Digestion

Digestion begins in the mouth. Saliva is the first digestive fluid introduced to food, and its primary active component is bacteria. Human saliva contains approximately 2,300 bacteria per million parts, which is more than three times the bacterial density found in the saliva of dogs and cats. The bacteria in human saliva is acidic and feeds exclusively on animal products. It does not act on vegetation at all.

The one enzyme related to carbohydrate digestion present in human saliva is the ptyalin enzyme, which also appears in horses. In horses it is abundant, because horses are designed to run on carbohydrates. In humans it is present only in trace amounts, sufficient to handle roughly 5 percent of total food intake as carbohydrate. This is the first anatomical indication of how much carbohydrate the human body is designed to consume.

Chewing serves the mechanical function of breaking food into smaller particles so that the intestinal tract and the bacteria within it can process them more efficiently. The more thoroughly food is broken down before swallowing, the less the digestive tract has to do downstream. If food is already in a semi-liquid or pated state when it reaches the stomach, the body does not need to produce large amounts of hydrochloric acid to dissolve it.

The human stomach has one chamber with two compartments. The first compartment, sometimes called the stomach proper, is where hydrochloric acid is secreted from the stomach lining and dumped into the food. Hydrochloric acid has one primary function in the context of digestion: it dissolves large chunks of food, particularly meat, into smaller particles so that bacteria can infiltrate and consume them. Without hydrochloric acid, bacteria can only access the outermost layers of a piece of meat. A slice of meat has roughly eight layers of tissue, and without acid breakdown, bacteria can only penetrate the top two and bottom two. The four layers in the center remain untouched. Hydrochloric acid dissolves those central layers and makes the entire piece accessible.

Hydrochloric acid in the human stomach works on animal products. It does not work on vegetation in its raw state. If vegetation has been cooked, the cellular structure begins to break down immediately upon cooking, which is why cooked vegetation does show some chemical reaction with hydrochloric acid, but even then the digestion is of a damaged, degraded form. On fruits, on raw vegetables, on nuts, the human stomach's hydrochloric acid barely etches the surface.

Dogs and cats produce hydrochloric acid in their stomachs at 15 times the concentration of humans. This is why a dog or cat can digest meat in 10 to 14 hours. Humans digest more slowly, in 16 to 24 hours, because human hydrochloric acid is not concentrated heavily in the stomach but rather is secreted in moderate amounts continuously throughout the entire length of the small intestine. When the total hydrochloric acid production across stomach and small intestine is counted together, a human produces as much hydrochloric acid as any feline or canine. The difference is in distribution, not total volume.

The second compartment of the human stomach is the duodenum. This is where bile enters the digestive process. Bile is produced by the liver, stored in the gallbladder, and released via the bile duct into the duodenum, where it mixes with the food arriving from the first compartment.

Bile's function is to disassemble fat molecules into smaller units so that bacteria can infiltrate and consume them, and so they can be reassembled downstream into approximately 60 varieties of cholesterol. Roughly one third of these cholesterols are made with the structure to provide strength and energy, one third are structured to protect the body, and one third are structured to cleanse. Without bile, every fat consumed would exit the body as diarrhea because the molecules are too large to be processed.

The liver's only natural, original function is to manufacture bile. Aajonus emphasized this repeatedly. The liver was not designed to filter blood or manage toxicity. That is a secondary adaptation forced on it by the polluted conditions of modern life, where the lymphatic system becomes overloaded and the liver compensates. This dual burden weakens the liver over time.

The gallbladder does not produce anything. It is a storage vessel. Its capacity is sufficient to store enough bile to digest approximately 20 pounds of fat, or equivalently, roughly 10 gallons of ice cream. The evolutionary rationale Aajonus offered for this large reserve was that hunters who killed a large animal would eat the fat first, as the most calorie-dense and fastest-spoiling portion, consuming 10 to 12 pounds of fat in a sitting over several hours. Without that bile reserve, constant diarrhea would result. The bile reserve allowed full digestion of a large fat load in a single eating event.

Human bile, when tested against vegetable oils, does not break them down properly. It can fractionate vegetable oil to a small degree but does not do so well. Applied to butter, cream, meat fat, and dairy fats generally, human bile works at 90 percent efficiency, provided the liver and gallbladder are healthy. In Aajonus's laboratory experiments, bile taken from human corpses and applied to a range of foods consistently digested animal fats completely while leaving vegetable-source fats almost entirely intact.

After the stomach and duodenum, food passes into the small intestine. This is where the bulk of digestion takes place. Ninety percent of total digestion, meaning the work performed for the whole body, occurs in the small intestine.

The small intestine contains approximately 60,000 groups of bacteria, all drawn from roughly three or four bacterial families, whose job is to consume the food. Among these are Campylobacter, Salmonella, coliform bacteria, acidophilus, various Lactobacillus strains including Bulgaricus, and other acidic, animal-tissue-digesting organisms. All of these bacteria are acidic in character, designed to consume animal tissue. In a healthy person, bacteria constitute 90 percent of the intestinal tract by mass. In a less healthy person, this drops to around 80 percent.

Throughout the small intestine, the body continues to secrete small amounts of hydrochloric acid and bile in addition to the bacterial colonies. The mechanism by which this is regulated involves the villa, the small finger-like projections lining the intestinal walls. These villa function analogously to sea anemones in an ocean current: as food particles move past them, the villa register the size and type of the particles and trigger the appropriate secretion. If a large clump of meat passes, more hydrochloric acid is released to break it down further. If a large globule of fat passes, more bile is released. The villa both secrete digestive substances and absorb the products of bacterial digestion into the lacteal system.

Sugar consumption progressively destroys the villa. Processed sugar, whether from beet or cane, erodes villa over time. By age 50, a person with a typical sugar-containing diet may have only one-fifth the original villa length remaining, effectively reducing digestive capacity by 90 percent.

The bacteria eat the food particles as they move through. Their excrement, their secretions, and their other waste products are what the human body actually absorbs. Aajonus described this as bacteria eating what you eat, and the human body eating what the bacteria excrete. He noted that once bacteria have finished with any food, regardless of what was eaten, whether blueberries, blackberries, beets, or meat, the residue is a thick milky white substance. It enters the lacteal system in that form.

The lacteal system is a complex web network of lymphatic tissue running alongside both the small and large intestines. It is part of the lymphatic system. As bacteria finish their work on food particles, the resulting milky white substance is absorbed through the villa and intestinal walls into this lacteal network. From there it passes into the broader lymphatic system, which transforms it into a slightly translucent, milky-clear fluid that the lymph system then delivers to every body part, including the red and white blood cells developing in the bone marrow.

The nutrients absorbed through the small intestine feed the entire body except the nervous system. The bowel handles the digestion that specifically feeds the brain and nervous system.

Food enters the bowel through the ileocecal valve (also referred to as the oloquial valve), then travels up the ascending colon, across the transverse colon, and down the descending colon to the sigmoid colon, where it is held while the body completes absorption of digested material before expulsion.

The bowel contains a distinct bacterial environment from the small intestine, dominated primarily by E. coli. The entire bowel must maintain an acidic environment for E. coli to function. E. coli cannot survive in an alkaline environment. If alkaline-producing foods such as whole vegetables are consumed, the resulting alkaline juices in the colon neutralize the acid environment and disable E. coli, interfering with the final stage of protein digestion.

In the bowel, the final digestion of fats and proteins into the most finite molecules occurs. Approximately 80 to 90 percent of the output of bowel digestion goes to feed the brain and the nervous system. This is why the bowel has its own distinct compartment and its own specialized bacterial population. Hydrochloric acid and bile continue to be secreted in small amounts throughout the bowel to assist this process.

Food takes 24 hours to travel from mouth to anus in the human body. Of this, 16 to 18 hours are spent in the small intestine. The bowel accounts for the remaining 3 to 4 hours. This is different from dogs and cats, which digest in 10 to 14 hours, and from herbivores, for which the process takes 48 hours.

Aajonus's laboratory experiments produced specific digestion timing data for different foods. Meat required 19 to 24 hours for proper digestion with the full complement of acids and bacteria. Milk required 6 to 10 hours. Eggs required only 27 to 30 minutes, because both the white and the yolk are already in liquid form, the white being liquid protein that does not require hydrochloric acid to process, and the yolk being liquid fat that requires minimal bile because it is already broken down. For this reason, eggs were described as the most easily digested food, and the only food that contains every nutrient the body requires.

If foods are already liquefied, the requirement for hydrochloric acid and bile is greatly reduced, and digestion proceeds much faster. Pated meat, blended to a paste in a food processor, reduces the digestive burden substantially compared to eating the same meat as a whole steak. Aajonus described having to chew a steak for two hours to approximate the consistency that a food processor achieves in seconds.

Aajonus conducted laboratory experiments using digestive fluids and bacteria taken from eight human corpses. He extracted bacteria from different sections of the digestive tract, hydrochloric acid from the stomach lining, and bile from the gallbladder, and applied them individually and together to a range of foods: various vegetables, six types of nuts (including almonds, Brazil nuts, and pecans), fruits, meats, dairy products, grains, and coconut, in both raw and cooked forms.

The results were consistent. The only foods that were completely and properly digested by human digestive fluids were dairy, meat, and coconut. Dairy and meat showed proper digestion at every stage. Coconut showed complete digestion but is still harder to digest than dairy or meat, and Aajonus classified it as more cleansing than stabilizing. Vegetation showed minimal etching of the cellulose molecules, no more than 2 to 7 or 8 percent at maximum. Nuts showed almost no digestion. Fruits showed similarly minimal activity.

On the fat digestion side, bile taken from the human corpses and applied to butter, cream, and meat fat worked properly. Applied to vegetable oils and nut fats, it barely functioned. The conclusion was that the human body is designed to digest animal fats and is not designed to derive fat from plant sources.

These experiments extended to understanding that cooked foods partially digested by human acids and bacteria still produced only damaged, degraded nutrients compared to their raw counterparts.

**Meat.** Meat is fully digestible by the human system. Raw meat, if eaten in whole pieces and chewed normally, will digest at roughly 80 percent efficiency in 19 to 24 hours. If pated to a liquid paste, digestion is faster and more complete because the body's enzymatic burden is reduced. Aajonus noted that even without concentrated hydrochloric acid in the stomach, he personally digested meat effectively because his body secreted hydrochloric acid throughout the small intestine.

**Dairy.** Milk digests in 6 to 10 hours. Dairy in all forms is well-suited to human digestion. Cheese, however, does not digest in the conventional sense. In the human body, cheese passes through the stomach and intestinal tract largely undigested, acting instead as a magnet that draws heavy metals and poisons out of the nervous fluid and tissues as it moves through. Only when eaten with honey does cheese begin to digest normally and provide nutritional value.

**Eggs.** Eggs are the fastest-digesting food at 27 to 30 minutes. Both fractions are already liquid, requiring minimal digestive activity. The egg is also the only food that contains every known nutrient, including all varieties of vitamins A, B, C, and all fat-soluble vitamins in the yolk.

**Coconut.** Coconut pulp is digested at approximately 60 percent if the whole coconut is consumed. The bile required to digest coconut fat requires multiple varieties to disassemble and reassemble the molecules. It is more cleansing than stabilizing and is the closest plant food to milk, but it is still substantially harder to digest than dairy.

**Vegetation.** Raw vegetables are digested at a maximum of 2 percent, meaning the equivalent of about three bites per day. What the human body extracts from raw vegetables is primarily the juice: vitamins, some enzymes, and some minerals torn free from the cellulose structure. The remaining pulp and fiber passes through undigested. When vegetables are cooked, absorption increases to 23 percent, but the nutrients are highly damaged. The body manufactures a small amount of cellulose-digesting enzymes in the intestinal tract when a person eats vegetables, but these are not natural to the system and cease to be produced when vegetable intake stops. The primary harm of eating whole vegetables is the alkaline juice produced as the cellulose is partially broken down. These alkaline fluids neutralize the hydrochloric acid and stun the acidic bacteria throughout the intestinal tract, impairing digestion of any meat, dairy, or eggs that follow.

**Vegetable juice.** Juicing separates the alkaline pulp from the liquid, delivering only the vitamins, minerals, and enzymes without the full alkalizing load of whole vegetables. This is substantially less disruptive to the acidic digestive environment than eating whole vegetables.

**Nuts.** Nuts are poorly digested. In Aajonus's experiments, neither hydrochloric acid nor bile worked effectively on nut fats or nut proteins. The bile barely touched them. Nuts require a long digestive tract, which humans do not have.

**Grains.** Grains are not digestible by the human system. Hydrochloric acid does not work on them, bile does not work on them, and human bacteria do not have an affinity for them.

Eating whole vegetables disrupts the acid-bacterial environment of the entire intestinal tract. As the digestive system attempts to process even the small fraction of vegetable matter it can handle, alkaline juices are continuously released throughout the passage of those food particles from stomach to colon. These alkaline fluids neutralize the hydrochloric acid and functionally paralyze the acid bacteria responsible for digesting meat, dairy, and eggs. Any animal product eaten alongside or after vegetables is therefore partially or completely undigested, depending on the type and quantity of vegetables consumed.

The bowel is particularly vulnerable to this disruption. E. coli, the primary digestive organism of the large intestine, cannot survive in an alkaline environment. Whole vegetables consumed in significant quantities alkalinize the bowel and eliminate E. coli function, shutting down the final stage of digestion and the nutritional pathway to the brain and nervous system.

Aajonus returned repeatedly to a detailed comparison of herbivore and human digestive anatomy to establish that humans cannot be vegetarians or vegans in any biologically sound sense. The differences are comprehensive.

Herbivores have a digestive tract 30 times the length of their torso. Human digestive tract is 12 times the length of the torso. Herbivores have two to four stomachs with up to eight sub-compartments total. Humans have one stomach with two compartments. Herbivores regurgitate and rechew food up to seven times before it passes through. Humans chew once. Food takes 48 hours to pass through an herbivore; 24 hours through a human. Herbivores have 60,000 times more enzymes to disassemble the cellulose molecule than humans do. Despite all of this anatomical apparatus, herbivores still only digest 66 to 75 percent of what they eat, and their feces is visibly full of undigested straw and grass fiber. Cows pass food that is still clearly identifiable as grass after 48 hours in a system expressly built for grass digestion.

Humans, with 2 percent cellulose-digesting capacity, digest roughly 10 percent of a vegetable, and that 10 percent is primarily the juice and dissolved minerals, not the structural matter.

The herbivore stomach contains anaerobic bacteria suited for breaking down vegetation. The human stomach contains acid bacteria suited for animal tissue. These are fundamentally different bacterial environments serving fundamentally different dietary purposes.

If a person eats only foods that the human digestive system can fully process, fecal output is minimal. Aajonus cited coyotes in the wild as an example: when living entirely on what they hunted, their fecal matter consisted only of fur and occasionally small bone fragments from large animals. The fur and hair would disintegrate in sunlight within a day. Everything else, including bones from smaller animals like rabbits, was digested completely.

A human eating the correct diet for human physiology, primarily meats, dairy, and eggs, would have similarly minimal waste output because the body digests those foods almost completely. What fecal matter does appear in such a diet consists primarily of dead tissue sloughed off by the body itself, not undigested food. Aajonus stated that some of his patients go as long as seven days between bowel movements and are nonetheless fully digesting their food. The medical profession's insistence on daily bowel movements does not apply to a diet of properly digestible foods.

The pancreas functions as the architect of the digestive process. When food is in the mouth, signals about the composition of that food reach the pancreas, and the pancreas determines what bacteria, enzymes, and other elements are needed throughout the stomach and intestines to process it. The pancreas also governs how the resulting molecules will be reassembled to serve the needs of that particular body. Each piece of food, even from the same source, contains slightly different nutritional profiles, and the pancreas reads these differences and directs digestion accordingly. In prehistoric human anatomy, the pancreas accounted for 30 to 40 percent of the body's total biosignaling activity. In modern humans it has been reduced to approximately 2 percent of that capacity due to the disruptions of modern diet and toxic exposure.

The bacteria present in the digestive tract are not pathogens in Aajonus's framework. They are necessary agents of digestion without which the system cannot function. Salmonella, Campylobacter, coliform bacteria, and E. coli are all identified as normal and essential inhabitants of the human gut, each responsible for digesting different components of animal products. The medical profession's treatment of these organisms as dangerous enemies is, in his view, profoundly mistaken and directly responsible for the digestive problems prevalent in modern populations.

Aajonus referenced a gastroenterologist's pig experiment as supporting evidence. The gastroenterologist noticed that pigs at a university were sluggish and unhealthy despite apparently optimal care, while pigs on a farm were robust, energetic, and cantankerous. The difference was that the university pigs had no whipworm or trichinosis in their intestines, while the farm pigs were full of these parasites. The gastroenterologist transferred whipworm from the healthy farm pigs into the intestines of the university pigs, and within five days the university pigs were well and energetic. The implication Aajonus drew was that parasites play a necessary role in digestion and gut health that the medical establishment's war on bacteria and parasites is systematically undermining.

The human digestive tract is most similar in structure to that of a pig. A pig's digestive tract is 10 to 12 times the length of its torso, compared to human's 12 times.

Aajonus described his own experience of being put on Maalox (calcium carbonate, effectively chalk) after his stomach ulcers from alcohol abuse caused him to vomit cups of blood. The Maalox neutralized the hydrochloric acid. The immediate consequence was a complete shutdown of protein digestion, because without hydrochloric acid, the stomach cannot break down meat or other proteins. Without protein digestion, fat digestion is also impaired, because fats and proteins work together in the digestive process. Carbohydrate digestion is also disrupted. The result was a cascade of total digestive failure. He described this as a "catch-22": the medication resolved the acid pain but eliminated the capacity to extract nutrition from food.

When food arrives at the stomach already broken into very small particles or fully liquefied, the body does not need to produce large quantities of hydrochloric acid to dissolve it. This reduces the metabolic cost of digestion and frees up resources for other processes. Aajonus used a food processor to pate raw meat into a smooth paste, cutting a whole raw roast into one-inch cubes before processing. In this form the meat is pre-broken to a degree that previously required two hours of chewing to achieve.

The same principle applies to the egg. Both the white and the yolk are already liquid, so no hydrochloric acid is needed for the white and minimal bile is needed for the yolk. This is why eggs digest in 27 to 30 minutes.

Aajonus noted that he himself had very little hydrochloric acid in his stomach due to previous damage, yet digested meat effectively because his small intestine secreted adequate hydrochloric acid throughout its length, and because he consumed his meats in pated or otherwise processed forms that reduced the stomach's required contribution.

Any food that does not contain bacteria and does not rot is, by definition, indigestible. Digestion is bacterial. If a food has been processed, sterilized, irradiated, or otherwise treated so that bacteria cannot survive in it, the digestive tract has nothing to work with and the food passes through providing no nutrition. "Any food that doesn't have bacteria and doesn't rot, you won't digest. May as well be eating bark."

---