‘I get up at 5 and hit the gym’: vitamins king, 70, reveals his health regimen
Frank Caruso is the embodiment of a commitment to good health. The vitamins king changed his life in his 20s and still out-trains younger gym-goers every morning.
The Saluti By Novella Italian eatery and wine bar takes pride of place in the Western Sydney Parklands, Australia’s largest urban park, often called Sydney’s “biggest backyard”.
In the first week of November, Saluti played host to a special family event: a surprise 70th birthday celebration for vitamin and supplements king Frank Caruso.
Caruso was brought to tears as his four brothers and sisters unexpectedly turned up bearing gifts.
But most moving was an appearance by his 93-year-old father, Carlo, and many of his 19 grandchildren and 20 great-grandchildren.
“I truly believe that if you take responsibility for your own health, you can live a long, healthy life. Most Australians unfortunately maintain their health by chance, not by making a choice. I still train every morning and take no medications. I get up five o’clock, hit the gym and do a class every morning. I still out-train 70 per cent of the young people there,” Caruso says proudly.
His diet secret is not to overeat, and avoid processed foods and sugar. He is currently on the keto diet, a low-carb, high-fat diet focused on eating eggs, meat, dairy and vegetables.
It is now corporate folklore that Caruso, one of Australia’s first health entrepreneurs, had a life-changing experience in 1979.
But when he turned up for his first session with his favourite fast food in hand, the gym owner confronted him about his poor diet and recommended he read a book about fasting.
Over the weeks that followed, he couldn’t put it down and started putting its preachings into practice.
Over the next two years he lost a stunning 37kg as he went on a vegan diet and started fasting: 36 hours once a week, and then 72 hours once a month.
When he was 25 he even did a 10-day fast when he only drank water, while continuing to work full-time as a motor mechanic. To this day he practises intermittent fasting.
The stunning weight loss inspired him to open one of Australia’s first health food stores on his 28th birthday, November 1, 1982, and later to launch one of the first magazines to help educate Australians on health and wellbeing.
After 13 years, having grown frustrated with the lack of passion for natural health shown by the corporate sector, in 1995 he started his own vitamin company called Caruso’s Natural Health.
Today, Caruso’s is one of the leading vitamin brands in the nation and claims to be one of the only that is both Australian-owned and manufactures all of its products here.
“I am very patriotic, I want to keep jobs in Australia, that is why I chose to manufacture here. All of our products say ‘Made in Australia’ and people love an Australian story,” he says.
Caruso’s has around 130 products and is stocked in over 3000 pharmacies, but its most important relationship is with pharmacy sector behemoth Chemist Warehouse.
“You don’t get space in Chemist Warehouse stores unless you perform. So we work really hard to create demand for our products,” he says.
Frank Caruso has an incredible backstory.
He is the son of Italian migrants who settled in Sydney’s southwest. His mother, Maria Rosa, was three-months pregnant with her first child when she came to Sydney in 1953. Her husband followed in December that year.
During the next decade she had four more children, including Frank, but in the 1960s tragically lost one baby in a miscarriage.
“I was about seven years old and I remember my grandmother, whose name was Katerina, crying loudly that day. The ambulance was out the front of our house and they put Mum on a stretcher,” Frank recalls.
“My grandmother thought she was going to die.”
For years after the tragedy, Katerina kept the embryo of her daughter’s deceased baby preserved in a bottle of spirits, as a memory of the life the family lost.
The seven members of the Caruso family lived together in suburban Smithfield in a 60sqm, two-bedroom granny flat built by Carlo Caruso, surrounded by market gardens.
“You wouldn’t believe that seven of us lived in that home,” Frank says.
“I used to get up every day at 5am to help my nona tend to the garden, milk the goats, do the chores and other stuff.”
Frank could not speak a word of English before he started kindergarten, given the native tongue in the home was Calabrese, one of the dialects spoken in the Calabria region of southern Italy from where his parents came.
Older brother Rick would come home from school each day to teach him English.
When Frank was 11 years old, his father had an accident at work that almost killed him.
The then 31-year-old Carlo fell 9m after he and a bunch of other workers were ordered by their boss to dust down the corrugated roof at the factory where they made fridges.
“He was on his all fours, walking backwards with all the other guys, but he didn’t see the fibreglass sheet covered with dust as he crawled on to it, and fell straight through,” Frank says.
“Thankfully he fell on top of a fridge. It saved his life, but he broke just about every bone in his body.”
When Frank visited his father in hospital he was bandaged from head to toe, screaming in pain.
“I remember my uncles and aunties around the bed and the priest pretty much giving him his last rites, that’s how bad he was,” he says.
It took Carlo two years to make a full recovery, and four years before he could work again. To this day he still can’t move his neck and one of his fingers bears an iron rod.
Back then employers only paid 20 per cent of the wage for any staff member on workers’ compensation, which forced the Caruso family to earn all the rest.
Just to survive, Frank and his brother did the milk run each morning, and on the weekend the family sold their vegetables to the local community from a bunch of makeshift billycarts.
Frank left school in second form in 1969 just after his 15th birthday.
“I went everywhere with my cousin to try to get a cabinet-maker job. I walked from Parramatta to Strathfield one day looking for a job. But nothing came up. In late January I saw a job picking spare parts at Wesco Motors in Roseberry. I started there the day they offered me the job. It was my first full-time job,” he says.
At 21 he took over the lease of a service station, but lost money on it and gave it up after two years.
He was a motor mechanic by trade when he started his health food store, convincing one of his younger brothers, Tony, to put in $20,000 in and go halves to get it started.
He and wife Grace – who was then nine months pregnant – had saved to build a house, but he convinced her through tears to spend the money starting the shop instead. They have now been married for 45 years.
The business lost $13,000 in the first year but has been on an upward trajectory since. Its only stumbles have been brushes with the Therapeutic Goods Administration in 2020 and last year. The latest was a $82,500 fine for failing to hold or provide evidence to support five therapeutic uses for three of Caruso’s products.
Frank lost his mother in 2009 at the age of 85, and his father – who was nine years younger – repartnered two years after his wife’s passing. He still drives, and comes into Caruso’s Sydney head office a few days a week to help his sons.
Frank’s three sons are also now in the business.
Caruso’s is planning to quadruple warehouse capacity in 2026 with a move into a 9500sqm building at Kemp’s Creek in western Sydney, as its supplement sales in Australia of just over $60m are still a small slice of the industry valued at $1.7bn.
Frank set a mission five years ago for Caruso’s to be the number one pharmacy-only brand in Australian pharmacies by the end of this financial year. It has since gone from 13th to second.
But he will always be driven by a higher purpose.
One of his favourite – and haunting – sayings is that too many Australian families feed their pets healthier food than they do their children.
“We are eating too much rubbish, eating out too much, and our activity levels have gone through the floor,” he says.
“My passion is educating as many Australians as I can about the principles of natural living. It still drives me today, and it is the only reason I am still in business.”
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout