Corn Syrup

Aajonus stated directly that processed carbohydrates, with corn syrup named specifically, are the main cause of obesity. His exact framing was that corn syrup is present "in 70% of all manufactured foods as a sweetener." This saturation of the food supply means that virtually anyone eating manufactured or packaged foods is consuming it constantly, often without awareness. The sheer ubiquity of the ingredient, embedded across product categories from soft drinks to baked goods to condiments, makes avoidance nearly impossible unless a person is sourcing food entirely outside the commercial manufacturing system.

He was careful to distinguish this from the claim, common in conventional medicine and mainstream nutrition of his era, that animal fats cause heart disease and obesity. His position was that hydrogenated vegetable oils are the main factor in heart disease, and that corn syrup is the main factor in obesity. These were distinct mechanisms producing distinct primary harms, though he acknowledged they frequently appear together in the same manufactured products.

Soft drinks received specific mention as being "loaded with corn syrup." Aajonus used the Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola companies as examples of products that were essentially entirely chemical in composition, and he noted that at one point corn syrup had been, in his words, "the nearest thing they got to anything food value in it." Even this qualified remark was not an endorsement. He immediately followed it by stating that in a soap process there is really no value in it, and that the replacement of corn syrup with aspartame made matters worse, not better, because aspartame is "one of the most toxic substances" available. The point being made was not that corn syrup had food value but that aspartame, its replacement in many formulations, is categorically more damaging.

Aajonus noted that ninety percent of the corn used in food processing is genetically modified. He connected GMO corn to a distinct set of harms beyond those of processed sugars generally, stating that GMO foods have proved to cause many allergies, cellular mutations, and some diseases. This means that when a person consumes high fructose corn syrup, they are not only consuming a processed sugar with all the metabolic consequences that entails, they are also, in ninety percent of cases, consuming material derived from genetically modified organisms with their own additional harm profile. The two problems are layered on top of one another.

A significant portion of what Aajonus addressed on corn syrup concerned its use as an adulterant in commercial honey. He received direct questions about this from people in his community who were attempting to source clean raw honey and discovered that some beekeepers were either adding corn syrup to bottled honey or feeding corn syrup to their bees. Aajonus treated both practices as disqualifying.

His method for detecting corn syrup adulteration in honey was sensory: he reported that when corn syrup has been mixed into honey, "the taste will differ from pure honey." Specifically, he described that it "burns my tongue, especially the throat and lingers for about 10 minutes, consuming only 1/4 tsp. to test." This burn and lingering sensation, produced by as little as a quarter teaspoon, was his diagnostic tool for identifying adulterated product.

His policy on beekeepers who used corn syrup at any point was absolute: "if the bee keeper uses corn syrup or sugar at any time, I do not buy honey from him/her." This included not just beekeepers who added corn syrup to bottled honey but also those who fed it to their bees, because feeding bees corn syrup affects what the bees produce.

Aajonus addressed a specific case involving Honey Pacifica, a supplier he had previously trusted and from whom members of his community were purchasing sage honey. The company admitted to feeding their bees corn syrup during a prior winter season. His response was to stop purchasing from them for that season entirely. He stated: "I didn't buy any last season because they used syrup. I had 4 gallons stored."

His understanding of why it had occurred was that the bees ran out of the honey left for them and the beekeeper reached for corn syrup rather than dipping into their bottled supply. Aajonus's practical recommendation was that beekeepers should always maintain access to their own bottled honey to supply bees in emergencies, rather than resorting to corn syrup. Honey Pacifica agreed to this practice going forward, and Aajonus stated he would resume purchasing their spring crop. The episode illustrates his framework: the harm from corn syrup is not merely direct human consumption, but extends to what the animals that produce food for humans are themselves fed.

Aajonus described how ice cream changed in the mid to late 1960s when manufacturers began replacing dairy-based formulations with corn syrup and hydrogenated vegetable oils. He explained that when you take oil, sugar, and corn syrup together and process them, "you have plastic. You have a sugar plastic." He described this ice cream as "styrofoam," a term he used to convey that the resulting product shares the structural character of an inert petroleum foam rather than a food. The companies he contrasted with this practice were Ben and Jerry's and Brockmire's, which he described as using actual dairy rather than corn syrup and hydrogenated vegetable oil.

The marshmallow comparison also appeared in his teaching: "They take the oil and the sugar and the sugar and corn syrup, and what do you have? You have plastic. You have a sugar plastic." This was the same chemical logic he applied to both marshmallows and industrially processed ice cream, connecting them as members of the same category of cooked oil and processed sugar combinations that produce inert, non-food substances.

While Aajonus did not always use the specific phrase "high fructose corn syrup" when discussing the biochemical mechanisms of sugar damage, his framework for processed and manufactured sugars applies directly to corn syrup as a processed carbohydrate. Columbia University research he cited found that 70 to 90 percent of the advanced glycation end products resulting from carbohydrate-derived blood sugar store in the body. A healthy body stores them at a rate of 70 percent; an unhealthy body, or one with compromised kidney or pancreatic function, at 90 percent.

Cooked and processed carbohydrates, which corn syrup represents in extreme form, are read by the body as already-burned glycogen. Instead of the body converting them into glycogen through normal metabolic processes, they are turned directly into advanced glycation end products, glycotoxins that accumulate in tissue. The sticky, thick quality of blood produced by high carbohydrate sugar concentrations causes the blood, lymph, and nerve serums to become viscous, reducing the efficiency of synapse firing, oxygen transport, and glandular function. Aajonus connected this directly to neurological misfiring, lost trains of thought, mood instability, and the broader pattern of hypoglycemia and depression that he regarded as driven primarily by processed sugar consumption.

Refined sugars, including corn syrup, are described as mutations. They enter the blood too fast. The pancreas first attempts to convert them into a more natural sugar, but most of the sugar passes into the blood as mutant forms, overstimulating the liver and triggering insulin overproduction even when blood sugar is not genuinely low.

A distinction Aajonus returned to repeatedly was the fundamental difference between corn syrup or refined table sugar on one side, and raw sugarcane juice on the other. Sugar must be boiled at temperatures between 450 and 700 degrees Fahrenheit for hours to release the sugar molecule from the cellulose of the cane. The sweetness present in raw sugarcane juice is not actually carbohydrate sugar at all in any significant quantity; it is alkalinizing minerals, potassium, phosphorus, and calcium, which taste sweet but do not function metabolically as sugars. When Aajonus drank up to 16 ounces of raw sugarcane juice in a sitting with no blood sugar reaction, he attributed this to the fact that the processing step required to produce actual refined sugar had not occurred. The sugar molecule remained bound to the cellulose and was therefore not released into the bloodstream.

This distinction is directly relevant to corn syrup because corn syrup is the product of exactly that kind of industrial processing: the application of extreme heat and chemical treatment to isolate and concentrate the sugar component away from the plant matrix in which it naturally occurs. Whatever buffer, fiber, or mineral relationship might have existed in the original corn is destroyed, and what remains is a concentrated processed sugar with no buffering capacity and no living enzymatic activity.

Aajonus addressed the general category of fructose-based sweeteners in his written work. He described fructose as "the sugar from fruit (as opposed to sucrose which is the sugar from vegetables)" and noted that sweeteners made of fructose, including processed fructose products, "cause as many similar complications as sucrose." He called fructose "the lesser of two evils" compared to sucrose, but made clear this was not an endorsement of processed fructose products. High fructose corn syrup, as a processed fructose-derived industrial sweetener, falls squarely within this category of substances he regarded as causing the same class of complications as refined sugar generally.

His clear and unambiguous statement on sweeteners was that "unheated honeys, raw fruit and raw juices are the only sweeteners that promote better health." Everything else, including processed fructose, processed corn syrup, sucrose, and all sugar substitutes, falls outside what he would consider beneficial.