Aging

The foundational mechanism Aajonus used to explain aging was the cellular bank account. Every person begins life with a reserve of nutrients stored in their cells. This reserve is what sustains life when the diet fails to supply adequate bioavailable nutrition, which is the condition produced by eating cooked, processed, and manufactured food.

When cooked food is eaten, the pancreas detects that the food contains protein and fat structures that are damaged and cauterized by heat, and that the enzymes necessary for digestion and cellular function have been destroyed. The pancreas responds by producing hormones, including insulin and related compounds, that travel to every cell in the body and extract small amounts of protein, fat, enzymes, and other active substances from each cell's own reserves. Aajonus described this as "sending out a couple of thugs" that go around collecting from every cell in the body whether the cell consents or not.

This happens every single time a person eats cooked or processed food. Each meal is another withdrawal. The individual amounts taken from each cell are minute, but accumulated over decades, the effect is profound. By the time a person is 40 years old, Aajonus said, they have spent 50 percent or more of that bank account. By 60 or 70 years old, many people are down to the bottom of their reserves. The cells that remain alive are fewer and weaker. The body that was built to 100 percent capacity is now being maintained by 22 to 27 percent living cells, which must carry the weight and perform the functions of 100 percent of the body's mass.

When people reach that threshold of approximately 22 percent cellular life, Aajonus observed, the body typically collapses and dies. The image he returned to repeatedly was the elderly person taking five minutes to cross a street, barely able to move, their remaining living cells overwhelmed by the load they are required to carry. That person is not just old, he explained. That person has a body that is 75 to 78 percent dead.

If a person eats raw, living food instead, the pancreas does not need to leach from the cells. The nutrients arrive bioavailable and intact. The bank account is not spent. The cells retain their reserves, continue to reproduce, and the body maintains or even increases its percentage of living cells over time.

One of the specific biochemical mechanisms Aajonus identified as a driver of aging was the production and accumulation of advanced glycation end products, which he abbreviated as AGEs. He noted the deliberate irony of the acronym.

When the body uses carbohydrates as fuel, whether from fruit, bread, grains, vegetables, or any other carbohydrate source, the metabolic process produces advanced glycation end products as a byproduct. Columbia University research that Aajonus cited found that in a healthy person, 70 percent of all AGEs produced by the body are stored permanently in the body for a lifetime. In a person with compromised kidney function or diabetes, that storage rate rises to 90 percent.

This means that every donut, every piece of fruit, every carbohydrate consumed over a lifetime has left behind 70 to 90 percent of its waste product embedded in the tissues of the body. As these accumulate over 30, 40, 50 years, the concentration reaches levels where they begin acting as acids, dissolving and breaking down healthy tissue. They cause brittleness and dryness throughout the body. They make the blood, lymph, and neurological fluid sticky, interfering with synaptic firing and contributing to cognitive loss. They damage the kidneys through acid accumulation. They cause the skin to sag, the muscles to lose tone, and the body to bloat, because at sufficient concentration the AGEs behave like the acid in a Coca-Cola, Aajonus said, dissolving the structural integrity of tissues.

When the body converts fat to fuel using the pyruvate pathway, using protein-derived sugar rather than carbohydrate-derived glycogen, Columbia University found that the advanced glycation end product byproduct drops to only 7 to 8 percent, which the body can easily process without storage. This means that a diet centered on raw meat, raw eggs, raw dairy, and raw fat produces essentially no AGE accumulation, while a diet based on carbohydrates continuously builds the AGE load responsible for tissue deterioration associated with aging.

Aajonus's practical recommendation to reduce AGE production was to pair carbohydrate foods, if consumed at all, with fats. Butter with bread, cream or avocado with fruit, fat with juice, slows the digestion and conversion of carbohydrates into glycogen and allows more of the carbohydrate energy to enter the citric acid cycle, converting fats to energy rather than producing glycogen and its waste byproducts.

Aajonus identified the pituitary gland as centrally involved in aging because it governs growth hormone production, which in turn governs the rate at which cells divide and reproduce. In humans eating cooked and processed diets, the pituitary begins dramatically reducing growth hormone production around age 21, when maturation is considered complete. In animals on natural raw diets, growth hormone production decreases somewhat but does not stop the way it does in humans.

He pointed out that when cats and dogs are fed processed kibble and cooked pet food, they also stop producing adequate growth hormones by around two years of age, mirroring the human pattern. This is not a natural biological event but a consequence of diet.

On a raw food diet, Aajonus stated, the pituitary continues producing growth hormones past 21, enabling the body to continue generating new cells at a rate sufficient to maintain or increase the proportion of living cells in the body. Without adequate growth hormone, the rate of cellular reproduction falls below the rate of cellular death, and the body begins accumulating dead cells faster than it replaces them. The consequence of this net loss is the progressive decline in cellular life percentage that underlies what is conventionally called aging.

A body with 90 percent living cells, which is approximately the level a healthy baby approaches, performs at full capacity. A body that has declined to 60 or 70 percent living cells is noticeably weakened. At 22 to 25 percent, the body is near collapse. Aajonus described this trajectory as entirely preventable through maintaining the conditions that allow growth hormone production to continue and cellular reproduction to outpace cellular death.

As the proportion of dead cells increases, the body faces a structural challenge. Dead cells cannot simply be removed without replacement, because the body uses them to maintain structural form. Aajonus described this as the body mummifying its dead cells to keep the person upright and functional in shape. A dead, mummified cell contributes nothing to metabolic work, energy production, waste management, or any other biological function. It is inert scaffolding.

When 27 percent of the body is alive and 73 percent is mummified dead cellular matter, those living cells are performing 100 percent of the metabolic work for 100 percent of the body's weight and structural demands. If that person is also overweight, the burden on the living cells becomes even more extreme. This is why elderly people on conventional diets appear frail and exhausted. The living cells that remain are not diseased in the conventional sense. They are simply overwhelmed.

Aajonus said that the body will maintain structure this way as long as it can, but that this mummification process is what people observe as the physical signs of aging: sagging skin, loss of muscle tone, dryness, brittleness, loss of dexterity, and loss of strength.

The timeline Aajonus used for complete bodily regeneration on an optimal raw diet was derived from two bodies of research: the work of Francis Pottinger and Edward Howell with cats and rats, and the basic biology of cellular replacement cycles.

Pottinger and Howell found that when diseased animals were placed on a perfect species-appropriate raw diet, it took five generations for those animals to return to optimal health. Each generation of offspring was healthier than the last, because cells pass their accumulated toxicity to their daughter cells just as mothers pass toxicity to their offspring during gestation. After five generations of clean cellular reproduction, the stored toxicity from the damaged original cells was fully cleared.

For humans, one generation of cellular replacement takes seven to seven and a half years. This is the time required for every cell in the body, including the slowest-cycling cells in bone, cartilage, teeth, gums, and other dense tissues, to be replaced one time. Softer tissues replace far faster: blood replaces in 60 to 90 days, organs and glands much faster than bone. But because all systems share the same toxic environment, and the harder cells are the last to clear, the full cycle is seven to seven and a half years.

Five generations of cellular replacement therefore requires 35 to 37.5 years, which Aajonus rounded to 40 years. This is the minimum time required, on a perfect diet without additional toxic input, to completely remove the accumulated compounds and damaged cellular inheritance from the body and arrive at optimal health.

Aajonus counted his own personal 40-year clock from December of 1982, the date he began eating raw meat twice daily. He described that date as his dietary birthday, the beginning of his journey toward optimal health. At various points in the transcripts he described having 12, 14, or 16 years remaining on that timeline, depending on when the talk was recorded. He consistently reported that even in the middle of that process, still years from completion, he was getting healthier every year, every day, rather than deteriorating.

He acknowledged that people who began the diet later in life would not live to see 40 years on it, but he was explicit that this was not a reason not to begin. Every day on the diet is a day of improvement rather than decline. Even someone who starts at 65 and dies at 80 will have spent 15 years getting healthier rather than 15 years declining. The direction of change, not the endpoint, was what mattered.

He also noted that toxic exposure during the 40-year period extends the timeline. Someone living in a city with heavy diesel and industrial pollution, breathing contaminated air daily, will need longer than 40 years unless they are consuming enough fat and proper nutrients to neutralize the daily toxic input. In such conditions, large amounts of fat are especially important for binding, surrounding, and facilitating the removal of environmental toxins that would otherwise accumulate in the tissues and add to the regenerative burden.

A subsequent observation from his later work, involving hot baths to mobilize stored toxic fat from the body, led him to estimate that the bat protocol could reduce the 40-year timeline to approximately 25 years, cutting 15 years off the process by using heat to soften waxy and plastic stored fat so that the body's chemistry could dissolve and clear it.

In his clinical work, Aajonus used cellular life percentage as a practical metric for assessing how far along in deterioration or regeneration a person was, and for estimating how long their recovery would take.

He described one example of a man whose right side of the body had 57 percent of cells alive. From that figure, the average could be calculated, and the estimate was approximately 35 years to reach optimal health on the diet. For a younger person in their late twenties with cellular life at 60 to 70 percent, the estimate would be around 20 years, with variables added for drug storage, since cocaine and other drug residues extend the timeline significantly, potentially doubling it.

He observed that it typically takes two to two and a half years of dietary work to get damaged glands rebuilt and functioning properly before real regenerative momentum begins. After that glandular stabilization, a person can expect to gain roughly one and a half to two percent of cellular life per year. After 12 to 15 years on the diet, the rate of gain can increase to two to two and a half percent per year. This means that early progress is slow, the first years being dominated by glandular repair, and later progress accelerates as the body's own infrastructure becomes more capable of sustaining regeneration.

At 22 percent cellular life, Aajonus said, most people drop dead. When he himself was near death at 21 years old, he estimated his cellular life was around 30 percent. By the time he was speaking at 60-plus years old, he estimated approximately 80 percent of his cells were alive, and he described his goal as reaching the point where dead cells were only about 5 percent of the body. He acknowledged that takes time, but saw no reason it could not be achieved.

Aajonus returned repeatedly to the mathematical calculation of the human lifespan as a foundation for understanding how profoundly current lifestyles shorten life. The formula is universal in nature: every creature lives seven times the period required to finish maturation. A dog matures in approximately two and a half years and lives 17 to 20 years. A cat similarly. Creatures fed cooked diets in captivity drop their lifespans in the first generation by one third, and by the third generation of all-cooked food they become impotent, deformed in offspring, and extinct by the fourth or fifth generation.

Humans, Aajonus argued, are already several generations into all-cooked diets. He pointed to 1947, the year of his birth, as a marker for when the total industrialization of the food supply was essentially complete in the United States. How many generations of humans have had no meaningful raw food in the diet since then? The consequences, he argued, are visible in disease rates, infertility, developmental disorders, and the progressive decline in average healthspan.

He cited a 1971 National Geographic article about people in Georgia, Russia, who were living to 138 and 142 years old on diets that included raw dairy and raw meat. He described meeting a 120-year-old man in a tribe in the Philippines climbing a palm tree faster than Aajonus could imagine climbing it. He described tribes in the Andes whose members, at 90 years old, participate in a 200-mile ball-kicking run through high altitude mountain terrain, rotating through a sprint line for the full distance. He described tribes where people at 138 had all of their teeth, and in one case the only missing tooth was explained by a heavy scar at the corresponding point on the lip, indicating the tooth was lost to injury rather than deterioration.

His working threshold for a premature death in his clinical practice was any death before age 138. He arrived at 138 rather than 147 because he had no documented record of anyone living beyond 138, so he subtracted approximately a decade as a conservative figure. Any client who died before 138 he considered a death that might have been delayed with different choices or better support.

Aajonus used observations from raw-food-eating tribal populations extensively to demonstrate that aging and deterioration are not synonymous in practice, not only in theory. The Andes tribe he described practiced an extreme annual athletic event at advanced ages that would be physically impossible for people whose bodies had deteriorated to 22 or 25 percent cellular life. The fact that 90-year-olds could participate in this event, year after year, climbing altitudes of 6,000 to 9,000 feet while sustaining a running pace for 200 miles, was direct evidence of what the body can maintain when it is properly fed throughout a lifetime.

The Philippine tribe he described, where members at 138 had full dentition except for trauma-related loss, demonstrated that tooth decay is not an inevitable consequence of aging but a consequence of diet and accumulated carbohydrate waste. The absence of cavities at 138 in a person whose diet contained no processed or cooked food was, for Aajonus, a straightforward demonstration of what the body preserves when it is not subjected to AGE accumulation and nutrient leaching.

He contrasted these populations with the Inuit, who eat largely raw animal food but consume much of it frozen. Because frozen food destroys enzymes, the Inuit, despite an otherwise appropriate diet, live only to about 105 or 110. This was his evidence that even among raw food cultures, the specific form and temperature of the food matters. Raw and unfrozen supports full enzyme activity. Raw and frozen reduces it. Cooked eliminates it.

Aajonus's critique of the medical understanding of aging was direct. The food industry and medical profession claim that the body produces its own enzymes to compensate for the absence of enzymes in cooked food. Aajonus rejected this completely: "money does not grow on trees just like enzymes don't grow in the body." The enzymes the pancreas sends out to compensate for cooked food are not manufactured from nothing. They are extracted from the cells of the body at a cost. This is the mechanism of the bank account depletion.

He also challenged the statistical narrative that modern medicine has extended human lifespan. His position was that the apparent improvement in average lifespan is an artifact of reduced infant and childhood mortality, and that when the full population is considered including children who die at birth and in early childhood, the real average death age is comparable to what it was a century ago, in the late 40s. People living in cities 100 years ago with heavy pollution, no refrigeration, and already-spoiled cooked food had poor outcomes. Healthy farm people living 100 years ago, eating fresh food and raw dairy, lived long lives. The overall statistics, he argued, do not reflect what is possible with proper nutrition, and the medical profession uses the inflated average to claim credit for improvements that, in his view, do not exist for the general population.

He described hormonal overproduction from toxic junk food as a mechanism that masks deterioration in younger people, giving them apparent energy while the underlying cellular decline proceeds invisibly. Many of these people, he observed, feel powerful and vital into their 30s and 40s while their cells are actually in serious decline, and then face sudden collapse, heart attacks, or rapid decline in their 40s and 50s with no warning because the hormonal masking kept them from experiencing symptoms.

Throughout the transcripts, Aajonus used his own body as ongoing evidence for his framework. He described being nearly dead at 21 years old, having perhaps 30 percent of his cells alive, crawling on his elbows on the floor. He described having to undergo aggressive chemotherapy that produced lasting toxic residue, including antifreeze compounds he could still taste coming out of his body in detox episodes decades later.

He began his optimal diet in December of 1982 when he started eating raw meat on a daily basis. He counted everything before that date as irrelevant to his 40-year regeneration clock. At 60 years old, he reported his skin coming back to life, his body becoming younger year over year rather than older, his strength and focus increasing rather than declining. He described psoriasis appearing as a detox episode, having had it continuously for years during chemotherapy but now experiencing it for only a few weeks every 15 years, each episode shorter and milder than the last, which he interpreted as evidence of progressively deeper layers of toxicity being cleared.

When asked if he was getting old, his consistent answer was that he was getting younger. He cited his improving physical capacity, his clearer thinking, his more vital body as evidence. He described the 68-year-old man with Alzheimer's whose body became physically younger than most people's after five years on the diet, looking like a teenager at 76 in physical form, even though his mind did not recover. This physical rejuvenation of the body, even in a case of advanced neurological disease, demonstrated to Aajonus that the body's capacity to regenerate is not abolished by age or disease, only by the absence of the conditions that support it.

He also described a period in which stress and danger from death threats after a radio broadcast on the swine flu caused him to age noticeably in a short period, which he took as evidence of how dramatically stress and external threats can accelerate the depletion of cellular resources and interrupt the regeneration process.

Central to preventing aging deterioration was the consistent consumption of raw fat at sufficient levels. Aajonus stated that consuming a raw diet in which 40 percent of calories come from raw fat prevents the normal process of body deterioration. Without adequate fat, the body deteriorates gradually or quickly. He recommended a minimum of 3 percent of calories from raw fat and up to 30 percent from specific raw fat sources depending on the individual's condition, with 40 percent total fat calories being the protective threshold.

Raw fat serves multiple functions in the aging framework. It provides the building blocks for cell membranes and brain tissue that cannot be properly constituted from cooked fat, which hardens like glass in the body over 10 to 50 years and causes brittleness of arteries, cracking of veins, aneurysms, and Alzheimer's-like plaque in brain tissue. It slows carbohydrate digestion when consumed with fruit or sweet foods, reducing AGE production. It provides the fuel the body uses through pyruvate and the citric acid cycle, generating only 7 to 8 percent AGE waste as opposed to the 70 to 90 percent from carbohydrate-based glycogen production. It carries and surrounds environmental and dietary toxins, facilitating their removal through the skin and other elimination pathways rather than allowing them to lodge permanently in organs and tissues.

The specific fat sources he emphasized were raw animal fats: meat fats, dairy fats, and eggs. He noted that butter consumed with carbohydrate-heavy foods significantly reduces the body's tendency to store AGEs, and that cream cheese or avocado consumed with sweet fruit performs the same function.

One point Aajonus made specifically about aging was that even raw food, if dehydrated, loses its anti-aging properties because dehydration destroys enzyme activity. Many people assume dehydrated food is raw food. Aajonus was explicit that it is not, at least not in the enzymatically active sense. Dehydrated enzymes become hardened and biologically inactive. They are not stable. The same mechanism that makes cooked food an enzyme-dead food makes dehydrated food an enzyme-dead food.

This meant that only raw, unheated, undehydrated, unfrozen food fully supports the enzymatic activity necessary to prevent the pancreatic leaching of cellular nutrients and to maintain the conditions under which aging and deterioration are not synonymous.