Spreading oil on troubled health issues

Udo Erasmus is a man on a mission to spread the message about the good fats essential for a healthy life

UDO ERASMUS sits down to engage more closely with a member of the audience of more than 200 at his recent public seminar in Dublin. He has been standing – or walking around – for in excess of two hours, answering questions about what foods we should and shouldn’t be eating and how best to cook them without ruining their nutritional value.

Ireland is one of the biggest markets for Udo’s oils and it’s clear many in the audience have tried it. But when he tells us to throw out our frying pans and cook our foods only in water or preferably not at all – “eat fresh, whole, raw and organic” is one of his soundbites – many people shake their heads at what they see as an impossible task.

The next evening in a Dublin hotel where the chef has cooked up some of the recipes from his book Omega 3 Cuisine, co-written with chef Alan Roettinger, Erasmus is relaxing into what is his fifth visit to Ireland.

He says he has spent between six and nine months of each of the past 13 years on the road spreading his message about healthy fats (Omega 3, 6 and 9) which, along with amino acids, vitamins and minerals, are essential for life.

Like other nutritional evangelists, he is zealous and convincing, yet because most people don’t understand how what we eat every day impacts on every cell in our bodies, confusion remains.

“We are told to take responsibility for ourselves, yet we are not given the information we need to do that well. There is so much lying that people are confused,” he says.

“Until we have access to what is true about health, we’ll always be guessing and remain dependent on experts even though they may not always have the answers.”

His message has expanded beyond the nutritional one and he has replaced his lecturing style with a question and answer format.

As well as following his own advice, he exercises regularly and leaves space for quiet time alone every day. “Health is the result of living with your heart aligned with life and your body aligned with nature,” he says.

The fourth child of parents born in Latvia and Estonia, life wasn’t always so attuned for Erasmus. He was born in Poland in 1942 but after the war, his parents “fled” to West Germany and emigrated to Canada in 1952.

“My mother started a pharmacy in the days of herbs and crushed pills and my father had a 112-acre farm on which he built a house and barns,” he says.

Following his second-level education, Erasmus moved to Vancouver to study medicine but transferred to biological sciences, graduating with an honours degree in zoology from the University of British Columbia.

He later abandoned post-graduate studies in biochemistry and genetics and returned to manual work in gardening and carpentry. He married and had three children, but the marriage broke up in 1976 and he never remarried.

He describes a poisoning by pesticides in 1980 as a turning point in his life. When the doctors could do nothing for his symptoms of cramps, nausea and dizziness, he sought alternatives. He took vitamins and detoxed in saunas built in the woods.

During this time, he also became engrossed in nutrition and began to write a book about his discoveries. Fats That Heal, Fats That Killtook six years to finish and earned him a PhD in nutrition.

And so his career in oils began. His first product – made solely with flax oil – was taken on by a small start-up company in 1986 with whom he split acrimoniously three years later.

“I knew I needed to be clearer about my goals. I was clear about setting it up but I wasn’t clear about what I needed from the business deal,” he says.

Further experiments on mixing flax oil with other oils (his current blend) led to more success. And the company which began to produce Udo’s Choice in 1994 continues to do so.

“A company is licensed to make the products which I formulated. I didn’t really want to run a factory, so I do the educational work. They pay for my expenses when I travel,” he explains.

After 14 years spreading his oil message, Erasmus has moved to a more philosophical place. Now at 68, his goals are very clear.

“I have three missions in life – one is to make sense of fats and make that information available globally. The second is to turn health into a teachable, systematically organised, coherent field, and the third is to turn human nature into a systematically organised field of knowledge,” he says.

One gets the feeling that his next book won’t just be about healing oils.