Essential Fatty Acids with Udo Erasmus: Rational Wellness Podcast 302
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Udo Erasmus discusses Essential Fatty Acids with Dr. Ben Weitz.
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Podcast Highlights
1:50 Udo first got interested in health after he had a personal health crisis–pesticide poisoning. He was into science in school. He left college and took a job spraying pesticides and he was very careless and did this for three years and got pesticide poisoning and he suffered with cramps, nausea, dizziness and severe fatigue. He saw a doctor and asked what she could do for pesticide poisoning and she said nothing. So he researched it and realized that since 98% of the atoms in your body are removed and replaced, and he ended up focusing on the importance of fats for health. He read a study on the importance of omega 6 fats, which are essential and must be consumed and if you don’t get enough, you can die. And then he saw studies showing that omega 6 gives you cancer and kills you.
6:29 Udo started looking into how oils are made and they are often treated with sodium hydroxide, phosphoric acid, and bleached. Then the oil goes rancid and smells, so they heat it to clean it up. This is called deodorization or molecular distillation. You end up with a colorless, odorless, tasteless oil and some of the oil molecules are damaged by the heat. The oil industry admits that 1% of the oil molecules get damaged, but this actually translates to 60 quintillion damaged molecules. It is more than a million damaged molecules for every one of your body’s 60 trillion cells. And these are molecules that never existed in nature. These oils should be treated with extra care, since they are easily damaged. The omega-3s are particularly sensitive to damage. The worst thing we can do with an oil is to put it in a frying pan and heat it, where it can be damaged by light, oxygen, and heat.
10:13 Many people are eating these damaged molecules and the average person consumes two to four tablespoons per day. And omega-3s are damaged 5 times quicker than omega-6s. And some of the most common oils like canola and soybean oil do contain some omega-3s. Both omega-3 and omega-6 are considered essential because the body cannot make them. And oils need a lot of care because they are easily damaged by light, oxygen, and heat. And we throw these oils into a frying pan where light, oxygen, and heat damages them at the same time, on top of the damage done by the industry already. More health problems come from damaged oils than any other part of nutrition and more health benefits will come from the oil change your body needs if you dump the dirty oils in your diet and you replace them with oils made with health. Udo dedicated himself to making oils with health in mind instead of shelf life. To make healthy oils you have to protect them from light, oxygen, heart from the time they’re closed in the seed through the pressing, the filtering, the settling, the filling until they are in the brown glass bottle. Plastic leaches into oil, so they need to be a glass bottle in a box in the fridge. They are refrigerated in the factory and in the store and at your home and you should add them to foods after they come off the heat and never use them for frying.
20:35 While some would argue that fish oil is a better source of omega-3s than flax seeds, since the omega-3 in flax is alpha linoleic acid and only 5-10% is converted in the body into EPA and then converted into DHA. And the EPA and the DHA are the active forms of omega-3. But Udo argues that the body converts the amount that it needs.
31:27 “And the worst thing we ever invented to do is learn how to fry. And I tell people, you got a frying pan at home. You probably have a frying pan in your house. Go get it out, turn it upside down, hit yourself on the head with it really hard so it’s associated with pain because that thing is going to kill you. Because when you fry anything, starch or protein or fat, you increase inflammation which is behind most degenerative conditions and pain, and you increase your risk of cancer, each one of them independent of the other when you overheat them. And the worst is oils because they’re the most sensitive.”
Udo Erasmus is a pioneer in the health and wellness movement for over 40 years. Udo co-founded the Udo’s Choice supplement brand starting with his Udo’s oil, which is a blend of omega 3,6, and 9 oils from flax seeds, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, evening primrose seeds, and other organic sources that can be found in nearly every Whole Foods and health food store in the country. Udo is a sought after speaker and an accomplished author of several books, including Fats that Heal, Fats that Kill, which sold over 250,000 copies and his new book, Your Body Needs an Oil Change, soon to be published. Udo also offers a Healthy Fats and Nutrition Mastery course. His website is UdoErasmus.com.
Dr. Ben Weitz is available for Functional Nutrition consultations specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also specializing in Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure and also weight loss and also athletic performance, as well as sports chiropractic work by calling his Santa Monica office 310-395-3111. Dr. Weitz is also available for video or phone consultations.
Podcast Transcript
Dr. Weitz: Hey, this is Dr. Ben Weitz, host of the Rational Wellness Podcast. I talk to the leading health and nutrition experts and researchers in the field to bring you the latest in cutting edge health information. Subscribe to the Rational Wellness Podcast for weekly updates. And to learn more, check out my website, drweitz.com. Thanks for joining me, and let’s jump into the podcast. Hello, Rational Wellness podcasters. Today I’m very excited that we’ll be speaking with Udo Erasmus about essential fatty acid. Udo Erasmus is a pioneer in health and wellness movement for over 40 years. Udo co-founded Udo’s Choice supplement brand, including his Udo’s Oil, which is a blend of 0mega-3, 6, and 9 oils from flaxseed, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, evening primrose seeds, and other organic sources, and can be found in nearly every whole foods and health food store in the country. Udo is a sought after speaker and an accomplished author of several books, including Fats That Heal, Fats That Kill With sold over 250,000 copies, and his new book, Your Body Needs an Oil Change, which is, I think, soon to be published. Is that correct, Udo?
Udo: That’s correct. We’re working on it.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Udo: A work in progress.
Dr. Weitz: All right. So thank you so much for joining us today.
Udo: Yeah, well, I’m glad that I don’t have to talk to myself in the bathroom mirror, so I appreciate you having me on to talk about what I talk about and think about.
Dr. Weitz: Right. That’s great. So perhaps you can tell our audience a little bit about your personal history and how you got interested in health.
Udo: Yeah. Okay. The long story is I was born during the second World War, so that means I’m going to be 81 this year. And I got really interested in science because things were so unsafe. I felt so unsafe. I was always looking for how things work, because when you know how things work, they become more predictable. And so I got into science and I got into biosciences. I got into psychology. I got into medicine because I thought it was about healthcare, because we call that healthcare, but it’s actually about disease management. And I went back into biochemistry and genetics where you learn how normal creatures work in normal situations, which is kind of a definition of health. So I have a good background in health, but nobody calls that health. They call it biology, and they call it biochemistry and physiology and genetics, and I did all of that. And then I left university, and eventually I took a job as a pesticide sprayer when my marriage broke up and I was really upset and wanted to kill something and sprayed pesticides for a living for three years, really careless, actually walked over the lawns that I’d sprayed barefoot and the skin peeled off the bottom of my feet. So then I was wearing rubber boots. And it was a summer job, so I wore a bathing suit because I’m fair skinned. I always wanted to be darker than I am.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: Yeah. When you’re discontent, you always want different than the way you got it.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: And three years, I got poisoned by the pesticides I sprayed. I ended up with cramps, nausea, dizziness. The biggest thing was no energy. I was 38 years old, and if I walked around the city block, I had to sit down and rest. I was like an 80 year old. I have more energy at 80 than I had at 38.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Udo: And I went to the doctor and said, “What do you got for pesticide poisoning?” She said, “Nothing.” So at that point, I said, you know what? I have a background in biological sciences. I’m going to try and figure out what I need to do. And so I went into the research, read everything I could about health and nutrition, disease and nutrition because the body is made out of food, plus water, plus air.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: And if something goes wrong with the body, the way to fix it is you raise the standard of what you put in it. Because every year, 98% of the atoms in your body are removed and replaced. So if I raise my standard, then in one year I will have rebuilt 98% of my body to a higher standard.
Dr. Weitz: That’s great.
Udo: And I thought, oh, well, that’s cool. So then I was looking at everything, minerals, vitamins, amino acids, fatty acids, fats, proteins, carbs. I was looking at all of that, and I got tangled up with fats because one day I read an article that said, a research study that said, omega six is essential, which means you can’t make it. You have to have it. To live and be healthy, you have to bring it in from outside. If you don’t get enough long enough, you die. If you bring it back before you die in adequate quantities, then all the problems that come from not getting enough are reversed because life knows what to do, provided we take responsibility at our mouth to make sure all of the essential building blocks land in our body.
So omega-6 is essential by that definition. Researchers came up with that definition through experimentation, and the next study I read said, omega-6 gives you cancer and kills you. And it’s like… I was like, what? I have to have it to live and be healthy and it gives me cancer and kills me. There must be something missing here. You can’t have it both ways. And it drove me nuts. It drove me nuts. And it got to try and resolve why, why that would… If that was true, and that was true, there’s something else going on. That made me look behind how oils are made. And I found out that when the industry makes oils, they treat them as sodium hydroxide, add phosphoric acid, very corrosive basin in acid, and they bleach it. And then it goes rancid and smells bad. And now they have to heat it to frying temperature to clean it up. It’s called deodorization or molecular distillation. And then you end up with the colorless, odorless, tasteless oil. And the supermarket shelves are filled with those. And those are the oils that are used in the studies.
Dr. Weitz: So molecular distillation is a chemical process because that is-
Udo: It’s a overheating process.
Dr. Weitz: That’s usually described as a way to get rid of mercury and the other toxics that are found in the ocean.
Udo: Well, yeah, not mercury. You distill something off of the mercury, the mercury gets left behind. You don’t boil off the mercury. But you will boil off pesticides. Half of the pesticides are boiled off when you heat the oil to frying temperature.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: And so they do that to clean up the mess they made. And I found out… So then I called the industry and I said, “Well, you’re doing a quarter.” They said a half to 1% of the molecules are damaged. So I called him and I said, “Well, if you know that your processing does damage to the molecules, why do you do that?” And he says, “Well, one of the reasons we do it is because we can boil off half of the pesticides in the oil.” That was not the right thing to tell me because I’ve been poisoned by pesticides. And I’m going in my head, “What do you mean? The other 50% of the pesticides stay in the oil.” And so I said to him, “Well, why don’t you start with organically grown seeds, because then you don’t have a pesticide poison to deal with.”
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: And there was this huge silence at the other end of the phone. And I waited and waited. And when he got back, he was really angry. He said, “I don’t know what your problem is.” He said, “The oil is still 99% good. It’s only 1% damaged. And if you got 99% on an exam, you’d be damn happy, wouldn’t you?” So now I back off and I say, “Well, first of all, I used to get a hundred percent in genetics because I loved the topic.” But I backed off. I said, “Okay, well, if it’s only 1%, maybe that’s not so much. So then what do you do with that?” Well, do the math. So I said, “Okay, if I have a tablespoon of an oil that has been treated the way industry treats it, and is 1% damaged, how many damaged molecules will be in that tablespoon of oil?” And I’m asking you that question because I know you don’t know, and I want you to guess.
Dr. Weitz: Well, I listened to a few of your other podcasts
Udo: Okay. Then it’s not fair. But when I ask people, always, when I ask live audience, I’ve been doing it for years and it’s really fun, they always estimate at least a billion times too low-
Dr. Weitz: Sure.
Udo: … how many damaged molecules are in that oil? And so I’ll tell you. The number is 60 quintillion damaged molecules. That’s a six followed by 19 zeros.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: How many is that? Well, it’s more than a million damaged molecules for every one of your body’s 60 trillion cells. And you think that’s not going to make a difference?
Dr. Weitz: Of course.
Udo: These are molecules that never existed in nature. And you don’t just eat one tablespoon. Usually two to four is there is optimum intake, and they got pesticides inside of them. And depending on how many omega-3s are in the oil, like in canola oil, for instance, and soybean oil, there’s omega-3s in them. Omega-3s are damaged five times quicker than omega-6s. So you’ll get more damage to oils higher in omega-3s. And most oils don’t contain omega-3s, so you’re not getting omega-3s in your diet. In fact, it was established 1981 that omega-3 is also essential, just like omega-6. Every cell needs them. They’re a nightmare to work with because they’re five times more sensitive to damage than omega-6s. There are only a few sources, and they need a lot of care. And of course, oils, which are the most sensitive of our nutrients because they’re damaged by light, oxygen, and heat, should get the most care, but we give them the least care. We throw them in a frying pan where light, oxygen, and heat damages them at the same time, on top of the damage done by the industry already, right?
Dr. Weitz: Yeah.
Udo: And it turns out now that more health problems come from damaged oils than any other part of nutrition, and more health benefits will come from the oil change your body needs if you dump the dirty oils in your diet and you replace them with oils made with health. And I got to the point where I said, I can’t get healthy. The oils like this. I’ve been poisoned. I need something clean. We should be making oils with health rather than shelf life in mind. And then I began to develop the method for doing that because I came off a farm and we knew how to tinker. So you have to protect them from light, oxygen, heat from the time they’re closed in the seed through the pressing, the filtering, the settling, the filling until they’re their brown glass bottle, because plastic leeches into oil, so that’s another problem. In a brown glass bottle, in a box in the fridge, in the supplement section, in the natural food stores. And then they’re refrigerated in the factory. They’re refrigerated in the store. You refrigerate them at home, and you add them to foods after they come off the heat. You never, ever, ever use these good oils for frying. So that’s what we created. So we created the industry of making oils with health in mind.
Dr. Weitz: So can you describe exactly how you derive these oils without using all those harsh chemical processes that the other companies use?
Udo: Yeah. Okay, the first thing you do is you start with organically grown seeds. That takes care of the pesticide issue. And then what you have to do is you have to build a very tight system through which the seeds are pressed and all of that turned into oil, where no light and no oxygen gets to that system, and you keep the temperature low. That’s fundamentally… But oxygen are very small molecules and light is super, super small, so you literally have to do darkness and nitrogen atmosphere and you have to put nitrogen into that system and to keep oxygen out. And that takes some messing with the technology.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Udo: That’s all. It’s not that complicated, but it requires care. Even when we ship, if it’s shipped for longer than two weeks, we even ship it refrigerated.
Dr. Weitz: So which of the fats that are the healthiest for us? I know you said the omega-3 and 6 are essential, but so many other fats are beneficial as well.
Udo: Like what?
Dr. Weitz: Like omega-9.
Udo: Okay. So if you look at all of the fats and oils in the world, the only two that you can’t make but have to have-
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: … that will kill you if you don’t get enough, long enough is omega-3 and omega-6. Omega-9, your body can make out of sugar and starch. It’s good fuel, but it’s not essential. Saturated, your body can make out of sugar and starch. They’re good fuel, but they’re not essential because your body can make them out of other things. Saturated fats have a bad reputation because they make platelets more sticky and they make you more insulin resistant. So they take you towards heart attack and stroke, but omega-3s make you more insulin sensitive. So they take you away from diabetes, and they make your platelets less sticky so they take you away from clots in arteries, from heart attacks. And the problem isn’t the saturated fats. The problem is that 99% of the population doesn’t get enough omega-3s to protect from the saturated fats. So when saturated fats give you problems, it’s because your omega-3 deficiency. We’re blaming the saturated fats for what should be blamed on damaged omega-3s or not enough omega-3s in the diet. Okay? But the only thing that’s essential from the whole arena is omega-3 and omega-6 essential fatty acids.
Dr. Weitz: Right. Now, your product contains omega six and omega-3s.
Udo: Yep.
Dr. Weitz: And personally, I find that 98% of the patients that I see have too much omega-6 and not enough omega-3.
Udo: Right.
Dr. Weitz: And so therefore I’m inclined to want to just use omega-3s to right balance them out.
Udo: It’s a mistake. I’ll tell you why. I developed flaxseed oil. That was my first oil. It’s the oil richest in omega-3. It has four times more omega-3 than omega-6 in it. I became omega-6 deficient on flaxseed oil. It’s not a well-balanced oil. I got dry-
Dr. Weitz: Right, but most people-
Udo: Hang on, hang on, hang on. Let me finish.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. Yeah.
Udo: Okay. I got dry eyes skipped heartbeats, arthritis like pain and finger joints, and thin paper skin, fixed it by eating sunflower seeds, which only have omega-6s. So I brought the balance back. But the second part of that is that the omega-6s that most people get are damaged. And if I want to make you healthy, I want you off the damaged omega-6s and replace them with omega-6s that are also made with health in mind. That’s why the blend. We have twice as much omega-3 as omega-6. That’s higher omega-3 than omega-6, but not so high you become omega-6 deficient. And the omega-6s are also made with health in mind. That’s why we do that. We’re trying to get you into an oil change, not an oil addition.
Dr. Weitz: Right. The problem is that so many people are eating food cooked in restaurants, they’re using commercial salad dressings. And even if they eat nuts and seeds are getting so much omega-6s that I think we need to focus on omega 3s to balance them out.
Udo: Yeah. Well, you can believe what you want. We did it that way because we’re trying to get people healthy. And I can’t get people healthy on flax oil that can make them omega six deficient.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: Okay? And if you say, well, people get their other omega-6, yeah, they’re all damaged. So my duty as a truth teller is I need to recommend to you very strongly, don’t eat that garbage if you want to be healthy.
Dr. Weitz: So how much…
Udo: We put them in, they’re not garbage, and we want you to get out of the garbage sources that are everywhere. And that’s hard. You have to make decisions. That’s not easy.
Dr. Weitz: How much fat should we have in our diet?
Udo: How much?
Dr. Weitz: Yeah.
Udo: If are they’re the right fats? You can go up to 60% of your calories from fat and stay healthy.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Udo: And if you get too much omega-3 within limits, your body will increase metabolic rate and energy production and will blow them off as heat. You need more in winter than in summer, because in summer when it’s warm, you don’t need as much heat produced. In winter when it’s cold, quite a bit of it is burnt as heat, aside from the functions that it has, the other functions. It has in health and hormone production and regulating molecules and antioxidants, anti-inflammatory immune support and so on, right? So for most people, we recommend a tablespoon per 50 pounds of body weight per day of the blend we developed, the Udo’s oil blend. And most people, most adults would take two to four tablespoons a day, based on weight. And we like to measure what is optimum by how skin feels. When your skin is dry, you need more oil. Skin loses oil first and gets it last because the inner organs get priority on it because essential fatty acids are so important. You can live with dry skin. So skin gets them last, loses them first. If your skin becomes soft and velvety because they form a barrier in the skin against the loss of moisture, then that the rest of your body is tanked up on what you need.
Dr. Weitz: Now, isn’t fish oil a better source of omega-3s because flax seeds contain alpha linoleic acid, which is poorly converted into EPA and DHA with which are the active forms of omega-3s?
Udo: Yeah. Yeah. You’re saying all the stuff that I get told all the time I’ve been at… Just so you know-
Dr. Weitz: I know you’ve heard all these.
Udo: Just so you know, I’ve been in the industry for over 40 years, right?
Dr. Weitz: I know you have.
Udo: 1980, I got poisoned. 1981, omega-3 was established as essential. And so the question about fish oil. Fish oil… Omega-3 is five times more sensitive to damage than omega-6. But did you know that EPA and DHA in the fish oils is five times more sensitive than ALA, the plant-based omega-3 essential fatty acids. And did you know that EPA and DHA are not essential fatty acids because your body can make them out of alpha linoleic acid if you get enough in your body. When we started with flax oil, the fish oil industry changed its advertisements and said the body can’t convert. There was already research that showed that the body does convert, but there are factors that enhance and factors that inhibit conversion.
Dr. Weitz: But isn’t it somewhere around five to 10% or less?
Udo: What?
Dr. Weitz: The conversion of ALA?
Udo: Yeah, the conversion into EPA is about five to 10% in men and women. It’s about five to 10% in women, but about 1%, or sometimes even less in men. But if you’ve measure the turnover of DHA, which is the critical, the one that they say isn’t getting converted, if you measure the turnover, it’s only 2.4 to 3.8 milligrams of DHA a day. And that means if you had one gram of alpha linolenic acid and the conversion rate was half a percent, you would still be making more than you need for your brain. So one is we don’t need as much. The second is, and what we’ve figured out way at the beginning, the issue isn’t that the body can’t convert because that’s not what the research said. The issue was that people are not getting enough starting material to make the conversion. So we said, Let’s give them the starting material, let’s make it with health in mind, and let their body in its tissues, whichever tissue it is, do the conversion itself based on what it needs and how much it needs, and where and when it needs it.” And so-
Dr. Weitz: The other reason why it seems to me that fish oil is a better source because we test, and we look at omega-3 index, we look at omega-6 to 3 ratio, and I find that it takes quite a bit of omega-3 to get that level below four to one or two to one, whatever ideal level we think is.
Udo: Yeah, we don’t even know what the ideal level is.
Dr. Weitz: Some people claim it’s 1:1 in primitive man.
Udo: Yeah, which is BS because if you were living in the Arctic or the Antarctic, you had more omega-3 than omega-6 in the diet. In the Mediterranean, you had more omega-9 in the diet. In the tropics, you had more saturated in the diet.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: So the idea, the historical ratio is complete BS.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: Yeah. So people put out this stuff, and they’re just making it up. Four to one is because the enzymes convert omega-3 four times quicker than omega-6. So they said, well, therefore, again saying, well, we should have the same amount of both, and so therefore we should get four times more omega-6. That’s not true either. The Inuit diet was two and a half times richer in omega-3 than omega-6.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: And then the other thing is in different tissues, the amount of conversion required is different. And so what are you measuring when you measure conversion and ratios? They usually use plasma. You know why they use plasma? Because it’s easy to work with. They’re not even looking what’s in the brain. They’re not even looking what’s in your muscles. They’re not looking at what’s in your liver. They’re not looking at what’s your kidneys. They’re not looking at what’s in your bones. So they’re making it easy to do the work, but then they forget the context, and they don’t give you the context. Let me tell you-
Dr. Weitz: So do you think plasma is not representative of the brain in the other tissues?
Udo: No, it’s not. Plasma, it’s highway, right? You’re carrying stuff from somewhere to somewhere, right? And it’s always cycling through the body. What are you picking up? Right? What do you need converted. If a cell somewhere in your body, if it needs a lot of conversion, guess what? It will create that conversion. If it’s a cell that doesn’t need much DHA, why would it make it? But you’re not measuring the cells, you’re just measuring the highway. You don’t know where those cars are going.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: So something is going on, but you really don’t know what’s going on. And consistently, the doctors would send me their fatty acid profiles and say, “What does this mean?” Well, here’s the thing. Your plasma tells you one thing. Your red blood cell membranes tell you a different thing. Your fat tissues tell you another thing again. And what does it all mean? Nobody really knows. Seriously.
Dr. Weitz: So you don’t really think that there’s a good way to measure our essential fatty acids?
Udo: Let me say, put it this way, if you’re measuring plasma fatty acids and then use, you make the assumption that the plasma tells you what’s going on in the brain, in the back of your eyeballs, in your sperm, in your butt, in your bones, in your liver, your kidneys, your lungs, and your cardio system, then you’re BSing yourself.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Udo: Right?
Dr. Weitz: What about red blood cell-
Udo: Yeah.
Dr. Weitz: … fatty acids?
Udo: Red blood cell fatty acids tell you what’s going on over the last four months. Plasma tells you for the day. Fat tells you for 16 months. So you can have three different measures on the same diet for the three different tissues, right?
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: And that’s why when people sent me those fatty acid profiles, they don’t know what to make of them because they’re different. But why is that? Because if you were on the same diet, eventually that might level out, but not really. If you’re always on exactly the same diet, then eventually your plasma, your blood cells, and your fat tissue should become similar maybe, because maybe omega S are absorbed out of the plasma quicker than omega-6s. See, we don’t even know that, right? When you start looking at it, we know so little. We know so little. The biggest issue, in my view, because 99% of the population does not get enough omega-3s for optimum health, the biggest issue is we need to bring omega-3s in because they’re the most widespread essential nutrient deficiency of our time, 99%, followed by 80% for vitamin D and 80% for magnesium. So we should bring those in. They need to be made with health in mind. That has to be done with great care because of how sensitive they are. And then let the body do what it needs to do. I’m going to be 81 this year. I insist on not using fish oils, or EPA and DHA. And the reason why, I know that on the SAD, the sad American diet, the standard American diet, people’s brain begins to shrink after 50. There’s research to say that. But what was that research done on? That research was done on the damaged oils, that line that everybody’s using. I’m not using any of those oils. I’m using only the blend, all plant-based. I’m not cooking any fish oils, not any krill oil, none of that. My brain hasn’t shrunk yet. And my brain has not shrunk and I have lots of energy. I have lots of energy. But I think what people have missed… And this is because the people who do the studies on oils get grants from the oil industry. So that puts them in a position where they can’t just badmouth the processing. Nobody talks about the processing. But when you look at where our degenerative diseases come from, mostly come from the results of processing. It’s either industry processing or the processing. We do in food prep. In nature, life’s mandate for creatures that eat was fresh, whole, raw, organic, and I would say for human beings, mostly plant-based. Because when we had rocks to hunt with, the great hunters only had rocks to hunt with, they came home without meat a lot. And when they had no meat, they ate vegetables because they don’t run away, they don’t fight back, and they’re easy to hunt down and kill. So we weren’t hunter gatherers. We were mostly gatherer hunters. And when they did come home with something, oh, that was great because it was high concentration of food and high in iron. For instance, good protein, for instance, maybe some herbal stuff in the wild animals, we don’t get that any more from our cows that are standing in their feces and their urine and eat corn instead of grass, right?
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: Grass and wheat. So a lot of has changed from processing. Even how we grow the foods has changed. Fresh, whole raw, organic is what every creature eats, except us. And the worst thing we ever invented to do is learn how to fry. And I tell people, you got a frying pan at home. You probably have a frying pan into your house. Go get it out, turn it upside down, hit yourself on the head with it really hard so it’s associated with pain because that thing is going to kill you. Because when you fry anything, starch or protein or fat, you increase inflammation which is behind most degenerative conditions and pain, and you increase your risk of cancer, each one of them independent of the other when you overheat them. And the worst is oils because they’re the most sensitive.
Dr. Weitz: But what if you fry at a lower temperature using a healthy oil?
Udo: Well, you wreck the oil. Fried oils fry health.
Dr. Weitz: So even-
Udo: Fried oils fry health. Fried foods fry health.
Dr. Weitz: Even at a lower temperature, even with an oil that has a high burning point?
Udo: High smoke point just means that you can do more damage before you notice. Seriously. Seriously. That’s just like… It’s an invention. It’s an invention. I’m sorry to have to break it to you, to your audience, right? There’s a lot of crookedness going on. It is so corrupt.
Dr. Weitz: So how do you make eggs?
Udo: How do you make eggs? Well, a fox, if you’re foxy, then you break the shell and suck it out raw. Okay? We used to do that as kids, hole in one, hole [inaudible 00:33:00]. It’s kind of slimy and it’s like… But you can cook it in water. So you can soft boil it, you can hard boil it, you can water scramble it, and you could poach it. Do you need more than four methods to make eggs? You have to burn the egg and burn the oil? You have to do that?
Dr. Weitz: No. The benefits of frying is that you can cook it up with a bunch of healthy vegetables, mushrooms, things like that.
Udo: Well, you could throw vegetables in your poaching water too. It’s not like… And I have to tell you. The worst thing we’ve ever invented to do to food regarding health-
Dr. Weitz: When you throw-
Udo: … is learning to fry, and the oils that are the most sensitive nutrients that we damage the most in the frying pan.
Dr. Weitz: But when you throw your vegetables in the water, you’re going to leach out a lot of the phytonutrients and you’re not going to get those [inaudible 00:33:55].
Udo: You’re going to leach out some minerals-
Dr. Weitz: … in the water. Yeah.
Udo: You’re going to leach out some minerals in the water. So drink the water. Drink the damn water, right? And if you eat them raw, you’re not losing anything.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: But if you cook them in water, you destroy the enzymes that help with digestion that are in the food. So you wreck those. You kill any probiotics on the food. So you need to replace those too, right? So cooking in water is already bad enough. When you fry an oil, you kill the probiotics, you destroy the enzymes, you lose a percentage of every one of your mineral, not the minerals, of the vitamins. You wreck some of the more sensitive amino acids, you completely trash the essential fatty acids, and then you burn the food. And all that yellow, brown, black turn into smoke stuff, that’s all toxic.
Some people say to me, “Oh yeah, I love the taste of burned steak.” And I just look at him and say, “No, you don’t. Because if you scrape that’s black stuff off a steak and you got a tablespoon full of that stuff and you eat it, it squeaks between your teeth like a chalk and a blackboard.” It’s [inaudible 00:35:19], it’s bitter, it’s scratchy, and it tastes disgusting. Now, why do you like burnt steak? Because you love your mother. Your was bamboozled by the industry to use oil for frying in a time when parents used to say, ‘Oh, the industry would never tell us to do anything that wasn’t good for us.'” There was a time like that. I’m old enough to know that, right? And we used to call… Cooking meant cooking in water, and then the other thing with oil. We call that frying and deep frying.
Now, cooking usually means in oil. So even the meaning of the term has changed, and all driven by an industry that wanted to make money on oils and have global markets. To get a global market, you need two or three year shelf life. And to get the shelf life, they have to treat the oils with sodium hydroxide, phosphoric acid, bleach them, and heat them to frying temperature. And then they keep for a long time, and they can take them around the world. So you have economies of scale, and they can also take garbage like they do with the fish oil. They throw the fish oil carcasses and the heads and the tails and the rectum and all of the inner guts and all that stuff. That’s where they get a lot of the oil from. They’re not getting it from, under the skin. Oh, add the skin when they take the skin off. So they’re taking all that stuff, they throw it in a barrel, it rots. And they take all that stuff, they pull out the oil and they clean it up. And then you get the fish oil. If you get it in little bottles, you put it in the fridge. Once you open it, within two or three days, you can already smell the rancidity. That’s how fast that stuff goes rancid from reaction with oxygen once you open it.
Dr. Weitz: Now, when you take fat supplements, yeah, essential fatty acids, should you consume tocotrienol, which is a form of vitamin E, or herbs or other antioxidants that keep the fats from going rancid?
Udo: Yeah. Okay. This is the first good question you’re asking. No. So here’s the thing. Sugar, starch, and fat, those are fuel foods. Would you agree?
Dr. Weitz: Sure.
Udo: They’re fuel foods. Okay. And what is a fuel food? Fuel food is a food that burns in your cells and creates the fire of vitality, of energy, of life. Does that make sense?
Dr. Weitz: Sure.
Udo: Okay. So you have those three foods. Here’s the thing. If you have a good fuel food and it gives you a nice roaring fire, that is your vitality and your juice, that fire will throw sparks, right?
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Udo: A good fire throws sparks, just like you make a fire in your fireplace. And if you really get it roaring, then you’re going to have sparks fly out, and you’re going to land on your carpet and burn holes in your carpet. So you put a screen in front of the fire. Well, in your body, the screen to pick off the sparks that a strong fire produces are called anti-antioxidants and anti-inflammatories, and those are found in whole foods. But when you make white sugar, all the antioxidants are in the pulp that you throw away. You get the fuel, you get the fire, and don’t get the spark control. That’s why sugar increases inflammation, because inflammation is caused by the uncaptured sparks. And the same thing with white flour, and the same thing with what I call the white oils, because they take all the antioxidants out of the oil when they make those colorless, odorless, tasteless oils. So you’re getting fire without spark control. So I have really good news for you. We don’t take the spark control out of the oils we make. They’re unrefined. The spark control is still in there. But I have even better news for you. This is only recently that I figured it out. When you take omega-3s, about 80% of them are turned into fire. What happens to the other 20%? Well, they’re converted into EPA and DHA, so structural. Out of EPA and DHA, the body makes hormone like regulating substance called eicosanoids-
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: … prostaglandins, prostacyclins, thromboxanes, leukotrienes. And from DHA, the body makes maresins, which are anti-inflammatory for the immune system, and resolvins, which resolve inflammation, so they’re anti-inflammatory, and protectants, which are antioxidants, very powerful antioxidants, and endocannabinoids that make you feel good. So these are all made out of omega-3s. And omega-3 is the only fuel food that not only gives if the fire, but part of it is turned into spark control made out of the same omega-3s. How about that?
Dr. Weitz: I’m not sure I quite follow you there.
Udo: Okay. Well, sugar is fuel food, but it’s not spark control.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Udo: White flour is fuel food, but not spark control. Colorless, odorless, tasteless oils are fuel foods, no spark control. Well, here we have one molecule in the fuel care category, the only molecules that is not only turned into a great fire, but some of it is converted into its own spark control, made out of the same molecule. And when I heard that, when I got recognized this, I said, holy smokes, who came up with that? How incredibly genius is that, that you have something that makes a super fire. And omega-3s make the strongest fire in the body. Our athletes, when they use the blend at a tablespoon per 50, mixed in food spread out over the course of day for 30 days, and they do their sport to exhaustion, before they started and 30 days after they started, they go up 40 to 60% in their performance of their sport when they do it to exhaustion. So huge, unbelievably good fire starter. They also turn on fat burning genes in the body, so they get your fats burning. So they help with weight management. They also turn on thermogenesis. So you blow off heat, you blow off overweight as heat, and they turn into their own spark control. And you know what? It doesn’t come better than that.
Dr. Weitz: So some people would say, rather than consume the oils, why not consume the nuts and seeds? And I know that a lot of times, we’ll use flaxseed sometimes therapeutically. Flaxseeds help to lower lipoprotein A, and flaxseeds can help with metabolism of estrogen to go down the right pathway. But I typically tell people to get organic flaxseeds, and grind them and then consume them that way rather than the oil.
Udo: Yeah. There are some people who don’t trust anybody, so they go back to whole foods in nature. And by the way, this is not a new question for me, that one either, right?
Dr. Weitz: I am not trying to-
Udo: And so the idea is that nature’s mandate is optimum health. That’s really what it’s based on, right?
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Udo: Isn’t that what question’s based on? Nature’s optimum health, therefore forget the oils, just eat the foods the way nature makes it.
Dr. Weitz: Sure.
Udo: That’s [inaudible 00:43:53]
Dr. Weitz: You can make another argument that if you have the flaxseeds, maybe you’re getting [inaudible 00:43:58] and the fiber-
Udo: Yeah. Yeah. Of course.
Dr. Weitz: … the other things besides essential patty acids too.
Udo: Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Weitz: But, yeah.
Udo: Yeah. Okay, that too. So I was asked that question. And I started thinking about it and I said, well, is nature’s mandate optimum health? And my answer is no, not really. Nature wants you healthy enough to grow up, to reproduce, to be there till your kids don’t need you anymore. And when your kids don’t need you anymore, nature doesn’t need you anymore either. And then you get recycled, your body gets recycled. How do you get the body out of here when it’s time from nature’s point of view? Well, you never make it optimally healthy. So as your machinery runs down in your forties or early fifties, if you’re always suboptimally healthy, then recycling perhaps happens earlier.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: So what I tried to do… But then I wanted to prove it, so what I did is I did got all my oil, I completely didn’t do any oils, only from fruits, and mostly obviously seed nuts because they have the most oil. So I took five tablespoons of flax seed oil, that’s all I could take, because they absorbed six times their volume and water, ground them up, and I took three tablespoons of sunflower sesame seeds. And that gave me the two to one ratio that we have in the oil. So that’s why I did it that way. So there I am with 33 tablespoons of stuff to get my optimum intake. Well, I was in California, and it was summer. In winter, I need about four tablespoons to get my skin soft and velvety. In summer, I only need two or three. I couldn’t even keep my skin from getting dry in summer in California where it was warm. Okay? So what I say to people is, look, seeds are nuts, are good foods. They’re lots of good things in them. And it’s true.
Flax has lignans in it. Flax has phytoestrogens that block the strong human estrogens, as well as the strong industrial estrogens.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: So they block those. So that’s helpful. And they have protein in them, and they have some minerals in them, and they have some other vitamins in them.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: So foods are good thing. Eat the foods, try to get the ratio. Ours, we say twice as much omega-3s, omega-6, both made with health in mind, not roasted and salted nuts, fresh seeds and nuts. And do that. And if your skin gets soft and velvety from that, then you can do it on seeds alone. I could not do it on seeds alone. So if you can’t do it on seeds alone, then augment with the oil whatever you get from the seeds and nuts. But you have to do all of this with a certain amount of diligence and foresight. You can’t just like, “Oh, well, I’m just going to eat a bunch of seeds and nuts. Oh, well, I’m just going to eat any oil I can. Oh, I’m just going to eat all this bad stuff.” You have to be deliberate. We live in a time where we have so many bad choices available that we need to make our choices about how we want to live deliberately.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. And I’d like to point out that argument that you just made. You can use that same argument basically against any sort of paleo or we should eat the way ancient man ate, because there’s no reason to necessarily think that the way ancient human beings ate was optimal for them. It’s just what helped them to survive.
Udo: Yeah. Yeah. And I think for a large part of human existence, we have been subsistence survivors.
Dr. Weitz: The goal was to live long enough to procreate. It wasn’t to worry about avoiding heart disease and cancer when you hit 70.
Udo: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But now we’re in a place where the idea that we can cheat nature a little by surviving over 40, right? Then we have to maybe do some things that… There’s a downside to that as well, obviously, right? Because you would say overpopulation. If everybody, according to nature on subsistence should die at 40, and then you got a third of the population is in between 40 and 90, right? That’s a load on the natural system.
Dr. Weitz: Right. So you recommend consuming your oil and to put it on food or just take it a certain number of tablespoons of it a day.
Udo: No, I have never, ever recommended that people should take oil off a spoon. And sometimes people do, and they talk to me and say, “I don’t like the way your oil tastes.” So I say, “Well, how’d you take it?” “Well, I took it off a spoon.” “Well, when’s the last time you took a cooking oil off the spoon?” “Oh, I never do that.” “Well, why are you doing it with mine?” Right? Right? Oils taste like oil. Oil will never taste like ice cream.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: You got to get used to it. So I always say mix it in food and spread your intake out over the course of the day.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: Always. So I’ve never recommend it to do it that way, and I will never recommend to do it that way. But it goes well on hot foods, on cold foods, on warm foods, and it’s compatible with any food. It enhances flavors, and it improves the absorption of the oil soluble nutrients in the foods.
Dr. Weitz: What do you think about the potential health of olive oil?
Udo: Olive oil, if it’s really olive oil, because they’re messing with olive oil quite a lot now, if it’s really extra virgin olive oil, it has been made by a process that does not damage the oil, that’s the good part of it. That’s one of the reasons it has a good reputation. But no omegas-3s.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: And only 10% omega-6, 80% omega-9-
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: … which the body can make out of sugar and starch. And the other last 10%, saturated, body can make out of sugar and starch. So it’s good that it’s not damaged. But in terms of the two, only two things you need from oils, not that impressive.
Dr. Weitz: But there is a fair amount of data that it helps to modulate your cardiovascular risk profile in a proper direction.
Udo: Yeah. Because the damage to the cardiovascular system can come from omega-6 and 3 deficiency, but mostly comes from omega-6 damage and omega-9 damage. And you will not get the damage to the molecules that then do damage in your body from an oil that hasn’t been damaged. And traditionally, olive oil was used cooked in water, this is the traditional use, cooked in water, dumped the water, put the oil on for flavor enhancement and absorption of nutrients. Now, everybody say, “Oh yeah, olive oil’s really good.” then they fry the olive oil. And all the damage that they didn’t do when the oil was made, you do in the frying pan. And then it’s like, no, then olive oil is a bad oil. If you fry it, it’s bad. It’s just that simple. Fried is-
Dr. Weitz: No matter what temperature you fry it at?
Udo: Yeah. Well, because if you do it in water, you won’t burn the food, unless it sticks to the bottom of the pan, which can happen, right? But if you using oil for frying, even if it turns yellow, you’ve changing molecules. So when you say low temperature, if you use oil at the low temperature that doesn’t wreck it’s completely useless because it won’t fry your food, right?
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Udo: So even when the food just turns yellow, before it turns brown, before it turns black, even at that point, you’ve already made changes to the molecules. And those changes are always from natural to unnatural, and unnatural is what is toxic and ends up in your body in some place interfering with what needs to be going on in that space. That’s why the fresh whole, raw, organic. So when you do frying at low temperature, well, that’s better than frying at high temperature, and that’s better than turning oil into smoke, and then inhaling it. But it’s not as good as cooking in water, which is not as good as eating raw if it’s not contaminated.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: So fundamentally, I always tell people, start where you are, but head in the direction knowing that the goal, the standard nature standard for health, fresh, whole, raw, organic, and probably for people, mostly plant-based. And then begin to take steps in that direction. If you fry every day, well, maybe take a weekend off. One day, you don’t fry. That’s a step ahead. Oh, then make it two days. Then eventually, you don’t fry at all anymore. [inaudible 00:53:22] that direction, if you want to be healthy.
Dr. Weitz: What about eating seafood as a source of omega-3?
Udo: Well, seafood, unfortunately, is now the dirtiest meat on the planet because we have been using the oceans as a sewer for so long that the oceans are super polluted. It’s dirtier than chicken meat, which is dirtier than even the cows sitting in their feces and urine, which is worse than if you’re getting something that is actually grass fed and free to move, right?
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: Yeah. You have to understand, it’s my job to not take prisoners because-
Dr. Weitz: Oh no, I know.
Udo: I need to say it honestly, so that you understand something and you can make choices that work for you.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: But if I was a dietician, I’d say, “Oh yeah, frying is not bad for you, but you got to have some fun, so you might as well do it.” No, you’re not never going to hear me say that, right?
Dr. Weitz: Yeah, no, I know that. I’ve heard you in other interviews.
Udo: Yeah. Yeah. I love health. Health is such an incredible gift, being pain free. I’m 80. I’ll be 81 in May. I have not any pain in any of my joints.
Dr. Weitz: That’s great.
Udo: And you know the joints that get fat, you know how the joints swell and all of that?
Dr. Weitz: Yeah.
Udo: I got nothing of that. None of my fingers are bent and can’t straighten, all the stuff that happens with arthritis and stuff.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: But when I was 38, I had the beginnings of arthritis in my knees. So if I just bent my knees standing and put a little pressure on my joints, they hurt. So I had the beginnings of arthritis. All of my siblings have arthritis. I got nothing. Why is that? Fresh, whole, raw, organic, mostly plant-based. Right. And I don’t use the cooked oils, and I don’t buy that stuff in the… I could get a salad in the restaurant that doesn’t have fried oil in it, so I get the salad.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: And at home I have very little bread or pasta. No pasta in the house, no bread in the house, no flour stuff.
Dr. Weitz: What does your diet look like?
Udo: Okay, so one of the things I do, I like tahini. Tahini is sesame.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: It’s like peanut butter, only made from sesame.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: Has good antioxidants. So I get this by the case. 500, it’s about a pound in a glass jar. The glass has oil floating on top.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Udo: Sesame oil. Sesame oil is about 45% omega-3, 40% omega-9, no omega-3. So I dumped the oil off of the tahini and I put my oil on it, the better oil, right?
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Udo: But not only that, I put on cayenne, and I put in ginger, and I put in turmeric or curry, and I put in black seed, and I put in cloves, and I put in ashwagandha and amla and bacopa. The strongest herbs, the most powerful herbs are unbelievably be good, anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant, anti-cholesterol, anti-cardio, anti-diabetes, anti-cancer, anti-lupus. They have so many. And spices are the richest source of those. So what I’m getting is I’m getting my sesame, there’s my protein. I’m getting my oil, both omega-3 and omega-6 made with health in mind. I get all of these other spices that have antioxidants and anti-inflammatories in them, and then I dip my raw broccoli in it, or my carrots, or my cabbage, or my kale, or whatever it is I’m eating. I don’t use potatoes because white potatoes are actually associated with strokes. And my mother actually had a stroke. She loved potatoes, but she also fried butter, so she did some other things that were probably not cool. So that’s what I eat. And then I take my supplements. I take 8,500 units of vitamin D a day. I have not had a cold for three years.
Dr. Weitz: So you just have tahini, that’s all you have? Or do you put the tahini on something? Oh, you said you dip your vegetables.
Udo: I dip your veggies in them. Yeah. So I’m getting my salad with my tahini.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: And then I also eat seeds and nuts. I eat seeds and nuts. And I have some fruit, fruit in moderation. Greens are better than fruit because there’s enough sugar in fruit that to be a concern when people have either infections that love sugar, bacterial infections that love sugar, or immune issues, because sugar inhibits immune function. And cancer cells love sugar, so why feed them?
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: Why feed them? They’re not nice to you. Why be nice to them? Right? And so how do you do that? Well, you change what you eat? You don’t… You starve them, basically. If you don’t have any sugar in your diet, you’re doing something to starve your cancer cells.
Dr. Weitz: Do you have any animal products on a regular basis?
Udo: No, I’m pretty much off of dairy. I used to eat salmon, but I don’t eat it anymore, because like I said, fish is the dirtiest meat on the planet now.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah.
Udo: Well, we’ve done that to ourselves, right? It’s funny, but it’s not funny.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: And I don’t eat eggs. But I’m not a fanatic either. If I go to a restaurant, they make me an avocado sandwich and they put a little sprinkle of feta cheese on it, I don’t jump up and down and start tearing the place down. So I eat a little bit of it on occasion. But instead of milk, I use almond milk, and sometimes oat milk. And when I was a kid, we had lots of dairy. It was all raw. We go into the farmer and got the milk. We used the milk the cows. We made yogurt out of it.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Udo: But when you get milk here and you try to open it up and let it turn into yogurt, it actually rots. That was a big eye-opener for me when I first moved to the city. So that milk is not what the cow gives. It’s very different. You don’t know what else they put in it. And then it’s in wax cartons. You don’t know how much wax ends up in the dairy. There’s the dairy fat. So there’s a lot of issues there. And yeah, a little yogurt occasionally might be okay, but you can get coconut yogurt. That’s just as good for probiotics.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah.
Udo: But I’m not fanatic about it. But I do think… And the more I get older, the more I like raw foods. And I wasn’t always like that. And I’m not doing it because I got this head trip, like this religion in my head about plants. It’s just I’m following what makes my body feel best.
Dr. Weitz: Do you consume teas? Coffee?
Udo: Yeah. Yeah. I have a drink in the morning that’s matcha and turmeric in almond milk.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Udo: But I also make green tea, and occasionally I have some herbal teas. And I drink lots of water, and I eat food that has water in it. So I pay attention to that as well. The best water is the water that’s in foods, but I also have a machine that electrolytes my water so I can make the water more alkaline. And so I pay attention to that as well.
Dr. Weitz: Right. Cool. Okay. So I think those are the things that I wanted to discuss with you. Anything else you want to bring up?
Udo: Yeah. No, we’re good. I also do a stillness practice every day. Because when you get really still, you discover the beauty of your own existence, and it also reverses aging.
Dr. Weitz: Okay. And essentially, you’re talking about meditation?
Udo: Something like that, meditation, self-knowledge, mindfulness, but focused on being present in the space that the body occupies.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: Yeah, so I do that every day. It’s kind of like, we say work hard, play hard.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: We’re missing one. Work hard, play hard, do nothing hard.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: Right? Because that’s your balance.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: Because you can burn out playing too.
Dr. Weitz: Right?
Udo: Burn out working, burn out playing. Where’s the rest time? And you get more rest when you do a stillness practice than you do when you’re sleeping.
Dr. Weitz: Do you use sauna or cold plunge?
Udo: I’m not as big on the cold plunge. I do cool showers. I wouldn’t say they’re ice cold. I do that sometimes, more in summer than in winter.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: And I haven’t done a sauna for a while, but I’ve be been most of the time pretty consistent on sauna. Sweating is good for you. You can’t argue with sweating. The best way to detox is through your skin. If you drive all that through your kidneys or your liver, you might hurt those organs. The worst thing that’ll happen to your skin if you sweat out toxins, you might get a rash.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Udo: But you’re getting rid of stuff and you’re getting rid of it in really the simplest way, and your body’s made for activity anyway. Because if you, there’s nothing to do. You don’t need a body, right? And you could just be a little disembodied spirit floating around somewhere, right? So sweating is a sign of activity. And activity is important for the body. And I have a medicine ball, and I have a little mini trampoline, and I have a shinning bar in one of my door jams.
Dr. Weitz: Oh, okay.
Udo: And so I do stuff. And sometimes I’ll just dance. I don’t need music to dance. I just like the movement. I don’t do it for show. I just do it for what it feels like, and stretching and all of that. So I do all of that. But nothing… I’m not trying to be a bodybuilder. I’m not trying to get really big. I’m just trying to keep body and soul together.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah.
Udo: That requires some activity. I walk. I also do quite a bit of walking, and I do gardening. So I’m active in that way.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah, that’s good. Yeah, I go to the gym. For me, that’s a form of meditation too.
Udo: Yeah. some people do. Yeah. I grew up on a farm, so my deal was always you exert effort to get things done, pitch the hay or move the rocks or whatever. And the idea of going into a gym and then huffing weights and not getting anything done is strange to me. I get why-
Dr. Weitz: Well, it’s like pushing the plow. You’re just pushing the bench press or the plows.
Udo: Well, I understand. I understand. There’s nothing wrong with it. And in the city where you don’t have that kind of activity going on, it’s important, nut I still have a problem with doing that. So I find ways to do gardening or schlep stuff, help somebody move and stuff like that.
Dr. Weitz: There you go.
Udo: Yeah.
Dr. Weitz: Okay, excellent. Well, thank you so much.
Udo: All right.
Dr. Weitz: I’ll send you links after we post it.
Udo: Yep. Yep. Yeah. And we’ll promote you and you’ll promote us. Thank you.
Dr. Weitz: Thank you. Thank you for making it all the way through this episode of the Rational Wellness Podcast. For those of you who enjoy listening to the Rational Wellness Podcast, I would certainly appreciate it if you could go to Apple Podcasts or Spotify and give us a five star ratings and review. That way more people will discover the Rational Wellness Podcast. And I wanted to let everybody know that I do have some openings for a new patients, so I can see you for a functional medicine consultation, for specific health issues like gut problems, autoimmune diseases, cardiometabolic conditions, or for an executive health screen, and to help you promote longevity and take a deeper dive into some of those factors that can lead to chronic diseases along the way. And that usually means we’re going to do some more detailed lab work, stool testing, sometimes urine testing, and we’re going to look at a lot more details to get a better picture of your overall health from a preventative functional medicine perspective. So if you’re interested, please call my Santa Monica Weitz Sports Chiropractic and Nutrition office at 310-395-3111, and we can set you up for a new consultation for functional medicine. I’ll talk to everybody next week.
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