Carnivore Diet

Aajonus returned to the anatomical comparison between humans and herbivores repeatedly across his seminars and writings because he considered it the most direct and incontrovertible foundation for the carnivore conclusion. He began in the mouth.

Herbivores have all molars, every tooth a grinding surface, because they need to reduce fibrous plant matter to something approaching a fluid state before it can be digested by bacteria further down the tract. Humans have mostly cutting teeth, canines for ripping, and only a few molars at the back for basic crushing. He noted that carnivores in the wild do not chew extensively; they rip and swallow. Native tribes he observed eating raw meat crushed it two or three times and swallowed large chunks without extended mastication. The Eskimos he lived with would take huge pieces of caribou or seal, chew two or three times to be able to swallow, and that was the extent of chewing. The Maasai did the same. He saw this as confirmation that the human jaw is not designed for the prolonged grinding required to break down cellulose.

In the stomach, he pointed to the presence of hydrochloric acid as a carnivore feature. Herbivores do not have hydrochloric acid in the stomach the way humans do; they operate on an entirely different fluid chemistry suited to fermenting plant fiber across multiple stomach chambers. Dogs and cats have fifteen times more hydrochloric acid than humans, but Aajonus noted that dogs and cats swallow large chunks without chewing, so they need more concentrated acid to break those chunks apart. Humans break food into smaller pieces before swallowing, so they do not need quite the same concentration, but the acid environment itself marks the human stomach as carnivore-type rather than herbivore-type.

The intestinal length comparison he made was this: the herbivore's tract is thirty times the length of its torso, the human tract is twelve times the length of the torso, and that makes the herbivore's intestines two and a half times longer than ours relative to body size. That additional length, combined with two to four stomachs and sixty thousand times more cellulose-disassembling enzymes, allows herbivores to extract usable fat and protein from plant matter over a forty-eight hour digestive cycle. The human digestive cycle for meat runs sixteen to twenty hours, with full transit in twenty-four. Cooked meat, by contrast, takes twenty-four to thirty-six hours and produces putrefaction, heterocyclic amines, acrylamides, and lipid peroxides that do not appear when raw meat is eaten. The raw meat transit of sixteen hours compared to the herbivore's forty-eight hours is, in his reading, further evidence that our system is designed for animal food and not plant matter.

He summarized the bacterial environment of the mouth in the same terms. Humans have more bacteria in the mouth than any other species on earth, with dogs and cats having sixteen to eighteen types while humans carry far more. That bacterial load, he held, is designed to begin predigesting animal foods. The only alkalizing enzyme present in the human mouth, which he called the "tylin" or "tylen" enzyme, is shared with the horse and is designed to break down carbohydrates. He used this to make a specific point: even in the mouth, the human system is predominantly oriented toward animal food digestion, with only a small concession to carbohydrate processing via that single shared enzyme.

He also tested digestion experimentally by applying hydrochloric acid and bile to different foods and observing the result. With animal fats that were in liquid form, he reported one hundred percent digestion. With vegetation and fruits, very little digestion occurred. He stated flatly: "We are meat eaters. We are carnivores, period, according to our digestive needs."

One of the more specific claims Aajonus made about the carnivore framework concerned what happens when whole vegetables enter the human digestive tract. Rather than contributing to digestion, he argued, they actively disrupt it by over-alkalizing the acid environment that the tract requires to process animal foods.

The digestive tract needs to maintain an acid environment throughout its length in order to break down meat, dairy, and other animal products. When whole vegetables enter the system, they digest so slowly that they continually secrete alkaline fluids, which neutralize the hydrochloric acid and other digestive acids that animal foods require. The result is impaired digestion of whatever animal foods are present, and what he described as a physical repulsion response when the system becomes over-alkalinized.

He extended this observation to explain why vegetarians over time progressively lose digestive capacity. As they eat less protein, they develop fewer and fewer of the enzymes associated with digesting complex foods, and eventually must reduce to mono meals, eating only one food at a time, because their systems can no longer handle combinations. He saw this as a degradation of digestive function rather than a refinement of it, and he observed it in practically every long-term vegetarian he encountered.

He made an exception for vegetable juice. When vegetables are juiced, the cellulose is removed and what remains is enzymes, minerals, and vitamins in a form the human body can absorb. He used vegetable juice as a supplement to a meat-centered diet, not as a food source in its own right, and he specified that vegetable juice should never be consumed with meat because one is acidic and the other alkalizing, and combining them disrupts digestion of both. Vegetable juice should be taken between meat meals, and he stated that without it, many people find their blood becomes too acidic to tolerate meat, which produces nausea and repulsion.

Aajonus did not argue that carbohydrates were absent from a carnivore diet, but rather that they were present within the animal foods themselves and needed in only small amounts.

He cited the Maasai as a tribe that consumed no separate carbohydrate source, living on milk and meat exclusively, and remained in excellent health. His explanation was that meat itself contains carbohydrates, ranging from five to ten percent depending on the animal, and up to twenty percent in the case of grain-fed cattle where starches concentrate in the meat. Birds, which eat more grain than most herbivores, carry a higher ratio of carbohydrates in their flesh. The carbohydrates present in meat arrive in starch form, sugar form, and various biological forms that the human body can use without needing to eat separate plant carbohydrates.

He also noted that the citric acid cycle requires only about five percent carbohydrate, which can be met entirely through the carbohydrate content of animal foods. Someone in good health would need no additional carbohydrate beyond what is already present in meat, dairy, and eggs.

Despite this, he acknowledged including some fruit in the diet for most people, specifically to accelerate bodily cleansing. He framed this as an optional addition that speeds up detoxification rather than a nutritional requirement, and he recommended pairing any fruit with fat to slow the absorption of fruit sugars and prevent the high-low blood sugar pattern. He also cautioned against eating sweet ripe fruit with red meat, because the combination converts the meat primarily into pyruvate, a protein sugar the body cannot use for cellular regeneration. Red meat was too important a regenerative food to waste in that way.

The first meal of the day occupied a specific role in his carbohydrate framework. He held that the first six hours after waking determine what the body uses to manufacture glycogen, the stored fuel that runs the nervous system. If the first food of the day is fruit, high-sugar cereal, or any carbohydrate source, the body builds glycogen from carbohydrates and produces advanced glycation end products as a byproduct, a finding he attributed to Columbia University research. If the first food is meat, the body builds glycogen from animal protein and fat through a different pathway without the same glycation byproduct load. This made the morning meat meal functionally critical, not just calorically important.

The carnivore diet Aajonus described was specifically a raw carnivore diet. He held that cooking meat creates a fundamentally different substance from the original food, not merely a less nutritious version but an actively harmful one.

Raw meat digests in sixteen to twenty hours and passes within twenty-four hours without putrefaction. Cooked meat takes twenty-four to thirty-six hours, and during that extended transit it putrefies, producing heterocyclic amines, acrylamides, and lipid peroxides that are not found in the digestive tract when raw meat is eaten. He emphasized that mutilated nutrients, which is what cooking produces, are not the same as simply absent nutrients. They are structurally damaged molecules that the body cannot use efficiently and must treat as a burden.

He observed that people who switch from cooked to raw meat almost universally report that raw meat digests transparently, leaving no sense of heaviness, no need to lie down and wait, and no digestive discomfort. He contrasted this with the experience of cooked meat sitting heavily in the intestines and failing to move without the addition of raw vegetables to provide some enzymatic activity. He noted that when eating cooked meat, raw whole vegetables become necessary not as nutrition but as mechanical assistance to keep the food moving and to partially buffer the over-acidity that cooking generates.

He also addressed chewing in the context of raw meat specifically. Chewing meat extensively is counterproductive because the tylin enzyme in the mouth is an alkalizing enzyme designed to break down carbohydrates. When meat is chewed for a long time, that alkalizing enzyme mixes thoroughly with the meat and begins to neutralize the acid environment the stomach needs to digest it. He instructed people not to chew meat but to crush it two or three times to reduce it enough to swallow, exactly as the hunter tribes do. He noted that if meat is chewed extensively, the digestive repulsion response is triggered, making it harder to eat adequate quantities. He observed that if he chewed his meat he could manage perhaps half a pound in a day, whereas if he used a Cuisinart to grind it and consumed it quickly he could eat up to three pounds in a day.

Aajonus was specific about how much meat to eat and when. He recommended a minimum of one pound of meat per day for nearly everyone, with his own intake ranging from one to three pounds daily. He described eating a pound and a half of lamb on the morning of one seminar, calling it delicious even though it was tough.

He structured meat consumption around two meals separated by an hour or two. Each meal would be somewhere between one cup and three cups of meat, with a cup and a third constituting roughly half a pound. The first meal was timed to establish the glycogen manufacturing pathway for the day during the critical first six hours after waking. The second meat meal followed one to two hours after the first. He also mentioned eating meat with bone marrow, describing it as very concentrated material.

For people coming off long-term vegetarianism, who had lost much of their digestive enzymatic capacity, he recommended starting with smaller, simpler meat meals, perhaps with a salsa sauce but without complex combinations, and building up gradually. He noted that former vegetarians often needed to start with chicken and beef in larger amounts, with fish as a balancing element, eaten perhaps at a ratio of five to six bites of red meat to one bite of fish, because their overacidic and depleted systems could not handle the full protocol immediately.

He also mentioned "fasting on meat," meaning eating nothing but meat and water for a period, as something he had moved away from dismissing after seeing it produce results in certain situations. He said he could no longer deny it worked. He had also worked extensively with cutting out most fruit and keeping carbohydrates very low, finding that this approach worked well in most situations.

Aajonus used "raw meat" to encompass all flesh foods without restriction: seafood, fish, fowl, beef, lamb, venison, buffalo, pork, and wild meat. He did not restrict the category to muscle meat from large land animals. He ate lobsters, crabs, and clams, noting that it did not matter what the animal ate as long as the animal itself was healthy. He stated that if he had only a tiger to eat, he would eat that tiger, and that eating healthy animals of any kind posed no problem regardless of whether those animals were themselves carnivores or herbivores.

He made a specific distinction about which cuts of muscle meat were most valuable. Hunter tribes considered filet mignon to be essentially dog food, and their folklore held that filet mignon creates weak tissue because it is too tender. They preferred tough cuts such as brisket, round, and chuck, which they considered superior meats for building strong cells. He observed this in his own experiments: he had eaten filet mignon and brains and had muscle tissue, but his muscle development did not reach its full extent until he began eating muscle meat from tougher cuts. He built and maintained solid muscle without exercising for nearly twenty years by eating muscle meat.

He also discussed wild game favorably, noting that wild animals eat an enormous variety of foods as they travel, whereas feedlot cattle may eat only two to five foods throughout their lives. For humans, this variety issue is resolved differently than for herbivores: human tribes typically eat the same meat consistently, and they stay very healthy doing so, because simplicity is appropriate for the human digestive system. The diversity that an herbivore requires through a varied diet of herbs is not needed in the same way by a meat-eating human.

He mentioned bone marrow as a particularly concentrated supplement to the meat meal, something to eat alongside the meat itself.

A significant portion of what Aajonus said about the carnivore diet was structured as a direct response to vegetarianism and veganism, because the question of whether humans could thrive without meat was one he engaged with consistently throughout his career.

He reported working with more than three thousand two hundred people over the years, and of that group he knew of only eight individuals who could sustain genuine health on a vegetarian diet. Two of those eight did not do well in their later years. By his count, fewer than five percent of humans could function adequately on a vegetarian diet long-term, and even that small group represented a constitutional type he described as genuinely rare.

He listed the consistent features he observed in long-term vegetarians: insatiable cravings that nothing satisfied, inability to maintain stable weight, progressive loss of digestive enzyme capacity requiring reduction to mono meals, energy deficits requiring stimulants or superfoods, and a pattern of secretly consuming dairy or meat while publicly maintaining vegetarian or vegan claims. He cited David Wolfe as an example, a prominent raw food and superfood advocate who Aajonus had warned at the outset would not be constitutionally suited to vegetarianism, and who after seven to eight years was reported by his own staff to be eating raw meat and dairy every day while still publicly advocating for plant-based nutrition. He contrasted Wolfe's trajectory with his own prediction: "I told him a long time ago. Look at me in seven years when you hit the wall."

He also described a case of a famous Swiss actress who had been a twenty-one year vegetarian and developed aggressive cervical cancer that caused continuous severe bleeding, requiring two to three transfusions per week. She had traveled across Europe to the best available practitioners without finding relief. When she encountered one of his patients buying dairy, meat, and cheese at a health food store, she initially refused to consider that approach. Eventually, in his account, after being brought onto his dietary protocol, she consumed three and a half pounds of filet mignon in forty-five minutes during a session with him. He described this as the body taking over once animal food was introduced, overriding the conditioning of twenty-one years.

He cited historical populations in the same frame. The Hunzas, often claimed as evidence for vegetarian longevity, were in his reading predominantly dairy eaters who consumed more dairy than even the Maasai and the Samburu. The Maasai themselves ate only milk and meat and needed no carbohydrate source. The American Indian and the Icelandic and Costa Eskimos all showed evidence of worsening skeletal health, specifically osteoporosis, when they shifted from a meat-based diet toward grain cultivation and gathering. The more grains and nuts they ate, the more degenerative disease appeared.

He extended this to growth hormone production specifically. In his animal experiments, only raw meat produced adequate hormones for cellular reproduction across all species he examined. Birds such as vultures, ravens, crows, and owls would not produce growth hormones without raw meat. He found the same in humans: he could eat seven pounds of nuts a day as a vegetarian and wake up a quarter of a pound lighter each morning, never nourished, steadily diminishing.

Aajonus framed the carnivore diet not only as a maintenance diet for healthy people but as the primary tool for reversing degenerative disease. He described his own recovery from bone cancer, juvenile diabetes, and multiple other serious conditions as having begun when he introduced raw meat into his diet after the encounter with the Eskimos in Alaska.

He also described a man who was wasting away on vegetarianism, could not stand straight, and whose vegetarian wife had essentially compelled the dietary change. Within a year and a half on Aajonus's raw meat-based protocol, the man gained forty pounds, stood straight, and looked strong and healthy. The wife, initially committed to vegetarianism, told him he would never leave the diet. He then recommended the same approach to the Dalai Lama, who in Aajonus's account had also become seriously ill. The Dalai Lama reportedly began eating meat again and visibly recovered.

He connected the raw carnivore diet's efficacy to the specificity of meat as a building material. "Meat is already so much like us. It's an animal and we are an animal, so there is so little transition to make." The molecular similarity between human tissue and animal tissue means the body can use raw animal protein and fat for cellular regeneration with minimal processing loss. He estimated that the human digestive tract extracts about eighty percent of what is usable from raw meat, which he considered excellent, noting that even herbivores only digest sixty-seven percent of the vegetation they eat.

He specifically identified raw muscle meat, as opposed to tender cuts, as the type most effective for building and maintaining body tissue. His experience of maintaining solid muscle mass for nearly twenty years without exercise was attributed directly to eating the tougher muscle cuts that native hunters preferred, brisket, round, and chuck rather than filet mignon.

He also connected insufficient raw meat consumption to an inability to regenerate cells and reverse or prevent the aging process of deterioration, stating: "Most people cannot regenerate cells to either reverse or prevent the aging process of deterioration without eating plenty of raw meat in combination with raw fats."

Aajonus consistently paired raw meat with raw fat in his carnivore framework, treating them as functionally inseparable rather than independent components. He stated that fat alone produces two and a half times more energy than carbohydrates or protein, and that the energy produced from fat is long-lasting rather than the quick, fizzled-out energy produced from carbohydrate or protein metabolism.

The specific combination of raw meat with raw fat was necessary for cellular regeneration. Raw meat provided the structural proteins and growth factors, while raw fat provided the medium in which those materials could be transported, utilized, and incorporated into new tissue. He observed that without adequate raw fat, the raw meat alone would not produce the regenerative effect he described.

He listed raw fats appropriate for use alongside meat as including raw unsalted butter, raw cream, avocado, coconut cream, and peanut oil pressed below ninety-six degrees Fahrenheit. Of these, the animal fats, butter and cream, he considered superior because they were fully liquid at body temperature and therefore one hundred percent digestible by the bile the liver produces. Vegetable oils and fats, including avocado, were useful supplements but not equivalent to animal fats. He described the human body as unable to maintain vegetable oil in a fluid state at its operating temperature, causing it to crystallize in the tissues, which he associated with the higher cancer rates he observed among vegetarians.

Beyond the anatomical and experimental evidence, Aajonus drew extensively on direct observation of non-industrialized populations whose diets he had studied personally over years of travel.

He described a tribe in the Philippines whose entire diet consisted of three foods: raw fish every day, raw coconut meat every day, and a piece of green fruit, either green mango or green banana, two or three times per week. He reported that they were strong and healthy and lived to an average of one hundred thirty to one hundred forty years, with some reaching one hundred fifty. He used this as evidence that a simple carnivore diet, built on raw animal food with minimal carbohydrate and no cooked food of any kind, was not merely adequate but produced exceptional longevity.

He also drew on the Eskimos with whom he had lived, describing their practice of digging up aged, fermented meats that were fifty to seventy-five percent predigested by bacterial action. To a wild animal, this highly fermented material was the most desirable food imaginable. To a person conditioned to cooked food, it was repulsive. He used this contrast to make a point about how thoroughly civilized food conditioning distorts natural food instinct.

He referenced the Maasai and Fulani tribes multiple times, both groups eating predominantly raw animal foods, including meat and milk, with minimal or no separate carbohydrate source, and both maintaining strong health across generations. He contrasted their robustness with the deterioration he observed in populations that shifted toward grain-based diets.

He also noted that every wild animal he spent time with, from coyotes to alligators, ate its food raw, and that no species in nature cooked food except humans. He observed that no wild animal living on its natural raw diet developed the degenerative diseases common in human populations and domesticated animals, unless the wild animal had been exposed to chemical contamination.

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