Fruitarianism

Aajonus became a fruitarian in the early 1970s, following a period of serious illness including bone cancer. He described the energy he experienced on the diet as intoxicating after coming from such a sick baseline, and he embraced the moral framework surrounding it completely, becoming what he called an evangelistic vegetarian who could "froth up the mouth" attacking meat eaters. He consumed seven to eight avocados a day to stabilize himself against the sugar load from the fruit, and he was spending five to six hours daily on the bicycle specifically to burn off the sugar so it would not, as he put it, dissolve his body or cause him to go around beating people up and behaving radically.

He acknowledged that when he was in that state he genuinely believed he was superior to meat eaters and bought into the moralistic framework that told him he was better because he did not kill animals. He described this as a lie he accepted and only came to question once he experienced the calming and clarifying effects of eating meat for the first time.

By the end of six and a half years on the fruitarian diet, his teeth were decaying rapidly, he had blood and bone cancer again, and he was in Alaska in excruciating pain at the end of August and beginning of September. He had been searching for herbal formulas or special fruits or plants that would restore his health, still operating entirely within the vegetarian-fruitarian framework. That search eventually led to his transition to raw animal foods.

After recovering his health on the Primal Diet and returning to occasional fruit consumption, he described a personal policy of limiting himself to no more than one fruit per day and keeping fruit to no more than approximately 5 percent of his diet. He noted that he had "a tendency to get manic" if he consumed more than that, that fruit had caused him to diverge and lose his train of thought during talks, and that reducing fruit was what finally brought his behavior back under control from the evangelistic extremism he had displayed as a fruitarian.

Aajonus made a structural argument about human digestive anatomy. The human digestive tract is twelve times the length of the torso, while an herbivore's is thirty times or more the length of its torso. Herbivores have multiple stomachs while humans have one. Herbivores possess sixty thousand times more enzymes than humans to disassemble the cellulose molecule and extract protein and fat from vegetation. By the time vegetation reaches the sigmoid colon in a human digestive system, the body is only just beginning to fractionate the cellulose molecule.

He extended this to fruit specifically. While fruit is not cellulose in the same way that vegetation is, the broader point was that humans did not encounter fruit in significant quantities in the wild. He described living outdoors for three years and only coming across fruit in very small amounts, seasonally, in tiny patches: blueberry patches, wild strawberries as small as a small marble, as tart and bitter as can be, nothing sweet. He stated that prolific amounts of fruit only appeared where humans had cultivated it, and he noted that even apes do not cultivate fruit, while monkeys do so deliberately in order to achieve the hyperactive and erratic state that fruit sugar produces.

He cited the findings of filmmaker John Goodall, whose 1970 or 1971 documentary "The Beginning" documented that in their natural environment, apes and monkeys never ate ripe fruit. They always ate it green, where there was almost no sugar. Green fruits are approximately 90 percent enzymes and very little sugar; once a fruit has ripened, it becomes approximately 90 percent sugar.

The anthropological claim that early humans lived on large amounts of fruit he dismissed directly, saying "these guys never lived outdoors." His three years of outdoor living gave him direct empirical evidence that high-carbohydrate fruit was not a norm in the wild.

The core biochemical problem with fruitarianism, as Aajonus described it, is the advanced glycation end product produced when sugar is used as fuel. He referenced Columbia University Medical Center findings that carbohydrates used as fuel store in the body at a rate of 70 to 90 percent, with a toxicity byproduct ratio of 70 to 80 percent of all byproducts produced by the sugar. He called this the advanced glycation end product and specified that it causes degeneration in tissues whether the sugar is raw or cooked. This is why fruitarians, even on raw fruit, experience progressive breakdown: the sugar byproducts continuously dissolve tissue.

He described the citric acid cycle as the mechanism by which the body is designed to use fruit sugars and citric acid, and he specified that this mechanism accounts for only 5 percent of the body's energy production process. On this basis, he argued that no more than 5 percent of the diet should come from carbohydrates. The energy breakdown he described was 80 percent fat, with the remainder split between protein and carbohydrate.

Fruit sugar specifically defats the blood and demineralizes the entire system. When fat is pulled from the blood this way, the body does not simply go without; it goes into the glands and bones and begins pulling fat reserves from those tissues. This produces what he called poroses of various kinds: osteoporosis in bone, neuroporosis in nerve tissue, and general disintegration of tissue throughout the body.

The excess enzymes present in fruit also create problems. Every fruit contains more enzymes than are necessary to digest that fruit, creating an excess. Those excess enzymes and the sugars they come with seek out fat and protein stored in the body to react with and to cleanse. The result is a hyperactive cleansing cycle that burns through the body's reserves. This is why fruitarians can appear to have high energy initially: they are running on the body's own fat and protein stores being dissolved by the enzymatic and sugar load from the fruit. He described this as a toxic high, not clean or sustainable energy.

He also noted that high concentrations of fruit cause demineralization specifically because of the citric acid cycle, which the body interprets as a signal to use fat for fuel. Citrus in particular, depending on sugar content, participates in this demineralization. He described the bones, teeth, nerves, and tissue generally deteriorating on a fruitarian diet, consistent with his own experience of teeth rotting out and bone cancer returning.

One of the most extensively developed themes in Aajonus's discussion of fruitarianism is the behavioral and neurological disruption caused by fruit sugar. He used primate behavior as the primary illustration.

The chimpanzee experiment he described from John Goodall's film involved a researcher cutting down a shoot of ripe yellow bananas and throwing them to a group of apes that had previously eaten only green, unripe fruit. Within forty minutes, animals that had never previously fought were fighting over the bananas. One adolescent was killed. One had an arm and a leg broken. A conflict that should have lasted at least two weeks given the available food supply erupted within forty minutes. He connected the expression "going bananas" directly to this African-documented phenomenon, stating that Africans had long observed that humans who ate ripe bananas would go crazy from the high sugar content.

He described what he called the killer monkeys separately: primates who wait specifically for figs and bananas to ferment to a high degree, with alcohol content so extreme that it can be smelled in the air from half a mile away. These monkeys binge on the fermented fruit for twenty-four to forty-eight hours straight, becoming intoxicated, and then go through the jungle killing everything in their sight for twenty-four hours: insects, other monkeys, gorillas, elephants, any living creature they encounter. He described this killing path as being approximately two hundred meters wide, a road plowed through the jungle. He mentioned this pattern across multiple sessions, with some variation in the exact duration of the binge (24 hours, 48 hours, and in one version "48 hours straight") and the duration of the killing spree (consistently described as 24 hours).

He extended the behavioral observation to domesticated monkeys he kept on his property in Thailand, where monkeys cultivated bananas on the mountainside and were perpetually hyperactive, jumping around, crazy. He noted that monkeys on fruit masturbate between eighteen and thirty-two times per day. He applied this directly to fruitarians: he observed that the fruitarians he knew could not sit still, were nervous, hyperactive, scattered in thinking, and that he himself had behaved this way, including being unable to control himself from going around telling people meat eaters were killers and murderers.

He connected sugar-driven violence to human history as well, describing Hitler as a vegetarian who consumed two heaping tablespoons of sugar in each glass of wine and thick layers of extra sugar on top of already-iced cakes, drawing a parallel between high sugar intake and extreme violence. He also mentioned Cain from the biblical account of Cain and Abel as a vegetarian, and Abel as a meat eater.

He described women who notice that staying away from fruit for five days before their menstrual cycle will produce very little emotional difficulty, while eating fruit and high carbohydrates during that time will produce significant emotional problems. He generalized this: "Anybody is feeling emotional at any particular time, cut out fruit for a few days, anything with high carbohydrate and you'll see you mellow out almost overnight."

For himself specifically, he described the shift: when he finally ate meat, "it made my mind calm. It made everything calm." He contrasted the hyperactive toxic high of the fruitarian period with the calm, clear energy he experienced on animal foods.

A specific consequence of long-term fruitarianism that Aajonus described is the progressive destruction of the body's capacity to produce digestive enzymes. He stated that fruitarians have very little protein in their diet, and protein is necessary to develop enzymes of an unusual nature. The longer someone remains on a fruitarian or vegetarian diet, the less they are able to digest. He described yogis who had been vegan or fruitarian for so long that they could not digest two fruits together because they had no enzymes left to digest any food properly.

This enzyme depletion leads to the practice of mono meals, eating only one food at a time, which he described as a compensatory adaptation to the inability to digest combinations of food. Once such a person starts eating protein again, the capacity to mix foods returns. He noted that many nutritionists who advise eating fruit alone come from a fruitarian or vegetarian background and are inadvertently reflecting the enzymatic limitations of their own systems.

In a fruitarian or vegetarian diet, whatever protein is consumed cannot be properly used for building because it is not being consumed in a digestible form. Vegetation yields protein that the human body mostly converts to pyruvate for fuel or transforms into fat rather than using for cellular regeneration and division. The result is that the body is constantly using fats to do everything that protein would normally assist with, burning through fat reserves at two to four times the normal rate. There is never enough fat unless someone is living almost entirely on fats, and in a fruitarian diet fat intake is inherently low.

Gabriel Cousins, identified in one source as a holistic M.D. who wrote "The Rainbow Diet," is referenced as having documented that strict vegetarians and fruitarians develop very thin cell walls. Aajonus's framework would identify this thinning as a consequence of the fat and protein depletion caused by excess enzymatic and sugar activity burning through body reserves.

Aajonus reported that approximately 50 percent of his cancer clientele had been long-term vegetarians or fruitarians. He observed that clients who had been on fruitarian or raw food vegetarian diets arrived with teeth disintegrating, bones disintegrating, and astronomical rates of osteoporosis. He referenced a statement from Washington University Medical University confirming that researchers following raw food vegetarians found astronomical rates of osteoporosis in that group.

He specified a general timeline: most people cannot sustain a purely vegetarian or fruitarian diet for more than two and a half to three years before beginning to break down. Some make it to six years. Only a handful have made it beyond seven years without significant bone and hair loss. He stated he had known eight people out of approximately twenty-three hundred vegetarians he had contact with over the years who appeared to be able to sustain health on a vegetarian diet up to a certain point in their lives.

He used David Wolfe as a case study. Aajonus described meeting Wolfe when he was new to the raw food movement and telling him that he did not have the constitution of the eight vegetarians he had observed thriving on the diet and that he would "hit the wall" in seven years. Wolfe reportedly dismissed this. Seven years later, reports came to Aajonus that Wolfe was drinking raw milk. He then described Wolfe returning to fruitarianism after temporarily recovering health on the Primal Diet, including a one-year period during which a hygienist used Aajonus's diet to regenerate a deteriorating spinal column before returning to his fruitarian practices.

He described a colleague he called "Wolf," apparently a different figure identified as the raw food and vegan guru, who began drinking raw milk three years before the time of the talk after Aajonus had predicted nine years earlier that his system would break down in seven years. Aajonus had told this person: "You're going to hit the rock wall. You don't have a system like I've seen those 8 people have."

Another person mentioned is described as having been in the best energy of his life as a fruitarian but wrecking his teeth as a result.

Aajonus drew on multiple tribal cultures to support his position on fruit.

The Maasai tribe, described by him as the strongest, healthiest, happiest, most fierce, smartest, tallest tribe on the planet among primitive peoples, have a legal prohibition against eating fruit. He compared this prohibition to the biblical injunction not to eat the apple. The reasoning given is that fruit causes over-emotionality and confused thinking, and because the Maasai carry no reserve body fat (being extremely lean from a diet of approximately 65 percent dairy and 35 percent raw meat), they have no fat buffer to slow the sugar's effect. Without fat to arrest the sugar's activity, even a small amount of fruit causes anger and erratic behavior. He noted that in the Maasai framework, feeding a child fruit is illegal and considered wrong specifically because it causes minds to become too erratic and too irrational.

He also identified the prohibition in the Samburu tribe, who eat approximately 70 percent dairy and 30 percent meats and are described as having no disease. He stated that in both the Samburu and in the Cy tribe (described as the skinniest but healthiest, smartest, tallest, and fiercest tribe in the world, living on 40 percent meat and 60 percent dairy), fruit is illegal because it raises sugar levels and makes the tribe "overemotional." He specified that the Cy tribe is the skinniest because they have no reserve fat, making them especially vulnerable to fruit's effects.

He described an incident involving the Shirley MacLaine group going to Maasai territory and providing candy, cakes, and processed sweet foods. After approximately twelve to fifteen years of this influence, the tribe recognized the damage to their health and went to their government to ban white visitors from coming within twenty miles of their villages.

He also referenced the Filipino tribe he visited on a remote island, reached after three days of swimming, boating, and four-wheel driving, who lived on raw fish and coconut with only occasional banana or mango roughly once a week. This tribe lived into their hundreds, which he described as shooting "the hell out of" the USDA food pyramid.

Despite his comprehensive critique of fruitarianism, Aajonus did not advise eliminating fruit entirely from the Primal Diet. He gave detailed guidance on how to consume fruit safely.

The most fundamental rule is to eat fruit unripe. He stated in written correspondence that he suggests in his new book that people eat fruit unripe. Unripe fruit is high in enzymes and low in sugar because it has not yet reached the stage where the fruit converts to the sugar that allows it to decompose into fertilizer. Once a fruit ripens, it is approximately 90 percent sugar. In the green stage, it is approximately 90 percent enzymes and very little sugar.

He cited gorilla behavior as the model: gorillas eat only green bananas and do not eat ripe fruit. He noted that the peels of green bananas contain aluminum and are almost impossible for humans to manage, though gorillas chew on the peels and some leaves to extract vegetable juice before spitting out the pulp. He did not recommend humans eat the peels.

In Asia, he observed that elders never eat ripe fruit and always take the green, unripe varieties. He noted that younger generations eating ripe fruit have "all the emotional problems" and "no rationale."

When ripe fruit is consumed, he specified it must be accompanied by significant fat. He described this rule as essential. Suitable fats include raw unsalted butter, raw cream, avocado, unrefined cold-pressed peanut oil pressed below 96 degrees Fahrenheit, and coconut cream. The fat slows the absorption of the sugar, buffers its effect, and prevents the rapid demineralization and neurological disruption that comes from consuming sugar without fat.

He described a fruit meal protocol: take half a cup to three tablespoons of cream, make whipped cream with a little honey, and slice fruit into it without adding coconut cream if the goal is to feed the nervous system and brain rather than to detoxify. He noted that adding coconut cream shifts the meal toward detoxification, since coconut cream is a major detoxifier and all fruit is inherently detoxifying. After such a fruit meal, he advised waiting two to three hours before having a small amount of vegetable juice or continuing to sip on the sport formula.

He recommended limiting fruit to one piece per day and described his personal limit as no more than one piece per day during fall and winter and early spring, specifically because he had noticed he became manic with more than that.

For low-sugar fruit options, he identified: cherries, all berries (blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, boysenberries, mulberries, strawberries as long as not too ripe), and pears as generally acceptable. Blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries he described as low in sugar. Citrus he said depends entirely on ripeness: the greener the better. He mentioned sapotes as a very good fruit, describing them as having a custard-like taste, white meat inside, with large seeds, available in Mexico and Southern California, and he specifically recommended eating them with whipped cream or coconut cream.

He cautioned against eating sweet fruits of any kind with red meat, because the combination mainly produces pyruvate, which is a protein sugar the body cannot use for regeneration.

He was explicit that his concerns applied specifically to sweet and acid fruits, meaning fruits with high carbohydrate content. He clarified that foods like avocado, tomato, and other high-fat bland fruits are a different category and do not carry the same sugar-related risks, though he noted that most people do not have a liver capable of digesting avocados properly.

Fruit washing was included in his protocol: he described sitting fruit in good drinking water and shaking it to remove contamination, because fruit is heavily sprayed by farmers who lie about their spraying practices since birds, insects, and everyone goes after fruit and it is very difficult to protect without chemicals.

Aajonus described fruit's primary physiological action as cleansing and detoxification rather than building or nourishing. He stated plainly: "all fruit is detoxified. That's why fruitarians disappear. You know, their spinal cords and their bones start disappearing and their teeth dissipate." The phrase "solid pine water and sugar" captures his view of what fruit essentially is in nutritional terms.

The excess enzymes in fruit actively seek out fat and protein stored in the body to react with and cleanse. This is not a passive nutritional interaction but an active dissolving of body reserves. For someone who is heavily toxic and has accumulated significant stored poisons in fat reserves, this cleansing can initially feel like improvement, which explains why Aajonus himself felt better when he first went to a fruitarian diet after being severely ill. The detoxification was pulling out poisons, which felt like increased energy and vitality, but without sufficient fat and protein being consumed, the body had no material with which to rebuild. It was consuming itself.

He noted that the way to use fruit's cleansing power without destroying the body is to eat very little of it, keep it unripe, and surround it with substantial fat so that the fat can arrest the sugar and enzyme activity and prevent it from dissolving tissue that is not meant to be dissolved.

Beyond the general deterioration, Aajonus linked fruitarianism to specific disease conditions. Tooth decay and tooth loss appeared prominently in his personal account and in his general statements about fruitarians. Bone cancer recurred in his own case after six and a half years. Osteoporosis is described as a consistent finding in fruitarians and raw food vegetarians. Neuroporosis, his term for nerve tissue deterioration, parallels osteoporosis as a consequence of the same sugar-driven demineralization process.

He described the mechanism as follows: fruit sugar defats the blood; without circulating fat to meet the body's needs, the body draws fat from glands and bones; this depletes structural fat in these tissues, leaving them porous and fragile.

He also referenced yeast infections, funguses, athlete's foot, and gangrene as consequences of excessive sugar in the body, linking these to the broader problem of what happens when sugar accumulates in the tissues and creates conditions favorable to fungal overgrowth.

Aajonus placed fruitarianism within a spectrum that included vegetarianism, veganism, and raw food veganism, all of which he considered insufficient for human health. He described fruitarianism as the more extreme end of that spectrum, with the added problem that fruit's active enzymatic cleansing accelerates tissue destruction in a way that even a grain-based vegetarian diet does not.

He consistently returned to the contrast with tribes living on raw animal foods. The Maasai and Samburu on raw dairy and raw meat: no disease, tallest, strongest, smartest, healthiest. The Eskimo on 90 percent raw meat with berries and some vegetables only in summer: no disease, longevity. The Filipino island tribe on raw fish and raw coconut: longevity into the hundreds. The Fulani on 90 percent raw milk and less than 10 percent very low-heat-cooked meat: broad, full-bodied, healthy. Against these examples, the fruitarian's progressive loss of bone, nerve, and tooth structure represented not spiritual evolution but physical destruction.

He also drew a contrast with the person's experience of energy. On fruit, energy feels high and hyperactive but comes from the body consuming itself through sugar-driven enzymatic activity. On fat and animal protein, energy is calm, clean, and sustainable because it comes from fat metabolism rather than from glucolytic burning of stored reserves.

---