That's all it, that's all that's about. So that's number one. Number two, omega-6s are bad. No, they're essential. Essential means you can't make them, you gotta have them, you gotta bring them in from outside. So omega-6s are not that, but damaged omega-6s. And the people who talk about seed oils, don't use seed oils, don't use omega-6s, they're blaming an essential nutrient for what they should be blaming on the damage done to that essential nutrient by industry or in the frying pan. Omega, you know, there's a guy, a crazy guy who was a professor at a university in Oregon, who said, if you eat enough omega-3s— sorry, if you eat enough B vitamins, you don't need essential fatty acids. That's completely, completely crazy. When he said that, there were already 6,000 studies that showed that omega-6 and omega-3 are essential. But there are people who follow this guy and who spout his words. And there's a lot of people here when you get high-profile people who are miseducated, who don't take on the responsibility of having a large profile and therefore double-checking their truth, then they educate everybody else. And it happens a lot in academia, by the way, you know, because somebody writes a book, uh, like a textbook. And there's expert in one topic, but not in all topics. And then they quote somebody else on other topics they're not expert in. Well, if the guy at the front end got it wrong, everybody who copies textbooks, because I have, they all do that. Then, yeah, I've seen like 10 generations of textbooks where they all got it wrong because the guy at the, at the front got it wrong. And they all copied him. And now we're doing it, only we're doing it on media, on podcasts, you know, on social media. And there are, and some of these, especially when it comes to fat, all those guys should be talking to me. Because I fixed the problem 40 years ago. But I don't have the profile that some of them have. And so they very You know, very, I mean, I don't think they, I'm not even blaming them. I'm not even saying that they're being mean and they're lying to people, but they haven't done their homework and they need to do their homework. And you get to recognize when you do the homework, omega-6 is just as essential as omega-3. They need to be in the right balance because otherwise one will crowd out the other or the other will crowd out the one. Is it goes through the same system to turn into hormones in the, in the cells. So you need to ratio, right? They need to be undamaged. They need to be made with health in mind. They need to not be containing pesticides and they should be packaged in glass because plastic leaches into oil quicker than into water because plastic and oil have very similar chemistry.

I mean, plastic actually came from oil, so which is, it makes sense like, wow, they're very similar. Yeah.

Came from earth oil.

Yeah. Correct.

But they're long chains of carbon and hydrogen. And so oil will dissolve in plastic or plastic will dissolve in oil. And now we're talking about, you know, microplastics and all of that. You know, the oils, when you get oils made with health in mind, they don't have plastics in them. They go through your system. They move out through your body to your skin. They will carry plastics with them, and you can get rid of plastics with oils through your skin by sweating.

There's research, there's studies on that?

No, I just know the chemistry. I don't know anybody. I know that, I know it related to it. Vietnam veterans poisoned by Agent Orange. They were put in a sauna 15 to 30 minutes a day for 3 to 6 months, and they were given undamaged oil to drive the Agent Orange, and they were literally able to measure the Agent Orange in the oil part of the sweat and to monitor its decrease in their bodies. Well, plastic, plastic is like that too. So it fits the same, it fits the same story.

Gotcha. I remember with fish oil.

That was done in, that was done in the '80s, by the way.

That it was. Yeah. I think, um, Dr., oh, there's a physician in Texas who used to have a, um, he's now passed away, who did, had a detox clinic. He actually wrote the textbook of environmental medicine with Pizzorno, I believe. Um, and they were actually doing with 9/11 responders, police officers breaking down crystal meth labs in Florida. They're getting sick. They were doing sauna therapy, IV therapy. But one of the part of that was They were doing like, they're sweating for 4 hours and they had massively, they had pretty amazing responses to the toxin levels and the symptoms getting better.

Just if it was Pizzarno, Pizzarno was learned from me about oils. Yeah.

So it's Pizzarno and Walter, um, Krynian, Walter Krynian was the other, was the one.

Oh, Krynian. I don't know Krynian, but the guy who did the Vietnam veteran studies, his name was Lasseter.

Lasseter. Before you go. Real helpful advice without the hype. If that's what you came for, you want the next episode too. So subscribe now wherever you listen. And here's how you can help someone else find the exact same thing. Leave a quick review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. One line from you could change someone else's health. Thanks for listening. Yeah, I think it's also the devil's in the details. I remember maybe 15 years ago there was people came out saying fish oil caused prostate cancer. Everybody got all upset about it. And so I decided to read the article because it didn't feel right to me. It's like, you know, it didn't feel right. So I actually looked at the article.

Fish oil or flax oil?

It was, well, here's, okay, well, let's, devil's in the details, right? They check, they check blood levels of omega-3s. And they noticed that if your blood levels of omega-3 were higher, those people had a higher incidence of prostate cancer. And they assumed they were taking fish oil. And so therefore the connecting the dots was, aha, therefore fish oil causes prostate cancer. But they never asked them if they were supplementing and they never found, you know, so it's like maybe they were taking full tainted flax.

No, it's what the point was is like, so I can tell you, they, I can tell you because there was study done that said where they came to the conclusion that flax oil will cause prostate cancer. But when they did the studies, they never used flax oil. What they used is alpha-linolenic acid, the plant-based omega-3 essential fatty acid, but they got it out of ampoules. And the ampoules are all— come, the oils in ampoules are highly refined, highly chemicalized, highly processed. And it's probably, it's the damage done to the alpha-linolenic acid That causes the problems. Yeah. But again, they, and then they went around and saying, oh no, no, you shouldn't use flax oil because flax oil has more alpha-linolenic acid than any other oil. And we did this study on alpha-linolenic acid, not flax oil, on alpha-linolenic acid that says this stuff that we're using causes, you know, increases the cancer cell growth. Wasn't even— they didn't even study prostate. They just did cell culture.

So let's transition to your most recent book, the last part of our conversation today. Tell us about it. What are your goals with this book? You know, what are your goals with writing this? Well, and getting out there to the public.

Yeah. When I wrote Fats That Heal, Fats That Kill, I targeted towards the 1%, either that have background or that are really interested in health. And we wrote it to the level that grade 8 students can understand because my brother was a teacher and he took, put me in front of his classes and he had me do the explanations and they, and they could understand. So grade 8, grade 9 level, right? So it's, but it's, it's not easy reading. You have to really pay attention. And I always thought I'd like to write a street-level book. And that's what, and I didn't get around to it because I was traveling. So it, it took a long time. It took 20 years to, almost 30 years to write Your Body Needs an Oil Change. But I did something else on top of that. I updated it, whatever, what's going on, and I broadened it out. And start to talk about the thing that I'm really most interested in now is I want to turn health into a teachable field. You know, we have a healthcare system. It's about disease. What is health? I went to medical school. I did one year. And I, because it's called healthcare and I wanted to know what health is. I'm always looking for the good stuff. Health I like and peace I like and truth I like and harmony I like because I came out of the war. So I'm kind of, Like, I'm always looking for the good stuff that really works, right? So I went to med school. We only learned about disease. So I went and talked to the dean. I said, I came here to study health. What is health? And he looked at me with these very compassionate brown eyes. And he said to me, we don't know. We're working on it. And I was shocked. Because I thought healthcare, so we, you know, you, if you know what health is, you can help people get healthy. But you gotta know what are the principles of, what are the components. We've never done that. Medicine has never done that. We don't have Health Canada is about disease management. Your healthcare system is about disease management. And like I said, it's not, it, that's it. There's a place for it. But couldn't we, shouldn't we be teaching health based in nature and human nature to kids in grade school, in high school, in university, in college? And shouldn't we maybe be creating every field of knowledge around an understanding of the needs of a human being, of what are the needs of a human being for health? So there's physical, there's mental, there's emotional, there's social, there's environmental, there is energy, and then there's awareness. All of them play a role in health. So I, in that, I start getting into that as well. So it's a kind of a bridge between, between Fats That Heal, Fats That Kill, and the book that I'm writing on the nature of human nature. And, you know, total health based in nature.

Gotcha. So just a couple closing thoughts here. If you were to walk away, what would be the one thing you'd want someone who's listened to you, who's familiar with your fats, would be the one thing that you'd want them to get away from the conversation today?

Jeff Duff fats?

Health in general. Like, what would be the one thing after our conversation you want them to—

Health in general, I would say you were born, you have inherited a genetic program That has never failed reproductively for 4.5 billion years. Don't screw it up in your lifetime. Okay? And fundamentally, you want to know what health is? You need to look at awareness, you need to look at energy, you need to look at inspiration, you need to look at the body, you need to look at protection, you need to look at social group, you need to look at environment, you need to look at the infinite awareness, the big picture, whatever you call that, field or God or peace. And you need to look at emotional states. There's 10 parts. Each one of them has a different nature, a different function, needs a different kind of attention on a regular basis, goes off in a different way and responds to a different kind of intervention. You want to be totally healthy? And live the best possible life, you need to give each one of those 10 its due. Okay? Is that hard? No, it's not hard. It's not hard, but you gotta, because you gotta start. And of those, all of those, the single most important is to find the peace that is your essential, that is your universal essence, as well as the universal essence of the entire universe. When you find that peace within yourself, everything else will begin to fall into place. By the way, there have been some fairly famous teachers in the past who have said things like that.

Yes.

What you're looking for is within you.

Correct. Yeah.

Yeah.

I really thank you for your time today. If people after this conversation wanna learn more about you, hear about your books, um, where can people go to find more about you and You know, what are you doing next?

Yeah, I'm on Facebook. I'm on Instagram. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on, I have a website called udoerasmus.com. That's a work in progress because we're changing what we're doing. I have a YouTube channel that has a lot of stuff, a lot of my work on oils, interviews I've done. And what I'm doing next, I'm 84. You know, I'm in pretty good shape for an old guy. And before I check out, I want to turn health, total health, and human nature into teachable field because those two are the most important topics for every human being. We all wrestle with them and we're all getting bad information that's based on basically people making money on problems rather than making money on solutions. Pollution. And, you know, and so we've built a system that is destroying us because we've made money more important than life. And we, we need to look at that. I mean, we individually need to look at, need to look at where we are in that and to what extent we are self-destructing humanity by being, living out of line with it.

Well, thank you so much for your time today, your wisdom, your words of encouragement. And anybody recommending, who has interest in fats, you know, The Fats That Heal, Fats That Kill is definitely— you said it was written at 8th or 10th grade level. I was reading, I'm like, this seems more like a college level to me. It seems kind of, you know, kind of in-depth. So, but it's a great book on fats. Yeah.

Yeah. I put the diagrams in there and all that. That's— but the explanations are all grade 9 level.

Really, thank you for your time.

And thank you for having me. I hope that all of your listeners and viewers get benefits. Absolutely.

All right. Everybody take care and we'll talk to you soon.

All right. Thanks.

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