Large intestine

E. coli is, in Aajonus's framework, the single most important bacterium in the human body. He described approximately 100 varieties of E. coli populating the large intestine, and he returned to this point in virtually every discussion of bowel function. E. coli is responsible for the final stage of fat and protein digestion, breaking those molecules down to the finite molecular size required to feed the brain and nervous system. He stated explicitly that without E. coli, the brain and nervous system cannot receive the form of nutrients they require, because no other structure in the body naturally produces that reduction.

He directly connected E. coli deficiency to psychological and neurological dysfunction. People with colon problems, he observed, are more irritable, more emotionally volatile, more prone to depression, and less capable of psychological stability. He pointed to people who undergo regular colonics and enemas as a living demonstration of this: "Do you know anybody who takes regular colonics? How emotionally and psychologically stable are they? They don't have their colonic often. Very panicked. Very panicked. Very emotional. Overly emotional." He regarded E. coli as something the pharmaceutical industry had deliberately maligned, pointing to the strain 0157H7 as the publicized villain, while maintaining that this was a campaign to undermine the public's relationship with a bacterium the nervous system depends on.

He stated that 60 to 80 percent of bowel movements on a raw diet should consist of E. coli and E. coli byproducts. Small, infrequent, or inadequate stools, he said, are a direct sign of low E. coli levels. He described the entire sigmoid colon as the site where E. coli byproducts are absorbed into the system to feed the brain and nervous system, and he treated any disruption of that population as a direct threat to neurological and psychological health.

Aajonus described the bowel as beginning at the ileocecal valve, which some sources he cited called the oocycle valve or oloquial valve. From there, food moves up the ascending colon, across the transverse colon, down the descending colon, and holds in the sigmoid colon before passing out through the rectum. He noted that the colon contains no digestive juices in the conventional sense. It is entirely bacterial. The body does carry bile collected from the entire journey through the stomach and small intestine, so fecal matter is typically yellow or brown from bile concentration. Because bile accumulates through the process, Aajonus said there is no shortage of it by the time food reaches the bowel, and the E. coli does not need fresh bile delivered to the large intestine to function properly.

He compared the human digestive tract length to that of the pig, describing both as omnivores and noting that pigs have a tract roughly 10 to 12 times the length of their torso, nearly identical to the human proportion. Herbivores, by contrast, have a tract approximately 30 times the length of their torso, or two and a half times longer than ours. He used this comparison to argue that humans are biologically adapted to eating animal foods, as their digestive proportions match those of omnivores rather than herbivores.

The total transit time he described is approximately 24 hours for food to travel the full digestive tract. The bowel's share of that time is three to five hours under normal conditions, though the sigmoid colon may hold fecal matter considerably longer in people whose bodies are deficient in nutrients and are trying to extract every available compound.

The bowel does not take on new categories of food. It works on the same fats and proteins that the small intestine has already begun breaking down. What distinguishes the bowel's bacteria is that they reduce these partially digested compounds to the absolute finest molecular form. Aajonus explained this necessity by pointing to the architecture of the nervous system: the nervous system is served by the finest, narrowest blood and lymph vessels in the body, and the molecules feeding it must be proportionally tiny. E. coli and the other colon bacteria are themselves tiny organisms capable of producing that degree of reduction, something the larger bacterial families in the small intestine cannot accomplish to the same degree.

He was explicit that the bowel's primary output goes to the brain and nervous system, with those structures also receiving a smaller 10 to 20 percent share from the small intestine. This is why, he argued, bowel dysfunction produces psychological symptoms so reliably and why people who damage their colonic bacterial environment through enemas, colonics, or antibiotics begin showing signs of depression, irritability, and cognitive deterioration.

In one passage, Aajonus made a direct comparison that most people overlook: "The skin is a bigger bowel than your actual intestinal bowel. It discharges more toxicity with perspiration than it does out your bowel with a movement." He made this observation when discussing the skin as a detoxification organ, and it reflects his broader view that the body uses multiple pathways to eliminate waste, with the bowel being one major route but not the only route.

Aajonus drew a hard distinction between what he called true constipation and what is commonly mislabeled as constipation in people on the Primal Diet. True constipation, in his framework, is an intestinal block, a physical obstruction where peristalsis stops completely, nothing moves past the block, and the abdomen grows progressively larger as food accumulates. This is constipation. Everything else, including irregular or infrequent bowel movements, small stools, or hard stools in people whose bodies are absorbing nutrients efficiently, is a different condition with different causes.

He described what actually happens when people on a raw food diet stop moving their bowels daily: the body is so deficient in nutrients from years of cooked and processed food that when it encounters genuinely bioavailable food for the first time, it absorbs everything. There is no waste because there is nothing the body is willing to discard. He said he sent thousands of patients who feared they were constipated to get ultrasounds and sonograms to check for fecal accumulation, and not one came back with a high reading of fecal matter in the intestines, with the sole exception of patients who had cancer.

He described the sigmoid colon's holding of fecal matter as a nutrient extraction process. The body is holding the material because the E. coli are still working on it and the system needs every molecule it can extract. The longer the hold, the harder and drier the fecal matter becomes, because the body is pulling all fluid and fat out of it. This produces hard, difficult-to-pass stools, but the underlying cause is not constipation in the obstructive sense. It is nutrient deficiency, specifically a deficiency of fats reaching the colon bacteria.

He listed the circumstances that produce fecal matter drying in the colon: eating cooked food where nutrients are fractionated into non-bioactive forms; fat deficiency from not eating enough fat overall; eating concentrated mineral foods without enough fat, such as drinking milk without sufficient cream or eating cheese without butter; and insufficient E. coli levels. He identified E. coli deficiency as the most common cause of chronic constipation on the Primal Diet specifically.

He also described what he called functional constipation resulting from the body's attempt to hold cheese in the intestines. Cheese, which he described as having almost no digestible fat or protein without honey or fruit accompanying it, acts as a sponge for toxins. When the body detects fat in the cheese it cannot efficiently absorb without getting the associated toxins, it attempts to hold the material in the sigmoid colon anyway to extract what it can. This produces very hard, slow-moving fecal matter. His solution was to eat equal or greater amounts of butter alongside cheese, sometimes up to one and a half to two times the volume of butter relative to cheese.

Because the small intestine and the rest of the body absorb almost all available fat from raw food by the time that food reaches the ileocecal valve, the colon bacteria regularly receive inadequate fat. This is, in Aajonus's framework, the central mechanical cause of chronic constipation on the Primal Diet. He described it plainly: the E. coli and the colon bacteria get the dredges, the lowest-quality remnants of food that the small intestine has already worked through. On a cooked and processed diet, those dredges contain contaminated, damaged fats or no usable fats at all. Even on a raw food diet, unless a person has been eating that way for 30 to 40 years, nearly all the fat is absorbed before the bowel receives it.

His primary intervention for this problem was direct rectal infusion of fat, specifically a suppository formula he recommended as a regular practice for anyone experiencing constipation, hard stools, or infrequent bowel movements. The formula consists of three tablespoons each of raw butter, raw dairy cream, and raw coconut cream, with a quarter teaspoon of honey, mixed together in a four-ounce jelly jar, then warmed by submerging the sealed jar in a bowl of hot water until the mixture reaches slightly above body temperature, up to 105 degrees Fahrenheit. The person draws this mixture into a four-ounce bulb syringe, gets on all fours, inserts the syringe into the rectum, squeezes the mixture in, then lowers the shoulders to the ground while keeping the knees on the floor and the buttocks elevated. In this position, rolling the stomach like a belly dancer allows the mixture to move from the sigmoid colon up through the descending colon and across the transverse colon, delivering fresh fat directly to the E. coli from the back end. He specified doing this right before sleep. He described the E. coli's response as almost celebratory: they receive fresh, uncompromised fat they would never otherwise get, they relax, they function properly, and the result is that fecal matter is released rather than hoarded.

He noted that fats absorbed through this route take two to three days to break down and feed the brain and nervous system, so the constipation relief extends well beyond the night of the infusion. For people with very low E. coli levels, he suggested doing this once a week. He also mentioned that some people use kefir yogurt or clabbered milk in the same fashion, using a bulb syringe to introduce it rectally, getting on all fours, and rolling the stomach to move it up through the descending and transverse colon into the ascending colon to seed bacteria throughout the bowel.

He gave specific instructions for people who clabber milk for four days until it reaches a solid yogurt consistency, then introduce three to four ounces rectally via bulb syringe, using the same all-fours position and belly-dancer rolling motion to move it up through the transverse colon, then roll onto the right side and continue the rolling motion to push it down into the ascending colon. The goal is to get live bacterial cultures all the way around the colon so the fecal matter traveling through encounters active bacterial populations at every stage.

He also noted that bile is already present in sufficient quantity in the large intestine from being carried over through the entire digestive journey, so there is no need to worry about fat digestion from a bile standpoint. The E. coli do not need fresh bile delivery to the colon. There is already plenty.

For people who needed an immediate bowel movement and could not wait for bacterial recolonization or fat infusion to work, Aajonus described what he called his instant bowel movement constipation formula. It consists of one egg, three to four ounces of milk, and two to four tablespoons of raw apple cider vinegar. He explained that none of these ingredients digest when combined in this proportion. They simply push through without being absorbed, and the result is typically a bowel movement within 24 hours or less. For very severe cases, he said people might need to take this combination twice over two days, but that was rare. He was clear that this formula provides no nutritional benefit because nothing digests from it; it functions purely mechanically to produce movement.

Aajonus was consistently and strongly opposed to enemas and colonics. His objection was specific: they wash out E. coli. Once the E. coli population is flushed from the colon, he said it takes 45 to 60 or even 90 days to replace it. During that period, the person is functionally unable to feed their brain and nervous system through the bowel, meaning they are on the edge of depression or actively in depression for the entire recovery window. He argued that people who do colonics regularly become more sensitive, more emotionally reactive, and less psychologically stable every year, not less. He described this as a compounding deficit: each colonic removes the bacterial population, the nervous system goes underserved, the person feels worse and more anxious, they reach for another colonic to feel clean and relieved, and the cycle deepens.

He stated explicitly that people who perform enemas every day or every two days are doing so partly to flush out B vitamins and other compounds produced by bacteria that have become irritating, but the cost is the destruction of the very bacterial environment responsible for neurological nourishment. His position was to eat better so you are not constipated rather than to flush the system clean.

He specifically named the pharmaceutical industry's campaign against E. coli as a deliberate strategy to impair neurological function in the population: "The pharmaceutical industry wants E. coli destroyed so your brain and nervous system don't function."

For cancer patients, particularly those with lymphoma, Aajonus described a different application of bowel contents. He recommended having patients contact an Amish butcher and purchase several pounds of the bowel with its contents intact from a cow or buffalo. The butcher ties the bowel section off at both cut points so it resembles a sausage, then ships it packed in frozen packs inside multiple ziplock bags or in a half-gallon glass jar. He recommended approximately two ounces of bowel with contents every four days for lymphoma patients. He noted that the bowel lining itself is also good to eat along with the contents. The formula can be washed down with water, not milk, because milk contains lactic acid which retards bacterial growth.

For patients with other bowel conditions such as Crohn's disease, he described using small intestines from a pig. He instructed people to contact an Amish farmer and request fresh small intestines of the pig, chop them up, and eat approximately a cup. He reported that people who had suffered bowel problems and constipation for 20 years found their constipation resolved for approximately six months after eating a cup of fresh pig small intestines. He said the person would need to repeat the protocol, and after approximately four to five years of this, the intestines would be fully repaired. He attributed the repair partly to the whipworm (trichinosis) present in virtually all pig intestines, which he said can digest approximately double what bacteria can digest in 24 hours while delivering the same concentration and quality of nutrients.

For general bacterial rebuilding, he recommended eating moist clay approximately one teaspoon every other day and one marble-sized portion of high meat once a day for 14 days, then once a week for as many months as needed to resolve constipation. He also mentioned that clay taken internally, particularly Aztec Secret clay from a health food store cosmetics section at about one teaspoon in a smoothie, water, milk, or egg, helps encourage intestinal bacteria.

Aajonus connected the bowel's function to the logic of eating high meat. When meat is aged and allowed to ferment under controlled conditions, its own bacterial population breaks down the fats and proteins to the molecular size normally produced by E. coli in the colon. Eating high meat means consuming compounds already reduced to the finite molecular form that feeds the brain and nervous system. He described this as bypassing the delay involved in waiting for food to travel through the entire digestive tract and arrive at the bowel for bacterial processing. This is why, he said, eating high meat or high eggs turns chronically depressed people into laughing, giggling people within 10 to 20 minutes. The nervous system receives its nutrient molecules almost immediately rather than waiting the full 19 to 24 hours of normal digestive transit.

He also noted that some people use fermented kefir yogurt as a rectal suppository specifically to introduce bacterial populations that pre-digest protein and fat to the molecular size needed by the brain and nervous system, delivering that nutrition directly into the colon rather than eating it.

Aajonus described loose stools and diarrhea as the body's emergency response to toxins that are so damaging to the intestinal lining that they must be expelled before they cause serious damage. The body flushes the intestinal tract rapidly specifically to prevent the toxins from having time to destroy the intestinal tissue. He described one patient who had been constipated his entire life and then experienced diarrhea every day for two and a half years after starting the Primal Diet, because his body was rapidly eliminating toxins that had accumulated over a lifetime. The patient refused to eat sufficient cheese to absorb the toxins and slow the elimination, because he was vain about his weight. Aajonus said cheese is the tool to slow this process: it absorbs the toxins in the digestive tract so the body does not have to flush them out rapidly through loose stools.

For bowel-related diarrhea or loose bowel movements, he recommended taking a heaping teaspoon of powdered clay in a smoothie, water, milk, or egg to help stabilize the bacterial environment and the intestinal wall.

Aajonus discussed parasites in the context of bowel health extensively, primarily through his own experience with a tapeworm that he described as having lived in his body for approximately 15 to 18 weeks before being expelled. He had suffered from severe constipation from infancy, going every three to five days and sometimes every five to seven days for his entire life before going on a raw diet. Even on a raw food diet, his first morning bowel movement was always large and hard, tearing his rectum every time. By the time he was 20 to 22 years old, his rectum was one to two inches thick in scar tissue from a lifetime of tearing and bleeding. He reported bleeding sometimes half a cup at a time and bled from approximately age three to age 27.

The day he noticed the first segment of tapeworm in the toilet was, he said, the last day he ever had true constipation. The tapeworm caused his fecal matter to become softer and smaller immediately, and the sigmoid colon area softened as well. He had not had a bowel movement that tore his rectum in the years following that experience. He measured the tapeworm at approximately 45 to 50 feet when it passed the first time, with additional sections appearing over subsequent weeks and another approximately 50 to 55 feet passing about six weeks later. He reported that he could eat cheese after the tapeworm without experiencing the granite-hard stools that cheese had always produced for him before.

He theorized that the tapeworm may have eaten intestinal cells that were still composed of high-carbohydrate tissue, or that it consumed scar tissue that had prevented proper mucus production in the sigmoid colon area. He used this experience as a primary example of his argument that parasites evolved in a symbiotic relationship with the human body and that fear of them is manufactured by pharmaceutical interests.

Aajonus used the character of bowel movements as a direct window into E. coli levels and overall digestive health. Very small stools he identified as a sign of very low E. coli. Hard, granite-like stools he identified as a sign of fat deficiency in the colon, either from insufficient dietary fat overall or from fat absorption being complete before food reaches the bowel. He described ideal stools as soft, well-formed, and of reasonable size, which he said he himself achieved only after the tapeworm resolved his lifelong constipation and after he maintained a consistent raw meat, dairy, and egg diet.

He noted that he eats almost no fiber, consuming primarily meat, milk, and eggs with very occasional small amounts of fruit, yet has huge bowel movements. He described this as evidence that dietary fiber is not the driver of bowel movement bulk. Bacterial mass, he said, is the driver. 60 to 80 percent of a healthy bowel movement should be bacteria and bacterial byproducts, not fiber. Without adequate bacteria, stools are marble-sized, granite-hard, and destructive to the rectum.

He also described a condition in patients coming to him late in illness, who had been tube-fed or were in severe decline, where blending milk with meat into a pate fed through a stomach tube worked acceptably while they were unconscious or fully dependent on tube feeding, but tended to produce loose bowel movements once they were conscious and mobile. He regarded this as workable in extremity but not optimal.

For Crohn's disease specifically, Aajonus described it as a condition where intestinal toxicity becomes so severe that poisons leak through the intestinal wall into the joints, causing massive swelling and extreme pain. He identified cooked starch and grain products as primary triggers, instructing Crohn's patients to avoid them entirely. He used the bowel-with-contents protocol from Amish or buffalo ranchers as the primary repair tool, describing how two-ounce portions cut from the sausage-tied bowel section, eaten every four days, help regenerate the intestinal environment. He estimated that severe Crohn's cases might require months to years of this protocol to fully repair.

He described bowel syndrome in general as producing depression and significant psychological problems, consistent with his overall framework that the bowel feeds the brain and nervous system. People with bowel syndrome, he observed, are mostly depressed and have significant psychological issues. He addressed irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and described patients with IBS responding positively to the introduction of parasites, specifically citing how people who had suffered bowel problems including constipation for 20 years found resolution after consuming fresh pig small intestines containing trichinosis.

He also described his own near-experience with what he feared might become ulcerative colitis or irritable bowel syndrome, which resolved when he followed a protocol of one raw egg every hour with a tablespoon of raw cream 15 minutes after each egg, then after a few days transitioning to three meat meals daily with three tablespoons of honey butter per meal, with almost no other food for an extended period.

---