Ocean Water

Aajonus cited the documented history of sailors drinking seawater as the clearest evidence of its toxicity. He traced those records back at least to the time of Galileo. According to Aajonus, sailors who drank even a tablespoon or less of ocean water daily in an attempt to stave off dehydration would go insane within eight to twelve days. The insanity he described was irrational thought and behavior, a complete derangement of the nervous system. By contrast, sailors who refused to drink seawater and accepted only a daily ration of one tablespoon of freshwater or rainwater did not go insane. He used this comparison repeatedly to make the point that the damage was specific to ocean water, not simply an artifact of overall dehydration.

He explained the mechanism as a disturbance of the fluid balance in the brain and nervous system. The concentrated salt in seawater, once inside the body, interferes with the normal ionic environment that the brain depends on for stable function. He described this as something that could be triggered by very small quantities, not just by drinking seawater in large amounts.

He also addressed a product called Quinton, which is a commercially prepared injection or supplement made from diluted ocean water. He acknowledged that in the small amounts and diluted form that Quinton produces, it is probably less toxic than undiluted seawater, but he maintained it is still toxic. He noted that proponents claim this is debatable, but his own position was that ocean water in any injectable or consumable form remained problematic because humans have a digestive tract that deconstructs and restructures substances in ways appropriate to human physiology, and injecting anything directly into blood plasma bypasses that system entirely. He stated that injecting ocean water, even diluted, is asking for real trouble.

Aajonus explained in detail what happens at the cellular level when seawater or concentrated salt enters the body. He described the sodium molecules in salt as being so large and magnetically dominant that they hold onto water molecules, preventing them from being absorbed into cells. The H2O ends up floating in the serum, unavailable for cellular use, bound to the large sodium molecules. The cell is thus deprived of the water it needs, even as the body is flooded with fluid.

He went further and described a direct cellular injury from seawater ingestion. The magnetism of the sodium on the outside of the cell is so strong that the one or two ions inside the cell, which he described as its guts and its stomach, are ripped out and pulled away by the sodium molecules. The result is that the cell shrivels from a grape to a raisin state. He also noted that the clumps of sodium can be so large that they block the cell entry entirely.

He extended this logic to a more general statement: what happens if you eat seawater? You start vomiting, and you die. That is what happens to individual cells exposed to that sodium load. The intestinal poisoning that follows drinking seawater, the vomiting, the stomach cramps, the charley horse that he described, is the systemic expression of what is happening at the cellular level simultaneously.

He made the further point that taking a single shake of table salt destroys approximately 100 million red blood cells. He used this figure to convey scale, noting that even though the destroyed cells would fit into a space the size of a BB, 100 million cells gone is still 100 million cells gone.

While Aajonus was completely opposed to drinking ocean water, he addressed the question of swimming in it with more nuance. When asked directly whether people absorb ocean water through the skin while swimming, his answer was conditional: if you are eating a lot of fish or coconut oil, you will not absorb it significantly. If your skin is very dry, you will, and it will make your skin drier.

He explained that the sting and burn sensation that comes from salt water on the skin is the salt drying cells out so severely that the nerve cells register pain. He described it as feeling almost like being bitten, then starting to burn and crack.

His recommended preventive measure was applying coconut oil or coconut cream to the body before entering the ocean. He stated that coconut oil hardens at ocean temperature, which is typically around 70 degrees Fahrenheit, and that at this temperature it stays solid enough to form a physical barrier that protects the top layers of skin from the drying and stripping action of the salt. He noted that people who spend extended time in the ocean, such as spear fishers, should always have some oil on their skin before going in, with coconut oil being the best choice, though butter or olive oil would also serve.

He said he always coated his own body with coconut cream before going into the ocean. He specified that the barrier effect holds as long as the water does not reach around 75 degrees, at which point the coconut oil begins to melt and the protective effect diminishes.

Aajonus described his own use of ocean walking as a key element of his recovery from a severe coral reef injury he sustained in 1996. He had been on the island of Maria, located between Tahiti and Bora Bora, snorkeling and lost track of time. He was stranded on a reef as the tide dropped, spent approximately eleven hours there when he thought he had been there six, and was trapped by a twenty-foot wall of coral he had to pass through as waves crashed. In escaping, he was caught in the coral and had his thigh torn open.

After the injury, he was in a wheelchair at a hotel. He first used the hotel swimming pool, having arranged with the owner to lower the chlorine level. Within a week of being in the reduced-chlorine water, he developed swimmer's earaches, sore throats, and headaches, and stopped using the pool. The hotel was approximately 300 to 350 yards from the ocean.

He then began walking to the ocean and walking a mile down the coast and a mile back through the water. He chose ocean walking specifically because the buoyancy of the saltwater reduced the weight on his injured leg enough that he could move it. He did this twice daily, once at seven in the morning and again at five-thirty in the evening, for approximately one and a half hours each session.

He continued this practice after transitioning to a bay near Antigua. He described the bay as relatively calm even when there was some rain-related turbulence farther out. Within eight months of beginning this program, which had started in November following a March injury, he was able to perform a sprint half-mile run down the beach. He had been in a wheelchair at the beginning of that period.

He also referenced going to the ocean in an earlier account of his general recovery from severe illness, describing walks in the ocean in contexts where he was building physical capacity from an extremely compromised state.

Aajonus made specific claims about the relative pollution levels of different bodies of water, and these claims governed his fish sourcing recommendations. He stated that rivers and lakes are approximately 35 to 40 percent polluted. The ocean, by contrast, he assessed as only 4 to 8 percent polluted, depending on the location, making it far preferable as a source of seafood.

He did not treat all ocean waters as equally clean. He identified the Gulf of Mexico as a special case, which he assessed at approximately 10 percent polluted, and he stated he would not eat anything from the Gulf. He attributed this to nuclear submarine bases in the Gulf region, specifically naming a base out of Mobile, Alabama, and multiple bases in Florida. He described servicemen from these bases openly bragging in the surrounding towns that they dump nuclear waste wherever they go, having been told by the military that the waste is non-toxic and that the ocean neutralizes it. He characterized these servicemen as having no science background and completely accepting military claims, which he rejected.

He extended his concern about the Gulf to the Panama Canal, noting that tankers traveling to the canal are dumping toxins there, further contaminating the surrounding ocean. He stated he did not trust the Gulf or lakes as food sources.

For the Atlantic, he stated he would eat deep-sea ocean fish from the Atlantic coast of Florida and above, up to and around the Carolinas and beyond, with preference for fish sourced farther north. For the Pacific, his preference was above San Francisco, though he would eat Pacific fish from anywhere along the California coast.

He made a comment about Jacksonville, Florida specifically, noting the presence of military naval bases there and the nuclear waste bragging by sailors in that region as well, and used it to illustrate the same pattern of contamination.

He also described his recollection of the state of Japanese ocean waters in 1959, when industrial chemical dumping was so severe that photographic film could be developed by dipping it into the ocean near the pier. Despite this historic level of pollution, he noted that Japanese people who were eating raw fish and other seafood from those waters did not present with the levels of mercury poisoning one might expect, which he used as context for understanding the body's capacity to handle environmental contamination when eating the right foods.

He stated that he would not eat anything from the Corps of Engineers waters or from the Gulf, expressing distrust of those sources specifically. He was also building his own freshwater lakes in Thailand and the Philippines, each approximately 100 meters by 100 meters, to create controlled fisheries free from ocean and river pollution.

Aajonus drew a consistent connection between ocean and water environments and the beneficial presence of algae. He described algae as an organism that feeds on metals and rock, pulling heavy metals from the environment and from the body when contact is made. This is the same principle he applied to his hot tub practice of allowing algae to grow on the concrete walls and then lying on the algae-covered surface.

In the ocean context, the algae present in ocean waters and on ocean surfaces represented for him a useful biological element that counteracted some of the dissolved mineral load of the water. He did not elaborate on ocean algae as extensively as he did on hot tub and pond algae, but the underlying principle was consistent: algae metabolizes metals and rock minerals, and contact with it draws metals out of human tissue.

He also described consuming algae-rich water in other contexts, including lake water and swamp water that was visibly green with living organisms. He preferred such water to plain water because it was not purely a solvent but carried nutrients in the form of living organisms. He never extended this preference to ocean water for drinking, because the salt concentration in the ocean placed it in a separate category from organism-rich freshwater.

Aajonus treated seawater and the broader category of salt as parts of the same problem. He described salt in any isolated, dehydrated, ionic form as dangerous, regardless of whether the source is table salt, sea salt for eating, or ocean water as a beverage. The relevant distinction he made was between sodium that is ionically bound within a food matrix, such as the sodium in celery, avocado, or tomatoes, versus sodium in a free dehydrated salt form. In the food matrix, the body never isolates the sodium. In the free salt form, it does isolate, and the result is the same cellular destruction he described in relation to seawater.

He described the Dead Sea as an extreme case, calling it full of all types of minerals and noting that for humans it is simply dangerous regardless of what nutrients might theoretically be present in it, because humans do not eat rock. He used this to underline that the mineral content of salt formations and salt bodies of water, however rich, is not accessible to the human body in a useful form.

His statement that seawater represents a massive solvent combined with a concentrated sodium load was the clearest articulation of why ocean water is categorically harmful. We are not sea creatures, he said, and so seawater does to us what it would do to land-based tissue: it causes intestinal poisoning, cellular shriveling, nerve dysfunction, and irrational thought leading to death.