Are Seed Oils Really Bad? A Different Look at Fats, Inflammation & Health

Natalie Tysdal (00:02)

Udo, thank you so much for joining me.

Udo Erasmus (00:04)

Well, thank you for having me. It's going to be fun.

Natalie Tysdal (00:06)

So

as we were getting to know each other before we started recording, told you I've been a consumer of your product for years. You have an original name, so it's easy to remember. But tell us about your history and how you got into this world of healthy oils.

Udo Erasmus (00:23)

Okay, so the long story is I came out of the Second World War. I'll be 84 this year. And we lost everything, like the culture and the farm and the house, everything. The France. And I kind of grew up not feeling entitled by any culture or any richness, because we were like I was a

war baby than I was a refugee than I was an orphan. And so my life was always about it. I was very insecure and I was trying to figure out how things worked because when you know how things work, gives you some predictability. So I was born scientist, always checking things out, busted a lot of things when I was a kid, ⁓ messing with them and trying to figure out how they worked. So that's the long story. And I ended up in biological sciences, took a year of medicine.

Natalie Tysdal (01:15)

way to learn.

Udo Erasmus (01:22)

left because they only teach about disease and they told us that a doctor should always sound as though he knows what's going on even when he doesn't. We call that lying on the farm. So I ended up in biochemistry and genetics and I got into psychology because I wanted to know what life is. I wanted to know what soul is. I wanted to know what health is. I was looking for what is the good stuff and ⁓ didn't find it at university. So eventually I left and

and got married. My marriage broke up. I wanted to kill something, so I took a job as a pesticide sprayer. And I was super careless. And after three years of doing that, I got poisoned by the pesticides I was spraying. And so I went to the doctor and said, what do you have for pesticide poisoning? She said nothing. That's when the penny dropped. ⁓ my health really is my responsibility.

And then because I had the background, started trying to figure out, how does, you know, I hadn't studied health, I'd studied biology. So you're learning something about health in biology because you're studying the normal functioning of normal creatures in normal situations. And in medicine, we only studied disease. So I, I, and I, I wanted to know what health is. Anyway, so I then went into the journals and read everything I could find about

Essential nutrients, know, 18 minerals, 13 vitamins, nine essential amino acids, two essential fatty acids. Your body can't make them, but has to have them, can't make them from anything else in your body. Got to bring them in from outside. If you don't get enough long enough, you die of any one of them. If you bring them back in adequate quantities before you die, all the problems that come from not getting enough are reversed. Right?

Natalie Tysdal (03:15)

Yeah.

Udo Erasmus (03:16)

Because life knows how to make a body work provided we take responsibility for not poisoning it and bringing in all the essential building blocks. And I got stuck in oils because that was the most confusing area. And I was because I was sick, I needed, I didn't need whitewash, I truth. And so I dug through it and what got me was I read a study that said omega-6 is an essential nutrient.

Right now people are saying, you know, Omega 6 is and seed oil is really bad. You shouldn't use them. But Omega 6 is an essential nutrient. You have to have it. If you don't get enough long enough, you die, right? And so I said, read the study, Omega 6 is an essential nutrient. And the very next study said Omega 6 gives you cancer and kills you. And I'm going, what? How can that be true? I have to take it so it can kill me?

Natalie Tysdal (03:51)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so frustrating. Yeah.

Udo Erasmus (04:15)

And I said, no, I must be missing something. And so I started looking at how oils are made. And I found out that when oils are made to give them a long shelf life, they don't make them because they're interested in health. They're interested in money. ⁓ So if you want oils, which are the most sensitive of our nutrients, they're damaged by light, by oxygen, and by heat.

omega-3 are five times more sensitive than omega-6. Super sensitive, need the most care, we give them the least care. And to give these things that are really sensitive a long shelf life, they figured out if you treat them with harsh chemicals, sodium hydroxide and phosphoric acid, and then you bleach them to take the color molecules out that absorb light and that then damages the oil, and then you make a mess when that happens, and then

to clean up the mess. You have to heat the oil to frying temperature for about half an hour. At the end of that you have a colorless, odorless, tasteless oil.

but you have about half to 1 % of the molecules of that oil have been damaged and turned from something in nature that life made a breakdown program for into something that never existed in nature.

Natalie Tysdal (05:27)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

It feels like half of what we eat these days, you know, if we're not, if we're not aware of it, if we're not paying attention and buying the right things.

Udo Erasmus (05:39)

Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right, so when you buy the oil, it's already half to 1 % damaged. If you then throw it in the frying pan, which is the dumbest thing we've ever invented to do with food, if health is our goal, then you've got to damage another five to 10 times more of the molecules. And so I say, okay, well,

Natalie Tysdal (05:48)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Udo Erasmus (06:07)

If they're damaging the molecules, why are they doing that? Because I didn't know. This is all new to me. I learned about fats in university, in university course, but they didn't talk about the damage done by processing. They didn't talk about the fact that there are pesticides in the oils. They didn't talk about the fact that oils, when you put them in plastic bottles, oil will swell the plastic and plastic leaches into oil. They didn't tell you it has any of that.

Natalie Tysdal (06:32)

Ugh.

No.

Udo Erasmus (06:34)

So I called the Oil Chemist Society. It's the umbrella organization of the oil industry. said, I want to talk to a researcher. So they put them on the line and I said, when you know that the way you treat these oils does damage to them, why do you do that? Because I'm thinking, yeah, why would anybody do that? Why would an industry damage our food and then sell it to us?

And he said, well, one of the reasons we do it is because we can get rid of half the pesticides in the oil. That's how I found out that there are pesticides in cooking oils. And in my head is another explosion. I didn't say it to him, but I said to him, well, why don't you use organically grown oil, organically grown seeds? Then you don't have a pesticide problem. And he had no answer. He had never heard that question.

was this long silence on the phone and I waited. I could talk, but I could listen too. So I waited and when he got back to me, he was really angry. said, what the hell is your problem? The oil is only 1 % damaged. It's 99 % good. And if you got 99 % on the exam, you'd be damn happy, wouldn't you? So this is like, you know, and so now I'm saying, okay, if it's only 1%, maybe I'm overreacting.

So we have a saying, when in doubt, do the math. Right? So I asked the question, if I have a tablespoon of an oil that is 1 % damaged, how many damaged molecules will I have in that tablespoon of oil? And I would like you to guess, because you'll see why. Because people don't have a basis for making the guess. Because we don't know how big molecules are. So give me, but give me a guess.

Natalie Tysdal (08:03)

Yes.

No, I have no idea. Yeah.

Udo Erasmus (08:27)

How many damaged molecules in one tablespoon of an oil that is 1 % damaged?

Natalie Tysdal (08:31)

I don't know how

many molecules are in a tablespoon. So 10.

Udo Erasmus (08:35)

I know, I know that's why it has to be a guess.

10. So the 1-0. ⁓

Natalie Tysdal (08:43)

I'm thinking there are going to be multiple zeros now. A thousand.

Udo Erasmus (08:45)

Okay, how many zeros?

A thousand. Okay, so we've got three zeros. The actual number of damaged molecules in a tablespoon of oil that is 1 % damaged is a six followed by 19 zeros. So we're talking about 60 quintillion molecules. And 60 quintillion molecules is more than a million.

Natalie Tysdal (09:00)

⁓ wow.

Wow.

Udo Erasmus (09:11)

damaged molecules for every one of your body's 60 trillion cells. Now these are molecules that are damaged, they're unnatural, they didn't exist in nature. They're created by the processing, by the industry. What's going to happen to those molecules when they end up in your body? They'll take up space and then they interfere with what's supposed to be going on in that space.

And that's why those oils are associated with increased inflammation and higher risk of cancer. And the people who talk about cooking oils being bad and omega-6s being bad haven't done that homework. They say, yeah, there's some problems and they blame the oil for what should be blamed on the damage done to it. Because omega-6s are essential. You can't live without them.

Natalie Tysdal (09:47)

So, yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

Udo Erasmus (10:08)

and you need them in the right ratio with omega-3, they need both to be made with health in mind and not damaged. They should both be organic. They should be in the right ratio because they compete in the body. So if you get too much of one, it'll crowd out the other. And if you get too much of the other, it'll crowd out the one. And I decided I can't get healthy on damaged oils like this. We should be making oils with health in mind.

And so I developed that, I'm a farm boy, so I know how to tinker with stuff. And so we developed a method for making oils where no light, no oxygen and no heat gets to damage the oil from the time they're closed in the seat in nature's packaging, all the way through the pressing, the filtering, the settling, the filling, till they're in a brown glass bottle, nitrogen flushed ⁓ in a box.

cut the light out completely, in the fridge to keep the temperature down, in the factory, in the stores, you at home if you buy it, and if they're shipped for longer than two weeks, we actually ship them refrigerated, like to Asia and to Europe. We ship the oil refrigerated. All right, so what we're doing is we're taking... ⁓

Natalie Tysdal (11:25)

So your oils are all over the world now as

well. Your oils all over the world. I didn't realize that. You shipped them all.

Udo Erasmus (11:31)

Yeah, we're in about

40 countries, but small scale. We're not like a major thing. We started from scratch, bootstrap operation, right? No money, but just like, my God, we could, you know. And then I found out while I was doing my studies that 99 % of the population does not get enough omega-3s for optimum health. And omega-3s are also essential nutrients.

Natalie Tysdal (11:55)

Well, so that was one

of the first questions I had if we could talk about that. Are we mostly deficient in the oil that you produce? Like, do we get it in foods or why do we need to supplement the oils?

Udo Erasmus (12:12)

Well, those are not supplement oils. Those are food oils because we use them in major quantities. Oils are, if you know fats are one of three pillars of nutrition. So you got carbs, proteins, fats, right? So, and of the fats, all the fats, only omega-3 and omega-6 are essential by the definition I gave you that you got, you have to have them and you die if you don't get enough long enough.

Natalie Tysdal (12:23)

Yeah.

Udo Erasmus (12:40)

So only omega-3 and 6 are essential. They're the most sensitive of our nutrients. They need to be in the right ratio because they compete and you need them both because they both turn into a whole bunch of different molecules in your body that have major health benefits. One of the biggest is omega-3s, which are too low in almost everybody. Most people get enough omega-6, but they're damaged.

and they got the ratio off. And so they're getting the omega sixes to do their job, but they're blocking out, they're pushing out the omega threes because they're not getting enough in the first place. And we actually decreased our omega three intake to one sixth of what we got in 1850. And we've doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and maybe even for some people, 10 times our intake of omega six. So we've really screwed up that ratio.

Natalie Tysdal (13:20)

Yeah.

Wow.

What about,

most people, think I'll just take a capsule. You know, I got this and I'll just get it on the shelf. What's the difference in...

Udo Erasmus (13:44)

Well,

there's a difference between food and supplement, right? You don't eat your food in capsules. Right? So what you're supposed to do if you want to be healthy, you want to get the best food you can, the least processed, whole food, organic, raw as much as possible, because there's all kinds of things that nutritional value goes down when you cook and fry.

Natalie Tysdal (13:53)

It's true. Yeah.

Udo Erasmus (14:14)

⁓ and probably for humans mostly plant-based, but they seem to live longer when they're more plant-based, but not plant-based margarine and sugar. That would be plant-based too. It has to be whole food plant-based. ⁓ So you can get those oils from seeds,

Natalie Tysdal (14:30)

Yeah. Yeah, right.

Udo Erasmus (14:43)

or nuts or any whole foods that are not damaged because they all have oil in them. Seeds and nuts have the most, anywhere between 25 and 60 % of the weight of the seeds and nuts is oil. And then they all have different ratios, omega-3 to omega-6. So, you know, if you don't know what you're doing, it's really hard to figure that out. So what we did is, and then so that, so you have the seed oils, those are food oils.

Natalie Tysdal (15:07)

Yeah.

Udo Erasmus (15:13)

And then the supplement oils are like fish oil and krill oil. And you cannot fix what's wrong with the food oil foundation with a supplement. You have to fix the foundation. And a supplement goes on top of the foundation, not instead of. And a lot of people think, fish oil, I'll just take a couple of cups of the fish oil. Well, therefore they're really damaged because they're even more sensitive.

than the plant-based omega-3s. People don't know that's why they burp on you. If you have a little bottle of fish oil and you open it and then you close it put it in your fridge, you can smell the rancidity within days. That's how sensitive they are. ⁓ I would rather say to people, eat the fish, forget the fish oils.

Natalie Tysdal (15:44)

Yeah.

Yeah. Wow.

Udo Erasmus (16:07)

and you don't need a supplement if you get the essential fatty acids because your body will make the fish oil. And the fish oil industry says it won't, but the reason is why it won't is only if you're not getting enough omega-3s to start with. So we fixed that problem. So basically we've exposed their marketing issue as a lie.

Natalie Tysdal (16:24)

So, is the.

Yeah, yeah.

Your product, so it's in a bottle, it's in a dark bottle, you keep it in the fridge. How much do most people take a day, and you drink it straight? Uh-huh. I didn't really just take a teaspoon, but yeah, guess, mm-hmm.

Udo Erasmus (16:41)

Yeah, you mix it in food, spread your intake out over the course of the day. They enhance flavors,

they improve the absorption of oil soluble nutrients. And the amount to take is whatever it takes to make your skin soft and velvety. Because skin gets them last and loses them first. So when your skin is soft and velvety, you know that you've got enough and you need them both to get that feeling. So if you only get Omega-3, that won't make your skin nice.

Natalie Tysdal (17:07)

Yeah.

Udo Erasmus (17:10)

If you only get Omega-6, no. They both together form a barrier in the skin against the loss of moisture. Then you don't need stuff on your skin. Okay. How much is that ballpark in winter? Tablespoon per 50 pounds of body weight per day. So most people would be two to four tablespoons. Now tablespoon has four grams, 14 grams in it. So that'd be 14 fish oil capsules, 28 fish oil capsules, 56 fish oil capsules.

Natalie Tysdal (17:19)

Wow, yeah.

Udo Erasmus (17:40)

That's the difference between food, which is a lot, and supplement, which is little bits. And then you can add a supplement to that and some people will get benefits from doing that. But if you use supplement instead of food, you're completely screwing yourself up.

Natalie Tysdal (17:47)

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, which is generally the case across. ⁓

Udo Erasmus (18:01)

Yeah. And in winter, you need more than in summer because

in winter, more of it is burnt for energy. So when people have drier skin in winter than in summer. So I use four tablespoons in winter and I use two or three in summer. Yeah.

Natalie Tysdal (18:16)

Okay.

So you're 84, you're still working. You've just written.

Udo Erasmus (18:21)

I'm not 84.

I won't be 84 till May. Yeah, really.

Natalie Tysdal (18:24)

sorry, I didn't mean to age you.

Your energy, you look amazing. You're still working and you've written a book. It's called...

Udo Erasmus (18:35)

Your body needs an oil change?

Natalie Tysdal (18:37)

Okay. And tell

me what, I mean, you've told me a lot of these things, but what other tips do you give in the book and how do you help people understand it? Why did you want to write this?

Udo Erasmus (18:42)

Yeah.

Well, did

two things. ⁓ original tome is called Fats That Heal, Fats That Kill. That's a very thorough book, 450 pages. Anything you'd ever want to know about fats and oils and probably a bunch of things you wish you didn't know. But it's very, very thorough. What I wanted to do is write an easier version of it, like a street level version.

Natalie Tysdal (19:07)

But knowledge is power.

Udo Erasmus (19:17)

And so ⁓ your body needs an oil change is that version. But I also have in the meantime, because I was going to write it 20 years ago and I never got around to it because I was busy traveling and and doing do it, know, lecturing and doing all that. And by this by this time, I've learned a few other things. So I use that as a bridge to the thing that I'm working on now, which is

We've lived on this planet for 200,000 years and the two most important things that we should know is what is a human being? Who am I? This is the existential question. Who am I? What am I here for? How does it work? What is this? Human nature. And then the second one, everybody every day has something going on with their health.

You you burp or you get gas or your breath smells or you get diarrhea, you get constipation or you get gut aches. So health is like huge. And we have never created a teachable field of health or a teachable field of human nature. How stupid is that? You know, we know more about our neighbors than we know about ourselves. It's like, how stupid is that? ⁓

Natalie Tysdal (20:18)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah. It's

why I do health news. We're always learning. I talk to people like you, yeah.

Udo Erasmus (20:44)

Yeah. And so I've decided, yeah,

and I've decided that I'm going to turn health based in nature and human nature, because that's where health comes from. It doesn't come from the medical profession and it doesn't come from the government and it doesn't come from the lawyers. Health was invented by life in nature. And there are 10 parts to it. nature and human nature, the 10

several distinct and separate components and each one 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. And when you live out of line with nature and your nature, any one of those 10, you're going to have illness consequences.

And when you get back in line with that part of nature or your age, you get your health back. That's the model. So I'm working on that. the beginning of that is in ⁓ your body needs an oil change.

Natalie Tysdal (21:57)

Wow. Well,

the oil change alone, like, you know, it's the little things we do. It's the knowledge first, you have to know, and then the little things we do. ⁓ Again, it's why I do what I do in learning. It's like, yeah.

Udo Erasmus (22:02)

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and I

would say oils are the most neglected area in nutrition and most confused and most misunderstood and most misrepresented and most lied about. Right. So I, so I fixed that. ⁓ you know, I, well, all the people who say you shouldn't use seed oils and omega sixes have not done their homework. They didn't look at

Natalie Tysdal (22:24)

Why is that? Why? Yeah.

Udo Erasmus (22:37)

So they blame the oil for what should be blamed on the damage done to it. And what is really interesting, I've been doing this work on oils for 45 years, not a single author of any of the books that dis Omega-6 and C-dols has ever talked to me.

Natalie Tysdal (22:42)

Hmm.

So I hear you and I'm thinking, I'm thinking when I go to a restaurant and yes, I avoid seed oils, but partially I avoid them because I know exactly what you're saying. It's hard to find good, healthy that haven't been chemically treated or haven't been. So you're right. It's.

Udo Erasmus (22:57)

You

Exactly. And

you basically, you're looking at the guy who fixed the problem. And I'm in the Canadian Health Food Association Hall of Fame for starting the industry of making oils with health in mind instead of with shelf life. So, and started that when I got poisoned in 1980. Yeah. Yeah. There's nothing like a kick in the butt to get your attention, right?

Natalie Tysdal (23:17)

Mmm.

So what would you suggest? Yeah, it all starts from a need, So yeah,

absolutely. So if you were to give, I know you put this, it's probably in the book, but because we only have a few minutes left, if you were to give three tips for consuming, know, salad dressings or whatever it is when you're buying.

Udo Erasmus (23:43)

that something needs to be different.

Yeah.

Natalie Tysdal (23:58)

And when you're consuming for yourself and for your family, I'm thinking of, my kids to grow up without all of the toxins. Like what are the three things you would say?

Udo Erasmus (24:03)

Yeah. Okay, I think

the first thing I would say, you have a frying pan in the house, everybody does, go get it, turn it upside down, whack yourself upside the head with it and throw it out.

Natalie Tysdal (24:15)

For anything, for an egg, for, mean, what, never fry anything?

Udo Erasmus (24:18)

Well, you can soft boil,

you can hard boil, you can water scramble, you can eat it raw.

Natalie Tysdal (24:24)

Wow, so frying anything.

Udo Erasmus (24:26)

Frying is the worst thing we've ever invented to do to food if health is our goal. That would be the first thing.

Natalie Tysdal (24:32)

Hmm. Even at a lower heat,

even if you're not turning the heat up really high. ⁓ no, I'm trying to get around it, because I do, use mine.

Udo Erasmus (24:38)

Now you're asking

the Russian roulette question, what can I get away with? Wrong question. Right question is, what do I need to put in place to have the longest life and the best health given my genetics? So what do I need to do? So instead of what can I get away with, tell me the best thing to do. So get rid of that stupid frying pan. That's number one.

Number two, get your oils right. And you either have to go to flax seeds for omega-3s and then maybe sunflower sesame for omega-6. That would be an easy way to deal with it. You need to get the ratio right. Probably,

two tablespoons of flax for every tablespoon of sunflower or sesame seeds. That would give you the ratio. ⁓ Or get oils made with health and mind and the only place where... I mean, I don't know how to do this, but ⁓ we're the only people who have ever done, who've ever made oils with health and mind.

and literally done everything right. Organic, no pesticides, in glass, no plastic, a box around it to cut the light out, in the fridge to keep the temperature down. then mixed and matched different oils to get the best ratio of omega-3 to omega-6, which is twice as much omega-3 as omega-6. And then you use it in your food after it comes off the heat.

So you can put it in hot soup, but you will never ever, ever, should you ever put that in the frying pan. Because the better an oil is for you when it's good, the more it gets damaged when you put it in the frying pan.

Natalie Tysdal (26:32)

Hmm.

Right. What about

what about other oils that are really popular avocado oil, coconut oil? Okay.

Udo Erasmus (26:45)

Avocado oil has no standards. There are no

standards for it. They've been suggested. No standards done to the oil by the industry. And they probably get it out of rotten avocados. So then you have free starting material and you can do a chemical feast on it and pull something out. You know, that's what they do with the fish oil. They come out of rotten fish heads and skin and stuff like that, right?

Natalie Tysdal (26:57)

Ugh.

Udo Erasmus (27:12)

So they have raw material that's free and then they can make something out of it and make money on it. That's one of the reasons. So that was one. What other oils? Olive oil has no omega-3s. That's the one that's missing or too low in 99 % of the population. Only 10 % omega-6. All the rest of what's in olive oil your body can make out of sugar and starch.

Natalie Tysdal (27:12)

Ew.

So ⁓ olive oil.

Udo Erasmus (27:40)

What's good about olive oil and why it's popular is because if it's extra virgin and sometimes they cheat on the labels and if it's actually really olive oil, sometimes they dilute it with other oils because the demand is much bigger and the olive oils grow very slowly. So it takes a long time and the demand grew very quickly in the past 20 years.

If it's really extra virgin olive oil, it hasn't been damaged by the processing. That's the thing that is nice. And then people like it because it's stable, but the oils you need that are good for health are not stable. So they have to be treated with more care. So I don't use olive. I eat olives and I think in the olives, you know, they're like superfoods. They're like super spices, have a ton of really good, healthy things in them.

Natalie Tysdal (28:14)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Udo Erasmus (28:39)

Eat the olives, forget the olives. My recommendation.

Natalie Tysdal (28:41)

Okay, okay, so you

gave me two tips, what was your third?

Udo Erasmus (28:46)

Third one has nothing to do with nutrition.

Practice stillness. Every day takes some time to just be with yourself to get to know yourself. To find out how incredible it feels just to be alive, not always doing stuff and getting her done and running around and you know, but just to be present in the magnificence of your own existence because you'll find your peace there.

pieces built into you as your universal essence. And unconditional love is your individual essence, which is the life energy, which unconditionally loves and cares for your body 24 seven life long. Wouldn't it be nice to feel that love? So you have peace and love. And then when you feel those, then it inspires you and you shine into the world.

Natalie Tysdal (29:41)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Udo Erasmus (29:52)

And

then you probably don't go around killing people and beating people up and doing all the stupid things we do because we're disconnected from ourselves and don't know how incredibly beautiful we are and all life is on this planet. So I would make that number, I would actually make that number one. Yeah.

Natalie Tysdal (29:54)

Yeah.

Such an important part. I would make that number one. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, such ⁓ great information. And I appreciate you. looking forward to seeing the second book you just mentioned and the first. I'll put links in the show notes for anyone who's interested in finding those books and finding you. And it's just such a pleasure to meet you.

Udo Erasmus (30:25)

Yeah.

Yeah, and thank you for doing what you're doing because if if it wasn't for you i'd be standing in front of my bathroom mirror talking to myself

Natalie Tysdal (30:41)

Well, there's a lot to learn from people who

have created something out of a hardship. So thank you. I hope to talk to you again soon. You know, no and yes, because it's where almost all good comes from, right?

Udo Erasmus (30:50)

Yeah, so we should maybe pray for hardship. That would be number four. Pray for hardship so it straightens you out.

⁓

My best things that have happened in my life came from disasters most of them self created. Poisoned by pesticides. Hello!

Natalie Tysdal (31:08)

We tend to do that.

Well, thank you again, Udo. It's been such a pleasure.

Udo Erasmus (31:15)

All right.

All right. Thanks, Natalie.