Pancreas

The pancreas, as Aajonus described it, operates as a real-time analytical and directive organ. The moment food enters the mouth, chemical signals travel down to the pancreas telling it the precise nutrient composition of that food. The pancreas then decides how to restructure those nutrients into a form appropriate for that particular human body. Even two tomatoes from the same vine will carry slightly different nutrient profiles, and the pancreas reads and responds to each one differently. The same is true of milk from different animals, meat from different parts of the same carcass, or any food that varies even slightly in composition.

This function extends far beyond simple digestion. The pancreas determines what bacteria need to be cultivated and propagated in the digestive tract to properly break down and absorb a given food. It decides how the molecular structures of incoming nutrients must be realigned, what enzyme combinations are required in the stomach and intestines, and how the final products of bacterial digestion, which emerge as nutrients in bacterial waste, must be shaped into human tissue. Whether the body is building bone cells, blood cells, heart tissue, or nerve cells, the pancreas plays a directing role in how the raw materials from food are reorganized to accomplish that task.

Aajonus compared this function to the work of a farmer who cultivates specific bacteria to process specific nutrients, and simultaneously to an architect who draws up blueprints before any construction begins. Nothing in the body is assembled from food without the pancreas having first issued the instructions. This is why, in Aajonus's view, losing the pancreas is so catastrophic. Patients who have their pancreas removed or destroyed require tubes and machines to stay alive because the entire organizing intelligence of digestion has been removed.

Aajonus was emphatic that insulin production is not the natural or primary function of the pancreas but rather a relatively recent adaptation forced on the organ by the shift to grain-based agriculture. Approximately ten thousand years ago, when Egypt and China began organizing large civilizations around grain cultivation, the human pancreas began to change. Before that, in hunter-gatherer populations and in tribal groups like the Maasai who ate no carbohydrates at all, the pancreas was small and insulin production was minimal or nearly nonexistent.

The Maasai, Aajonus noted, considered it illegal within the tribe to eat fruit. Their diet was entirely animal-based, consisting of meat, blood, and dairy. Their pancreases were correspondingly small, reflecting a body that had no structural need to convert large sugar loads into storable glycogen. Only when populations began eating grains in mass quantities did the pancreas have to begin manufacturing large amounts of insulin on a continuous basis.

Even in the context of modern physiology, Aajonus argued that the need for insulin on a proper diet is extremely low. On a diet where carbohydrates represent only five percent of caloric intake, and at most ten percent, the body barely needs to manufacture insulin at all. The pancreas can produce the small amount of glycogen the brain and nervous system require through a different pathway entirely, one that uses pyruvate derived from protein rather than from carbohydrates. Pyruvate-based glycogen production leaves no harmful residue. Carbohydrate-based glycogen production leaves behind a byproduct called advanced glycation end products, which Aajonus identified as toxic accumulations in the body.

The insulin mechanism becomes a problem only because people are eating far more carbohydrate than the body was designed to handle. Once grain eating became widespread and then industrialized, the pancreas was forced to evolve a new quasi-endocrine function, dumping insulin directly into the bloodstream as an emergency measure to handle the massive sugar loads. Before agriculture, Aajonus maintained, the pancreas was likely not an endocrine gland at all in this sense.

Aajonus described the growth of the modern human pancreas in evolutionary terms, tracing it across thousands of years of dietary change. Lucy's pancreas was two and a half times smaller than ours, proportional to her body size. She was roughly three feet eight inches tall, an adult, and her entire skeletal structure was smaller than modern humans, but the pancreas was disproportionately smaller even accounting for body size. The same proportional relationship was found in remains estimated at five million years old from South America.

The expansion began roughly ten thousand years ago with the rise of grain cultivation in Egypt and China. Egypt was at least nine thousand years into grain-based civilization, China at least eight thousand years in. As these populations grew too large to sustain on animal foods alone, grains became the primary caloric staple. The body had no existing machinery well suited to processing these foods, so the pancreas began to enlarge and adapt. Over the subsequent ten millennia, the pancreas grew to two and a half times its natural size.

In one passage, Aajonus noted a discrepancy in his own statements about whether the comparison is two and a half times smaller or one third the size, using both phrasings at different points. In one workshop he said Lucy's pancreas was "one third the size of ours" while elsewhere consistently using the "two and a half times smaller" framing. Both appear in the source material without resolution.

Aajonus also linked the enlargement of the human brain to the same agricultural transition, arguing that the brain expanded not because humans became more intelligent but because it became a dump site for accumulating toxins from processed and cooked food. The brain is sixty to eighty percent fat, and the growing toxic load from cooked fats required an expanded organ to sequester those poisons.

When a person eats exclusively raw food, the pancreas's job, in Aajonus's description, becomes simple and clean. Enzymes and nutrients from the raw food arrive already bioactive. The pancreas registers them, decides how they need to be rearranged for that body's current needs, and sends the appropriate instructions into the duodenum. The bacteria in the digestive tract do the actual work of breaking down and reassembling food components, guided by the pancreatic instructions. The pancreas does not need to compensate for missing enzymes or manufacture emergency hormones. Its burden is minimal.

Aajonus stated directly that on a fully raw diet, if the person is perfectly healthy, the pancreas barely functions in an effortful way. It performs its architectural role with little strain. This is the state for which the organ evolved across millions of years of animal-food consumption.

The pancreas also secretes corrective enzyme combinations when something is missing or imbalanced in incoming food, dumping these directly into the duodenum to supplement whatever the food itself could not supply. This self-correcting capacity is part of its normal raw-food operation.

When cooked food enters the body, the pancreas faces a radically different situation. Cooking destroys the bioactive enzymes in food. There are no intact enzyme structures for the pancreas to work with and redirect. The digestive system cannot properly break down and absorb the denatured proteins, damaged fats, and altered carbohydrates that arrive from cooked meals.

In response, the pancreas manufactures hormones, which Aajonus described repeatedly using the metaphor of the mafia or thugs. These hormones circulate through the body and visit every cell, demanding a small contribution of raw materials. A few enzymes here, some proteins there, some fats, some vitamins and minerals, taken from each living cell in small enough quantities that no single cell is devastated immediately. Aajonus compared this to spending from a bank account a few cents at a time. The depletion is invisible in the short term but catastrophic over decades.

The cooked food also triggers a phenomenon called leukocytosis, in which a third of the white blood cells leave the bloodstream and migrate into the intestinal tract to deal with the toxicity of the cooked meal. This means the blood is depleted of the cells responsible for clearing poisons from the circulatory system every time cooked food is consumed. If even one raw food is included in a cooked meal, leukocytosis does not occur, because the alkalinity of the raw food neutralizes enough of the toxicity to prevent the immune response.

Aajonus also noted that pancreatic fluid production increases exponentially when cooked food is eaten, because the pancreas must work far harder to try to make use of denatured and damaged structures. This chronic overwork is what causes the pancreas to become hardened, scarred, and eventually diabetic in aging populations.

Aajonus made the claim, which he said he had been advancing for twenty-six years before a doctor confirmed it, that the pancreas is a storage site for every toxin that has ever entered the body. He stated that researchers eventually confirmed the pancreas contains records and deposits of every foreign substance a person has been exposed to. He considered this consistent with the pancreas's role as the body's analytical library for incoming substances.

He connected vaccine ingredients specifically to pancreatic damage, arguing that vaccines are a primary driver of widespread pancreatic disease. He identified five ingredients present in vaccines as major poisons: liquid thimerosal, liquid aluminum, formaldehyde, detergents, and ether. Each is a serious poison alone, and their combination in a vaccine is, in his view, even more damaging. These poisons are stored in the pancreas and contribute to the scar tissue, calcification, and functional loss he observed in the pancreas of nearly everyone eating a conventional diet.

Aajonus described both type 1 and type 2 diabetes as consequences of pancreatic exhaustion and damage from inappropriate diet and toxic accumulation. Type 1 diabetes means the pancreas is no longer producing insulin at all. Type 2 means insulin is produced but cannot be properly utilized. In both cases, he viewed the pharmaceutical industry's response, which is to sell insulin injections and related treatments generating an estimated $1,300 to $1,800 per patient per month from a diagnosed population of 58 million, as a financial motivation to maintain rather than resolve the condition.

In his own history, Aajonus had juvenile diabetes, which he attributed to having approximately ninety percent of his pancreatic tissue toxic from the cancer treatments he received as a young man. Through the raw diet, he described his pancreas as having healed roughly fifteen percent from zero, which he considered enough to function without insulin injections. He remained careful to eat very little fruit, consuming it at most every three days and choosing green, unripe fruit even then, because sugar remained difficult for his pancreas to handle.

He described a clinical threshold in iridology and body readings: a pancreas functioning at around ten percent or below represents diabetic territory on a raw food diet, while on a cooked food diet the threshold is much higher, around thirty to forty percent function remaining, because cooked food demands so much more from the organ.

Aajonus taught a method of reading pancreatic health through the palm, which he described as working similarly to palmistry but based on tissue characteristics rather than lines. The area just above the ball of the thumb, in the fatty region, corresponds to the pancreas.

If this area is puffy or red, it indicates the pancreas is overactive and secreting too much insulin, lowering blood sugar. This is the sign of hypoglycemia, in which the person's blood sugar is being chronically reduced by excess insulin output.

If the area looks like a chicken's or turkey's cowl, with folded, ridged, collapsing skin, the pancreas is largely dead or inactive. This pattern indicates diabetes. Aajonus said people with this pattern in the hand need to eat Jerusalem artichokes, yams, and anything with natural inulin to help process the sugars they consume. They should always eat sugars alongside other foods rather than alone, and consume large amounts of honey, because honey can substitute functionally for insulin in these cases.

If the area is firm and normal in texture without puffiness or ridging, the pancreas is in reasonable condition.

Aajonus performed detailed pancreatic assessments as part of his body readings, which he conducted primarily through iridology. Across multiple examples in the source material, he described finding significant pancreatic damage in the people he evaluated.

In one reading, he found that the right side of the pancreas was heavily striated with scar tissue, with approximately fifteen percent of the organ functional. He told the person they were five percent above being diabetic on the primal diet, and would become diabetic on any other diet. He called that particular group's level of pancreatic problems the worst he had seen in any city relative to the number of people evaluated.

In another reading, he found a left pancreas with about fifty to forty-five percent life in it but with a blocking toxicity on the left side. The right side was practically dissolved, functioning at only five to eight percent, though still enough to avoid the clinical diabetic threshold on a raw diet.

In another case, he found the left side of the pancreas waterlogged and beginning to dissolve, with about seventy percent activity and eighty percent tissue alive, but described this person as having one of the better pancreases he had encountered, noting the damage was from excess water consumption rather than from scar tissue or toxic deposits.

He also found striations of scar tissue in one patient's pancreas and attributed these to exposure to diesel fumes from the patient's father's engines, noting that pesticide and herbicide exposure, vaccines, and industrial chemicals all produce characteristic scarring patterns in the pancreas.

Aajonus returned repeatedly to the argument that the medical and pharmaceutical industries deliberately narrow the public understanding of the pancreas to maintain dependency on insulin medications and diabetes treatments. By teaching that the pancreas does nothing but handle sugar, they ensure that patients believe the organ is fundamentally simple and that insulin injection is the only relevant intervention. Aajonus called this a strategy to make people think the body is stupid and incapable of self-management without pharmaceutical support.

He argued that if people understood the full architectural function of the pancreas, they would understand that the organ requires a diet of raw animal foods to function properly, and they would not need pharmaceutical intervention. He viewed the expansion of the diabetic population as an entirely predictable consequence of grain consumption and processed food, not as a disease requiring drug management but as a correctable dietary problem that the medical system has financial incentives to perpetuate.

Aajonus gave several specific recommendations for people with pancreatic damage or weakness.

For people with hypoglycemia or overactive pancreases, he recommended eating frequently in small amounts, keeping sugar intake minimal, and combining raw fats with any carbohydrate consumed. In the book "We Want to Live," he described a protocol for severely overactive pancreases in which a combination of cooked starch with raw fat, raw salt-added cheese, raw cream, raw eggs, stone-pressed olive oil or fresh coconut, and a little fresh fruit is consumed two to four times daily. The mechanism he described: the cooked starch binds with excess insulin, the raw fat then binds with the starch-insulin mass and escorts it to the bowels, and the fresh fruit raises blood sugar back to a normal level. He acknowledged that while this protocol resolves the depressive crash from hypoglycemia within about forty minutes, it does accumulate sugar byproducts and toxins from the cooked starch over time and can eventually contribute to disease.

For people with diabetic-pattern pancreas readings, he recommended Jerusalem artichokes, yams, and natural inulin-containing foods to assist sugar processing. He recommended honey as a functional insulin substitute, specifically unheated raw honey, noting that heated or processed honey creates problems while raw honey does not.

He recommended against eating fruit frequently or in large amounts for anyone with pancreatic compromise. His own practice was fruit at most every three days, always choosing green, unripe varieties with lower sugar content.

For people whose pancreatic readings showed blocking toxicity on one side, he did not expect recovery of that side to be possible unless the toxicity cleared first, and expressed doubt about whether it would clear. He emphasized that a person only needs enough pancreatic function to stay above the diabetic threshold on a raw diet, and that the right side alone, if reasonably functional, can often sustain this.

He also specifically noted that eating the raw primal diet does not overload the pancreas. The statement was direct: on raw foods, the pancreas is not overloaded. On cooked foods, it is chronically overloaded and in virtually every person he evaluated, it was the most damaged gland in the body.