Mood

Aajonus identified low bacterial levels in the colon as the primary cause of depression, stating directly that 90 to 95 percent of all depression is caused by low bacteria in the colon or bacteria that is not operating properly. E. coli is the main bacteria he cited, describing it as responsible for releasing 90 percent of the B vitamins from food and for producing the finite protein particles that feed the brain and nervous system. When the colon's bacterial population is depleted, the brain is not being fed, and depression follows.

He explained that when the body is forced to rely on the solvent process to dissolve and eliminate toxicity, because it lacks sufficient bacterial, viral, mold, or parasitical help, the body gets depressed. When bacterial and other microbial populations are present and active, the body and mind become more organized, vital, and happy. This was not a metaphorical statement for Aajonus; he grounded it in the specific biochemistry of how nutrients are broken down and delivered to the nervous system.

He also described how the medical approach of eliminating bacteria through antibiotics, colonics, enemas, and toxic food creates the exact conditions that produce depression. Getting rid of bacteria means getting rid of colds and flus, but it also means producing clinical depression. He referenced the research of John Monroe, who found that in the absence of bacteria and virus in the body, clinical depression arises, and that when bacteria and virus are reintroduced, the colds and flus return but the clinical depression resolves. He said that when he realized this, and when he observed how happy Eskimos were eating decomposed, bacterially rich meat, the connection became clear to him.

The most direct dietary intervention Aajonus described for depression was high meat and rotten eggs, meaning raw meat and eggs that have been aged to high bacterial content. He said that eating these foods can lift someone out of depression in 10 to 20 minutes. His explanation was that in high meat and high eggs, the bacteria have already broken proteins and fats down into the finite molecules that feed the brain and nervous system directly. When eaten, these pre-digested nutrients go immediately into the nervous system without requiring the digestive process to complete that work first.

He reported that he had nearly 300 people provide feedback on high meat and rotten eggs for depression, and that only one person did not become giddy, silly, and happy within 10 to 20 minutes. That one exception was a man who was not depressed to begin with; he had eaten high meat seeking the pleasurable effect he had seen in others, and while it did not make him giddy, it did not harm him either. Every other person in his sample reported the mood elevation.

He described one particularly striking case, a well-known yoga instructor who had been slim, looked healthy, had dry skin, and had never sustained a relationship because she had been in depression since age 11 or 12. By the time she came to Aajonus she had been on five medications a day for 27 years, which had never resolved the depression. He gave her high meat. She called him throughout the night every 45 minutes to an hour, and with each call her voice was a little happier, a little lighter. By 5 o'clock in the morning she was giggling, laughing, and whistling, literally singing zippity-doo-dah. By the time he answered the phone she was saying she thought she was okay because she had no ill reactions. She went on to eat high meat almost every day, appeared on the Ripley's Believe It or Not show, and was a woman who had spent 19 years on 27 psychotropic drugs daily, none of which had produced what one night of high meat accomplished.

In the context of bipolar disorder, he specified high eggs, high meat, and suppositories made with fat for the depressive end of the cycle. He also noted that the suppository format using raw fat delivers nutrients to the nervous system through the rectal tissue.

Aajonus extended the bacterial framework to include a broader sense of connection. He said that people mainly get depressed because they do not feel connected, and that this disconnection operates on a cellular, bacterial, and viral level. He referenced research by another individual whose work he described as demonstrating that when virus is destroyed, depression is created, and when virus is reintroduced, happiness returns. He interpreted this as evidence that staying in connection with the full microbial world that naturally inhabits the body is essential to emotional wellbeing, not just physical health.

Aajonus connected blood sugar instability directly to mood dysregulation, drawing from his own experience. He described how his body had developed biological habits from fear, anger, and violence in childhood: either his blood sugar would drop, causing depression, or his adrenaline would soar and he could not control his excess energy, causing manic behavior, or his blood sugar would drop while adrenaline soared simultaneously, causing irritability and a sour disposition. He said he eventually learned to handle this primarily through diet, with earlier reliance on cognitive tools he received from his uncle.

He described the diabetic state as producing extreme emotional instability, where blood sugar going up and down means one minute a person can be screaming with a knife wanting to kill somebody and the next minute loving and kissing them. He presented this not as a character failing but as a biochemical state that the person cannot control.

He gave a specific rule of thumb: if feeling depressed, it is most often low blood sugar, and the recommendation was to eat some fresh fruit with raw fat and a cooked starch. He noted that the combination of a small amount of cooked starch with raw fat and fresh fruit was what he had used during his own recovery period to control depression and rage after the severe toxic damage from chemotherapy and radiation.

Heated honey was identified as problematic for mood because it imbalances blood sugar, producing an hour or two of energy followed by deep depression or falling asleep. He was careful to specify that only unheated honey should be used, because heated honey behaves as a simple sugar that spikes and crashes blood sugar, whereas unheated honey acts as an insulin replacer that supports stable neurological function.

Aajonus described a mechanism by which past emotional trauma creates lasting biochemical residues that continue to influence mood long after the original event. He drew extensively on the work of Elnora Van Winkle, a neurological scientist who worked at Milhouse Laboratories at either Columbia University or New York University (he cited both in different passages) for 47 to 52 years, during which time she was solely responsible for cataloging and identifying every chemical in the brain and nervous system.

Van Winkle wrote a paper called The Biology of Emotions, which Aajonus referenced repeatedly throughout his workshops, directing people to find it online in both its technical scientific version and its layman's version. She found that when the body builds a hormone during trauma or upset, it produces byproducts just like any other biological process, and those byproducts store in the body just like any other toxin. When the body detoxifies those stored byproducts, it recreates the same emotional and physiological experience that originally produced them: the anxiety, the trauma, the original emotional state. This means a person can experience intense depression, rage, or anxiety with no current external cause, no current physical reason, and no circumstantial reason for feeling badly, because the depression or rage is coming from stored chemical waste products from an earlier time.

He described this as a key insight into why people have emotional experiences that seem to come from nowhere, and why someone might feel suddenly furious at a mate who has done nothing, because the hormonal byproducts from a past trauma are circulating in the blood and looking for expression.

Van Winkle also found that in women, if certain hormones rise in the blood and then decrease, old emotional patterns connected to those hormone levels re-emerge. Aajonus gave an example of a woman who, when her hormones were high, began directing rage at her mate that actually belonged to her father from childhood. As soon as those hormones decreased, all of that behavior ceased. He noted that the anger was inappropriate to the present situation and that the woman had been unable to express it originally with her father.

Aajonus identified cooked starch, specifically in the form of the nut formula, as the substance that binds with the toxic byproducts of neurological hormones and assists in removing them from the body. He described starches as binding with certain types of neurological hormone byproducts that cause unhappiness or psychotic states. He said the nut formula helps remove those byproducts so that a person does not suffer as much during a detox of these stored emotional chemicals. He mentioned this in the context of his own experience during a seminar where he felt more intense than usual, attributing it to chemicals in the hotel room, and said he needed the nut formula to bind with those toxic substances.

Aajonus described the endocrine system as a direct generator of mood states through the hormones it produces and dumps into the bloodstream. He said that with adrenaline pumping, a person can experience a lot of action or emotion, including anger, joy, delight, or manic depression, depending on the condition of the body. The adrenal glands he associated primarily with muscular activity; the thyroid he connected to heart and lung function; the pituitary to maintaining the nervous system during sleep and waking.

For people with overactive sex glands producing excess testosterone, estrogen, and adrenaline, he said those hormones build up and can create a hormone that makes a person irritable and anxious. His recommendation for this state was physical exercise and, if no partner is available, self-pleasuring, because those hormones released through orgasm turn into endorphins that help a person relax and feel better. He referenced Dr. Ellis from the 1960s as having discovered this in chemistry laboratories, and said he had not believed it initially but had come to believe it.

He described how for people with very overactive glands from the head up, there is a tendency toward being ultra-critical, and that this criticism drives low self-esteem further down. His recommendation for this configuration was creative activity, because creativity is where genuine enjoyment would be found.

Aajonus was consistent in identifying high fruit consumption as a driver of manic mood states. He described his own experience on a raw fruitarian diet as characterized by manic energy that he had mistaken for vitality, given his background of chronic illness. He said most fruitarians are manic, out of control, and very quick to anger. He was the same way on that diet.

He also described Van Winkle herself as a person who had worked for 50 years with neurochemicals and for whom the vibrant, manic feeling produced by a fruit diet felt like euphoria, like a drug. He said this feeling killed her quickly. He was clear that he now understood the manic energy from fruit as a form of blood sugar instability producing false stimulation, not genuine health.

The biochemical mechanism he described was that high fruit intake drives blood sugar up sharply, producing what feels like energy and aliveness, followed by crashes into depression or sleep. On a chronic basis, this cycling creates irritability, rapid anger, and unpredictable emotional states, all of which he had experienced personally.

Aajonus consistently distinguished anxiety from depression as having a different root cause and a different remedy. He stated directly: anxiety is always a need to exercise, while depression is always a need for bacteria in the colon to digest proteins and fats that feed the brain. He noted that even when anxiety and hostility are caused by psychotropic drugs, the nut formula and especially physical exercise can resolve it and change that state.

For people experiencing anxiety from hormonal excess, exercise was the primary recommendation because it uses up the adrenaline, testosterone, and estrogen that accumulate when a physically active body is sedentary.

One of the more detailed positions Aajonus took on mood management concerned the debate between primal therapy, which involves screaming, yelling, kicking, and beating objects, and his own preferred approach of channeling emotional energy into creative and pleasurable activity. He said he and Elnora Van Winkle went round and around on this, that it was the only thing they seemed to differ on in the entire framework she had developed.

Van Winkle's position, drawn from her scientific work, was that people experiencing emotional turmoil from stored neurological byproducts needed primal release. Aajonus's objection was that if a person continues the anger and resentment in the present, even through a therapeutic exercise like beating a pillow, they are continuing the same neural and chemical patterns in the present as well as re-engaging the past. They are creating more of those substances. The behavior becomes entrenched, and then what happens when there is no pillow around and the person is facing their partner?

His alternative was to redirect that same energy into something creative and delightful: singing, dancing, painting, something that makes the person happy rather than continuing the cycle of unhappiness. He said doing so will change the memory patterns and will even change the way the body reacts the next time it encounters that emotional trigger.

He acknowledged that when depressed, it can be impossible to imagine doing something joyful. His practical suggestion was to start with something minimal: put on a record with a nice beat that you really liked at a particular time in your life and let it start moving you. Do not fight it. Even just smiling while depressed, even if it feels false, begins to change the chemistry. He said: if that is all you can get yourself to do, you will start to feel differently.

He described singing happy songs as a real, practical tool for mood, even when not happy. He said the mind is always thinking, and if a person is directing their thinking toward happy thoughts, they cannot help but think about those happy thoughts. He added that you can be a New Yorker and fight it hard, but the mechanism still works. Singing happy songs helps transport hormones and can get rid of the hormones driving the bad mood state.

Aajonus connected the widespread mood pathology of modern people to industrial chemicals in the environment and food supply, describing it as illness and sickness caused by manufacturing and processing chemicals that get into people and cause deranged thinking, deranged moods, and deranged attitudes. He contrasted his mother's family of 13 children who all got along with his own family of four boys who hated each other, attributing the difference to the fact that his father was a scientist for General Electric and their home was filled with the first microwaves, the first TVs, and constant chemical exposure.

He described how pesticides, petrochemicals, and other industrial compounds that get into glandular tissue can make those glands behave abnormally, producing overactive states that generate behavioral and mood consequences. He cited an example of a man with overactive testes and adrenal glands not from natural testosterone excess but from petrochemical contamination from his work, which had caused irritation and disturbance in those glands.

During a personal account of his own detoxification protocol, Aajonus described eating large quantities of decomposed nerve tissue, specifically rotten brain and rotten spine, as part of a recovery process from the radiation damage he received during cancer treatment in 1967 and 1968. He noted that before he had recognized depression as a bacterial deficiency, he had observed the happiness of Eskimos eating highly decomposed, foul-smelling meat and had noticed that he himself felt really happy after 20 minutes of eating such food. He described Eskimo children jumping up and down for joy at the prospect of food that smelled bad enough that it seemed inconceivable to him how they could be that excited. He said that after connecting this observation to the bacterial and neurological science, he recognized it as confirmation of the whole framework of mood as a bacterial and nutritional phenomenon rather than a psychological one.