Allergy Skin Tests

The entire architecture of conventional allergy testing assumes that the protein extracted, concentrated, and processed for use in a skin test or immunoglobulin assay is chemically equivalent to the protein as it exists in a raw food. Aajonus rejected this assumption entirely. He argued that cooking and processing foods create protein structures that the human body was never designed to encounter, and that most allergic reactions experienced by people eating conventional diets are reactions to those cooked and processed proteins, not to the foods in their natural form.

He stated directly: "Most people eating cooked and processed foods will have varying degrees of allergies to cooked and processed proteins similar to those used in allergen tests." This means that a skin test result showing a positive reaction to, for example, eggs or dairy reflects what happens when a chemically altered egg or dairy protein encounters that person's immune chemistry, not what happens when that person eats a fresh raw egg or raw milk from an uncontaminated source. The two events are biologically distinct.

On a raw Primal Diet regimen using non-genetically-modified, non-industrially-contaminated foods, Aajonus held that a person would not develop true allergies to the foods themselves. The implication he drew from this is that allergen test results, when applied to raw food consumption, constitute a false positive: the test measures something real (a reaction to an altered protein) but draws an incorrect conclusion (that the person is allergic to the food).

A specific and detailed example of this measurement trap appears in the newsletter passages, where a patient reported being tested by Cyrex Laboratories and found "allergic to eggs and dairy, as well as whey," based on immunoglobulins showing up after exposure to those antigens. This result was causing the patient to consider abandoning the Primal Diet. Aajonus's response situated the test in the same framework he applied to all allergen tests: the testing was done with processed, altered proteins, and the results reflected reactions to those altered proteins, not to raw eggs, raw dairy, or raw whey as consumed on the Primal Diet.

He reiterated that the specific immunoglobulin methodology used by Cyrex, described by the patient as "a newer test and much more accurate than any of the tests from the past," was still subject to the same categorical limitation. No matter how refined the immunological detection method, if the antigen used in the test is a processed or altered form of the protein, the result cannot be directly applied to predict reactions to the raw, unaltered version of the same protein.

In a separate passage, Aajonus addressed thyroid-related iodine skin tests, where iodine is applied to the skin to see whether the body absorbs it, interpreted as a marker of thyroid status. He rejected this procedure as both toxic and meaningless. He described the iodine used in such tests as "rock iodine," an isolated mineral not bound with other nutrients, not the bioavailable food-bound iodine found in living plants and animals. Because it is isolated and unbound, it behaves like a mineral rock rather than a biological nutrient. The body's failure to absorb it, or its failure to produce a clear reaction, tells nothing useful about the body's actual iodine status, because the substance being tested is not the same as food iodine.

He stated that applying iodine to the skin in this way is itself toxic, because isolated iodine without biological binding partners is a poison to tissue, not a nutrient. The test is therefore exposing the body to a toxin to generate a reaction that is then interpreted as diagnostic information, when in fact the reaction, or the absence of one, is simply the body's response to an isolated chemical that it cannot use.

Aajonus made a broader observation about the logic underlying both allergy testing and vaccination programs, treating them as part of the same medical framework that mistakes the body's reaction to altered or isolated substances for information about how it responds to the same substances in their natural, whole, biologically integrated forms. A patient whose friend was "on a regular vaccination program to get rid of" allergies prompted Aajonus to explain what he considered the actual cause of allergies: either the body lacks enzymes to properly digest one or more constituents of food, causing those constituents to pass undigested into the blood and poison it, or the body cannot utilize one or more constituents breathed, eaten, or absorbed, and those constituents accumulate to a toxic level in the sinuses or blood, causing severe reactions when more of the constituent is introduced.

Neither of those root causes is addressed by a vaccination program or by a skin test. The vaccination program introduces more of an altered form of the substance into the body on a repeated schedule, which Aajonus viewed as further poisoning a system already unable to process the substance properly. The solution he offered was the opposite: raw food, which is more easily digestible, removes the digestive bottleneck that produces the allergy in the first place. He noted that allergy symptoms always mitigate over time on a raw diet, with most cases becoming insignificant within three years.

Aajonus argued that the practical function of allergen tests, regardless of their stated purpose, is to generate a conclusion that the body is malfunctioning and requires an external intervention: "some magic bullet, some supplement, homeopathic or pharmaceutical drug." He was explicit that those interventions, even when labeled natural or derived from foods, are all processed with laboratory industrial chemicals. He stated: "Those substances are not food."

The measurement trap works by producing a result (positive allergic reaction to a processed protein), applying that result to a natural food (concluding the person is allergic to the food), and then offering a pharmaceutical or supplemental intervention as the solution. Each step of the chain, in his view, is either wrong or misleading. The reaction is to the processing, not the food; the conclusion misapplies the test result; and the offered solution introduces more industrial chemicals into a body that is already struggling with an excess of them.

The one circumstance in which Aajonus acknowledged that eating raw food could still produce allergic reactions was when that raw food had been genetically modified or contaminated with agricultural industrial chemicals. He stated that on a raw diet, "we do not eat altered proteins that cause most allergies, unless we eat genetically modified (GM) foods or foods contaminated with agricultural industrial chemicals." This is important because it means the protection he attributed to raw food is conditional: the raw food must genuinely be free of genetic modification and industrial chemical contamination. Food that has been altered at the genetic level or soaked in agricultural chemicals will contain altered proteins even when consumed raw, and those altered proteins can produce reactions that resemble what allergen tests measure.

This distinction also clarifies why allergen tests done with conventionally produced food proteins might have some limited correspondence to reactions in people eating conventionally produced raw food: both involve altered proteins. But for someone eating genuinely raw, non-GM, non-industrially-contaminated food, the allergen test result remains inapplicable.