Blood Tests

Aajonus stated repeatedly and with specificity that the amount of blood taken during standard clinical blood draws far exceeds what any laboratory actually uses to perform tests. Based on his time inside a laboratory setting, he said that a laboratory uses approximately one-eighth of a teaspoon, or about half a cc, to perform a test. He stated that a single half cc of blood is sufficient to run twelve separate tests. Despite this, standard clinical draws typically involve three vials of approximately three cc each, meaning the vast majority of blood collected is discarded. He described this as a racket and said the stated justification of having extra material in case the lab makes a mistake does not hold up because a laboratory would not need to redo a test fifty times.

He gave specific instructions based on this knowledge: if a person chooses to have lab work done for any reason, they should refuse the standard draw and insist on no more than two small vials. His recommended challenge to medical staff was to ask them directly whether they had ever been inside a laboratory and to tell them that a half cc per test is all that is needed. He framed the oversized draw as serving to make the procedure appear more thorough and medically weighty than it actually is, rather than serving any scientific necessity.

He demonstrated this position practically during a glucose tolerance test he underwent at Washington University Medical Center in St. Louis, which required blood draws every thirty minutes for two and a half hours, totaling five draws. He told the staff they could not take their standard three vials per draw and insisted on a half cc each time. He stated flatly that 99.9% of all the blood drawn in standard clinical settings is thrown away.

To investigate thyroxine levels during states of unconsciousness and cardiac arrest, Aajonus arranged to take blood samples from football players who were knocked out during games. He got permission from a coach and attended a full season, bringing five hypodermics each loaded to take a quarter of a cc of blood at one-minute intervals while a player was unconscious. He noted that if a player did not wake up after six minutes the player would be dead, so he only needed five draws per incident. There were three knockouts that year that lasted approximately five minutes before the players revived.

He emphasized that he only needed a quarter of a cc per draw, which he contrasted directly with clinical practice of taking three full vials. Each minute that the person was not breathing and the heart was not beating, the thyroxine level doubled. Then at the fourth or fifth minute the thyroxine was working again. He used this data to examine the relationship between thyroxine function and the body's revival from unconscious states.

He also noted that in his parasite research, after eating parasite-infested raw meat himself and feeding it to animals, he took blood, urine, and fecal samples every ten days for ten weeks to check for parasites and signs of bacterial disease. Not one parasite appeared in any of the samples across the entire ten-week period.

Aajonus argued that blood composition changes so rapidly that any single blood test represents nothing more than the state of the body in one narrow moment, making it nearly useless as a diagnostic baseline. He stated that body chemistry changes every twenty to forty minutes. He explicitly applied this to blood cell analysis, saying those readings change every moment and that it is impossible to base anything meaningful on something so transient. He used the example of dark field microscopy showing his blood cells clumping together: he acknowledged many things can cause cells to clump, including what was eaten a couple of hours before, what was eaten the day before, or even electrical fields from equipment in the room, and that there were thousands of possible causes.

He applied the same reasoning to nutrient and hormone measurements. If a body is supplied with a million dollars worth of hormones and nutrients every day and uses all of it continuously, taking a blood test at the moment when those substances have been fully utilized will show low levels. That does not mean the person is deficient. The body is manufacturing and consuming those substances in real time. He said the pharmaceutical industry deliberately exploits this misunderstanding by using the smoke-and-mirror logic of single-point-in-time blood tests to classify people as deficient and then sell them supplements or drugs.

He stated this position plainly about his own diagnostic practice: "I do not use blood tests because they change by the hour." Instead, he examined and analyzed irises by photographing them on a digital camera and enlarging them on his computer screen, evaluated glandular activity by observing the palms, and observed blood through other means.

Aajonus described the reference ranges used to evaluate blood test results as rigged to get patients to take medication. He framed this as a deliberate institutional structure rather than an accidental methodological flaw. He tied this to broader patterns in the pharmaceutical industry, noting that drug companies look for particular biochemical markers to link to disease specifically because they are preparing to produce or market a drug that will alter that particular biochemical. The diagnostic framework is built around the medication, not around health.

He used the example of blood pH to illustrate how confident medical authorities are about ranges that he believed were simply wrong. Aajonus tested with blood pH of 5.5, verified at Washington University Medical Center in St. Louis, and a doctor on a television show told him to his face that anyone with a blood pH of 5.5 would be dead. He showed the doctor the test results afterward. His position was that all carnivores, including humans, should have a blood pH of 5.5, matching the saliva, urine, and fecal pH. His own values across all four had been at 5.5 for twenty years. He noted that alternative medicine practitioners typically cite 6.0 to 6.9 as the target pH range, which he also rejected, saying that is also wrong for carnivores.

Aajonus drew a sharp distinction between anemia as a set of symptoms experienced by a person and anemia as a finding on a blood test. He stated directly: "Anemia is a symptom, not a blood test." Low hemoglobin or low iron on a test means nothing unless the person is experiencing the functional signs of anemia, specifically turning white, inability to get out of bed, inability to get off a chair, inability to breathe, aching, soreness, ease of cutting, and failure to heal.

He described a one-year-old girl who was not growing well, running approximately four months behind schedule in development. Her blood analysis found low iron. Iron supplements from rock-derived plant sources were prescribed. He challenged the logic of this: we do not eat rock, plants eat rock, and the iron in rock-derived supplements is not bioavailable to humans in the same way as iron from animal tissue.

He also described a male patient from Seattle in his mid-fifties who came to him twelve years prior with a leukemia diagnosis. Aajonus looked at the man and said he did not have leukemia. The man had an extraordinarily high white blood cell count of 800,000 compared to red blood cells that were roughly half that number, but he was a marathon runner doing seven miles every morning and fourteen miles a day in the weeks leading up to a race. Aajonus's position was that this person's body was simply structured to operate at those unusual ratios. The patient had been on the diet for twelve years at the time of the telling. His white blood cell count remained sky high and came down only a tiny bit. His red blood cell platelets stayed very low. Aajonus instructed to look for symptoms, not pharmaceutical measurement benchmarks: "Forget the pharmaceuticals measurements. Always and forever."

On cholesterol, Aajonus stated that the standard $30 to $40 blood test measures total cholesterol quantity but says nothing about the quality or the source of the cholesterol. He personally paid for a $6,000 laboratory test that could determine whether fat floating in the blood was freshly digested and new to the system, or cauterized from old cooked fats. When he ran this test on people eating the Primal Diet, he found that roughly half of the cholesterol showing up in their blood tests was old toxic cholesterol being drawn from tissues and discarded, moving through the blood on its way out of the body through the urinary tract, bowels, or skin.

His conclusion was that a high cholesterol reading for someone on the Primal Diet is actually a sign of successful detoxification of old hardened fats, not a sign of cardiovascular risk. He said he would throw a party if a client's cholesterol went to 700. He stated he would like everyone's cholesterol to be as high as possible. He rejected the concept of beta-cholesterol as a meaningful concern on this diet and said the real problem in cardiovascular disease is hardened vegetable oils, not animal fats or cholesterol itself. He also described a client who was an Olympic gymnast who had to maintain a cholesterol level of 327 to function as an athlete. When she maintained that level on cooked food she got colds or flu every three to six weeks. On raw fats she functioned very well. He used this to illustrate that some people require very high cholesterol levels and that testing for quantity alone gives no useful information.

As part of the Washington University Medical Center study, the cardiac unit wanted to check Aajonus's pancreas because he had been a juvenile diabetic. The standard protocol required a sugar water solution rather than honey, which he argued for and was denied. It was the first time he had consumed sugar since 1972 or 1973. He described being shaking and buzzed like he had drunk a gallon of coffee, and not eating anything to calm it because he had to keep the test environment clean.

Draws were taken every thirty minutes for two and a half hours, a total of five draws. As described, he refused more than a half cc per draw. The glucose level descended consistently every thirty minutes. Where the expected leveling-off point was around 110, his continued down to 54, which he described as evidence of how effectively his pancreas processed and cleared glucose. He also described getting progressively calmer as the sugar level dropped rather than experiencing the shaking and anxiety typical of reactive hypoglycemia.

Aajonus described going to the cardiac unit of Washington University Medical Center in St. Louis, which was studying raw fooders who had maintained the diet for at least five years. They were specifically interested in him because of his high consumption of animal fats, butter, cream, and cheese. He described eating up to half a pound of butter a day, one to three pounds of meat a day, and raw cream continuously.

The cardiac specialists checked his arteries using ultrasound, spending approximately forty-five minutes on what is typically a twenty-minute procedure because they could not find what they expected to find. They checked the carotid arteries, spent twenty minutes looking for congestion and found nothing. They spent ten minutes on each side of the heart rather than the typical three minutes. They checked the heart from every angle. The world-famous sports cardiologist heading the study described what he was seeing as beautiful and expressed amazement at finding nearly clean arteries in someone almost fifty-six years old. Aajonus noted he still had a little plaquing remaining from childhood heart damage but nothing dangerous.

They then took him to a floor where they ran EKG and cardiogram tests while he exercised on a treadmill with electrodes on his chest and around his heart. The results were extensive enough to fill five long pages. He described not knowing how to read all of it but noting that everything was wonderful. He pressed 210 pounds and showed no strain, then stopped deliberately. He was not winded. The researchers noted that people exercising every other day at the facility could not push the weight he pushed and were out of breath.

In a structured personal study, Aajonus arranged blood and urine analyses for individuals before and after their doctors administered seven different drugs. The blood analyses were specifically focused on RNA and DNA, taken twelve hours after drugs were administered. In every case, mutations were found in the RNA and DNA when compared to the pre-drug baseline. The urine analyses were focused on bacteria, taken before drug administration and again a half hour after. Before drugs, all cases showed a normal live bacterial count. A half hour after drugs, all cases showed large quantities of dead bacteria.

Aajonus applied the same skepticism about standardized testing to hair analysis. He took samples from seven different locations on his own head, including the nape of the neck, which is the conventional sampling site, and the temples. Every location showed a different concentration of whatever was being measured. The lowest concentration was at the nape of the neck, which is precisely where labs instruct collection. The highest was at the temples, reading 4.2 or 3.8. His conclusion was that even naturopaths had been locked into using the least informative sampling site because labs instructed them to do so, and labs followed the instructions of the medical profession whose work they serviced.

Aajonus distinguished between laboratory work that he considered useful and the institutional diagnostic structure he rejected. He funded extensive personal laboratory testing across decades to investigate parasite transfer, bacterial behavior, drug effects on DNA, thyroxine levels, and cholesterol quality. He paid for an $8,200 comprehensive laboratory test at Cumer Labs in St. Louis on a cancer patient's vomit when she was deteriorating faster than expected. That test revealed 3,000 times the lethal dose of thimerosal in her vomit, which he described as evidence she was being poisoned, not failing to respond to her healing protocol.

He distinguished this empirical, observation-based testing from what he called intellectualizing and theorizing, which he associated with researchers who draw conclusions from test-tube and Petri dish environments and then apply them to living bodies without in-vivo confirmation. He cited the example of researchers claiming that avidin in egg white binds with biotin in egg yolk and that trypsin in egg white inhibits amino acid absorption. These interactions occur in test tubes, he said, but not inside an animal's body, where the substances react with pancreatic fluids and other complex biological environments. The test-tube result does not transfer.

Aajonus flatly rejected blood type diet systems, specifically naming the D'Adamo system. He stated that D'Adamo did not conduct clinical experimentation but only examined blood components in a laboratory setting and then theorized a dietary protocol from that, without testing it in practice. His own clinical experience contradicted the central premise: many clients who were A blood type came to him after following the D'Adamo protocol, which told them to avoid red meat, and they were weak, edemic, and symptomatic in multiple ways. When he put them on raw red meat, they recovered.

He did however describe three blood type categories of his own that he considered empirically valid, based on blood acidity and alkalinity rather than on blood group antigens. Acidic blood types easily produce red blood cells but not white blood cells and generally do better with white meats such as fish, fowl, and rabbit. Alkaline blood types easily produce white blood cells but not red blood cells and generally do better with red meats such as beef, lamb, and venison. A third type is neutral. He described discovering these categories through direct observation guided in part by the suggestions of someone named Owanza, and then following through with his own experimentation. He described reading the blood on a given day by looking at palm color, noting that red splotches and white splotches indicate relative red and white cell predominance, and that this reading changes day to day.

In written correspondence, Aajonus was presented with the claim that newer immunoglobulin-based allergy testing (specifically Cyrex Laboratories testing) showed a patient was allergic to eggs, dairy, and whey, which would eliminate core components of the Primal Diet. He did not engage with the specific technology of the test but his consistent framework position, stated in multiple contexts, was that blood-based testing measures quantity not quality, captures a single moment in a continuously shifting biochemical system, and is structured by the diagnostic industry to lead toward pharmacological intervention. His rejection of blood test credibility as a decision-making basis extended to any interpretation of blood-based immunological markers as definitive guides for dietary restriction.

Aajonus contextualized his skepticism about blood testing within a broader critique of the medical-pharmaceutical-food production complex. He stated that medical test standards are set by an industry that does not want people well because its financial interests are tied to ongoing treatment rather than to recovery. He stated that his father, an inventor who worked for General Electric on military projects, had access to knowledge about what food does to the body that was suppressed rather than applied. He described doctors as people who look at numbers, who see patients as statistics and as analyses of blood components, who have been trained in emergency ward environments that teach panic and worst-case thinking, and who have never been in a laboratory in their lives and therefore cannot challenge the protocols they follow.

He also noted that laboratories derive most of their income from the medical profession, and that the medical profession then instructs labs on what samples to take, from where, and how to interpret results, creating a closed loop in which the sampling and measurement methodology is set by the same industry that profits from the results pointing toward medication.