Adrenals

The adrenal glands are small, approximately the size of a thumb up to the second joint, or even smaller. There are two of them, one sitting atop each kidney, which Aajonus described as giving the body a backup system. He noted that many endocrine glands come in pairs, including the gonads, precisely so that the failure of one does not eliminate the function entirely. The adrenal glands are categorized as endocrine glands because they secrete hormones, primarily adrenaline, directly into the bloodstream rather than through a duct system. This direct-to-blood secretion is what allows them to produce an immediate, whole-body physiological response within seconds.

Because the adrenal glands sit on top of the kidneys, and the kidneys are positioned in the lower back protected by surrounding musculature, the adrenal glands are relatively well protected from external trauma. Aajonus noted that to damage the adrenal glands through physical impact, you would have to be struck hard in the back.

Aajonus described the adrenal glands' sole legitimate function in a healthy body as producing adrenaline for fight-or-flight situations. He cited a well-known case from the early 1950s of a woman who, seeing her baby about to be run over by a car that had already crushed the infant's fingers, lifted the rear end of the 3,000-pound vehicle. He returned to this example across multiple seminars because it illustrated what a genuinely tiny amount of adrenaline can accomplish: he stated that a pinprick, or a thousandth of a microgram, of adrenaline introduced into the blood can produce two to three times a person's normal physical strength, and in extreme emergency situations, even more.

He also noted that adrenaline injected into a non-beating heart can restart cardiac function, and that the medical profession has long used this fact. However, he was careful to distinguish between trace adrenaline released naturally in a genuine emergency versus manufactured or injected adrenaline, which he viewed as a drug rather than the real biological compound.

He described additional legitimate triggers for adrenal secretion beyond fear-based fight or flight: situations of extreme hunger in which an animal is too weak to hunt but spots prey. In those circumstances, the body will produce adrenaline to give the animal enough physical capacity to pursue food. He characterized this too as an emergency circumstance.

The adrenal glands also participate, alongside the thymus, in converting some adrenaline into hormones that help regulate lung and heart functionality during periods of elevated physical activity. The thymus helps the lungs and heart function continuously, and some of the adrenal output is chemically transformed for that purpose.

Aajonus explained that adrenaline does not work in isolation. It requires a fuel source to produce its effects in the body, and it operates primarily by mobilizing fat from the muscles and blood. When adequate fat is available in the blood, adrenaline calls it out and burns it in the muscles, producing the extraordinary physical capacity associated with emergency states. This is the clean, functional version of adrenal activity.

However, adrenaline can also burn sugar. He specified that sugar in conjunction with adrenaline behaves like sulfuric acid, or battery acid, which he identified as highly destructive to tissues. When fat is not available, whether because of dietary insufficiency or because the person has not been eating enough raw fats, adrenaline will combine with whatever sugars are available. This combination saturates the body with an acidic compound that damages tissues throughout the system.

When neither fat nor sugar is available in the blood or muscles, adrenaline will seek out the nervous system as its fuel source. It will begin breaking down the myelin sheath, which Aajonus described as being approximately ninety percent fat, and using that fat as its working material. As the myelin thins, the nervous system becomes increasingly exposed to electromagnetic signals from the blood and from the external environment. The result is hypersensitivity, irritability, anxiety, and an inability to function clearly. He framed multiple sclerosis in this context: the lesions in the myelin caused by adrenaline operating without adequate blood fat.

He also noted a molecular efficiency comparison: it takes two and a half times as much sugar or starch to burn the same amount of energy that one molecule of fat provides. This makes fat the far more efficient fuel for adrenaline to work with, and it makes low-fat diets particularly damaging when they allow or encourage chronic adrenal activity.

In Aajonus's framework, chronic adrenal activity is almost always a response to a body operating in a constant emergency state due to toxic accumulation and dietary deficiency. He identified two primary drivers.

The first is insufficient dietary fat. Without adequate raw fat in the body, the blood cannot transport oxygen efficiently enough to convert fat into energy through normal metabolic processes, and the red blood cells become compromised. When the normal energy production pathway fails, the body turns to adrenaline as a substitute fuel source. This was not designed to be sustainable. He stated plainly that 100 years ago, nobody had heard of adrenaline as a health problem, because people were eating large amounts of raw cream, unpasteurized butter, and other raw fats, and those fats gave them their energy through normal metabolic means. There was no need to fall back on the adrenal glands for daily energy.

The second driver is industrial toxicity. He stated that 60,000 chemicals are now used in food production, out of 80,000 chemicals produced in total. This constant toxic bombardment, combined with air pollution, radiation, and electromagnetic fields, keeps the body in a perpetual emergency state. The endocrine glands, including the adrenals, respond to this emergency by continuously secreting hormones. He also pointed out that many people with apparently good adrenal function still suffer from chronic fatigue because their adrenaline is being used entirely for detoxification, bound up with toxins to prevent more serious disease, and has nothing left to contribute to energy production.

Caffeine was identified as a specific trigger for adrenal overstimulation. Chronic consumption of coffee or caffeine-containing drinks like Coca-Cola stimulates the adrenal glands repeatedly until they exhaust themselves. He linked this pattern to type A personality types, though he noted type B or C personalities could also develop adrenal exhaustion if their caffeine consumption was extreme enough.

Aajonus described adrenal exhaustion as the endpoint of a body that has been relying on adrenaline for its daily energy when it should have been relying on proper foods and fats. The body essentially works the adrenal glands to death. When the glands finally give out, the person can no longer function at a basic level because they had built their entire functional energy model on adrenal output, not on proper nutrition and digestion.

He listed the characteristics of adrenal exhaustion as follows, drawing from his published writings: weight loss, fears that exceed what would be considered rational, ridges running lengthwise in the nails, apathy toward most forms of effort, unusual hair loss, the feeling of being unable to hold the back straight, and feeling as though the legs cannot adequately support the body.

In hand and eye reading, he described adrenal exhaustion as visible in the palm. He discussed an area of the hand where adrenal activity can be read, noting that when that area is flat and lifeless, it indicates either low adrenal activity or adrenal exhaustion. When the tissue in that region becomes fleshy without firmness behind it, it signals that the gland is moving toward exhaustion. He described seeing one case in which the left adrenal gland was almost completely exhausted while the right was still functioning, and he confirmed this by cross-referencing what he observed in the iris of the eye, where the right eye corresponds to the left side of the body internally.

He also noted that adrenal exhaustion rarely comes alone. In almost all cases, by the time the adrenal glands are exhausted, the thyroid has also reached exhaustion, and every other gland is similarly depleted. This is why he generally recommended a multi-glandular tissue supplement for anyone presenting with adrenal exhaustion.

Aajonus described a consistent relationship between overactive adrenal glands and candida. When the adrenal glands are chronically overactive and combining adrenaline with sugars in the absence of fat, those sugar-adrenaline compounds become lodged in tissues throughout the body. Candida and other yeasts feed on the sugar stored in these pockets of adrenal-sugar residue. He stated that candida typically appears before adrenal exhaustion fully sets in, but the two conditions occur together in at least 86 percent of cases in his observation.

He noted a sex-based difference in how this manifested. Women will sometimes express the adrenaline-sugar compounds through vaginal yeast infections rather than systemic candida, because the anatomy allows those compounds to exit more rapidly through that route. Men, lacking that pathway, tend to accumulate candida systemically and chronically.

Once adrenal-sugar combinations have damaged tissues throughout the body, those tissues lose the ability to produce their own prostaglandins, which are intracellular hormones. The tissues continue to secrete extracellular hormones for a time, but when that capacity also breaks down, complete exhaustion follows.

Aajonus described situations in which the adrenal glands are called upon to compensate for failing function in other glands. He gave a specific example in a seminar reading: a man whose testes were significantly debilitated found that his overactive adrenal glands were essentially substituting for the missing testosterone. The result was not the hyperactivity one might expect from overactive adrenals in a person with adequate testosterone, but rather a kind of debilitated calm, a muted or suppressed state rather than a healthy, relaxed one.

He also described the reverse substitution, in which sex hormones compensate for absent adrenal output. In one seminar reading, he observed a woman whose adrenal glands were barely functioning, with one essentially inactive, while her sex glands were very overactive. He read this as the sex hormones filling in for the absent adrenal hormones. He stated that the body generally has the capacity to take one hormone and transform it into another through a complicated process, such as converting thyroxine into something that functions like an adrenal hormone, particularly when the body is fatigued and damaged enough that it must use whatever is available.

Aajonus returned consistently to fat as the substance whose absence creates adrenal dependence. The proper fats, consumed raw, allow the body to produce energy through normal metabolic processes without engaging the adrenal glands at all. When people have enough raw fat in the blood and tissues, the muscles can draw on fat as their primary fuel, the red blood cells can carry oxygen efficiently to facilitate fat-to-energy conversion, and there is no need for the emergency boost of adrenaline.

He framed the epidemic of adrenal disorders in modern people as essentially a fat-deficiency epidemic combined with a toxicity problem. When adrenal glands are overactive, the reading he gave was almost always that the person lacked enough of the right kinds of fat, or that their red blood cells were too compromised to bring oxygen to the conversion process. He stated that if someone's adrenal glands are overactive and the body is dry, with insufficient lipid content throughout the tissues, no external circumstance, including relationships or financial abundance, can create genuine happiness or ease. The body is too irritated at a cellular level.

He noted that 100 years ago, people who lived near farms and had access to unpasteurized cream, butter, and raw dairy were incredibly healthy and did not experience the adrenal problems that have become common. Ice cream, at that time made from raw cream, became popular during that same period of widespread health. The shift away from raw fats toward processed, pasteurized, and cooked fats eliminated the primary fuel source and forced the body into chronic adrenal dependence.

When adrenaline cannot find fat to work with, it enters the nervous system and begins irritating it directly. Aajonus explained that if the adrenal glands are dumping adrenaline into the blood and there is no fat available, the adrenaline will eventually begin eating the myelin sheath because the myelin is approximately 90 percent fat and represents an accessible fat source. As the myelin thins, it loses its insulating capacity, and sensory signals from the blood, from external electromagnetic fields, and from physical stimuli all begin flooding the system with no adequate buffer. The result is irritability, anxiety, hypersensitivity, and poor decision-making. He described this as the state in which animals will make confused or suicidal decisions, such as an elk at the end of a winter season when blood fat is nearly depleted, fighting when it should flee.

He was specific that the problem is not the adrenaline itself but the absence of fat to work with. When fat is present in adequate amounts in the blood and muscles, adrenaline performs its emergency function cleanly, mobilizes the fat, burns it for extreme output, and does not damage the nervous system at all.

Across his seminar readings, Aajonus regularly assessed adrenal gland status through the hands and iris. He described an area of the palm associated with adrenal activity and read its texture, fullness, firmness, and depth of lines to determine whether the glands were overactive, moving toward exhaustion, functioning well, or had significant dead or hardened tissue. In one reading he described a left adrenal gland with approximately 40 percent dead tissue and functioning at only about 10 percent. In another, the right adrenal gland was nearly deteriorating. In multiple readings, he noted bilateral adrenal overactivity, particularly on the right side, and linked this to irritability, impatience, and a body that could not find ease regardless of external conditions.

He made a distinction between low adrenal activity and adrenal exhaustion. Low adrenal activity means the gland is underperforming but not destroyed. Adrenal exhaustion means the gland has been worked until it can no longer produce. Both can appear as a flat, lifeless mound in the relevant area of the palm, though the quality of the flatness differs.

He also described a case in which a person had very wide adrenal gland areas on both sides of the hands, indicating a long history of very overactive adrenal glands, and cautioned that without dietary change, this level of chronic adrenal overdrive combined with tissue dryness could lead to widespread sores within about ten years.

Aajonus was explicit in his seminars that when someone says they have an adrenal problem, 99 percent of the time they do not have an adrenal problem in the sense of the gland being the origin of the dysfunction. The adrenal glands are responding appropriately to a body saturated with industrial toxins. The problem is the toxicity. Removing that toxicity is the key intervention, and strengthening the body may need to come first before direct detoxification is appropriate.

He characterized the pharmaceutical and medical approach to adrenal hormones as a fabrication designed to create pharmaceutical dependency. When doctors say a person has low adrenaline, low growth hormone, or low thyroid, he argued that having those hormones in the blood at measurable levels is itself the symptom of a compromised body. In a healthy person eating correctly, the endocrine glands should not be producing hormones that register in blood tests because they are only supposed to activate in true emergencies.

When discussing how to support or regenerate the adrenal glands, Aajonus emphasized the use of raw glandular tissues from animals. He specified that regenerating glandular cells requires both fish and beef, because many glands contain predominantly red cells, and the type of flesh needed to regenerate them depends on their cellular composition. He described adrenal exhaustion as almost always accompanied by thyroid exhaustion and broader multi-glandular exhaustion, which is why he generally recommended a multi-glandular tissue supplement rather than targeting only the adrenals.

In one passage, he described a specific situation in which one adrenal gland was nearly dead, and suggested that in addition to dietary support, the appropriate glandular tissue needed to be introduced. He noted that the body would use the proteins and fats from meat tissue that corresponded to the gland being rebuilt, and that the presence of the correct meat type in the stomach oriented the body's chemistry toward rebuilding that glandular tissue.

He also noted that people with very active adrenal glands and high hydrochloric acid production would crave specific foods, such as turkey, that supported their condition, and that in those individuals even foods that might cause complications in others could be consumed without difficulty because the adrenal and hydrochloric acid activity created the conditions needed to handle them.