Arsenic

Aajonus catalogued arsenic exposure across multiple pathways. Drinking water was one of the most direct. The Environmental Protection Agency, he noted, did not lower its outdated arsenic drinking water standard until 2001, when it finally reduced the allowable level by fivefold, an implicit acknowledgment that prior standards had been inadequate. Beyond water, rice was identified as a food that concentrates arsenic. Playground equipment was named as another common exposure source. These were described as daily, ongoing exposures that most people were not aware of.

In poultry, the arsenic exposure was intentional. Feed manufacturers included arsenic to keep insects and rodents from consuming stored grain, and as a crude antibiotic to suppress disease symptoms in the birds. Aajonus presented laboratory test data organized by brand and cut to show how much arsenic remained in commercially available chicken meat after processing:

Smart Chicken Breast (nonorganic): 1.7 ppb. Smart Chicken Thighs (nonorganic): 1.5 ppb. Smart Chicken Breast (organic): 2.0 ppb. Raised Right Leg Quarters: 1.6 ppb. Raised Right Breasts: none detected. Gerber's Amish Chicken Breasts: none detected. Gerber's Amish Chicken Thighs: none detected. Gold'n Plump Breasts (boneless): 20.2 ppb. Various fast food preparations were also tested, with Carl's Jr. fried thigh registering 46.5 ppb, which was among the highest. KFC Breast (mild) came in at 3.9 ppb and KFC Thigh at 2.2 ppb. Wendy's grilled chicken breast registered 15.9 ppb. Arby's Chicken Sandwich registered 15.3 ppb. Hardee's Chicken Breast (no bread): 7.5 ppb. Subway Chicken Sandwich: 4.9 ppb.

Arsenic also appeared in his discussion of pharmaceutical supplements. He described arsenic as part of the solidification and separation process used in making standard supplement tablets, including those marketed as organic. He stated that fractionation of supplement ingredients required ammonia, kerosene derivatives, or wood alcohol, and that arsenic was part of the separation and solidification chemistry used to produce tablets. He regarded all such supplements as toxic and not food.

He also identified arsenic in mining and smelting environments, including gold mines. He referenced strychnine and arsenic as substances historically used in gold mining operations, substances he was personally exposed to during family connections to engineering work in gold mines and nuclear facilities.

Arsenic in clay beds was a specific hazard he mentioned. Some Native American tribes who used certain clay beds as food or body paint were exposed to excessive arsenic through those clays, and he connected this to cases of pancreatic cancer in those populations.

A question submitted to Aajonus specifically about arsenic in eggs clarified his position on organic and free-range labeling. Any non-organic feed given to poultry, he stated, is contaminated. Some organic feeds may also be contaminated. He said the only reliable way to know whether eggs are safe is to have the food itself tested in a laboratory. Organic or free-range labeling on eggs sold in the UK or the US did not automatically guarantee freedom from arsenic contamination, because the safety of the eggs depended entirely on what the hens were fed, and the feed, not the label, was the determining factor.

Aajonus placed arsenic within his broader framework of metallic mineral toxicity. Metals in food are present in trace amounts and, when food is consumed raw, those metals remain ionically bound with proteins, fats, enzymes, and other nutrients. That binding is what makes them non-toxic. The moment those bonds are broken by cooking, the metals become free radicals. Free radicals carry a disrupted electromagnetic charge and behave destructively inside cells, burning and dissolving tissue through oxidation and over-acidity.

The brain and nervous system attract and accumulate the greatest concentration of free radical metals, including arsenic, because these tissues use metallic minerals to transfer light and conduct electrical current across synapses, axons, and ganglia. When those tissues become overloaded with free radical arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium, and other metals, the result is misfiring synapses, blocked transmissions, and general neurological dysfunction.

Arsenic at low environmental levels was also implicated by laboratory data in cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and mental decline. Aajonus treated these not as speculative associations but as established laboratory findings, and he characterized the EPA's delay in tightening arsenic standards in drinking water as evidence that regulatory agencies were not protecting public health.

Aajonus returned more than once to a historical account of a man in the late 1800s who publicly drank approximately half a cup of arsenic in front of assembled media from London, Paris, and elsewhere. The arsenic was provided by an actual laboratory, not by the performer himself. The man did not die. Observers stayed for up to ten days and then weeks, and nothing happened. The man did not reveal his method until the 1960s, or in some accounts, on his deathbed. What he had done was drink a half cup of clay, or in one version a cup of clay with oil, before drinking the arsenic. The clay absorbed the arsenic entirely, binding it so thoroughly that none of it caused harm. The clay passed the arsenic out of the body through the intestines.

In one version of this account, Aajonus said the man had also timed the procedure precisely, knowing exactly when the arsenic would be fully bound within the clay and fat so that it could not be released. The man had also made substantial wagers with wealthy people, and he collected several million dollars in winnings.

Aajonus used this story to demonstrate that clay is a powerful absorber of poisons, including arsenic. He applied the same principle to his recommendations: clay and cheese are the primary tools for binding ingested or internally dumping toxins.

The man's use of clay before drinking arsenic became the basis for Aajonus's recommendation that clay, particularly terramin clay or terebinth clay, can bind heavy metals including arsenic in the body. He was asked directly whether terramin clay binds with heavy metals like mercury and arsenic, and he confirmed that it does.

He was cautious about clay quality. He had initially recommended rozzbod red clay but later learned it was being treated with additives, which he said made it unsuitable. He advised that any clay used should be free of chemical treatments and additives. He also expressed concern about bentonite clays derived from volcanic ash, because he had found that volcanic materials could contain molten metals causing pain and scarring. Terramin clay, by contrast, was high in natural aluminum, which he distinguished from cauterized or free radical aluminum. The natural aluminum in terramin clay, he said, would bind with toxic aluminum and help carry it out of the body.

He noted that pregnant Native American women ate small amounts of clay daily to prevent poisons from the mother's blood from crossing into the fetus, which reinforced his view that clay had legitimate protective and detoxifying uses when the clay itself was clean.

Cheese was Aajonus's primary ongoing tool for absorbing toxins, including arsenic, as they were released from storage sites and dumped into the digestive tract. He described the mechanics in detail. When the body detoxifies stored metals, it dumps them into the intestines, where they can cause burning and damage to the intestinal lining. Raw, no-salt-added cheese contains an extremely high concentration of fat molecules, and it takes anywhere from 200 to 5,000 fat cells to bind with a single molecule of mercury or a comparable toxic metal to prevent it from doing damage as it passes through the intestinal tract. Cheese provides that concentration in a small volume of food.

His instruction was to eat a small piece of cheese, roughly the size of a sugar cube or about half a teaspoon, at intervals ranging from every 15 minutes to every 60 minutes depending on the degree of toxicity present. For people with massive metal contamination, such as construction workers exposed to spent uranium, radiation, and industrial metals, he recommended a two-cup jar of sugar-cube-sized pieces of cheese to be eaten throughout the day, one piece every 15 to 45 minutes or more frequently if needed. The cheese acts as a continuous absorptive train moving through the intestines, collecting toxins and passing them out in the feces rather than allowing them to be reabsorbed or to damage the gut lining.

Aajonus developed two specific raw food combinations for gradually removing stored arsenic from body tissues.

The first formula: one-third cup tomato, two tablespoons no-salt-added raw cheese, and five to seven leaves of cilantro. One version of this formula listed 57 leaves of cilantro, while another version listed 5 to 7 leaves. Both versions appeared in his published newsletters and accompanying articles.

The second formula: two to three ounces raw coconut cream, one-half tablespoon unsalted raw butter, one tablespoon raw dairy cream, and one-half to three-quarters cup of organically grown dark berries such as blackberries, blueberries, and boysenberries.

He emphasized that simply choosing a poultry brand that did not feed arsenic to its chickens was not sufficient to resolve all toxin issues related to poultry, because soy toxicity was a separate and additional contamination present in most commercial feeds.

Aajonus described the situation with cooked food and metals clearly. All foods, in their natural raw state, contain trace amounts of metals including arsenic, lead, and cadmium. These metals are not harmful when consumed raw because they remain in an enzymatically, nutrient, and ionically bound form. The moment cooking occurs, those bonds are destroyed. The metals become free radicals and the fats that would normally buffer the damage are also destroyed or separated from the metals. With the widespread removal of fat from processed diets over the past several decades, those liberated free radical metals have nowhere to go except into the brain and nervous system, which are the primary sites for metallic mineral utilization in the body. Arsenic in cooked food thus contributes to the neurological burden that Aajonus linked to the proliferation of mental decline, behavioral disorders, and other neurological conditions.

He also pointed out that canning dramatically worsened this problem. Canned foods became widespread during and after World War II. When food is sealed in metal cans and subjected to heat processing, the metals in the food are fractionated by heat, and the tin, iron, mercury, and arsenic in both the food and the can itself are all released as free radicals. The tin used in cans, he stated, is the third most toxic metal after mercury and thallium, and it leaches into canned food under those conditions.

Aajonus was consistent in his position that cancer is caused by heavy metal and chemical contamination rather than by diet alone or by spontaneous cellular malfunction. Arsenic was one of the metals he named most directly as a cancer trigger. Laboratory evidence had demonstrated, he stated, that arsenic causes cancer even at low levels. The connection between arsenic in poultry feed and cancer risk in humans who eat that poultry was central to his newsletter article on the subject.

He applied the same causal framework to clinical cases. Whenever a patient developed cancer, he investigated what toxic substance was present in the affected tissue. Cancers he attributed to specific heavy metals included kidney cancer from cadmium, pancreatic cancer from manganese excess and from arsenic-containing clays consumed by certain indigenous tribes, and breast and lung cancer from thallium and mercury inhaled by a jewelry maker who worked directly over a Bunsen burner. Arsenic fit the same pattern: it was an external toxin introduced either through food, water, the environment, or industrial contact, and it was the toxin's accumulation in tissue, not the tissue's own cellular mechanisms, that produced cancer.

Aajonus ranked the major toxic metals in order of severity across different statements. Mercury was consistently identified as the most toxic, described as the FDA's own designation for the most toxic element on Earth. Thallium was placed second or very close to mercury in its neurological toxicity. Arsenic was placed third in several statements, with lead following. In one passage he listed them as mercury, thallium, arsenic, lead, in that order. In another, he referenced tin as the third most toxic metal after mercury and thallium, with arsenic appearing in a separate ranking context. These rankings appeared in different workshop contexts and the slight variation was not resolved between the sources. What remained consistent was that arsenic occupied a tier of extreme toxicity requiring active countermeasures.

Because most commercial poultry was fed arsenic, Aajonus recommended investigating specific brands and their feed practices. He published telephone numbers for poultry suppliers so that readers could contact them directly to ask about their feed practices. He listed Tyson Foods and Gold'n Plump among the brands to investigate. His brand data showed significant variation. Gerber's Amish chickens, for example, had no detectable arsenic in either the breast or thigh cuts, while Gold'n Plump boneless breasts registered 20.2 ppb and certain fast food preparations ran as high as 46.5 ppb.

Even selecting an arsenic-free poultry, he cautioned, did not resolve the separate issue of soy toxicity in the feed, which required its own protocol to address.