The revolution of health and wellness is upon us, and leading this revolution is Udo Erasmus, a global innovator in the health and wellness industry. His unique food philosophy and exceptional product line have been transforming lives for decades. Udo was flagging threats to our health (seed oils, sugar and more) and solutions to metabolic syndrome (whole foods, supplements and self-care) long before some of us were even born!
Our in-depth conversation with Udo touches on how refined carbs damage our microbiome, nutrient absorption, and mental health. And how probiotics, digestive enzymes and whole foods can help support and repair our digestive tract and strengthen our immune system. Udo's personal sugar story (with a funny highlight) and insights into inflammation’s impact on our bodies will strengthen your resolve to kick the sugar habit. And hopefully, make you think twice about feeding it to your loved ones including your children and grandchildren.
What I loved most about this interview is the authentic inner peace Udo radiates. He places a refreshing emphasis on NOT just finding wellness but also self-contentment - something that can feel so elusive in our stressed lives. Udo shares highlights of his journey from stress and struggle to wellness and serenity. It touched me deeply.
Tune in to this heart-opening episode and be reminded of the importance of aligning your diet with nature, avoiding sugar, and making a conscious effort to find peace inside, too.
As an added bonus, Udo put together a free e-book called: “10 Ways to Kick Your Sugar Habit”. Download your copy here: https://udoerasmus.com/KickSugarWithUdo
Florence's courses & coaching programs can be found at:
www.FlorenceChristophers.com
Connect with Florence on:
FACEBOOK | TWITTER | INSTAGRAM | YOUTUBE
The revolution of health and wellness is upon us, and leading this revolution is Udo Erasmus, a global innovator in the health and wellness industry. His unique food philosophy and exceptional product line have been transforming lives for decades. Udo was flagging threats to our health (seed oils, sugar and more) and solutions to metabolic syndrome (whole foods, supplements and self-care) long before some of us were even born!
Our in-depth conversation with Udo touches on how refined carbs damage our microbiome, nutrient absorption, and mental health. And how probiotics, digestive enzymes and whole foods can help support and repair our digestive tract and strengthen our immune system. Udo's personal sugar story (with a funny highlight) and insights into inflammation’s impact on our bodies will strengthen your resolve to kick the sugar habit. And hopefully, make you think twice about feeding it to your loved ones including your children and grandchildren.
What I loved most about this interview is the authentic inner peace Udo radiates. He places a refreshing emphasis on NOT just finding wellness but also self-contentment - something that can feel so elusive in our stressed lives. Udo shares highlights of his journey from stress and struggle to wellness and serenity. It touched me deeply.
Tune in to this heart-opening episode and be reminded of the importance of aligning your diet with nature, avoiding sugar, and making a conscious effort to find peace inside, too.
As an added bonus, Udo put together a free e-book called: “10 Ways to Kick Your Sugar Habit”. Download your copy here: https://udoerasmus.com/KickSugarWithUdo
Florence's courses & coaching programs can be found at:
www.FlorenceChristophers.com
Connect with Florence on:
FACEBOOK | TWITTER | INSTAGRAM | YOUTUBE
Welcome everybody to an interview today with Udo Erasmus Lami. I hit you up with some highlights of this man's very interesting and very diverse life story history. Yeah, so he's a pioneer. He's well known as a pioneer in the health and wellness industry, having created first a flax oil and then the Healthy Fats movement. He's the co-founder of the Udo's Choice Supplement brand, which has expanded from oils to enzymes, to probiotics, which he sees as key to helping us to live happy, healthy lives, and we're going to talk a bit more about that today. He's a global leader in these health products, having sold tens of millions of bottles of healthy oil, probiotics and digestive enzymes.
Speaker 1:He's an accomplished author who wrote the book Fats that Heal, Fats that Kill, and that's how I first learned about Udo. I read that book decades ago. He totally changed totally changed the course of my life in terms of my awareness about Fats that Heal and Fats that Kill, and that book is sold over a quarter million copies. He has an extensive background in biochemistry and biology. He has a master's degree in counseling psychology and has impacted over five million lives. He has conducted over 5,000 live presentations, 3,000 plus media interviews, 1,500 staff trainings and has traveled over 40 countries to share his message of how we can preserve and maybe even reverse preserve our health and maybe even reverse some of our health conditions by understanding what we need to thrive. Welcome, Udo.
Speaker 2:Glad to be on. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:And I will say that we're going to start with some questions around his food philosophy and about how probiotics and enzymes and oils fit into the picture, and then we're going to end with his sugar story, because Udo has his own sugar story. So we're going to save that for the end. But, udo, why don't you tell us a little bit about what is your food philosophy?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, when you look at food philosophies, they usually come from cultures. So you could, in the US, you talk to the Department of Agriculture, you know. So they have a creative food pyramid and here's how people should eat. But all of these cultural setups are based on propping up existing businesses. So they're not just talking about health, they're talking about industry. But when it comes to health, health was actually invented by life in nature. So when I talk about food philosophy, I always want to go to that big picture, because nature's mandate for how creatures should eat was fresh, whole, raw, organic, local. For human beings, mostly plants, because there was a time when we only had rocks to hunt with, and so when we had rocks to hunt with, we were more gatherer hunters than hunter gatherers, because animals run away or they fight, so that hunters came home without meat. A lot Plants don't fight and they don't run, and so they're easy to hunt down and kill. So when the hunters came home without meat, the family ate plants, and in plants. This is a green planet. Greens has got to be the foundation of everything. Even a steak is made out of grass, the milk is made out of grass, the blood is made out of grass. So that's the foundation. The foundation of everything is green and that's probably what should be at the bottom of the food pyramid, the foods to eat the most eat green foods. They could also be red and they could also be yellow and they could be orange, but they should be low starch, low carbohydrate, water, rich, nutrient, rich, plant based foods and they should be plant based, whole and organic. And then the second major food part is seeds and nuts. Seeds and nuts keep so that was good winter food and they have oils in them. Oils are very good fuel for the body, but the oil, it comes with antioxidants and anti-inflammatory nutrients. And when you separate those, like we've done with sugar and with starch and with the white oils the colorless, odorless, tasteless oils, you've concentrated the fuel but you've taken out all of the protection that your body needs from when the fuel burns and creates a good fire of vitality in your body, it also throws sparks, so we call those free radicals, and they do damage in the tissues. And the job of antioxidants, anti-inflammatories, in whole foods is to pick off those sparks so they don't do damage in our tissues. The reason why sugar causes inflammation is because of the sparks it throws when you eat it and it burns, and we've taken out the spark control. Same with white flowers, same with white oils they all increase inflammation and inflammation is behind just about everything that goes wrong in the body. So that's the food philosophy.
Speaker 2:How was it in nature before we got so civilized? That's always where I look for how should I structure my food philosophy? Because you've got to look at nature. Nature created all of that. Nature created us. We're supposed to live in line with nature and in line with our nature, and when we get out of line it doesn't really work that well. So that's kind of the foundation where, when I make products, I'm always looking at how was it when we ate fresh, whole, raw, organic? How did we change that when we came into the city, you know? And then it was like shelf life issues, processing issues, damaging the enzymes so harder to digest, killing the probiotics that keep unfriendly bacteria from creating problems for us. So if you cook the foods, then you need to replace the enzymes and the probiotics that you messed up by the cooking. So then, so it's always comes back to I live in the city and there are some convenience for living in the city, but what do I need to do to live in the city as though I was living in the country, right, yeah, and then what? What went missing and how do we bring that back? So that's always the way that I think of of the whole nutritional issue.
Speaker 2:It was in, you know, giving. To expand on that, there was no white sugar. There was no sugar. There was no sugar by itself in nature. The sugar, any sugar, was in fruit. Fruit was seasonal, you know, there was 10 times more greens than fruit all the time, even in the tropics, right. And then fruit was in fall. Creatures got a little bit fat on eating fruit Sometimes, you know, the bears bear would eat apples in the fall and then sleep, sleep them off, and during the winter hibernation, right. So fruit was a much less prominent than it is now. And then we couldn't ship it from place to place. There was no shipping, there was no transportation, so it was all seasonal and local and sunripe and and and whole foods. We had no frying pans so we didn't fry anything and we didn't have cooking pots and at one point we hadn't even tamed fire yet. So you know, we were nibbling raw things, just like all the rest of the creatures. Do you know? Every creature in nature eats fresh, whole, raw, organic.
Speaker 1:If we were the only species that cooks our food.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so sometimes I say to people well, you know, if you ever see a squirrel with a frying pan, then that would be your sign that frying is a natural process. You might see a squirrel in a frying pan, but that's. I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about a squirrel with a frying pan. Yeah, and we're the only people, we're the only creature who thinks it's smarter than nature and can just, you know, and we think we can do, make, do all these changes and that there wouldn't be any consequences. I mean, it's like not only are we stupid, but we're also arrogant on top of it in the way we treat ourselves.
Speaker 1:So what about, like what about the benefits of cooking meat for bacteria and salmonella and stuff like that?
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, so again you look at how it is in nature. 10% of the biomass on this planet is bacteria. Most people don't know that. 10%, how much biomass are we all humans together? 0.1%, so that means there's 100 times more biomass of bacteria on this planet Than us. And how does do the rest of the creatures live on this planet without cooking their food? Oh, they live in harmony, but they don't cook their food. So one of the things is on the like where's the cow get its probiotics from? Why doesn't the cow have to take probiotic supplements?
Speaker 1:Because it's on the grass.
Speaker 2:They're on the grass, you know, and in nature when you don't. You know our agriculture rise it. You know. The probiotics are in the top fermenting layer of organic material on top of the soil. When a plant pushes through the soil and into the air, it picks up probiotics. The soil bacteria are stripped back. It picks up probiotics. The probiotics cover the food and a creature comes along and eats the food, gets the probiotics.
Speaker 2:What do the probiotics do? Protects them from unfriendly bacteria, oh my God. And so what we did is we cooked the foods, we killed them. But they are rot bacteria everywhere and they are bacteria that love to live inside of your body because it's warm and it's lots of food, but would make you sick if they did, and the probiotics protect us from them getting out of hand, right. But again, it's like we changed it from the way it was in nature and then made the assumption that there's no consequences to us killing the probiotics when we cook our food. And then we started saying, oh yeah, you know, but bacteria are bad and the bacteria are not friendly and all we got to kill in and we hygienized ourselves stupidly with chemicals that are more toxic than the bacteria. Right.
Speaker 2:But the big thing is we're out of. You know, it's not that we have to cook the food. It's because we live out of nature, out of line with nature, that those bacteria are a problem to us in the first place. Why aren't they a problem for deer? Why aren't they a problem for squirrels? Why aren't they a problem for whales in the ocean? Why aren't they a problem for the birds? How come every creature can live without doing that except us?
Speaker 2:Well, because we damaged our microbiome Because the industry makes money on it.
Speaker 1:What's that?
Speaker 2:I said because an industry makes money on it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and plus how many of us have been on multiple rounds of antibiotics, we've wiped out strains that may never recolonize, and so you know, I imagine that again, that's one of those sort of things we had to do to sort of keep ourselves safe in our new environment that we've created, which includes lots and lots of antibiotics.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the problem with antibiotics is that they kill the unfriendly bacteria and then they kill the friendly bacteria too. And then, because you kill the friendly bacteria that are riding shotgun on your bacterial you know content in your gut, you kill them and now it becomes even easier for unfriendly bacteria to cause another infection, right? So when it's so, I say to people if you're going to take antibiotics, you need to take probiotics before, during and after, because you do not want to leave a window for reinfection. Super useful to be taking probiotics on a regular basis, and I do it. I actually brush my teeth with probiotics every night before I go to bed Because in nature they start it in your mouth. When we take probiotics we usually swallow them. Then we get benefits from our stomach down but not from our stomach up, but in nature they started in their mouth, worked their way through the digestive tract and protected the entire digestive tract.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. So do you open up one of your probiotics and stick it on a toothbrush, or do you have a special?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I have a. You know here's like Right, Can you see it? Yeah, Okay, I open it up, dump it on my tongue and brush my teeth with it and I make sure it goes into all the crevices and everywhere. You know and one of the proofs that this is a good idea to do. You know how people wake up in the morning. The worst breath is always in the morning.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know why is that? Because when we're asleep we don't swallow, Okay, and when we do our mouthwash we kill 99.9% of all the bacteria. And that 0.1% doubles every half hour, or every 20 minutes depending, and so it's in your mouth, multiplying, doubling every half hour. After eight hours you have 32 or 64 times more bad breath bacteria in your mouth than you had before. You brush your teeth, so your mouth is dirtiest in the morning because they're there just eating and multiplying and there's nothing there to stop them. So I brush my teeth, put the probiotics in the probiotics steal their food, outpopulate them and inhibit their growth and I wake up with exponentially less severe bad breath in the morning.
Speaker 1:And how come? How come the ones that are remaining have to be the bad ones? How come the good guys can't stay behind and procreate all night?
Speaker 2:Well, if you look at nature, the function of the good bacteria is to protect living creatures by being on the outside of them, okay, and then you have bacteria that are everywhere, that are. I call them rot bacteria, and their job is when something dies, turn it over. Bacteria rot it, turn it over, recycle the parts, because it comes from nature. So the parts are get recycled, so they have an important function, but they're not supposed to recycle you until after you're dead. So while you're alive the way nature created all this they protect you while you're alive from the bacteria that would like to recycle you.
Speaker 1:Oh my goodness, how come the recycle the rot bacteria, the ones that are left in the mouth after we use these antibiotics and these antibacterial mouth watches?
Speaker 2:Well, no, they, the antibiotics kill everybody. But the rot bacteria, you know the probiotic bacteria. They cover the surface of living creatures that are food for us, so that you find them mainly on the food, fresh, raw food, right? The rot bacteria have to be everywhere. They're in the air, they're in the water, they're in the soil, they're flying around, you know, they're literally everywhere. Because they need to be everywhere, because things die everywhere and they want, they need to be there to do the recycling. So so you have.
Speaker 2:So you have probiotics friendly bacteria in specific places on food and you have unfriendly bacteria or rot bacteria everywhere. So in the midst of everywhere, that's rot bacteria. Remember, a hundred times more biomass of bacteria than human beings, than human biomass, right? So more of them are for recycling than are for protecting. But the way nature arranged it is, if you live in line with nature, if you live aligned with nature, you get your probiotics with every mouthful of food, starting in your mouth and then working their way through your digestive tract and protecting the entire digestive tract which, by the way, is outside your body. You know, the inside of your digestive tract is actually outside your body.
Speaker 2:So, it's the middle, right? Yes, and so your digestive tract is your connection to the microbiome of the planet, right? Because you're putting things in there and you get all of these bacteria that are everywhere. They're all going through your system, but the ones we favor are the ones that are protective of us while we're alive.
Speaker 1:Right. And then when we have a compromised gut lining, we haven't got that protection from the outside world which is really the inside of our entire digestive tract.
Speaker 2:We have stuff that shouldn't be going over into our bloodstream, going over yeah, and probiotics actually improve your body's ability to make what's called mucin, which is a slippery layer that coats the digestive tract, so that enzymes and acid and bacteria and abrasion don't wreck your digestive tract Right. So and the probiotics encourage our cells to make that protective lining. So that's just one of the roles they play. They also make certain vitamins and they make short-chain fatty acids which are food for the cells that line the lower digestive tract and they inhibit and they make other molecules that are absorbed into the body that support immune function. And the list goes on.
Speaker 1:They detoxify heavy metals and they create neurotransmitters.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and some of them eat cholesterol and yeah. Because we can't break down cholesterol. A human body can't break it down, but bacteria can.
Speaker 1:I didn't know that. I know that that's interesting. I didn't know that. So I actually thought that was a bile thing. I thought bile in the liver broke that down.
Speaker 2:No, bile emulsifies fats and makes them easier, so that makes it into more surface area, so that it becomes easier to digest.
Speaker 1:By the bacteria.
Speaker 2:By or by your digestive fluids Right, but the enzymes that your pancreas makes and the enzymes that your, the cells that line your digestive tract make, and it's just a couple. There's like lipase, which breaks down fats into fatty acids and monoglycerides, and then they're absorbed and then in your body, you body puts them back together into blood fats, triglycerides.
Speaker 1:Wow, okay, yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, it gets pretty complicated. Your triglycerides you can have good triglycerides that lower your blood fats, so there's fats that lower your blood fats and their fats that raise your blood fats. So there's double stories.
Speaker 1:And back to the topic of sugar, that we know for a fact now that sugar is one of the most harmful, has a very harmful impact on our microbiome. Can you speak to that at all Like? Why is that?
Speaker 2:Well, the main thing about sugar is fuel for the microbiome, just like it is fuel for our body. So the sugar molecule is not the problem. What is the problem is how much we get, how fast it's absorbed, which is way too fast, faster than we burn it, which then gets us carb addiction, because your blood sugar goes up and then insulin drives it into the cells and then you burn some, and what you don't burn, what you don't need to burn, has to be turned into fat. Now you've got low blood sugar, you get cravings. When you get cravings, you start gorging and then you eat too fast. Because you eat too fast, you're trying to get your blood sugar back up. By the time your blood sugar is normal, you've eaten too much and you get another high blood sugar insulin into the end. You get the mood swings and the blood sugar swings and the insulin swings. You get all of that just because what we've done, because we've separated from the fiber that slows down its absorption and we've separated from all of the other minerals and vitamins and essential nutrients that we would actually get with the sugar as fuel that we would get if we were eating fresh, whole, raw, organic, the way nature intended.
Speaker 2:So you have to say well, sugar is fuel, and that's, of course, the sugar industry. That's their excuse, right? Yeah, well, sugar is fuel. Why are you bitching about the fuel? No, we're bitching about what got. It's actually the processing. That's the problem.
Speaker 2:And then you end up with sugar which is now like a drug, which is now has side effects because it's out of line with the way we're supposed to be getting it, right? So when we say sugar is bad, what we're really saying is white sugar is bad. Refined sugar is bad. Sugar that has had, that has been separated from everything else that nature put into the plant that made that sugar. That's bad. So you know, and then I have. There's one thing with white sugar. Well, there too, one is if you're starving, if you're totally starving, we'll tell you. We'll get to that one later. But the other one is that white sugar, bacteria can't live on white sugar. So if you gas your leg and you have a deep wound and it's like really, really, really bad, you can pack that wound with sugar and it won't get infected because bacteria can't live on white sugar. So that's the only, that's the only good use for sugar that I know of. But it shouldn't be. It shouldn't be a food Right.
Speaker 1:And it's funny because you can leave a dishes of sugar and you're not going to get. It doesn't rot, there's no critters, don't get in there, I mean yeah.
Speaker 2:But if this is true, that you can prevent a wound from getting infected, what that also tells you is that sugar as a nutrient is inadequate even for bacteria, right. Never mind for yourself, right. So you pack wounds with it until you find another way to deal with it. Just don't put it in your mouth. And well, even you could put it in your mouth. You like to taste the sugar. Then put it in your mouth, taste it and then spit it out. Just don't swallow it.
Speaker 1:No, no, because it absorbs through the mouth.
Speaker 2:Well, it does and you will swallow and you know all of that. But the point is you could Right, right and, of course, frankly, when it comes to say why is everything have to be sweet? Right, why can't you develop a taste for bitter? Bitter is better, bitter is better for you than you know. Why sweet, and why do you have to put something else? If you don't do sugar, you do something else. That's sweet, but it's not like a genetic thing, it's like you know. We got it with mother love. I was married once and I asked the question why is it, on the day that you're celebrating the birth of your incredibly beautiful children, you feed them the worst junk that'll make them sick and give them diabetes? It did not endear me to that person and we are no longer married. Oh, wow, but it's a good, but it's still a good question to ask. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right. Why are mothers?
Speaker 2:Can we celebrate by doing the best thing we could possibly do for health and for long life? Since we love these kids so much, why wouldn't we do that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know, mothers are dropping this ball, women are dropping this ball.
Speaker 2:Yeah, everybody's dropping the ball.
Speaker 1:Sure, it's our responsibility to make sure that we protect our children, and lots of different ways, and this is one new way that mothers really need to step up. That we need to protect our children, our grandchildren, our families, our loved ones and our own bodies from the harms of refined sugars is. As sweet and addictive, and pleasurable and comforting as they can be, they are still nothing but trouble.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, was it one minute on your lips?
Speaker 1:and a lifetime on your hips Right, but not to mention how damaging that has been to women over decades of being so frustrated by the weight gain and blaming ourselves and being obsessed about the size of our thighs and the width of our hips, when really really there are much better things to worry about, and certainly starting with our diet can help those issues go away. So we're freed up to do a better job as mothers.
Speaker 2:So we do have choice and we have choice. We have right here at our mouth what we put in. Once we swallow it it's out of our control. Then life does what it does and it's geared to do it a certain way. So sugar is I call it undeclared fats. Sugars are undeclared fats because the body will turn what you don't burn into fat. It has to do that.
Speaker 2:But we do have choice here. If you know it's not good for you, then don't put it in there. And it's just like, almost like. We have so many bad choices available to us that we have to be deliberate about what we choose to eat. And why would you ever want to? If you really just think about it for a second, like right now, why would you ever put something in your mouth that you know is going to give you inflammation, that tastes good but is going to give you inflammation, get you overweight, give you a deprived view of spark control?
Speaker 2:You know, yesterday I just read this thing. What did they say? Sweetened drinks. They did. A JAMA Journal of American Medical Association said 50 to 79 year old women so post menopausal women and they looked at sweetened drinks linked to chronic liver disease, get increases in liver cancer by 85% and all-cause mortality increased by 68% just from sugar drinks. And then triglycerides go up, so your blood fats go up for eating sugar. And when your blood fats go up, that heads you towards diabetes, insulin resistance, heads you towards cardiovascular disease, cancer cells love sugar and infections love sugar. So you're taking this one thing because it has a sweet taste on your tongue. It decimates your body. It's like why exactly are we doing that?
Speaker 1:Right, right, right Back to the idea of fresh, raw, seasonal, local foods. There are so many people as we age that we're unable to, or we struggle to, digest raw vegetables. I have lots and lots of people that have come through my world, my coaching programs, that struggle in that way. So even that's good advice. But if your digestive system has been damaged and that's not an option, and cooked vegetables are easier to digest and I guess that's where your supplements come in, is that right?
Speaker 2:Well, yes, yes and no. Certainly, when you cook the food, you should replace the enzymes and the probiotics that you destroyed by cooking, because they're really important. But the other thing is that the reason why people can't digest raw vegetables is not because nature said you shouldn't. It's because we have degenerated our digestive system by what we've given it to work with. So we have basically weakened our digestive system by eating cooked and processed foods and then, in order to go back to doing it the way it was in nature, we have to start small and build it up. It might take you six months to two years to go from the usual sad North American diet, the standard American diet. You go from that to how it was in nature fresh, whole, raw, organic. It might take you two years to get there. But what we do is we say, oh well, you know that didn't work for me. I ate this big raw food meal and then my stomach hurt, so I'm never going to do that again. But yeah, you know what. It took you decades to screw it up.
Speaker 2:It'll take you a little time to bring it back together, because your body, your digestive system, is built in response to what it needs to do, just like. Your muscles and bones are built stronger if you give them more work to do Right. The body changes in response to challenge. So if you haven't challenged the body and it's deteriorated, you know it's just like you don't go like I never did exercise. So now I'm a little overweight and you know I don't have much energy and my muscles are really weak and small.
Speaker 2:You don't go and lie down and try to press 350 pounds. No, you start with. You might start with five pounds in each hand and go up to 10 pounds and go up to 15 pounds, and you take a week, two weeks, three weeks, three months, three years. But you don't say, well, that didn't work for me because I tried to do it instantly and it didn't work Well, so I'm never doing that again. No, do what you can Right. Maybe one leaf of lettuce, one raw leaf of lettuce, maybe that's all you can do to start with, but pretty soon it'll be two leaves, pretty soon it'll be three.
Speaker 2:Pretty soon it'll be a whole salad.
Speaker 1:Right, and our produce that comes from the grocery store, like some of it's pre-washed, does that mean it's more or less cleared of probiotics as well?
Speaker 2:Well, that's a relatively complex thing because when we did agriculture when before agriculture, the soil was not turned over when you turn the soil over, you're actually burying the probiotics that are on the top fermenting layer and you're putting soil bacteria to the surface. Well, in nature the soil didn't turn over like that. So the leaves and the needles and all of that it's on top, it's returning into soil. On the bottom, it's in touch with the soil, right, the probiotics are in that fermenting layer and so if you were taking it that way, then you would have probiotics, but you might not have that much probiotics and you might have a lot of soil bacteria that you don't really want inside.
Speaker 2:On the produce that comes from agricultural food production oh, my goodness, wow. So you have to think about that and there are, when people do regenerative agriculture, a lot of them say you don't want to turn over the soil. What you want to do is you want to keep mulch on top of it and fermented stuff and you leave it on top and it protects the foods you eat. Then as the foods push through that, they pick up the probiotics and then you're going to have produce that has probiotics on it. You could even go and people have taken probiotics and grown them in tanks and then spray them on the fields.
Speaker 2:Wow, if I was doing agriculture, I would be doing that. I would be making sure that the probiotics that are important for human health end up on top of the soil in that fermenting layer and I would make sure that I was doing that. If we're not doing that and it's all turned over and they then they do. They do pesticides and they do other chemicals, and some of those are hard on microbes as well. All bets are off. You don't really know what you're getting. So I buy organic but I still take probiotics, simply because I can't trust that what I'm getting is going to provide me naturally with probiotics. When you ferment foods, then you're also getting probiotics, so that's the other way to get them.
Speaker 1:Right? Well, let's go there then, because I think 99% of us listening to this are not eating probiotic-rich raw foods local, seasonal, organic, probably not. So About fermented, and probably most of us are eating some fermented food. I imagine that lots of people are on the sauerkraut kick that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yogurt and sauerkraut.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yogurt and sauerkraut, kefir maybe.
Speaker 2:Yeah, kimchi.
Speaker 1:Kimchi. So let's assume that we actually really need probiotics and enzymes, and I know you've been working for decades in this space. You were an early pioneer in the area of supplements around these three areas oils, probiotics and enzymes how did you decide to put together your probiotic blend Like what's in it? How did you decide on that blend?
Speaker 2:Well, there's a lot of research being done. That was quiet before they hit the wave, because right now probiotics are a big deal. Everybody talks about probiotics. We were there before the wave hit, but there was lots of research around, and so then you find out well which are the best probiotics, and there are a number of different issues.
Speaker 2:Different parts of the digestive tract have different probiotics in them. The probably the most important are the bifidobacteria, and they're most populous in your lower digestive tract, in your colon, and that's where a lot of as you get older, lots of problems happen, and bifidobacteria address many of those problems quite well. Not only that, but as you age, the kinds of probiotics and the amount you need for optimum function changes. So a kid might only need three billion and an advanced adult or a senior might need like 40 or 50 billion, and that's a good thing for best results. And the kinds change as well. So there are some probiotics that you find in infants healthy infants but you never find them in teenagers and they're gone. They're not that important in the rest of the life cycle. So then you make them age specific, because you're actually trying to help people do what works best for their digestive tract. You make them age specific and then appropriate in number to the part of their life cycle.
Speaker 2:And that research? We didn't do the research. We worked with people who do the research and they helped us put it together Okay.
Speaker 1:So I am familiar with one of you. Do you just have one probiotic? I'm sorry to say that Seven. You have several. Okay, tell us about Seven, seven, okay. So how would someone know where to begin, where to begin with that piece?
Speaker 2:Well, the easiest is age specific.
Speaker 2:So we have one for infants, one for children, one for adults, one for seniors, okay, or advanced, called advanced adults Okay, and that was put together. And that was put together on the basis of the research. Okay, that was available. And then we have a lozenge which is kind of like instead of dessert. It has one gram of dried cane juice in it and you dissolve it in your mouth and the idea is, well, yeah, you want to start it in your mouth, that's why you use it that way, and you use it instead of dessert. You get one gram of cane juice, that's your dessert, and then they find its way through the system.
Speaker 2:Then there's one that is used for travelers, like if you go to India or you go to Mexico and you might get Montezuma's Revenge, or Deli Belly, as they call it. That one is mostly lactobacilli they are better at dealing with other microorganisms. And that one is also used for vaginal, because the probiotics that you put into the digestive tract actually find their way into the birth canal. You know, that's, how do they do that? Well, they have to go, you know, down and around, right, but they do it. So and I said, wow, why do you eat them here when you want them here, right.
Speaker 2:And it turns out that somebody did the studies and showed that the probiotics you introduce in your mouth find their way to the birth canal. How cool is that Cool? Think about it. It's like how cool is that? Yeah, so everyone is the so travelers and birth canal. And then the last one is a high dose 80% bifidobacteria, super high dose, and that's the one I used to brush my teeth with. It finds its way to the colon and does a lot of jobs in your digestive tract, but particularly in your colon.
Speaker 1:Now do you know it's making its way to the colon, like how can you study that to confirm that?
Speaker 2:fact. Well, you basically take stool samples. You know, every microbe has a genetic blueprint or a genetic footprint. We call them a footprint. Right? They don't have any feet, but it's a footprint, right? So every bacteria has a footprint, a genetic footprint. So what you do is you test them. You test this bifidobacterium and look at the genetic footprint, and then you take it and you wait until it's long enough to make it through your digestive tract. You take a stool sample and then you separate from the stool sample the different kinds of microbes and you see if you have microbes with the same footprint as the ones you took. Okay, so they're just. In a way, it's like they're recognizable, like every species has a footprint and they're unique, so you can tell what you're getting. This is all sophisticated science.
Speaker 1:And can you tell how much you're getting? So let's say you do a high dose of bifidobacteria and you're testing the stool to see how much it's going through Like, what percentage gets through Like can you tell?
Speaker 2:Well, okay, again, this is like. This is more complicated than you're even asking. Okay, here's what happens. They probiotics.
Speaker 2:There are probiotics that are used to the human digestive tract, which has high acid and high bile in it. So if you get probiotics from the digestive tract of a cow, they don't survive so well because a cow doesn't have high stomach acid and doesn't have high bile because it's eats grass. It doesn't need that. So ours are different. So you wanna get those that survive stomach acid and bile most effectively and you want them.
Speaker 2:There are transient probiotics and there are probiotics that implant in the lining of the digestive tract so they stick around longer. And these probiotics you put them in your mouth. They're in an environment for the whole time through the digestive tract that has tons of food. So they eat and multiply and they might double every 20 minutes or 30 minutes, and so you start off with 100 billion in your mouth. Some of them get killed by acid, some of them get killed by bile, some of them probably get killed in fighting with other probiotics, but at the same time they're eating and they're doing their job and they're multiplying and they would stick around. You know what you if I put them into a day they would go through the digestive tract. But because they implant, they stick around, maybe for two weeks, and the whole time that they're sticking around they're eating and multiplying. So the amount of benefit you get from those 100 billion you started with could be in the trillions.
Speaker 1:Got it. Wow, interesting, that makes sense, Right?
Speaker 2:yeah, got it, and the higher up you start them, the more time they have to eat and multiply. So that's another reason why the best way to take them is from up here. Now, they don't all taste good. The super Bifidoplas tastes really good. Oh, it does. Oh, okay, yeah, it tastes really good, and some of them don't taste as good, so that's one of the reasons I use it. It's also high dose and I'm also 81. So You're 81. Yeah, yeah, so I pay attention to that.
Speaker 2:You know when you, as you get older, you have more. You need more Bifidobacteria. Okay. Decrease as you get older, so you need more, Okay. So to answer your question is hard, simply because there's so much going on. This is like a whole ecosystem that is living and flourishing and reproducing and doing all kinds of things, and by the time you get to the bottom end and you try to figure out how many you have, there's a good chance that you have way more than you started with.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh. Okay, got it Very interesting. So let's talk about digestive enzymes, cause one of the things that caught my ear is that the digestive tract has lots of bile, that has lots of acid. Well, I can tell you that I'm pretty sure that I am low acid and I don't think I have great bile production, just from all my sugar-binging junk food days. So where do probiotics fit into the picture? That way, I'm not going to say probiotics, I'm sorry, I meant to say digestive.
Speaker 2:Well, so that's good. Probiotics also make some enzymes that help in digestion. Oh, but they don't make nearly as many as when you get concentrated enzymes. Okay.
Speaker 1:Tell us about those.
Speaker 2:And enzymes are molecules and probiotics are microorganisms living microorganisms. So the enzymes are not living organisms, they're concentrated, they're made by bacteria and fungi and pineapple. There are all kinds of different ways that you can make them, and those are grown in tanks and then isolated, separated into, depending on what enzymes you make proteases for protein digestion, lipases for fat digestion, little bit of amylase for starch digestion. Now we don't want much amylase in there because we don't want to speed up starch digestion into sugar because then that gets you the sugar problems. But there are some proteins that have starch strings on them. They're called lectins and you need amylase to clip those starch strings off the proteins and then the proteases can digest the proteins quite easily. So you have to have a little bit to do that.
Speaker 2:And then the enzymes. You know you're replacing the enzymes in raw foods that do about 60% of the digestion for you 60%. So if you cook your food and you destroy the enzymes, you are more than doubling the load on your digestive system. And remember, nature made your digestive system for raw foods. So you're more than doubling the load on your digestive system That'll catch up with you when your digestion doesn't work. Then your immune system has to get involved in digestion, because the immune system's job is to protect you from foreign stuff, and all of everything you're putting through your digestive tract is foreign stuff. So then the immune system has to get involved in digestion and then it's not free to go and do all of its other jobs, like dealing with infections elsewhere in the body, digesting inflammatory proteins, digesting autoimmune proteins, dealing with allergy inflammation proteins, you know, and replacing dead and dying cells. You know that's like the immune system has huge job to do. So you wanna take enzymes so you don't tie up your nutrients and you don't tie up your immune system in your digestive tract.
Speaker 1:Now, do you become dependent on them then? Like do you take digestive? Are you still taking digestive enzymes all the time, or can you take them for a while to restore your?
Speaker 2:So can I tell you that's the wrong question? Okay, let me tell you why it's the wrong question. You tell me You're supposed to be always depending on the enzymes in the raw foods. You're supposed to be getting those, right? You kill them, you destroy them by cooking, by processing, right? So should you always replace them when you destroy them? Yeah, you should, right.
Speaker 2:And you literally are dependent just like you're dependent on water from birth to demise True, on air from birth to demise You're also dependent on food from birth to demise, and foods are supposed to have enzymes in them because they're raw from birth to demise, right? It's like if you're a mother and you're breastfeeding, you don't cook your breast milk, right? You have probiotics in your breast ducts and when the child takes breast milk, it gets probiotics with mom's breast milk, unless mom is too hygienic and tries to sterilize her breasts, and sometimes people do that, sometimes women do that. But if you're living sort of natural and you're not just showering with detergents and like every day, right, you could get too hygienic, so you wanna live naturally.
Speaker 1:Now, what is the difference between enzyme blends that have just the enzymes variety of enzymes versus the ones that also have ox, bile or HCl in them, and what are your thoughts on those?
Speaker 2:Yeah, good question. The enzymes I work with. We don't use either bile or hydrochloric acid in them, and the reason why is that? The main reason why people have low stomach acid is because they're not getting enough of their nutrients absorbed and that's because they're not digesting their food well enough. Or they might have to take a little bit of zinc, like a zinc supplement or some other minerals that are required in hydrochloric acid production, or they might be on a low salt diet, because hydrochloric acid has chlorine in it and salt is our main source of chlorine and if you're on a low salt diet you might end up with low stomach acid. People have gotten paranoid about salt and we do use too much, but we need some.
Speaker 2:So if you take enzymes without hydrochloric acid in them, then you may digest the food better, you may absorb all of your nutrients and your body will then make hydrochloric acid. The reason I don't like hydrochloric acid in the supplement is because when your body makes hydrochloric acid, which it goes to the stomach to digest protein, it also makes bicarbonate which goes to the pancreas and is then dumped onto the food when it comes out of the stomach to neutralize it, to change it, to make it ready for digestion in the small intestine. So every time you make acid in the body, you're making base in the body and the two neutralize each other. When you take hydrochloric acid, you acidify your body and you're not bringing in the basic, the alkali, so you actually acidify the body. So I would do that only short term and only after I fixed digestion.
Speaker 2:Before you fix digestion or no, I would not use hydrochloric acid unless I've done everything else. Then I would do it short term, as short term as possible. I would look at what is required for hydrochloric acid production. I know Zinc is one of them and I would make sure that I'm getting the essential nutrients that are required that the body can't make. I would make sure that all that was in place. Then, if it's still low stomach acid, then I might use it short term and see if that gives you a little kickstart.
Speaker 1:Got it, got it, got it. So that makes sense, right? Because the enzymes exist in nature. We need them. They're essential. They're on our fresh produce, yeah, and if we're not eating the fresh produce or we're eating produce that doesn't have probiotics, then we need to replace those enzymes. But the hydrochloric acid is not coming in through food. It's not something that right it's. Our body can figure that piece out. If it's got the right nutrition, it can sort that piece out.
Speaker 2:Correct. That's beautiful. Beautiful the way you said it, because I've never said it that way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes sense to me. Yeah, so I just want to say to the audience I have good news and I have bad news. The bad news is I'm so sorry, I'm so fascinated by Udo's depth of understanding of human digestion and health and food and that I didn't really get to do much of a deep dive on oils. So the bad news is is we all have a ton of time for that. But the good news is he has a book that's called Fat Set Heal, Fat Set Kill. So you can get that and you can read it and sort of deep dive with him a little bit there. But there's been a little bit of time on oils and what do we need to understand?
Speaker 2:about oils. Okay, fundamentally, I started at the height of the fat craze, fat phobia craze. Everybody said you know you should eat lots of carbs. They put them at the bottom of the food pyramid in 1977. The government report on nutrition and health and then the agriculture department put it bottom of the food pyramid. Food you should eat the most carbs Complete BS, completely wrong. And then fats the least on top of the food pyramid.
Speaker 2:Because oils are the most sensitive of our essential nutrients. They're damaged by light, by oxygen and by heat very readily. They need to be treated with the most care and we treat them with the least care. We throw them in the frying pan and reckon with light, oxygen and heat all at the same time. It's the dumbest thing we've ever invented to do with our health. It is the dumbest thing Frying pan. If you have a frying pan, get it out, turn it upside down, hit yourself at the up to side of the head with it and then throw that stupid thing out. Fried foods fry health and fried oils fry health.
Speaker 2:When I got poisoned by pesticides and the doctors couldn't help me, I started looking at all this like minerals and vitamins and all of this stuff that we're talking about. And I got stuck on fats because I got a study that said Omega-6 is an essential nutrient. You can't make it, you got to have it. You got to get it from food. If you don't get enough, your health will go down. If you don't get enough long enough, you die. But 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 as long as you make sure that you bring enough into your body so it can use these essential building blocks to make a body that works. Okay, well, that made sense. Omega-6 is essential and Omega-3 is essential. That was figured out just around the time.
Speaker 2:And the next study I read said Omega-6 gives you cancer and kills you. And my head exploded. It was like what the hell is this? You know it's like you have to have it and then you get cancer and it kills you. Hey, where's the? Where's the fair in that? Right and that just like and it was that contradiction and saying no, there's something missing, I'm missing something. You can't have both. They can both be true, but then there must be some reason for that.
Speaker 2:And in looking for that reason I found out how much damage is done to oils by industry before it goes in the bottle, before you buy it, when you make these, when you get these colorless, odorous, tasteless oils in the plastic bottles that line the store shelves you that's an oil that's been treated with sodium hydroxide, very corrosive base, then with phosphoric acid, a very corrosive acid, then bleach, which turns it rancid, and then it has to heat it, to be heated to frying temperature to clean up the mess they made. And then you have this oil that has a long shelf life, by nature oils of a short shelf life, and in that process about half to 1% of the molecules in the oil are damaged. So I called the, the, the oil chemist, and said why do you do this when you know it does damage? Oh, they said well, for one thing, we can get rid of half the pesticides in the oil.
Speaker 2:Oh, I didn't even. I had not even ever thought of that. Oh, my god, there's pesticides in oil. I got poisoned by pesticide. That's not good news for me. Oh, the other half stays in. So I said why don't you start with organically grown seeds? Then you don't have a pesticide issue? No answer. And then he got mad at me. He said what the hell is your problem? It's only 1% damage. So I decided to do the math how many damaged molecules are in one tablespoon of an oil? That is 1% damage by processing.
Speaker 1:No idea.
Speaker 2:Okay, give me a number. I know you don't know, but it's, there's a reason for doing this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I mean my brain's kind of like stunned right now because I'm thinking well, the answer is 1%, because only 1% of it will be damaged 1%, but how many molecules?
Speaker 2:Oh gosh 14 grams in a tablespoon. It's a half an ounce ballpark.
Speaker 1:Right, 14 grams. How many molecules? I don't know 1,000.
Speaker 2:Okay, so beautiful. So molecules are really really, really small. If you have an oil that is 1% damaged, in one tablespoon of that oil you will have 60 quintillion damaged molecules. Oh my gosh, that's a six followed by 19 zeros. So your answer of 1,000 is 16 zeros too short, Fail, right? No, no, it's okay because we don't know. But here's the thing. So that's more than a million damaged molecules for every one of your body's 60 trillion cells.
Speaker 2:You think that's not going to affect you Because these are molecules, are not natural. Now They'll be damaged. They're not in their natural state, so they're going to get in your body and they're going to occupy space and they're not going to be able to do the job that a molecule is supposed to be doing in that space. And then you do that for 30 years. So you multiply that number by another 10,000. Right, that's how many days in 30 years? Ballpark? And then there's pesticides in there and there's plastic in there, and then you use them for frying, which you should probably multiply that number by another 10 times. And you think that's not going to hurt you.
Speaker 1:It's shocking that 99% of the molecules can survive all that they're doing with the acid and the hydrogen.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, when you fry them, of course more of them get damaged. So you might end up with 5% damaged molecules. So it's the thing that we've done the worst. So I said I can't get healthy on oils like that. We should make them with health in mind. So I figured out how do you protect an oil from the time it's in the seed, where nature's packaging is quite good. They've had seeds that 5,000 years old flax seeds that they found in Swiss caves 5,000 years old. They planted them and they grew Wow. So that seed was able to stay alive for 5,000 years. So nature's packaging is pretty good.
Speaker 2:So from the time it's in nature packaging, through the pressing, the filtering, the settling, the filling, it's in a brown glass bottle because you don't want plastic in the oil in a box to cut the light out, nitrogen flushed everybody does that so there's no oxygen in there, in the fridge at the factory. You want no light, no oxygen, no heat to damage the oil through that whole process. And we had to design that and build the parts because nobody's doing that in the industry, because they all think they can make a mess at the front end and then use a chemical feast to try to clean up the mess. And then you know, and so we developed a method for making oils with health in mind. And then we developed flax oil, because flax oil is the richest source of omega-3s. Then I became omega-6 deficient on flax oil because it has too much 3, too little 6. And then I developed a blend that is better balanced and that's what I work with. And fundamentally, we're doing the essential fatty acids and then letting the body do its conversion into EPA and DHA and the icosanoids and all of the other molecules that are made from the essential fatty acids. We said we can. You know, 99% of the population doesn't get enough omega-3 for optimum health. When I heard that and found out omega-3 is essential, I was like, oh my God, we could help so many people, we could help almost everybody if we could make oil with health in mind. And that was the drive, because it feels good. Here you can help people. And so out of that that project came.
Speaker 2:Now let me go back just for a second to the thousand damaged molecules. When I ask people, nobody ever you know everybody always guesses at least a billion times too low. So what I'm saying to you is that look if you think. If it's too, if you're estimating two billion times too low, it means you're actually doing something that is a billion times worse for you than you think it is and that, maybe, is something you need to stop and think about, and maybe you need an oil change because you have so underestimated the damage you're doing to yourself and, of course, the industry is not going to tell you that, Right.
Speaker 2:So then they put the food pyramid, you know, on the food pyramid they put the oils on top, which you should eat the least of, and they should have blamed the damage done by processing and by frying, but they blamed the oil. And here's the thing If you have carbs at the bottom, there are no essential carbs. There's nothing in carbohydrates that you can't get elsewhere, but there are essential fatty acids that you have to bring in from outside because you can't make them. So carbs are the least important food because there are no essential carbs. There are essential fatty acids, there are essential minerals, there are essential amino acids from protein, there are essential vitamins. There are no essential carbs.
Speaker 1:So does that mean that you don't eat any grains? Because I get that? They all have to be cooked, I'm assuming, so you probably avoid those.
Speaker 2:No well, you could sprout grains and all of that. But me personally, as I've gotten older, I have I'm more and more fresh whole, raw, organic, for pretty much that's how I eat. I don't actually use my stove. I have a very nice stove and I never use it. I sometimes I cook beets because I can't eat beets raw, because they scratch my throat and it's uncomfortable.
Speaker 2:I don't know why, but that's about all I ever cook, and so I'm eating like that, and then lots of vegetables, seeds and nuts, tons of them, and I eat some fruit, probably more than I should, although I work it off good. So I'm not, you know, but sugar will actually give you wrinkles and make you age faster, so you want to limit it from that perspective too. If you look at animals that eat fruit, they tend to age quicker, they tend to have more wrinkles, but oils don't give you wrinkles. Oils actually form a barrier in the skin against the loss of moisture, so they hold moisture and they keep your skin soft, smooth and velvety, and the essential fatty acids do that exceptionally well. So I'm more inclined to be in the direction of keto than in the direction of grains.
Speaker 2:I don't have bread in the house. I don't have pasta in the house, I don't have what else? Bread, what else is grain? Macs, chips, all that kind of stuff? None of that stuff. You know what? I get one body. I really enjoy my life. I want to be around as long as I can.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:I think I'm doing pretty good. I want to support because I enjoy my life. I want to support whatever makes it possible for me to be active and productive and caring and loving, as long as I can.
Speaker 1:And it's just so obvious. It's just so obvious and everything, just your face and your voice and what you know, what you're yeah, it's just so obvious. That's your MO On your website. You say you know, I've journeyed from hell to heaven. Yeah, I used to struggle and suffer, and that you've truly figured out how to sort of live heaven on earth down here. And I can see that a big, huge piece of it is the quality of our health. The quality of our life and the quality of our health are quite tied, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's true. I was born during the Second World War, in right in the middle of that war, and we were refugees when I was six years old sorry, two years old, two and a half years old in winter, fleeing from the communists chasing us in tax and trucks on dirt roads with no military presence, on horse-drawn hay wagons, with dead people and dead horses and dead people in the ditches, and the allies the good guys were using us as target practice. It was all just women and young children. They were shooting at us from planes and so my mother left the road because it was safer to go through the fields, but she had six kids who she could only handle two, so four of them she had to leave behind, and I was one of the left behind ones. I ended up in an orphanage and eventually her sister found out what happened and she found us and reunited us. But that's pretty. For a two-year-old that's a pretty intense experience.
Speaker 2:I remember always being very shy and I liked books, because books were safe, because the book doesn't hit you in the head, you can read about a war and no bullets are flying, and then I kind of always wondered man, there must be a better way to live than this. I heard people arguing like adults, arguing about all kinds of crazy things that I thought were trivial. I said, man, there must be a way that we can live and harm me. I'm going to find out how. That's how I got into science, and then into biosciences, and then into psychology, and then into medicine for a year, always trying to find out what is that thing about us that we would need to embrace, that would allow us to be able to live harmoniously, helping each other, instead of always trying to outdo each other and hurt each other. And I did find it. It's like through lots of experiences, and I was willing to do the experiences, or maybe I was just stupid enough to do the experiences. So I got a lot of experience.
Speaker 2:And the truth is that a human being has peace at the core, and that peace goes from the core to infinity. So every human being is a focus of peace. But most of us don't bring our focus into that core, so we don't experience it. And then we're always drawn out to change in the world. You know it's like changes. Is this a friend? Is this a forward? Can I ignore it? So we have to assess what's going on when things change. So we always get drawn out into the world of change and we have to deliberately come back to the peace. But we don't do that.
Speaker 2:And then the way we get back to the peace is that there's a thing called heartache. You know what heartache is, oh yeah, oh yeah. I've never met anybody who doesn't know what heartache is. We don't talk about it. We don't know what it is, we don't know how to deal with it. There's all kinds of things that trigger it, but the trigger is not the cause. So if somebody dumps you, your heart might ache. You call it blues, right? Or heartbreak, right, grief, yeah, and then, or yeah, grief and loss, and yeah, all of that emptiness, sorrow, and we think it's because the person dumped us that our heart aches. But it's not true. It's not true. The trigger is not the cause. What is the cause of heartache?
Speaker 2:When you're in your mother's womb? Everything's taken care of, nothing to do, nowhere to go, pretty safe, so you're hanging out. I call it the Buddha tank. You're hanging out in your mother's womb. You have no language, you don't know that you have a mother, you don't know anything about culture or religion or science or anything, you just hang it out in an experience. Your focus is at rest inside, in its source, in life or in peace. And thus you spent the first nine months if you're a normal term baby in peace, in bliss, in love, maybe even inspiration, although that's more of an outcome. Then, when you get born now you have to get to know the world. Your senses take you out into the world of change. You get to know that world and in that process you go from being present inside and absent outside to becoming present outside and absent inside. That's where heartache comes from, normal, natural, necessary process for every human being. And the heartache is your call to come home. That's what it is, and you think maybe, that the girlfriend, the boyfriend's going to do it, and then they dump you and you fall back into your disconnection from yourself.
Speaker 2:So what I say to people when you feel heartache, you don't have to look for it. It happens all the time, just like for lots of different reasons, we have lots of different names for it. When you feel it, be with it, sit with it, feel it Not going to kill you. It might be a little uncomfortable, you might have some tears, but feel it and appreciate it, acknowledge it, because it's the call for you to come home and it takes you out of your head and makes you simple. It's your driving force, because everything you do in your life is to try and somehow feel whole again.
Speaker 2:When you do it on the outside, you never feel whole. You get three days of yeah, yeah, I did it, I did it. And then this thing is back, because nothing on the outside will reconnect you to what needs to be reconnected on the inside. So you sit with it and it pulls you out of your head. It's the starting point for the journey back home inside. And once you were able to take that journey, that's, by the way, how you get to heaven, because heaven is, you know, kingdom of heavens within you, right, but you have to experience it, not just words. It's like, has to be an experience, and once you do that, you're probably going to get a little sloppy again and then you'll drift out again and then this will come back to remind you to come back home.
Speaker 2:So it is, heartache is the greatest gift we've been given, other than being alive. Just like thirst for water, hunger for food, heartache is for fulfillment, for coming home, for finding our contentment, for finding our wholeness again, because it's already within us, it's always been there. But our focus, when your focus is out there, you know, then your focus is not in here. You know, it's kind of like you say I have a million dollars in my right pocket and in my left pocket I've only got lint, and so I'm not, I'm not willing to look at my right pocket. I'm always looking for million dollars in my left pocket and I'm not willing to look in my right pocket.
Speaker 2:Well, how's that going to work? Right? And the same thing. You want peace, you want love, you want contentment, you want wisdom, you want insight. You know. You want joy, you want bliss, whatever it is you call that. You got to go where that is Not expected to chase you out into the world. So you have to take time for stillness, and in that stillness you will discover the magnificence of your own existence.
Speaker 1:I'd like to sign up for that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, of course. Of course, I will give you a contact that you can check out. Somebody showed me how to do that, because there was a time when I couldn't sit still for five minutes. I was just always sort of.
Speaker 1:Well, that makes sense to me. You know, through my trauma-informed sort of understanding of life, that coming from such traumatic early beginnings right that you would have a traumatized nervous system.
Speaker 2:And that you would accept the contentment within you and the life energy which is unconditional love. They're not affected by any trauma.
Speaker 1:No, I understand.
Speaker 2:It's that trauma is physical, mental, emotional, social and environmental. Yes, but the core is stable, completely stable. Its nature is to be stable, to be unchangeable. What a nice thing to have that within you. It's like your mother's finger. You know, if you're a little kid, you know it's like your mother's finger. You know you have a place where you can always rely on.
Speaker 1:This took such a beautiful twist. I didn't expect it to go there. Yeah, it's so authentic and you can see it in you. Right, and many of us are in. We're on the summit because our health isn't great, our mental health isn't great. We know we're overeating sugar. We were even on the addiction spectrum and that just means that we're doing what you're saying. We're looking in the lint pocket, we're trying to find the black forest cake, the bagels, the whatever, to sort of do this.
Speaker 2:You could say sugar is lint.
Speaker 1:Sugar is the lint right.
Speaker 2:It's not possible.
Speaker 1:But if we let the sugar go and bring in the good foods that really nourish our bodies and then begin the journey of going in, coming home, finding our self, our true self, that connection that we can all be 81 year olds like Udo, truly saying honestly I live a happy life and doing our best to pass that along to future generations. So anyways, dr Udo sorry you feel like a doctor to me all your knowledge. Udo, thank you so much for your time, for your products. Everyone. Please make sure you go and check out his products right. They're the highest quality, phenomenal integrity every step of the way, pioneering work, and his book Fats at Heal, fats at Kill, will help us deep dive there as well. Is there any?
Speaker 2:final comment you want to hear my sugar story? Okay, sure, sure, okay. So when we grew up pretty poor, so we didn't eat a lot like oranges were never, and of course that was a long time ago we didn't eat a lot of sweet stuff except on holidays, especially Christmas, and on Christmas we had cookies what do they call those cookies? Anyway, so we had sweets at Christmas and every Christmas I would get a major snot-nosed colt. Every Christmas it was like clockwork. When I stopped eating the cookies, that ended my snot-nosed Christmas colts. Very, very predictable, completely predictable. Years of getting them and years of not getting them. And sugar was the difference. And why? Again, because a teaspoon of sugar knocks down your immune system for five to eight hours. And in winter, when you're also low in vitamin D and your other things are not working so well, then the bugs just have a field day. It's that simple. And then the other one I get high blood sugar rushes.
Speaker 2:I'm quite sugar sensitive, my kid's quite sugar sensitive. My kid comes, he'd eat the junk stuff and I didn't buy it for him, but he came and ate it. He liked the stuff and he'd come and he'd sit down in a chair and he would just crash Like it was just I mean really crash worse than I did. And I said to him notice, to see if that doesn't happen every time you eat a bunch of sugar. I didn't tell him, I just asked him to check it out. A couple of months later he comes back and he says dad, you're right what, dad right about what? Well, I've paid attention to the sugar and I noticed that it happens every time I eat a bunch of sugar and I've decided not to eat so much sugar anymore. So he figured it out by his own observation and you know what, anybody who's listening to this can figure it out by their own observation too. It's like it's only a little, just a little lag.
Speaker 2:And then the other thing he wanted me to buy him one of those sweet things. And I said to him you know, ty, I'm not going to spend money that I work hard for to buy you something that I know is not good for you. But if you want to spend your own money on that stuff, that's up to you. So I didn't force him and I didn't tell him how smart I was and I didn't beat him over the head with it.
Speaker 2:But it's always, you know, when you direct the attention and let people discover for themselves what happens as a consequence of whatever it is they're doing, then they learn it from their own experience and then it's real for them. If I say you shouldn't eat sugar, you know. You can just give me the finger, you can say oh well, you know, that's what you think, or you know just because you said so, I'm going to eat more sugar, right. But when it's your own experience that you're responding to, because it's your own experience, your own insight, your own knowledge, that's foundational and fundamentally, that certainly applies to sugar. It's like, after fried foods, sugar is definitely the worst thing on the planet that we've done to ourselves.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so Thank you for that. I'll just add to that I know this is going way along. This is the last thing I'm going to say and we'll wrap this up today. But when I was raising my daughter, I was quite committed to raising her whole foods on me. I didn't, I could not have fed her sugar. It just would have been painful. And so when she started to ask me, well, mom, can I have that? I'll say you know, when you're outside the house you can choose it honey. Other people, you know other people might give it to you. That's your choice. I can't, I can't feed you white sugar honey. I love you too much, I know too much about it. It would hurt my heart to feed it to you. I literally can't do it. I have never. She's 21 years old. I have never fed my child white refined sugars. Right, like I won't say I haven't given her honey or maple syrup. I sort of softened there in some places. For sure I didn't see it as the same sort of. You know, two by four.
Speaker 2:Not the same.
Speaker 1:White refined sugar is. But yeah and yeah, yeah, because I get it. It's like when you really really know what it's doing to somebody and you really really love them, it's like incompatible, you can't.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yep.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:All right.
Speaker 1:Udo thank you for the interview and all your work and all your wonderful supplements.
Speaker 2:Thanks, florence, thank you.