Frying

The most detailed and alarming claim Aajonus made about frying concerned acrylamide, a carbohydrate byproduct that forms at elevated levels when high-carbohydrate foods are fried in oil. He described a study by a team of Swedish scientists who investigated cancerous tissue and found that 60 percent of the composition of that tissue was acrylamide. The researchers then mapped which foods produced the highest acrylamide concentrations and found that chips and french fries were the worst offenders, followed by cereals and donuts.

Aajonus reported the quantitative findings with specific numbers: potato chips contained 1,500 times more acrylamide than the raw potato itself when fried. He noted that when the oil used for frying was a hydrogenated trans fatty acid oil, the acrylamide content increased by 1,500 times on top of what plain frying already produced, meaning the plastic-oil-fried version of a chip carried acrylamide levels compounded by both the frying process and the oil chemistry. The Swedish scientists, after presenting their findings publicly, recommended outlawing chips, cereals, and french fries. Aajonus noted that this report went directly to the press but was subsequently suppressed, a pattern he described as consistent with the food industry's control over public health messaging.

His position was that donuts were among the worst foods on the planet partly for this reason, being both fried and high in carbohydrates, combining the acrylamide problem with the plastic oil problem simultaneously. He placed chips and french fries in the same category. He stated that no matter what kind of chip or what kind of french fry, the frying process itself guaranteed acrylamide formation, and the type of oil used in virtually all commercial preparation made the problem worse rather than better.

The oils used in virtually all commercial frying were, in Aajonus's account, not food in any meaningful biological sense. He described the process of hydrogenation, in which oils are subjected to oxidization with heat, as the same process that produces plastic. He recounted the origin story repeatedly: a technician fell asleep while watching vegetable oil being processed, and three to six hours later the oil had solidified into hard plastic. The technician was fired because the product was inedible, but the discovery became the basis for the plastics industry. Aajonus drew the direct conclusion that eating hydrogenated oils was, chemically speaking, eating liquid plastic.

He described 99 percent of all oils as hydrogenated, and stated that nearly every donut, chip, french fry, and fried food in every market, including health food stores, was fried in what he called plastic oils. Food manufacturers, he explained, do not necessarily hydrogenate the oil themselves but purchase oils that were already hydrogenated before use. Labels claiming no trans-fatty acids were, in his view, false when applied to fried foods prepared in pre-hydrogenated oils, because the manufacturers of the finished food used already-hydrogenated inputs. He insisted the term "trans-fatty acids" should be replaced in public vocabulary with the phrase "plastic oil" because that term describes the actual molecular reality.

The consequences of eating plastic oil from frying included blockage of lymphatic systems, congestive heart failure, and stroke. He was explicit that most congestive heart failure and blocked lymphatic systems were caused by trans fatty acid plastic oils, not by animal fats. The body, he explained, cannot digest plastic oil because 99 percent of digestion is bacterial, and bacteria have no mechanism for feeding on plastic oil. The substance therefore does not metabolize but instead accumulates, blocking circulatory and lymphatic pathways and contributing to neurological disruption through what he described as misfiring caused by industrial chemical contamination of the system.

Aajonus acknowledged that frying in olive oil would be meaningfully different from frying in hydrogenated oils, but he followed this acknowledgment immediately with a qualification that rendered the exception nearly meaningless in practice. He stated that 90 percent of all olive oils on the planet were only 10 percent actual olive oil, with the remaining 90 percent being hydrogenated mineral oils, meaning oils derived from petroleum deposits that had been purified, clarified, and hydrogenated to achieve infinite shelf life. These mineral oils had no biological origin and were, in his description, structurally identical to plastic in liquid form.

He explained the economic logic: vegetable oils are expensive and difficult to produce, while rock oil or mineral oil from petroleum deposits can be refined cheaply and given infinite shelf life through hydrogenation. The olive oil label becomes a marketing fiction when the product is mostly mineral oil. This meant that when a restaurant claimed to fry in olive oil, the practical reality in nearly all cases was still frying in hydrogenated mineral oil or a blend dominated by it. The instruction he gave was that any food fried in any restaurant should be understood as contaminated with plastic oil unless the restaurant could verify otherwise, which he treated as essentially never happening.

Beyond the acrylamide and plastic oil problems, Aajonus described the direct physical effect of heat on fat molecules as a separate category of harm. He stated that once fat molecules are heated and burned, they swell to sometimes 10 to 50 times their normal size. He used pork rinds as a concrete illustration: a small piece of pig fat, when cooked and boiled in the method that produces a pork rind, puffs into a large crispy chip-like structure that represents approximately 10 percent of the original material's density, with the remaining volume being composed of swollen heat-damaged fat. A person eating such a food could be full of fat without having nutritional fat, while being physically large in structure because of swollen fat molecules rather than functional tissue.

He described the labile point for fat as approximately 70 degrees Fahrenheit, meaning that even well below frying temperature, fat begins transforming into lipid peroxides, which he identified as very carcinogenic. Frying temperatures are vastly above this threshold. The lipid peroxide transformation begins early, and full frying produces extensive peroxidation throughout the fat being used as the cooking medium. These lipid peroxides were described as a distinct category of carcinogenic byproduct separate from both acrylamides and plastic oil contamination, meaning that frying in theoretically clean, non-hydrogenated fat would still produce lipid peroxides at concentrations harmful to health.

Aajonus linked cereals to frying through the acrylamide discussion, noting that cereals were among the highest-acrylamide foods, being both high in carbohydrates and processed with heat and oil. He described the combination of high carbohydrate content and frying as producing the most toxic foods on the planet. He stated that cereals were the worst, and that sending cereal as food aid to third-world countries, as companies like General Mills and General Foods did under charitable programs, was effectively delivering acrylamide-saturated food to children who were already malnourished. He described the acrylamide burden from this practice as compounding the diseases generated by powdered milk, which he identified separately as producing the fastest and most severe disease profile observed in the Pottenger cat studies.

He noted from personal history that he had eaten boxes of sugar crisp cereal daily as a child, sometimes two or three boxes a day, and reflected that this explained his cancer diagnosis. Cereals were not incidental to his critique of frying; they were central examples of the acrylamide problem because the grain is a high-carbohydrate substrate processed with heat and oil in ways structurally analogous to making a chip.

Aajonus's overall recommendation was to cook nothing at all. However, for those who would cook regardless, he offered guidance that treated some methods as less harmful without describing any as safe. He said that if cooking had to happen, it should be done in glass or china ovenware, and if metal was unavoidable, stainless steel was described as the only slightly safe option. These recommendations applied to cooking generally but were directly relevant to frying because the choice of vessel and oil determines how much additional contamination enters the food beyond the damage done by heat itself.

For oil type, if someone was going to use oil in any cooking context, he said olive oil or coconut oil were the options, while still maintaining that using them would create some problems. He was explicit that frying in these oils, even if they were genuinely cold-pressed and unadulterated, did not eliminate the acrylamide problem for carbohydrate-rich foods or the lipid peroxide problem, and that the oils themselves underwent damaging transformation at high heat. His statement on olive oil as a cooking oil was accompanied by the caveat that truly cold-pressed olive oil was nearly impossible to find, and that any oil claiming to be cold-pressed should be verified by contacting the producer and asking whether the oil ever exceeded 96 degrees Fahrenheit at any stage of processing or bottling. He described attempting this verification himself with a coconut oil producer and being refused, concluding that refusal to provide that confirmation meant the oil was heated above that threshold.

The only fried or puffed food that received anything approaching a conditional pass was hot-air popcorn with butter. Aajonus noted that because hot-air popcorn is not fried in oil, it does not carry the plastic oil contamination of chip-style snacks. He said it could be eaten on occasion with lots of butter. This exception was narrow and specific: it applied only to hot-air preparation, not to oil-popped corn, and it was framed as an occasional option rather than a regular food. Chips, by contrast, were described as the worst thing, and the distinction he drew was explicitly grounded in the oil-frying versus hot-air distinction. Cookies were placed in a similarly condemned category, being high in carbohydrates and typically baked or fried with problematic oils.

Aajonus described restaurant eating as almost entirely incompatible with the Primal Diet framework because virtually all restaurant cooking involved either frying in plastic oils or exposing food to heat-damaged fats. His practical advice for restaurant situations was to order raw steak or raw fish when possible, bring food from home, and treat the occasional restaurant meal as an infrequent departure rather than a regular occurrence. He mentioned eating at a steakhouse and getting raw steak after ten minutes of negotiation with the kitchen. He brought his own butter in crystal canning jars, and if he used olive oil at a restaurant, he described doing so maybe once every three or four months as a sauce component.

He advised that if a person was going to eat cooked or processed food, it should be a genuine choice made for taste rather than for convenience, and that anyone choosing to eat poisonous food should at least enjoy it rather than consuming it absentmindedly. The orientation was not moralistic but practical: fried restaurant food is plastic oil and acrylamide, and eating it should be understood as a deliberate decision with known consequences rather than treated as a neutral act.

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