Cartilage

Cartilage buffers the impact of joint movement by acting as a compressible, rubbery material between articulating bone surfaces. Aajonus described it as "kind of hard, rubberish," built to be neither brittle nor toxically swollen. It is found at every major joint in the body, including the knees, hips, elbows, shoulders, ankles, and wrists, and also appears in structural roles elsewhere, such as the cartilage of the throat in which the parathyroid glands are housed. At the ends of long bones near the knuckle and joint surfaces, the bone transitions from dense marrow-rich tissue into cartilage, which is why Aajonus noted that when eating femur or tibia bones for the marrow, "up near the knuckle it's all cartilage and bone, there's nothing in it."

The cartilage at joints is supported by the bursa, a sac that produces lubricating fluid. When the bursa is healthy and producing clean, non-acidic fluid, the joint moves freely and the cartilage is protected. When the bursa produces toxic, acidic fluid, it irritates the joint rather than lubricating it, creating conditions that allow viruses, infections, and yeasts to proliferate in the joint space, and these then begin consuming the cartilage.

Aajonus established a hierarchy of how long it takes the body to replace every cell in different tissue types, and cartilage falls in the mid-range of that hierarchy. Blood cells take approximately 45 to 60 days. Soft tissue takes about two and a half years. Cartilage and tendons take approximately four to four and a half years. Hard compact bone takes seven to seven and a half years. In one passage he gave slightly different figures within the same framework, stating cartilage takes about four years, tendons about three years, and muscles about two years, which reflects variation across different talks rather than a single fixed number.

The significance of these timelines for cartilage is that even after the underlying cause of cartilage destruction is corrected, the physical rebuilding of the tissue requires the body to cycle through four or more years of cellular replacement. In a joint area, Aajonus noted, "you are talking about a hardened cartilage and bone that permeates and takes seven years to regenerate all the cells in a bone," contextualizing the cartilage timeline within the broader difficulty of joint healing. If a person has spent years or decades deteriorating cartilage, the rebuilding process will require a corresponding duration, even on a fully raw diet.

The most extensively developed piece of Aajonus's cartilage framework is the relationship between leaky gut, also called Crohn's disease in his usage, and the migration of undigested food particles to joint cartilage. His explanation proceeds in a clear mechanical sequence.

The stomach mucous lining becomes thin, allowing the body's own digestive acids to begin eroding the intestinal wall. As the wall becomes thinner, eating causes physical ripping of the gut, creating lesions through which undigested food particles pass into the body cavity. The body then has to deal with these particles somewhere. It has two main options: fat deposits, where particles can be stored for decades with relatively little disruption except excess weight, and cartilage, because cartilage is the second most resilient tissue in the body after the stomach lining itself, capable of withstanding highly acidic digestive environments.

The stomach, Aajonus explained, "forms hydrochloric acid in the dissolved bone, yet it doesn't dissolve its own tissue. That's very resilient tissue. Well, your cartilage is very close to the same. So it can have digestive activity down there." The body sends undigested food particles to the joints, predominantly the knees first in about 80 percent of cases, then the hips, then the elbows, then the shoulders and neck, and manufactures hydrochloric acid and bile at those sites to digest the escaped food. This is why people with chronically affected joints sometimes display darkened skin around those joints: "the body is sending bile to that area to handle it, to break it down."

The digestive process at the joint, though successful in dealing with the food particles, simultaneously erodes the cartilage because cartilage was not designed to serve as a digestive organ. The body also produces bacteria at the joint to help digest the damaged cartilage cells and the undigested food particles. This is where conventional medicine goes wrong, in Aajonus's view: "they produce bacteria to eat the dead, damaged cartilage cells, and then they say, see, it's the bacteria that's causing arthritis and rheumatism. And they're just the freaking janitors." The bacteria found in arthritic joints are there to consume already-damaged cartilage and undigested particles, not to attack healthy cartilage cells. "The form of bacteria that is found in arthritis is actually a form of bacteria used to digest the undigested food particles and damaged cartilage, not breakdown and digest healthy cartilage-cells. However, the joint-area digestive-process simultaneously gradually erodes the cartilage to varying degrees."

The sequence of symptoms that emerges from this process is: first joint pain, then swelling as deterioration continues, then in severe cases like osteoarthritis, complete disappearance of cartilage from the joint. Once the cartilage is fully consumed, the body begins eating into the bone itself. Aajonus described this process as typically becoming clinically obvious in the fifties, though the underlying deterioration often begins decades earlier.

Aajonus distinguished between two different origins of joint disease that can produce similar symptoms. The more common form, accounting for 85 to 90 percent of cases, is the leaky gut mechanism described above, where the cartilage is being used as a digestive site rather than having been structurally damaged. The less common form is actual physical bruising or structural damage to the cartilage itself.

In the case of true physical damage, such as a runner on a poor diet who repeatedly bruises the cartilage, the body responds by generating bacteria to dissolve the damaged cartilage cells. This is "true arthritis and rheumatism, where your body has gotten bacteria into that, generate bacteria to dissolve the damaged cartilage." Aajonus acknowledged that this form exists but emphasized that "most arthritis and rheumatism are the symptoms of digesting leaky gut food rather than bruised or damaged cartilage. Each one's different."

A third mechanism he noted is the presence of caustic toxins stored directly in the cartilage or bone marrow, including heavy metals from vaccines and chemicals from industrial agriculture and food processing. These accumulate in joint tissues and cause direct inflammatory and erosive damage. He also observed that when the body is detoxifying stored toxins from cartilage or bone marrow during a healing process on the raw diet, those toxins are often discharged outward through the skin at the joint areas, producing rashes or skin discoloration around the knees and other joints.

Multiple mechanisms of cartilage damage appear across Aajonus's discussions:

Leaky gut sends undigested food to joints, where the resulting digestive acids erode cartilage over time. Toxic, acidic bursal fluid creates a corrosive environment in the joint. Viruses, infections, and yeasts proliferate in the joint when lubrication is poor and bursal fluid is acidic, eating away at the cartilage. Cooked beef in particular was implicated, as Aajonus told those with a tendency toward arthritis to stay away from cooked beef entirely, noting the uric acid produced goes into the joints. Vegetable oils are crystallized in the body at human body temperature, and over years these crystals disrupt the cellular structure of tendons, bones, and cartilage alike, producing arthritis, rheumatism, and osteoporosis through what amounts to internal scarring. Physical trauma such as repeated running or joint impacts on a poor diet can bruise cartilage directly.

Cold therapy applied to injured joints was another mechanism of long-term cartilage and joint damage in Aajonus's framework. He described the practice of icing swollen joints as causing clotting rather than healing, and said that athletes who receive ice packs, cortisone injections, and elastic bandaging to remain in competition often end up with destroyed knees within five years, eventually requiring plastic replacement joints. "Never freeze a swollen area. You put a hot water bottle next to it, you put heat there to increase circulation, you'll get well faster."

The complete disappearance of cartilage, as in severe osteoarthritis or the end stages of rheumatoid arthritis, is described as the point at which the body begins consuming the bone itself. At this stage, Aajonus said, the damage is so extensive that knee and hip replacement surgery may be the only practical option for restoring mobility: "it's so gone, so eaten away. There is no regenerating that. It would take as long as it took them to deteriorate to rebuild it."

One specific detail Aajonus offered about cartilage is that warts are composed of cartilage cells that can no longer function properly as cartilage. "A wart is usually dead cells that are cartilage and can no longer function as cartilage properly, but they're not completely dead. So the body builds it into the skin and makes it a wart. It's a viral activity. Well, the virus goes in and changes the RNA and DNA, so it pulls it out of the joint area and builds it into the skin." This connects wart formation directly to joint cartilage degeneration as a parallel detoxification or tissue-relocation process.

Aajonus consistently emphasized the mineral density of cartilage and bone. "Watch the mineral, because just remember the cartilage and the bone are very mineral concentrated because they are solid." For people with arthritis or any tendency toward joint deterioration, he recommended deep sea fish, oysters, and other shellfish as mineral sources. He also recommended chicken specifically because of its fat content, which he said lubricates the joint and provides the elasticity cartilage needs. Chicken fat, particularly from the pockets of fat around the back end of the chicken eaten raw, was one of his preferred fats for this purpose.

Raw cream was also recommended for bruised cartilage specifically, along with white chicken meat, to "provide the fats to lubricate the area so it can allow it to stretch, so it has elasticity. And the white meat so you can build cells to build it out so it won't be so tight."

Aajonus ate raw animal cartilage as a regular part of his diet in Los Angeles, going through a full package of bones per day, roughly seven bones, eating them with his meat meal. He described working near the knuckle ends of femur and tibia bones where the hard bone transitions into cartilage. While acknowledging that the cartilage near the joint end does not contain bone marrow, he stated that eating the bone and cartilage together "helps regenerate tissue fast." He consumed this daily when in Los Angeles, roughly six weeks per year.

When asked directly about grinding or grating fresh, never-frozen animal cartilage and bone, Aajonus confirmed this is helpful and that he had experimented with this approach. "Yes, grinding or grating some bone and/or cartilage can be helpful."

For joint problems of all kinds, Aajonus consistently prescribed hot water bottle application, calling heat "so important for any kind of joint problem." He was explicit that cold should never be applied to swollen joints, as it clots the area and prevents proper healing. Heat increases circulation and brings the body's repair materials to the site.

Raw meat was central to his joint healing recommendations. For people with replacement joints who suffered ongoing pain, he noted that "most sufferers completely eliminated crippling replacement pain within 2 weeks of consuming raw meat." Even after irreversible cartilage destruction necessitating surgery, addressing the underlying cause, particularly through raw meat consumption, was necessary to prevent continuing deterioration at other sites and pain at the replaced joint.

For arthritis driven by leaky gut, the primary intervention was correcting gut permeability by eating in very small amounts. The specific protocol he described involved living primarily on eggs, eating 20 to 30 eggs per day for a large person, up to 50 if needed for weight maintenance, taking them in amounts no larger than one egg at a time with small amounts of honey and butter at a ratio of two parts butter to one part honey, and sipping milk no more than one to two tablespoons at a time. This minimal-volume eating prevents the gut ripping that sends food to the joints.

Cheese eaten very frequently, every 15 to 30 minutes, was described as a major component of joint healing, improving digestion, skin, and the gradual reduction of swollen joints. In the case of a 50-year-old woman with severe rheumatoid arthritis who was fully crippled, confined to a wheelchair with enormously swollen knees, wrists, elbows, and deformed hands who could not feed or dress herself, Aajonus had her eating cheese every 20 minutes, taking hot baths of 105 degrees for 90 minutes daily, and within one year her knees had reduced to a third of their previous size. Over subsequent years her joints normalized fully, and she was eventually able to walk without a cane, climb stairs, and travel.

Raw celery or raw celery juice was mentioned as a means of dissolving uric acid deposits in joints. Drinking six to eight ounces of raw milk blended with one tablespoon of cold-pressed flax seed oil, peanut oil, or unheated fermented coconut oil was described as helping to lubricate and strengthen joints, with the Moisturizing and Lubrication formula being the best recipe for this purpose. Applying a poultice of one raw celery stalk blended with two tablespoons of grated raw horseradish root to a painful joint was said to reduce pain within 20 minutes in most cases. For those experiencing skin rashes or discoloration around joint areas during detoxification, Aajonus recommended one to two Moisturizing and Lubrication formulas daily, no-salt raw cheese eaten hourly, and long hot baths nightly.

Pineapple with whipped cream or coconut cream in a three-day cycle every seven days was prescribed in one case to help dissolve scarring in tendons adjacent to a damaged joint, with the reasoning that unless scarring is removed, new cells cannot be built in the area.

Aajonus was clear that cartilage cannot be rapidly regenerated once destroyed. The four-year cellular replacement timeline applies to cartilage in optimal conditions, meaning on a fully raw diet without ongoing damage. In the context of someone whose father's knee cartilage was fully worn through, Aajonus wrote: "At this late stage, to cleanse and heal his condition could take 2-5 years." He framed the choice between surgery and natural healing straightforwardly: surgery could restore pain-free walking within months, but without resolving the underlying cause, problems would emerge elsewhere and the replaced joint would continue to cause pain. The natural route takes years but addresses the source.

The case of the senator's granddaughter with knees affected by leaky gut arthritis illustrates the healing arc: on the raw diet, six months produced knees that were "almost normal" and functional movement; at one year and a half she was fully asymptomatic. He also described the Chicago woman with full-body rheumatoid arthritis as taking multiple years on the diet with hot baths before achieving complete normalization of her joints, but the trajectory was consistent and cumulative.

Aajonus also noted that in the broader timeline of complete cellular rebuilding, five generations of fully healthy raw-food animals were required in the Pottenger and Howell studies to return to optimal health, which he extrapolated to approximately 37 to 40 years on an all-raw diet for complete human healing. Cartilage, at four years per full cell turnover, would require multiple cycles within that larger arc to fully rebuild from severe degeneration.