Freezing

The most detailed evidence Aajonus presented came from a set of experiments in which he divided animals into two groups, feeding one group raw meat that had been frozen and the other group the same meat unfrozen. He was specific that it was the same meat from the same animal, simply divided, with one half frozen and one half kept refrigerated at a higher temperature, approximately 55 degrees Fahrenheit. The animals received no water, no butter, no honey, no milk, and nothing else besides the meat, so that the single variable of freezing could be isolated.

Every animal that ate the frozen meat developed a skin disorder within six weeks. Within ten weeks, one of the dogs had mange severe enough that it was seeping through the skin, raw and bleeding, with half its hair lost. The animals were cranky, irritable, constantly scratching, unable to sleep, and in visible distress. One animal developed scurvy. These animals also drank substantially more water than the unfrozen group, which Aajonus attributed to the dehydrating effect of freezing: frozen meat loses a significant amount of its water content when it thaws, and the animals were consequently depleted.

The animals eating the same meat unfrozen had no skin disorders, no scurvy, no irritability, no excessive thirst. Their coats were fine. They slept well, played, and were by all observable measures in good health. Aajonus described these animals as vibrantly healthy with no problems.

He drew two conclusions from this. First, freezing meat destroys enough of its nutritional content to produce measurable disease in animals that eat only that meat. Second, frozen meat causes dehydration because the water that was naturally part of the tissue is lost in the freezing-thawing process. He noted that in real-world conditions, people eating frozen meat would also be eating raw dairy and other foods, which would reduce but not eliminate the risk. However, he was clear that if someone wanted the best possible outcome from their food, they should not freeze it.

After establishing that frozen meat produced disease, Aajonus turned to the question of frozen dairy fat, specifically raw butter. He already knew from prior work that raw butter could correct virtually any skin condition, and he used this knowledge as the basis for a second phase of experiments. He took the animals that had developed skin disorders from the frozen meat and divided them into two groups. One group received raw butter that had never been frozen, kept refrigerated at approximately 55 degrees. The other group received the same butter from the same batch, but frozen solid.

The results were consistent across multiple iterations of this account. The animals receiving unfrozen raw butter healed their skin disorders approximately five times faster than those receiving frozen raw butter. In concrete terms, the unfrozen butter group healed in roughly four to seven days, while the frozen butter group took twenty days to six weeks. The animal with mange, the most severe case, took a full six weeks on frozen butter to heal, representing the outer bound of the five-times figure.

He repeated this experiment in several variations. In one account he described putting the two most severely ill animals in the unfrozen butter group specifically to test whether the unfrozen butter had an advantage even under harder conditions, and the unfrozen group still healed three to five times faster. He also noted that both groups did eventually heal, meaning frozen butter is not inert or actively poisonous, but its healing capacity is severely reduced compared to fresh raw butter.

He used this finding to reject the claim that freezing dairy does not matter. He was explicit that someone telling you freezing has no effect on butter is wrong, and that the evidence is not abstract but visible in healing time. He also argued that the combination of frozen butter with frozen meat offered some protection, in that animals given frozen butter along with frozen meat did not develop the full severity of skin disorders that the meat-only-frozen group did, suggesting that the fats in butter, even compromised, offered partial buffering against the damage from frozen meat protein.

In his book material, Aajonus stated a specific figure for the utilization of protein from frozen raw meat. The protein in raw meat that has been frozen is only 25 percent utilizable in the human body. Fresh raw meat, by contrast, has protein that is nearly 100 percent utilizable. This is a fourfold reduction in the bioavailable protein content from a single processing step. He did not explain the biochemical mechanism in technical terms but attributed it generally to the destruction of nutrients and the structural degradation that occurs when cellular tissue is frozen.

This figure was presented as part of his broader argument that frozen food, while not equivalent to cooked food, is a significant step down from fresh raw food and should not be casually recommended as an acceptable substitute.

Aajonus offered a process-level description of what freezing does to food that tied together his various claims. He explained that when you freeze a piece of meat or fruit and then thaw it, it immediately starts to break down and melt. Molds appear, decomposition accelerates, and the material moves rapidly toward returning to the earth. Everything that was alive in the tissue before freezing is dead after it, and dead organic material has only one direction to go. He contrasted this with unfrozen food, which decomposes more slowly in ways that are biologically useful, and with dried food, which desiccates without the same rapid decomposition.

He also described the water loss from frozen meat as a separate but related problem. The water that is naturally bound within the tissue separates and is lost in the thawing process, which is why the frozen-meat animals in his experiments were more thirsty and showed signs of dry skin and dehydration that the fresh-meat animals did not.

He described freezing as killing bacteria, and connected this to the broader role of bacteria in biological function. His view was that bacteria are responsible for approximately 99 percent of all bodily functions, and that destroying the bacteria in food through freezing removes a critical part of what makes raw food valuable. He used the example of Arctic peoples who inundate themselves with bacteria before winter because once the cold arrives, frozen foods carry no bacteria, and they need to build up their reserves before that period begins.

In a written response to a question from someone who had frozen their cheese to prevent spoilage, Aajonus stated that freezing alters the minerals in cheese. He explained that when cheese is frozen, the minerals become more readily absorbed rather than binding with toxins and being passed through the body. He described frozen cheese as better than none but noted that it was preferable to simply skim the outer molds from cheese rather than freeze it.

This is a specific functional concern distinct from the general nutrient-destruction argument he made about meat and butter. With cheese, the issue is not just reduced healing capacity but a change in the mineral behavior that affects how the cheese interacts with toxins in the digestive tract. Frozen cheese loses its ability to function as a toxin binder in the same way fresh cheese does.

Aajonus made a consistent distinction between foods that are damaged by freezing and foods that are largely unaffected. His position was that freezing is problematic for protein and fat, but that carbohydrate-dominant sweet fruits are largely unaffected.

Sweet fruits can be frozen and eaten without significant loss of benefit. He was explicit that this exception applies to mostly carbohydrate fruits, not to all fruits. He specifically excluded avocados and coconuts from this exemption because of their fat content. He also noted that even low-carbohydrate fruits like cucumbers and tomatoes can be negatively affected by freezing.

For fats, he stated that freezing cream and butter reduces their healing properties significantly, as documented in his animal experiments. He acknowledged that some fats, including raw cream and butter, "seem to maintain well when frozen for short periods," which he connected to his discussion of homemade ice cream. However, he was clear that this tolerance for short-term freezing is limited and that extended freezing causes measurable degradation.

For proteins, and particularly red meat from temperate climate animals, he was unequivocal that freezing causes harm and produces disease in animal subjects.

Aajonus introduced a nuanced exception for certain types of fish and animals from cold-water or Arctic environments. He found that frozen fish from cold ocean environments, including salmon, swordfish, and tuna, did not produce the same ill effects in animals that red meat from temperate climate animals did. He specified that trout does not do well frozen because it is a freshwater fish. Cold-ocean fish appeared to tolerate freezing without producing disease in his animal tests.

He also cited the work of Vladimir Stefansson, who lived with Eskimos eating all raw foods including raw meat, and found that frozen red meat was problematic but that seal and fish from Arctic environments were not. Aajonus extended this to a general principle: animals that evolved in frozen or near-frozen conditions have tissues that are more tolerant of freezing, while temperate climate animals like cows, lambs, and goats do not. Freezing the meat of a cow or a domestic lamb produces a problem; freezing the meat of an Arctic seal or a caribou may not.

He also noted that even among Arctic peoples, freezing was understood as stripping bacteria from food. The solution they found was to consume large amounts of bacteria-rich fermented food before the deep winter period began, precisely because the frozen food of winter would carry none.

Aajonus addressed ice cream specifically as a case where freezing is acceptable under very constrained conditions. His position was that homemade ice cream made from raw cream and fruit should be eaten immediately, meaning made right then and consumed the same occasion. He was clear that he was not talking about freezing it and saving it for the next night. The instruction in his book that ice cream should be discarded within 24 hours reflects this same logic: frozen dairy begins degrading immediately, and the window within which it is still reasonably useful is short.

He also recommended making ice cream only as cold as a Dairy Queen product, meaning slightly frozen or very cold rather than hard-frozen solid, because this level of cold produces very little alteration or harm. The harder and colder something is frozen, and the longer it stays that way, the more damage accumulates.

Aajonus was explicit that freezing destroys bacteria in food. He used the example of Arctic peoples filling themselves with bacteria-rich food before winter because once everything freezes, bacteria in food are eliminated. He also used this to explain why bacteria grow so rapidly on previously frozen meat once it thaws. The bacteria that were present before freezing are killed, the structural defenses of the tissue are destroyed, and what is left is a substrate with nothing to slow decomposition. This is why he argued in his book that E. coli and other bacteria flourish quickly on frozen-then-thawed meat: the bacteria are not surviving through the freezing but are colonizing the damaged material rapidly after thawing because there are no intact biological defenses remaining.

This framing also informed his rejection of the common argument that freezing meat is beneficial because it kills parasites. His response to this was that parasites are not present in the meat in the way that claim assumes, and that even if one accepted the parasite argument, destroying bacteria to kill supposed parasites creates a different and worse problem.

Aajonus made a brief but specific point about glandular tissue. He noted that glands contain bacteria that can survive even at extremely low temperatures, but that freezing causes a great deal of damage to certain glands. If a gland is frozen and then eaten, it is less functionally useful than if it were eaten fresh, because the structural and enzymatic content of the gland has been altered. He used the pituitary gland as a specific example, noting that it has to do with growth and development, and that freezing reduces its effectiveness when consumed as food.

Aajonus described a direct conflict with Mark McAfee of Organic Pastures dairy over freezing practices. He reported that McAfee freezes all of his butter solid and that the milk is brought to 32 degrees or below during transport, sometimes arriving at stores with ice crystals in it. Aajonus noted that ice crystals cannot form in milk unless it is at 32 degrees or lower, meaning the milk has actually been frozen even if it does not appear to be a solid block. When confronted on this, McAfee reportedly said it was fine and cited Sally Fallon as his authority. Aajonus rejected this entirely on the grounds that neither McAfee nor Fallon had conducted experiments to support the claim. Because of this, he stated that he would not use Organic Pastures milk and instead sourced milk from a farmer in Pennsylvania.

Aajonus's disagreement with Sally Fallon over freezing was long-running, spanning at least twenty years by his account, and he described it with considerable frustration. Fallon's position, as Aajonus represented it, was that freezing does not damage food, that nutrients survive intact, and that meat can appropriately be frozen for 14 hours or more to kill parasites. Aajonus rejected every part of this. He stated that she had no empirical experiments to support her claims and was operating from belief rather than evidence. He also noted that at one point he had a scientist corroborate his findings about frozen butter and cream, but that this scientist's contribution was edited out of a raw milk brochure in which both Aajonus and the scientist had participated, apparently at Fallon's influence.

He invited Fallon to conduct her own comparative experiments, and reported that she said she would have people eat frozen versus unfrozen food, but he indicated no follow-through on this had occurred. He was willing to grant that Fallon was a well-intentioned person but was unsparing in his criticism of anyone who told people freezing was harmless without having done the testing to know.

Aajonus drew a distinction between refrigeration temperatures that are acceptable and temperatures that begin to cause damage. He preferred that meats not be refrigerated below 36 degrees Fahrenheit, because alteration begins to accelerate at that point. He considered 36 degrees acceptable and anything below 32 degrees, which is the freezing point of water, to be in a different and more damaging category. He described 55 degrees as a good refrigeration temperature for butter specifically.

He also noted the difference between chilling and freezing as it relates to milk and cream. Even chilling milk below 55 degrees changes its properties. Milk that has never been refrigerated appears to increase cellular division in subjects at a rate observed in about 65 percent of cases, while milk that has been chilled to 36 to 40 degrees normalizes cellular division to a slower rate. This is not quite the same as freezing, but it reflects his broader position that cold itself, even before the freezing threshold, causes biological changes in food.

In a written exchange, Aajonus addressed frozen raw wheat germ that had been vacuum-packed. He stated that it would be of some value to people on the Primal Diet if it were not frozen, and that for people on poor diets it might offer some benefit even frozen, but his clear position was that freezing diminishes it. This was consistent with his general framework: frozen plant foods retain more of their value than frozen animal proteins and fats, but they are still inferior to their fresh equivalents.

Aajonus's practical guidance on freezing was consistent with his experimental findings. Do not freeze meat, butter, cream, or cheese if it can be avoided. Frozen fish from cold-ocean environments is an acceptable exception. Sweet fruit can be frozen without significant harm. Avocados and coconuts should not be frozen because of their fat content. Ice cream made from raw cream can be frozen to a soft consistency and consumed immediately but should not be kept frozen for longer than 24 hours. Homemade raw butter can keep for up to twelve months in a properly managed refrigerator without freezing if done correctly, making freezing unnecessary as a preservation strategy for butter. When traveling, butter can be kept for up to five days without any refrigeration in moderate temperatures, and Aajonus reported going up to two weeks without refrigerating his butter.

His overarching instruction was that if someone must choose between frozen and cooked, frozen is still better than cooked for most foods, but the comparison to cooked is not the standard to aim for. The standard is fresh and raw, and the gap between frozen and fresh is real, measurable, and biologically significant.