Food Dyes

Aajonus identified cadmium as the substance that makes yellow food dye yellow. He was specific that this applies across multiple dye numbers, naming yellow dye 16, 13, 5, and 7 by number. Cadmium is a heavy metal that he described as a cancer-causing substance, particularly associated with kidney cancer, when it is not in proper biological balance with other minerals. He illustrated this with a specific case: a patient named Jeff whose father had kidney cancer. Aajonus told Jeff to take a piece of the kidney tissue and send it to a laboratory to determine what heavy metal was present, implying that the cadmium from yellow food dye would be found as the causative agent.

His framing of cadmium was not that it is inherently without biological role, but that as a heavy metal concentrated in synthetic dye form and introduced outside of any natural mineral matrix, it becomes toxic. The phrase he used was that it is "cancer-causing, heavy-concentrated mineral when it's not in proper balance biologically with other minerals."

Aajonus was careful to distinguish between the artificial yellow introduced by food dyes and the various forms of natural yellowing that can appear in the body, because they have entirely different causes and meanings. Yellowing of the skin, for instance, he consistently attributed to bile accumulation, not to any dietary pigment or carrot consumption. When patients presented with yellow or orange skin tones, he explicitly told them this was bile coming out through the skin, not carotene or any food pigment.

In one detailed exchange with a patient, he stated: "You're very yellow. That's all bile, not keratin. Keratin doesn't look like that." He further clarified that bilirubin and bile can exchange back and forth and that both are present in the body to digest and break down fats, and that when the body uses them to bind with poisons instead of with fats, the bile spreads throughout the system and causes irritation to tissues.

He also addressed the common belief that eating carrots causes orange skin coloring, calling it a mistaken attribution. The actual cause, he said, is bile coming out through the skin, producing an orange cast that people incorrectly blame on carotene. Teeth turning yellow he associated separately with aflatoxins and varitoxins produced by cooked grain byproducts contaminating the system, and with fungus growing on nerves and in the tubules of teeth, not with food dye exposure.

In his framework for understanding how individuals respond differently to cooked and processed foods, Aajonus identified food coloring as a substance that compounds the burden on people who lack the enzyme-mutations to process cooked yellow or cooked green foods. He listed food coloring explicitly among the substances that people with cooked yellow food enzyme deficiencies should avoid, alongside ordinary corn oils, cooked corn in any form including steamed or popped, carrots, yellow squashes, onions, corn bread, banana bread, and pasteurized or frozen juices including pineapple, lemon, and orange juice.

People who lack enzyme-mutations for eating cooked or processed yellow foods, he wrote, most often look pasty around the nose and eyes and have very slow digestion, especially after eating a cooked or processed yellow or orange food. Food coloring falls into this category because it typically carries yellow pigment made with cadmium and is embedded in processed food products that already stress the digestive system of enzyme-deficient individuals.

He also listed food coloring under the substances to avoid for people who lack enzyme-mutations for cooked or processed green foods, alongside ordinary olive oils, cooked leafy vegetables, artichoke, celery, green beans, green peppers, broccoli, spinach pasta, canned or bottled vegetable juices, and teas. This suggests that food colorings were understood by Aajonus as cutting across multiple color-based enzyme-mutation categories depending on the dye used.

The most severe case of enzyme-mutation deficiency he described was a predisposition toward HIV positive, which he associated with lacking enzyme-mutations for eating all three cooked food color groups: green, red including orange, and yellow including orange.

Aajonus gave a detailed account of the food coloring used in farmed salmon as a specific and particularly serious example of industrial food dye. Wild salmon has a naturally rich pink or red flesh color that comes from its diet and environment. When farmed salmon were first brought to market, the flesh was pale and, as he described it, looked diseased to consumers. The fish farming operations lost significant money in their first two years because of this.

They then paid the University of Washington to develop a food coloring that could be administered to the fish to make their flesh look "rich and alive." When a scientific report on this dye came out, Aajonus said, it revealed that the coloring, when passed through the human body, is not absorbed as food at all. Instead, it causes toxicity, and it was identified as a form of plastic containing BPA and other toxic substances capable of causing damage in the body. He stated directly that the industry did not care about this, because their only motivation was selling the product.

Aajonus placed food colorings within a broader category of industrial food adulterants that includes preservatives, additives of all kinds, pasteurization, and ultra-pasteurization. He did not treat food coloring as a minor or borderline concern; he grouped it with substances that are straightforwardly poisonous regardless of regulatory approval or industry designation as safe.

He noted that the trajectory of food processing has been consistently toward more severe processing, not less, citing ultra-pasteurization as an example of how processing has intensified over time to the point where everything is taken above the boiling point and all biological activity is destroyed. Food coloring is one element within this larger pattern of industrial contamination of the food supply, and he understood the cumulative effect on human biology, particularly on the neurological system and on the capacity to distinguish sensory information, to be severe. He made the observation that around one hundred years ago, people could see approximately one million color variations, whereas now people can see perhaps five hundred, and he connected this decline in perceptual capacity to the accumulation of pesticides and food additives in the neurological fluid, which uses trace elements like aluminum and iron to reflect light and conduct electricity for the nervous system.

Aajonus did not lay out a single specific detoxification protocol exclusively targeted at food dye exposure, but he addressed the underlying principle of eliminating heavy metals and industrial chemicals through raw fat consumption and other elements of the Primal Diet. For patients presenting with yellow skin caused by bile accumulation, which can be exacerbated by the body's attempt to deal with toxic substances including heavy metals from dyes, he recommended eating cheese before drinking any formula intended to pull bile from the system, because cheese in the stomach would prevent it from attacking the skin. He also described coconut cream, lime juice, and specific juice combinations as useful for pulling fungal and toxic accumulation from tissues.

For the specific case of cadmium and heavy metal accumulation, the framework assumes that raw fats will bind with and carry out stored metals, that raw meat supplies the proteins needed to rebuild damaged tissues, and that avoidance of all further processed food including food coloring is foundational to any recovery.