Chewing the Fat

With Udo Erasmus, Ph.D Taken from the Holistic Times The Newsletter of Clayton College of Natural Health Volume 12 Number 3

On TV talk shows, the international lecture circuit, and countless telephone consultations, Udo Erasmus is a fat-talking man.

He feeds each audience a feast of fats and figures and fat-astic new findings. For more than two decades, his fat-finding mission has taught nutritionists, neighbors, physicians, and a growing mass of followers about the good, the bad, and the ugly fats. His ground-breaking first book, Fats and Oils, mushroomed into what many consider the definitive text on essential fatty acids: Fats That Heal Fats That Kill.

In its upcoming 16th reprinting, his big fat book still points a pudgy finger at industry carelessness and gives guidelines on how to get back to living in line with nature. Careless food processing robs nutrients from our food supply and creates toxic molecules, he says. The gut-wrenching result is a world whose population is malnourished, toxic, obese, and ill.

Dr. Erasmus has spent more than 20 years immersed in oils: developing methods for making oils with health life rather than shelf life in mind; introducing flax oil and ultimately refining it into Udo’s Oil, a proprietary blend containing all the things we need from fats and nothing that we don’t. He offered to serve up some holistic kitchen table wisdom from his home office in Vancouver, British Columbia.

HT: What are the bad fats that we should eat less of?

HT: For decades nutrition consultants have steered their clients away from white sugar and white flour. It seems that removing white oils and white fats from the diet has not had nearly the attention it deserves.

UE: The white lie is an optimistic notion that willpower alone is enough to make enlightened choices. The truth is, in order to grasp what’s really at stake, we need good information to direct all of our choices, all of the time, in the direction of health.

HT: What should practitioners recommend instead of damaged cooking oils?

HT: What happens when people don’t get enough omega-3?

UE: Omega-3 is essential, and “essential” has a special meaning in nutrition. Essential is any nutrient that the body cannot make, but must have, and therefore must obtain from food. Essential also means that too little leads to defi- ciency symptoms that are degenerative in nature, get worse with time, and too little for too long leads to death. Essential means that if enough of an essential nutrient is returned to the diet, then all the deficiency symptoms arising from too little of that nutrient are reversed.

Our innate intelligence knows exactly where to take these and how to use them to build healthy bodies—if enough of the essential nutrient is made available to the body.

Research over the past 20 years has shown that increasing omega-3 intake improves virtually every major degenerative disease of our time. This means all of the degenerative diseases that improve by increasing omega-3 in the diet must be, at least in part, caused by omega-3 deficiency. That’s because omega-3 can only reverse what is caused by omega-3 deficiency. Omega-3 will not reverse magnesium deficiency or vitamin C deficiency, only omega-3 deficiency. The implications here for health are enormous.

HT: The benefits of omega-3 cover the entire body, because every cell, tissue, gland, and organ requires omega-3 for normal function, and optimum omega-3 intake for optimum health.

UE: That’s right. From cancer to CV factors, both types of diabetes, bone strength, skin health, energy level, brain function, mood, learning, concentration, sleep, inflammatory conditions, autoimmune conditions, weight maintenance (by increasing fat burning in the body), liver and kidney function, digestion, hair and nail health, hormone function including menstrual tension, oxygen metabolism, connective tissue health, and healing of injuries.

HT: How much is optimum?

UE: That depends on what form of omega-3 you use, and how much the oil is omega-3. After I wrote Fats and Oils I developed flax oil, which contains almost 60% ALA and is therefore the richest source of omega-3 available to us, but contains only about 15% omega-6 (4:1 ratio of omega-3 to omega-6). I later became omega-6 defi- cient on this oil, and thereafter developed a blend that contains about 50% ALA and 25% LA (2:1 ratio of omega-3 to omega-6). That’s what I use today.

I recommend 1 teaspoon/day as a minimum and 1 tablespoon/ 50 pounds of body weight/day as optimum for non-athletes. Athletes take as much as twice the optimum.

HT: Either way, isn’t that a lot of oil?

UE: People consume two or three tablespoons of oil per day in normal food use, based on the fear that they will get fat. Overweight simply comes from eating more carbohydrates than we burn.

Good fats actually help us lose fat, because they turn on the body’s fat-burning mechanisms. Omega-3s, which are too low in most people’s diets, turn on fat-burning most effectively, and we use them for weight management all the time. We lower carb intake and increase oil blend intake to increase energy, and turn on fat burning in the body. Then we get them active. The fat just melts off people when they do this.

Oils are major nutrients. It would be a big mistake to limit daily oil consumption to a few capsules of fish, flax, evening primrose, or other oil. A person would not obtain enough oil for the body’s requirement, even if it is a very good oil. Like protein, carbohydrates, greens, and water, we need oil in quantities of several tablespoons rather than in pills or capsules.

HT: How much oil do you use every day?

UE: By experimenting, I found that my daily optimum is 4 tablespoons of my oil blend. This equals 2 ounces (56 grams) of oil and, at nine calories per gram, makes up about 504 calories or about 25% of my daily calories.

I add the oil blend to foods after they come off the fire, but never use it for frying, as frying does great damage to good fats. Other than that, the oil blend is compatible with all foods. It’s great for hot soup, steamed veggies, pasta sauce, and mashed potatoes after these hot foods have been served, which cools them down.

It’s good in salad dressings, mixed into veggie or fruit juices, yogurt, cottage cheese, protein shakes or apple sauce (apple sauce disguises the oil remarkably well). The good fats enhance flavors and improve the absorption of oilsoluble nutrients from our foods.

HT: Is it true that the body cannot convert the seed oil omega-3 (ALA) to the fish oil omega-3 fats EPA and DHA?

UE: That’s what I’ve called a fishy fish story. When I began to work with seed oil omega-3 fats 20 years ago, I often heard that the body is unable to convert the seed omega-3, ALA to fish n- 3s, EPA and DHA. But after spending six years researching fats for my Ph.D., it turns out the only thing on which critics agree is that some human bodies may be unable to convert enough ALA to EPA and DHA.

HT: Which is to say that these critics are hedging their hedge with another hedge.

UE: All of which is pure speculation! (Laughs) In fact, all human populations are genetically able to produce the enzymes necessary for the conversion to take place. The Hindu culture is vegetarian, eats no fish or fish oils, and other than small amounts of clabbered milk used for its content of probiotics, eats no animal foods at all. Yet their brains contain just as much DHA as that of fish eaters. And their vision, another indicator, is just as good. Sperm requires DHA for fertility, and a DHA-poor diet would result in people who are deaf, blind and sterile. They would not reproduce, and their genes would be lost from the gene pool.

HT: Are there nutritional factors that increase or decrease the body’s ability to convert ALA to EPA and DHA?