Bacteria

Aajonus described digestion as being 80 to 99.5% bacterial, depending on the source passage, with enzymatic and digestive juice activity accounting for only 1 to 20% of the total process. He consistently used the figure of 90% bacterial digestion in most of his workshop presentations, and cited a gastroenterologist's estimate that placed digestion at 99.5% bacterial with only 1% attributable to human digestive juices such as hydrochloric acid and bile.

The digestive process he described works as follows. Hydrochloric acid in the stomach breaks large food particles down into smaller molecules, reducing them to a size that intestinal bacteria can access and consume. The bacteria then eat those food molecules. Their waste products, specifically their feces, urine, and perspiration, constitute the nutrients that the human body actually absorbs and uses. Aajonus stated this plainly and repeatedly: "We eat their urine, their sweat and their feces. That's our food."

He identified approximately 60,000 groups of bacteria in the intestines, all falling within roughly three or four bacterial families, as the primary agents of food breakdown in the small intestine. Without these bacteria, he said a person would digest no more than 13% of what they eat, and even that fraction would be poorly assimilated. This is why, in his view, antibiotics are so damaging. Antibiotics do not isolate or target specific bacteria; they destroy all bacteria indiscriminately, wiping out the organisms on which virtually all digestion depends.

Saliva bacteria he identified as specific to the digestion of animal matter. He distinguished human saliva bacteria from the digestive apparatus of ruminants like cows, which produce enzymes and bacteria suited to breaking down cellulose and high-carbohydrate vegetation. Human saliva bacteria is oriented toward animal foods, and Aajonus pointed to this as one of many indicators that humans are naturally and primarily carnivorous. He even recommended that a person spit into their milk to create a personalized kefir, because saliva bacteria already know how to work on that food for that individual body.

The bacteria the medical and pharmaceutical industries label as pathogenic are, in Aajonus's framework, janitorial bacteria. Their job is to consume damaged, dying, non-recoverable, or dead cells and tissue. They do not create the damage; they respond to it. He used the analogy repeatedly of blaming janitors for the mess they are cleaning. The mess was created by industrial toxins, food additives, cooked food byproducts, pharmaceutical drugs, and other chemical exposures. The bacteria arrive afterward to break down and remove what has been destroyed. Observing bacteria at the site of damaged tissue and concluding that the bacteria caused the damage is, in his view, exactly as illogical as concluding that a janitor mopping a floor caused the spill.

He named specific bacteria that are routinely blamed for food poisoning and disease, including salmonella, listeria, campylobacter, E. coli, and helicobacter, and he identified every one of them as janitorial or digestive bacteria performing natural and necessary functions. He noted that there are 3,200 varieties of salmonella, none of which has genuinely caused disease, and that there were once 8,600 varieties of salmonella living on human skin before daily bathing became common practice. Those skin-dwelling salmonella ate dead and peeling skin cells, preventing the buildup of dead tissue layers that would otherwise accumulate on the body's surface.

He extended this reasoning to the conditions under which janitorial bacteria become more active. When industrial toxins, food additives, or cooked food byproducts damage cells in large quantities, more janitorial bacteria are required to process the resulting waste. The magnitude of bacterial janitorial activity is always proportional to the extent of cellular damage, not the other way around. Researchers observe concentrated bacterial activity in diseased tissue and conclude that the bacteria caused the disease, when the correct reading is that the bacteria are responding to damage already caused by chemical or industrial insult.

He also made the point that bacteria do not disassemble healthy tissue. They are specifically oriented toward damaged, dead, or dying cells. A cell that is low in its own bacterial content and exchanges, as damaged cells typically are, becomes a target for janitorial bacteria. This is by design. The body's own ecology coordinates the removal of non-viable tissue through bacterial activity.

Aajonus tracked the scientific literature on human bacterial composition over several decades and presented progressively updated figures at different points in his work. Thirty years before one of his newsletter writings, microbiologists believed humans were composed of about half bacteria. Later figures placed the ratio at 100 bacterial genes to every 1 human gene. A gastroenterologist's estimate cited in one newsletter placed us at 150 bacterial genes to 1 human gene, meaning digestion was 99.5% bacterial. A microbiologist named Bonnie Bassler, who appeared at a TED conference, declared that humans were at least 99% bacterial and 1% human. By 2012, updated research placed the figure at 360 bacterial genes to 1 human gene, making humans 99.997333% bacterial and less than 2/100 of 1% human.

Aajonus also cited his own laboratory calculations suggesting that in healthy animals not exposed to industrial chemicals, there should be approximately 300 times more bacteria than animal cells in the body. He observed that modern science had only found 150 times more bacteria than human cells, and he attributed the deficit to the constant exposure to industrial toxins that kill bacteria throughout contemporary life.

He cited one microbiologist's estimate of 600 million varieties of bacteria in the human body alone. His own position was that 90% of every bodily function is bacterial, including digestion, smiling, singing, breathing, and running, as he listed in his newsletter. He concluded from all of this that the notion of any naturally occurring bacteria "taking over" the body and causing disease is absurd on its face. A few hundred or even a few thousand bacterial cells of any one strain cannot overtake the trillions upon trillions of bacterial cells already present and functioning in the body. The idea fails basic proportional reasoning.

Aajonus returned repeatedly to the Petri dish as the central methodological flaw in the bacterial theory of disease. When researchers extract living cells from an organism and place them in a laboratory dish filled with artificial nutrient serum, those cells are immediately removed from every natural condition that sustains them. There are no self-perpetuating, bio-generated, naturally flowing fluids. There are no natural waste removal systems. Metabolic waste products from both cells and bacteria accumulate in the dish solution without any mechanism to evacuate, evaporate, or perspire out. The cells begin deteriorating and dying almost immediately.

When bacteria are then introduced into this already-dying cellular environment, they do exactly what they do in nature: they eat the damaged and dying material. The researchers observe this and say the bacteria are destroying human cells, presenting it as proof of pathogenicity. But the correct observation is that the cells were already dying because of the artificial, unnatural environment. The bacteria are simply fulfilling their janitorial function on cells that have no viable future in that context.

He also noted that the only bacteria capable of surviving in artificially forced Petrie dish environments are mutant forms that are chemically compelled to persist. These mutant laboratory forms bear little relationship to the natural forms of the same bacterial species found in living bodies, yet the observations made on them are presented as definitive evidence of how natural bacteria behave in vivo.

He described his own experimental approach in contrast. He worked with human intestinal bacteria extracted from upper and lower GI tubes donated by volunteers, and placed that bacteria into Petri dishes containing animal foods that had been processed in a hermetically sealed blender with milk so there was no oxygen introduced. The human bacteria showed strong proclivity toward animal products and almost none toward vegetation, barely etching vegetable matter even when it was liquefied. This he used as further evidence that human digestive bacteria is designed for animal foods.

E. coli was a subject Aajonus addressed with particular frequency because it is one of the bacteria most aggressively blamed for food poisoning and death in mainstream public health messaging. He described E. coli as the main type of bacteria in the bowels, responsible for eating and digesting the final stages of food. Their byproducts and secretions, he said, are the richest nutrients available to feed the brain and nerve cells. He also referenced research from the University of Toronto conducted in association with the Hospital for Sick Children of Toronto, where the toxin produced by E. coli was found to completely dissolve tumors and the blood vessels supplying those tumors within five to seven days with a single injection.

He was equally specific about what he considered genuinely dangerous: the strain designated E. coli 0157H7. He stated flatly that this strain does not occur in nature, cannot be found in any natural environment, and exists only in laboratories where it can be obtained as a sample from the CDC or the FDA. He performed his own analysis by applying an enzyme to 0157H7 that normally fractures any natural bacteria at five distinct points, analogous to detaching the head, both arms, and both legs of a human body. The 0157H7 fractured at only one point, directly in the middle, which he interpreted as proof that it is a man-made, genetically spliced bacterium rather than a natural organism.

He reported taking 87 or more food samples in connection with food-borne illness investigations and finding no 0157H7 whatsoever in any of them. He connected the strain's appearance in food contamination narratives to political and industrial cover. In one specific example, a large meat contamination event was attributed to E. coli by health authorities when the packing company responsible was connected to the Bush family, and neither the federal government nor the FDA pursued the actual source.

He summarized his position clearly: there is no good bacteria or bad bacteria in nature. All naturally occurring bacteria is good. The only bad bacteria is man-made, and 0157H7 is the primary example he cited. He described the process by which man-made bacteria like 0157H7 might be introduced into the environment: it is planted there, and once planted, it does not survive in a living state.

Aajonus devoted specific attention to the role of bacteria on the skin surface, which he said was once populated by thousands of varieties of salmonella and other bacteria responsible for consuming dead skin cells, maintaining the skin's ability to breathe, and eliminating waste products through the skin. Before daily bathing became a cultural norm, humans harbored approximately 8,600 varieties of salmonella on their skin that ate dead and peeling skin continuously. He described what happens without that bacterial skin population: dead cells accumulate and would, in the absence of bacterial action, produce a thickening and hardening of the skin surface over time.

He also described the behavior of salmonella in different body zones, including the eyes, armpits, and genital area, where specific varieties handled regional skin waste. The daily bathing culture and the use of antibacterial soaps stripped these bacterial populations from the skin surface, removing a natural self-cleaning and waste-management system that had served human and animal bodies for millions of years.

Animals, he noted, lick each other and lick wounds and discharges, depositing their own bacteria onto injured tissue. He described this as a natural bacterial treatment in which the animal's saliva bacteria helps consume and remove toxic waste discharging from the wound while simultaneously delivering its own bacteria to support the local healing environment.

Aajonus drew a clear distinction between what happens when bacteria work on raw food versus cooked or processed food. When bacteria in the intestines consume raw food, the food cells are natural and the bacterial waste products are non-toxic nutrients that nourish the body. This is the symbiotic relationship he described as the basis of all healthful digestion.

When bacteria consume cooked or heavily processed food, the dynamic changes. Cooking destroys the food's native bacteria and biological structure, creating a fundamentally altered chemical substrate. Food additives, preservatives, agricultural chemicals, and the byproducts of heat processing are embedded in the food. When intestinal bacteria eat this material, the additives are released into the bacteria's metabolic process, and even the bacterial waste products that are meant to serve as nutrients become dangerously toxic. The body then must deal with not only the original chemical load but also the toxic bacterial byproducts generated from processing it.

He also described what happens in the gut when contaminated or heavily processed food produces tissue damage. The intestinal cells themselves become damaged by chemical additives, and janitorial bacteria then colonize to consume and recycle those dead intestinal cells. The pharmaceutical industry observes this bacterial activity on intestinal tissue and calls it a bacterial infection, but Aajonus's reading is that the bacteria are there because the tissue was damaged by the food's chemical content, not because the bacteria spontaneously decided to attack healthy intestinal walls.

The one category of genuinely harmful bacteria Aajonus acknowledged is man-made, genetically engineered, or hybridized bacteria created in laboratories. He described the military and industrial food sector as the primary sources of these organisms, produced for germ warfare applications and for use in narratives designed to justify food processing and sterilization mandates.

He stated that eating grazed meats, meaning animals raised on pasture, makes it nearly impossible to encounter any deranged or man-made bacteria, because naturally raised animal food carries only natural bacteria. He also identified the medical system itself as a significant route of exposure to unnatural bacteria, through injections, experimental drugs, and hospital environments, and he estimated that staying away from the medical establishment reduces by approximately 90% the likelihood of encountering foreign or unnatural bacteria in the body.

If a person eats contaminated, heavily processed food for a sustained period, the deteriorating tissue that results can produce a bacterial environment that generates more toxic secretions, because the bacteria are working on a toxic substrate. In this scenario the bacteria are not the originating problem; the contaminated food is. But the bacterially processed waste from that toxic tissue becomes compoundedly toxic. This is the only scenario Aajonus acknowledged in which internal bacteria could contribute to a harmful byproduct, and even then the root cause is the food contamination, not the bacteria itself.

He cited the 0157H7 strain again as an example of manufactured bacterial weaponization, describing it as a mutant E. coli that has been genetically spliced and then planted in environments where it can be discovered and blamed for illness, sustaining the bacteria-causes-disease narrative that the pharmaceutical and food processing industries depend on economically.

Aajonus compared bacteria to other janitorial organisms in terms of their efficiency. He described parasites as the most efficient janitors, capable of eating 100 times their weight in 24 hours with a waste product of only 1 to 5%, meaning one would eat the equivalent of 100 pounds of food and produce only 1 to 5 pounds of waste. Bacteria he ranked second, capable of eating 50 times their weight in 24 hours, also with a waste product of approximately 1 to 3%, sometimes up to 5%. Fungi and molds produce proportionally more waste. Viruses he categorized separately as not being alive, having no nucleus, no respiratory system, and no digestive system, and therefore not comparable to bacteria in this analysis.

He also described bacterial activity in the context of acute injury. If 10,000 capillaries are ruptured and red and white blood cells escape into surrounding tissue, those displaced blood cells are no longer in their correct environment and begin to decompose. Bacteria begins consuming those decomposing cells. In a very large injury, such as a severed limb, the scale of decomposing tissue might require the additional assistance of fungus or parasites. The body recruits the appropriate level of janitorial activity proportional to the damage present.

Aajonus described bacteria cycling through approximately 17 distinct stages or forms as meat ages and ferments in a jar. Some of those 17 stages have A and B subdivisions, making the total number of distinct bacterial transformations somewhat greater. He specified that it takes approximately 3.5 days for the bacteria to use up the available oxygen in a sealed jar of meat, and recommended removing the jar and briefly opening it outside every third or fourth day to reintroduce a small amount of air and allow the bacteria to cycle through additional stages. He described this practice of briefly opening the jar outdoors and then resealing it as important for ensuring all 17 forms of bacteria are represented in the final product.

If the meat is refrigerated, the bacterial cycling slows dramatically, moving through only one stage per week. If kept at room temperature in a cupboard and opened periodically as described, the cycling progresses through all stages more completely. He stated that he had eaten high meat aged up to significant lengths of time and found no harm in it. Bacteria in high meat consume the meat in its successive stages, and the resulting product represents the full range of bacterial transformation forms.

For fecal matter preparations, he noted the opposite handling requirement: E. coli is destroyed by air exposure, so fecal matter should be kept in a small jar with minimal air space and not refrigerated or opened. The anaerobic nature of the fecal bacteria requires that air be kept out rather than periodically reintroduced.

Aajonus addressed staphylococci specifically in response to questions about MRSA. He described staphylococci as natural organisms present in healthy people, typically aerobic and living on skin surfaces and in nasal passages. Like certain varieties of salmonella, they consume dead skin and microscopic skin mites. When a person suffers an injury involving skin damage, staphylococci may colonize the site to consume the large quantity of damaged and killed cells and waste that accumulates at the injury. The "methicillin-resistant" quality of MRSA, meaning its failure to succumb to ampicillin and other penicillins, he would have read as simply bacteria doing their janitorial work without being suppressed by antibiotic interference, though his explicit comments on MRSA were brief in the available passages.

Aajonus described kefir and yogurt as milk thick with bacterial feces, urine, and perspiration, meaning the product of bacteria that have consumed milk and left their waste in it. He said this makes kefir and yogurt highly nutritious foods that can be absorbed quickly and efficiently with little additional digestive work required, because the food has already been pre-digested by bacterial action. He was careful to note that the bacteria in kefir and yogurt are not the same food-disassembling bacteria as those found in the human intestines, but they are nevertheless beneficial to human health.

He also cited research from Dr. Sara Arab (identified in one newsletter as a student who eventually became a notable researcher) and referenced experiments showing that E. coli from cow dung, when introduced in appropriate contexts, can benefit the human body. Bacteria not native to the human body can still confer benefit when the context is appropriate.

Antibiotics were a consistent target of Aajonus's critique because they destroy bacteria indiscriminately. Unlike a surgical approach that might hypothetically target one specific strain, antibiotics kill all bacteria in their path. In a body that is 90 to 99.997% bacterial by genetic composition, and in which 90 to 99.5% of all digestion and bodily function is bacterial, a course of antibiotics is functionally equivalent to poisoning the vast majority of the organism.

He argued that antibiotics seem to "work" half the time not because they addressed a bacterial infection but because the body heals itself through other means during the period of antibiotic use, and any observable improvement is attributed to the drug rather than the body's own recovery process. He also suggested that when blood is properly observed after antibiotic use, elevated indicators of damage would be found that are not being reported or acknowledged by the medical profession.

The broader economic argument he made was that as long as the medical and pharmaceutical industries can sustain the premise that bacteria cause disease, they can sell antibiotics, antiseptics, antibacterial consumer products, and the cascade of treatments needed to address the damage those products themselves cause. The antibacterial soap industry he described as analogous to the bottled water industry, both being marketing inventions for selling chemically processed consumer products that damage rather than protect health.

Aajonus pointed to the dietary practices of traditional and tribal peoples as empirical refutation of the bacterial disease theory. He noted that many tribes ate primarily unsalted raw meat, unsalted raw fats, and unsalted raw dairy from the beginning of their food cultures, without washing hands or sterilizing food. Every form of natural bacteria present on and in those foods, including salmonella, E. coli, and campylobacter, was consumed abundantly and constantly. Those populations were vibrant, healthy, and disease-free, which Aajonus used as living proof that bacteria in food does not cause disease.

He also referenced a specific African tribe depicted in a film called "The Last Dance," which documented a final hunt before the tribal hunting territory was designated a national forest. The tribe ate rotten meat as a dietary staple and maintained health on it. He cited similar practices in other carnivorous groups who ate decayed, pre-digested animal foods without developing the diseases attributed to bacterial contamination in modern public health literature.

He described the relationship between animals, infants, and bacteria in similar terms. Babies instinctively put everything in their mouths, including dirt and objects covered in microbes. Rather than interpreting this through the lens of "building immunity through small doses," Aajonus held that animals and humans have formed working relationships with bacteria over millions of years, and that bacteria have always had a janitorial role, not a pathogenic one. Preventing babies from putting things in their mouths, he said, hinders the natural formation of that relationship.

Aajonus was direct about what he saw as the manufactured nature of bacterial fear in modern culture. He traced the economic motive clearly: the food processing industry profits by extending shelf life through the elimination of bacteria from food, which requires industrial processing that also destroys nutrients, which in turn keeps consumers perpetually undernourished, hungry, and returning to buy more food. The antibacterial product industry sells chemical poisons marketed as protective agents. The pharmaceutical industry sells antibiotics and the treatments for the damage antibiotics cause. Medical institutions sustain their authority by positioning bacteria as a constant threat requiring professional management.

He stated that if people understood that food additives, industrial toxins, and pharmaceutical medicines cause approximately 98% of all diseases, those industries would lose their economic foundation. Blaming bacteria, in his framework, is a deliberate and sustained strategy to redirect attention away from the actual causes of disease and toward naturally occurring organisms that cannot possibly be pathogenic given the biological reality of what we are.

He pointed to the trajectory of cancer rates as an illustration of the failure of the bacterial-disease medical model. In 1956 or 1957, his mother was discussing cancer with a doctor at a time when the incidence was 1 in 10,000. By the time Aajonus was presenting this information, the rate had moved to approximately 1 in 3 for females and approaching 1 in 2 for males. Following the medical model's assumptions, this trajectory has no explanation and no solution, while the industrial toxin and food processing model he proposed offers a direct causal account.