Anger

Aajonus taught that anger, resentment, and rage are not merely psychological states but physiological processes generated by specific chemical conditions in the body. An overly acidic system causes irritability that can evolve into anger and violence. Cooking meat forms heterocyclic amines and lipid peroxides that irritate nerves in many people, and he specifically recommended eating raw white meats as a way of avoiding this neurological irritation.

Excess adrenaline is a central mechanism. When a person eats too much red meat, the adrenal glands are overstimulated, and since adrenaline is for fight or flight, excess red meat consumption can produce irritability, irascibility, and crankiness even without any external provocation. A person in that state is not necessarily going to become violent, but they will be unhappy, acidic in disposition, and prone to short-fused reactions. Grains, and more reliably the Nut Formula, were the tools Aajonus recommended to chelate with these hormones and level them out.

Blood sugar instability is another driver. When blood sugar drops, depression follows. When adrenaline soars independently, manic behavior results. When blood sugar drops while adrenaline simultaneously soars, the result is irritability and a sour disposition. Aajonus described this pattern from his own childhood and early adulthood, where biological habits formed from chronic fear, anger, and violence in the household made normal behavior nearly impossible until he learned to manage it through diet.

Carbohydrates metabolizing into alcohols in the body was identified as another pathway to violent behavior. He described the physiology in terms of what happens when the nervous system becomes overloaded with those alcohol byproducts: the body is forced to burn them off through muscular energy and violent activity. He used the example of monkeys going on rampages when their system is loaded with such compounds as an illustration of the same principle. When he was a fruitarian, he described himself as passionate to a degree he later viewed as manic and aggressive, attributing it directly to the carbohydrate and fruit load he was consuming.

A central piece of Aajonus's understanding of anger came from the work of Elnora Van Winkle, a neuroscientist and biochemist who spent 47 to 52 years at Milhauser Laboratories at New York University cataloging every chemical in the brain and nervous system. She wrote a paper called "The Biology of Emotions," available on the internet in both a technical version and a layman's version. Aajonus cited her work repeatedly as scientific confirmation of something he had observed empirically.

Van Winkle's finding, as Aajonus explained it, was that when the body produces hormones during trauma or emotional upset, those hormones have byproducts, just as any other biological process has byproducts. Unlike the byproducts of positive emotional states such as falling in love, which do not normally store in the body, the byproducts of trauma, anxiety, and anger do store in the body like any other toxin. They accumulate over time, and when the body eventually detoxifies them, the person re-experiences the same emotional state that was present when those compounds were originally produced, even if there is no present circumstance in their life that warrants that emotional state.

Aajonus illustrated this with a specific example Van Winkle documented. A woman whose father had beaten her or treated her badly as a child would have those neurological hormone byproducts stored in her body. Thirty years later, when her body began cleaning them out, those compounds would be circulating at high levels in her blood. The male element currently present in her life, her husband or mate, would then become the target of anger that properly belonged to her father. She had no conscious awareness of the displacement. As soon as those hormone levels decreased, the behavior ceased completely.

He extended this to everyday experience: a person who is feeling well and has no particular reason for conflict with their partner can find themselves inexplicably furious at that person simply because neurological hormones from an earlier trauma, such as being beaten by a parent at age ten, are in the process of being cleared from the body. He described seeing this pattern consistently in people undergoing neurological detoxification on the diet.

The implication Aajonus drew was that if a person re-enacts the anger when these compounds surface, expressing it through yelling, physical aggression, or any form of rage discharge, they produce more of those same psychotropic compounds, which then store again in the body and perpetuate the cycle. The rage becomes self-reinforcing at a chemical level, not just a psychological one.

Aajonus engaged in a sustained two-year argument with Van Winkle about the practical implications of her findings. Van Winkle believed in primal therapy, the approach developed in the 1960s and 1970s in which a person vents anger by screaming, beating pillows, kicking furniture, building a padded enclosure and screaming as loudly as possible, and otherwise physically discharging the rage. Aajonus rejected this approach entirely and disagreed with her recommendation even while agreeing with her scientific findings about the biochemistry.

His objection was mechanistic. If the body re-experiences stored traumatic rage as those compounds detoxify, and a person responds by expressing that rage physically and emotionally, they generate more of those same psychotropic hormone byproducts, which then store in the body again. The cycle does not resolve; it continues indefinitely. "If you do that, when you feel that kind of anger and violence, if you keep it going, you're going to create more of those psychotropic drugs. It's going to be an endless cycle."

He also observed a practical hazard: a person going through intense neurological detoxification who engages in primal-style rage discharge is not going through that process in isolation. They are interacting with people around them, and those people, partners and close relationships especially, bear the weight of it. He described cases where someone pushed neurological detoxification hard, went through traumatic emotional releases, and in the process destroyed a relationship that had lasted eleven or twelve years. The person processing the rage had a framework for understanding what was happening to them, but the person being raged at did not, and the destruction was real.

He also noted that when Van Winkle herself continued to express anger through this framework, "she died in a very angry moment." She had gained fifty pounds on the diet, was feeling well, was intellectually converted away from it to an instinctive diet, became very thin again, and died angrily. He used this as a direct illustration that continuing to channel energy into anger, even with a theoretical justification for doing so, does not serve the body or the person.

He had also tested the primal approach on himself. During the primal therapy movement of the late 1960s and through the 1970s, he went through that kind of rage work extensively, and he found that it simply kept the momentum going. It did not dissolve the anger. It perpetuated it.

Aajonus's alternative to primal therapy discharge was to redirect the energy into something that creates genuine happiness. Singing, dancing, painting, any creative or physically joyful activity that the person actually enjoys. The principle is that the same neurological energy driving the rage impulse can be channeled into an activity that produces positive neurological compounds rather than more traumatic byproducts.

He described this as a repatterning process. If a person consistently channels that energy into singing or dancing rather than beating a pillow or screaming, the next time that kind of emotional charge comes up, the automatic response of the nervous system will not be toward violence or anger but toward whatever creative, happy activity has been practiced. The memory patterns change. The body changes the way it reacts to the experience. He was explicit that this transformation is real and not merely behavioral: it changes the neurochemistry of the response itself.

He also noted that if a person is deeply depressed, they may find it impossible to imagine singing or dancing. His answer to that was to simply start listening to a beat, to put on music with a rhythm, and let the body begin to respond. He described this not as willpower but as a physiological lever. The beat itself triggers a neurological response that begins to shift the state.

For managing the immediate biochemical load of excessive hormones and toxic adrenaline, he recommended eating the Nut Formula. The Nut Formula contains starch from nuts combined with raw fat and eggs and honey to neutralize phytic acid. Starch binds with certain neurological hormone byproducts, specifically the psychotropic trauma and stress hormone byproducts that Van Winkle identified. The raw fat binds with the toxicity as well. Eaten together, this combination can eliminate excess adrenaline and calm anger in approximately 20 to 40 minutes.

He also recommended cooked starch combined with an equal or greater amount of raw fat for this purpose. A specific example he gave was half a baked potato eaten with a whole stick of butter. The starch goes in and binds with the toxic compounds. The fat binds with the toxicity simultaneously. He described this as the original reason he included cooked starch in the first edition of his book. He had discovered through direct experimentation that a little cooked starch in combination with raw fat and fresh fruit could control his own depression and rage during a period when he was recovering from severe illness and experiencing what he described as constant fury and a feeling of being destructive and chaotic.

Exercise was also recommended as extremely helpful for managing anger, particularly forms of exercise that the person genuinely enjoys.

Aajonus made a consistent and specific observation that people eating predominantly fruit or following fruitarian diets tend toward a particular type of manic, passionate anger that they simultaneously cannot perceive in themselves. He described attending a conference in Del Mar where David Wolfe's fruitarian group was present, and characterizing those people as ultra-thin, manic, and foaming at the mouth in defense of their beliefs while sincerely believing themselves to be peaceful and non-violent.

He cited Hitler as a fruitarian vegetarian and referenced Cain from the biblical story of Cain and Abel as another vegetarian. He described a specific individual he knew on a heavy fruit diet as a genuinely nasty man who had no grasp of reality, whose brain was not working properly, who would become enraged and throw things while simultaneously insisting he was the calmest person anyone had ever met.

The physiological mechanism he pointed to was the conversion of carbohydrates, and fruit sugars specifically, into alcohols in the body. When the nervous system becomes overloaded with those alcohol byproducts, it exhibits violent behavior as the body's attempt to burn up the compound through muscular energy. He described his own experience as a fruitarian as involving easily triggered anger, which he mistook for good energy at the time because it resembled the manic energy of the violent household he had grown up in, and therefore felt normal to him.

The shift from fruitarian to raw meat eating changed his emotional state profoundly. When he was a vegan and raw fooder eating primarily fruit, he spent time every day plotting how to harm or stop political figures, with an intensity he described as obsessive. After beginning to eat raw meat daily and eliminating fruit, he became an entirely different person, approaching things without anxiety or anger. He noted this shift occurred even though he had spent years doing intensive yoga and meditation and was considered highly evolved in that community. Diet accomplished what years of spiritual practice had not.

Aajonus extended the biochemical reading of anger into a general principle about violence in society. He stated his belief that almost all violent and antisocial behavior has biochemical and biological roots, not as a speculative claim but as a conclusion drawn from watching it be turned on, off, and mitigated by dietary change in real people over many years.

He described the case of a man he called Tarzan, a six-foot manic-depressive schizophrenic with a nasty temper who had become a landscape artist specifically to avoid human contact. As this person moved toward the primal diet, his anxiety and reactivity shifted. The case was used to illustrate that the labels applied to emotional and behavioral disorders are often descriptions of chemical states rather than fixed character traits.

He also described children's reactive behavior as direct evidence for the food-chemistry-emotion connection. A child, not yet trained to suppress reactions, will respond to bad sugar within the body with rages lasting one to two hours that are three to four times more intense than the response to natural fruit sugar. Children become whiny, cranky, unable to sleep, and volatile in direct and immediate response to what they have eaten. Aajonus noted that some traditional tribes, including the Maasai, prohibit fruit consumption entirely because they understand the behavioral consequences.

He was also explicit about neurological detoxification as a specific trigger for apparently unprovoked anger. When the body cleanses stored neurological trauma byproducts, the person can find themselves angry for no identifiable reason. He warned that pushing neurological detoxification aggressively is dangerous if the person is not living alone and not isolated from close relationships, because the person going through it has a framework for understanding the experience but those around them do not, and the damage to relationships can be permanent.

Aajonus did not advocate for suppressing anger entirely, but he drew a precise boundary around violent expression. Anger expressed as violence usually perpetuates violence and fear. Therefore, violent words or actions should only be used when they are genuinely constructive and the only option. He did not treat this as an absolute prohibition but as a high bar requiring clear justification.

His own biography included a period in which he was genuinely violent, both as a child defending himself from an abusive older brother and as a young person in a school environment where he lacked the social communication tools to navigate conflicts any other way. He described the strategic decision to sucker-punch the largest person in the school on the first day of each school year as a survival adaptation, not a value. The violence was instrumental and stemmed directly from a neurological incapacity, not from character.

He was careful to distinguish between violence as a symptom of biochemical imbalance and violence as a conscious choice. His position was that most of what people attribute to character or moral failing in violent individuals is actually the result of disordered body chemistry, and that demanding good behavior from someone in that condition is as irrational as demanding sobriety from someone who is actively drunk.

The specific nutritional interventions Aajonus described for managing anger and rage were as follows.

The Nut Formula was the primary recommendation. Nuts provide starch that binds with psychotropic trauma hormone byproducts. The formula includes raw fat and eggs and honey to neutralize the phytic acid from the nuts. Even though the protein and fat from the nuts themselves are not well digested, the starch component performs the binding function. He recommended this as the first tool when excessive hormones, toxic adrenaline, or the surfacing of stored trauma byproducts produces anger or irritability.

Cooked starch combined with raw fat was the secondary tool. The specific formula given was half a baked potato with a whole stick of butter, which he said will bind with the toxic neurological compounds. Equal amounts of cooked starch and raw fat were the guideline. He said he used this discovery to control his own depression and rage during recovery, and this experience was part of what inspired his broader thinking about the relationship between diet, violence, and mental health.

Raw white meats rather than cooked meats were recommended for people experiencing neurological irritability, because cooking meat forms heterocyclic amines and lipid peroxides that directly irritate nerves. For people who are overly acidic and irritable, he sometimes started them on fish temporarily to alkalinize the system before transitioning to red meat.

Reducing red meat intake was recommended for people who were over-consuming it and experiencing irritability as a result of adrenal overstimulation. The adrenal glands respond to red meat by increasing output, and since adrenaline is for fight or flight, excess adrenaline without physical outlet produces irritability and crankiness.

Exercise that the person enjoys was consistently included as part of the anger management protocol.

He explicitly recommended against heavy or aggressive neurological detoxification for anyone who is in close relationship with others, specifically because the anger and rage that surfaces during that detox process can destroy relationships in ways that are not recoverable.