Diet Soda

Aajonus's position was that sodas, including diet sodas, contain no food value in any meaningful sense. He stated this directly and without qualification: "There's no health value in any of the sodas." He described them as purely chemical combinations and made the comparison that a person would need to be locked up in an institution to choose to drink them voluntarily, contrasting this with the cultural conditioning that makes chemical sodas seem normal while other unconventional drinks seem disgusting.

He pointed to the carbonation in commercial sodas as a specific point of concern. The carbon dioxide used in Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, soda water for alcoholic beverages, and all other commercially produced sodas is laboratory-derived, not natural. He distinguished this sharply from naturally sparkling mineral waters such as Gerolsteiner, where the carbon dioxide layer exists in the well alongside the water and is pumped into the bottle simultaneously without any synthetic processing. Commercial soda carbonation, by contrast, is chemically produced and therefore not a natural gas. He described the carbon dioxide in commercial sodas, including diet sodas, as an unnatural, chemically derived compound.

The element of diet sodas that Aajonus addressed with the greatest specificity was aspartame, the artificial sweetener that replaced corn syrup in diet formulations. He described aspartame as one of the most toxic substances used in the food supply. He noted that aspartame goes by at least 13 different names, and commented that all of those names reflect something about what it actually does to the body.

He cited animal testing data, stating that in 32 percent of test animals, aspartame created kidney cancer or bladder cancer. He described aspartame as a poison that is simultaneously addictive and capable of mutating cells and damaging genes. He credited Dick Cheney by name as the person responsible for aspartame's approval, characterizing the political pathway that allowed a substance with known toxicity to be placed into the commercial food supply.

He noted that aspartame was present not only in diet sodas but in nearly all sodas, diet and otherwise, though he acknowledged that some brands had begun advertising that they no longer included it. His response to this was not relief but criticism: he questioned why it had been included for as long as ten years in the first place if the companies knew it was harmful, and he stated directly that both Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola knew what the test results showed and used the ingredient anyway.

He referenced a documentary that he had seen which went through the history of aspartame's approval, interviewing doctors and people who had worked for the FDA, and he described this as evidence that the regulatory process had been corrupted to allow a known harmful substance into mass consumption.

He gave a clinical example of a patient, a woman he described as having suffered for six or seven years from severe symptoms, who turned out to have a reaction specifically to aspartame. As soon as she stopped consuming aspartame, her symptoms disappeared. He used this case to illustrate how a single chemical in the body can create complete systemic havoc, and he framed her experience as evidence that the effects of aspartame are not theoretical but clinically observable.

Aajonus identified Sweet and Low as aspartame under a different commercial name, noting that the proliferation of names for the same compound was part of how the ingredient's presence was obscured from consumers. He stated that aspartame has 13 different names and that these names all reflect in some way what the substance actually does to the body, though he did not enumerate all 13 names in the passages available. The point he was making was that product labeling makes it difficult for consumers to identify the compound they are consuming, which he viewed as deliberate concealment rather than coincidence.

Beyond aspartame, Aajonus addressed the presence of benzene in soft drinks in his newsletter writing. He described a specific chemical reaction between sodium benzoate and ascorbic acid in soft drinks that produces benzene. He noted that an industry whistle-blower had paid for independent testing, and the results were reported in February 2006, showing that some soft drinks still contained benzene levels considerably above the limit allowed in drinking water.

He described the FDA as having known about benzene in soft drinks for 15 years and having kept that information from consumers while continuing to assure the public that there was no immediate risk. His position was unambiguous: science rather than speculation shows that there is immediate harm to soft drink consumers from benzene exposure at the levels found in tested products.

He characterized the industry's explanation, that some firms might not know about the potential for sodium benzoate and ascorbic acid to form benzene, as naive at best. His view was that any company generating billions of dollars in annual revenue knows everything about the chemistry of its products, and that the continued use of these compounds reflected a deliberate choice to prioritize addiction chemistry over consumer health. He described the chemical reaction of sodium benzoate and ascorbic acid as serving a functional purpose for the industry: it creates the "zing and addiction" that keeps consumers returning to soft drinks, and the industry did not want to stop using it even if it causes or contributes to cancer.

Aajonus noted that even the closest thing to a food-derived ingredient in regular sodas, corn syrup, had been removed in favor of aspartame in diet formulations, and in many regular formulations as well. He described corn syrup as the nearest thing the sodas had ever gotten to anything with food value, and even in that case he qualified it by noting that in the processing involved, there was no real food value remaining. The shift from corn syrup to aspartame, in his view, moved these products from having essentially no food value to being actively more toxic, since aspartame is both addictive and cell-damaging in ways that corn syrup, as bad as that is, is not.

Aajonus placed diet sodas within a larger analysis of corporate food industry behavior. He described Coca-Cola board meetings as being entirely focused on the question of how to make people more addicted to drinking Coca-Cola, specifically by manipulating the chemical combinations to produce greater dependency. He characterized the dietary version of their products as replacing one harmful ingredient with a more harmful one, specifically moving from corn syrup, which at least has a biological substrate, to aspartame, which he regarded as a genetic and cellular toxin.

He also described the water marketing campaign, which he traced to a bet made by executives at Pepsi-Cola, as having been modeled on the same logic: use doctors and published literature to convince people to consume something they had not previously needed in those quantities, thereby creating a new market. He saw both the water marketing campaign and the diet soda marketing campaign as applications of the same principle: manufacture consumer behavior through paid scientific authority and then profit from the manufactured behavior.

He commented that the King and Queen of England, who he said owned the major food processing companies in the world across every country, had declined to invest in Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola when those companies started, because they believed nobody would be "stupid enough to just drink chemicals." He used this anecdote to illustrate how dramatically the industry had succeeded in conditioning human behavior, noting that people not only drink chemicals voluntarily but pay for them at prices comparable to or exceeding nutritious beverages.

In a characteristically pointed contrast, Aajonus discussed a soda product being developed in India by a Hindu nationalist organization using cow urine as the base ingredient, flavored with molasses and maple syrup, and naturally carbonated. He used this comparison to make a specific argument: that cow urine is at minimum a biological substance with some nutritional properties, whereas commercial diet sodas contain nothing biological at all, only industrial chemistry. He described cow urine as "nutritious" by comparison to diet sodas, not as a ringing endorsement of urine-based beverages but as a way of illustrating just how far below zero the nutritional value of commercial sodas sits.

He acknowledged that the cultural conditioning around urine provokes disgust, while the same cultural conditioning around sodas produces comfort and desire, and he regarded this inversion as evidence of how thoroughly industrial marketing has distorted human instinct about what constitutes food.

For people who wanted the sensation of a carbonated or flavored drink, Aajonus consistently redirected toward his sport formula, which he emphasized was not to be confused with commercial sport drinks like Gatorade, which he described as "nothing but chemical, all chemical, not food." The sport formula uses naturally sparkling mineral water as one of its components, specifically the kind where the carbon dioxide comes from the well and is not synthetically produced. The base of the formula consists of pureed cucumber, tomato, watermelon, and/or raw whey, combined with coconut cream, dairy cream, eggs, honey, lemon juice, lime juice, and raw apple cider vinegar.

He also described whey mixed with a small amount of sparkling mineral water as tasting like soda. He noted this as a practical alternative, describing whey, the liquid runoff from making cheese, as having a yellow urine-like appearance but a soda-like taste when properly prepared, and pointing out that unlike diet sodas it is a biologically complete fluid with genuine electrolytes and nutritional content.

For people who had consumed soft drinks and wanted to address any benzene that might have been stored in body tissue before it could cause further harm, Aajonus indicated in his newsletter writing that there was a protocol for doing so, though the specific details of that protocol are not fully enumerated in the available passages beyond the general direction of supporting the body's elimination processes through the Primal Diet framework.

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