Grilling
Broiling over a direct flame is the least destructive cooking method available, but only relative to worse options. Charcoal and lighter fluid introduce mercury, thallium, and petroleum residues; high heat destroys all living constituents and produces heterocyclic amines and lipid peroxides.
Aajonus regarded grilling as one of the more damaging ways to cook food, though he addressed it only briefly and usually in passing while making broader points about the harms of cooking in general. His position was that any application of heat sufficient to alter the chemical structure of food produces toxins, and grilling is no exception. He did not treat grilling as categorically worse than other forms of cooking in most of his remarks, but he did note that charcoal grilling carried specific additional hazards from the fuel and accelerants used.
The one moment in the source material where Aajonus addressed grilling with any specificity was in the context of his own rare consumption of cooked food. He stated that he had his first cooked meal in roughly three years about two and a half months before that particular seminar, and that it consisted of broiled chicken. His phrasing was direct: "If you're gonna cook, the best way to cook is broiled. You know, over a flame that isn't charcoal and has no lighter fluid in it." The occasion was a tribal area in the Philippines, and the chicken was small. He ate one leg, including the drum and thigh, one breast, and one wing. He recalled that he used to love crispy chicken wings and would eat the bone and all when he still ate cooked food, and that he did the same this time. The result was six nights of nightmares and a need for six and a half hours of sleep for the following three days. He concluded that twenty minutes of that cooked food cost him approximately thirty hours of disrupted sleep and unpleasant dreams.
Broiling: The Safest Cooking Method
Aajonus's position was not that broiling or grilling was acceptable, but that if someone was going to cook at all, broiling over a direct flame free of charcoal and lighter fluid was the least destructive method available. He did not elaborate extensively on why this was the case in these passages, but the implication within his broader framework is that the absence of coal-derived combustion products and petroleum-based accelerants reduces the chemical contamination introduced into the food and the cooking environment. His framing of it as "the best way to cook" was clearly qualified, meaning only that it was preferable relative to other cooking methods, not that it was a sound practice.
Charcoal And Lighter Fluid Hazards
The specific warning Aajonus attached to grilling was the use of charcoal and lighter fluid. He named both as disqualifying factors. His broader framework around coal burning is relevant here: he traced the Black Plague to the large-scale adoption of coal burning in London and Paris beginning around 1310 to 1312, arguing that burning coal releases mercury and thallium into the atmosphere and that these metals break down the lungs. While he did not draw that historical argument directly into a discussion of backyard charcoal grilling, the logic of his framework connects them. Burning coal or charcoal in an enclosed or semi-enclosed space introduces mercury and thallium as combustion byproducts, and food cooked over such a flame would absorb residues from that combustion in addition to the toxins produced by the heat itself.
Lighter fluid adds petroleum-derived chemical contamination on top of that. Aajonus identified the 60,000 industrial chemicals now present in the environment as a category of toxins with no relationship to food, and accelerants used in grilling fall into that category.
How Cooking Transforms Meat
Aajonus's objection to grilling is inseparable from his objection to cooking meat in any form. When meat is cooked, proteins are transformed into heterocyclic amines, which he described as acrid, difficult to utilize, and carcinogenic toxins that collect and store in the body and produce joint problems including gout, arthritis, and rheumatism. Fats cooked at high temperatures produce lipid peroxides, which he described as additional carcinogenic poisons. He stated that cooking meat above 98 degrees begins altering phosphorus, and that by 110 degrees phosphorus is cauterized and made useless. By 123 degrees he said there are no stable nutrients remaining and a substantial load of toxins has been created. At 140 degrees phosphorus crystallizes into a glass-like state. The higher the temperature, the more compound and complex the damage.
Grilling, by its nature, exposes meat to temperatures far above any of these thresholds. The surface of meat on a grill reaches temperatures well above 200 degrees Fahrenheit, which in Aajonus's framework means complete destruction of enzymes, bacteria, fungi, and every living constituent that would allow the food to function as a live, ecologically self-renewing substance, combined with the formation of a full spectrum of toxic compounds.
The Jack Box Incident
In a separate passage, Aajonus addressed the 1993 Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak directly and used it to illustrate that cooked meat, not raw meat, was the source of the harm. He stated that the hamburgers involved were cooked, not raw, and that E. coli according to scientific literature is incapacitated at approximately 179 degrees. His point was that a hamburger thrown on a grill, even for fifteen seconds, reaches that temperature unless it is frozen, and therefore the E. coli in the meat at the time of cooking was not the source of the illness. Instead, he argued, E. coli that forms in cooked meat after cooking is a pathological form unlike the natural E. coli found in raw meat, having been deprived of the biological context that keeps it functioning in a beneficial role. This argument reinforced his broader position that grilling and cooking do not make meat safer; they destroy its living constituents and create conditions for a different kind of microbial and chemical harm.
His Own Experience as Evidence
Aajonus frequently used his personal experience as a form of evidence within his teaching, and the Philippines broiled chicken story is the clearest personal data point he offered about grilling. Six nights of nightmares and three days of extended, unrestful sleep following a single small grilled chicken meal, after several years of eating exclusively raw food, is presented not as anecdote but as a demonstration of how sensitized a body becomes once it is no longer habituated to the toxins that cooking produces. He framed it as: "That 20 minutes of that cooked food robbed me of about 30 hours plus unhappy dreams and not feeling rested and relaxed when I had awakened." For someone still eating cooked food regularly, these effects would be masked by the body's ongoing burden of accumulated cooking toxins, but he considered them to be occurring nonetheless.
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