Petroleum

Aajonus described a head chemist from a major pharmaceutical and vitamin supplement company as his source for the following division of the supplement industry: there are only two things used to produce supplements, hexane, which is derived from gasoline, and kerosene, which is labeled "natural." All supplements marketed as natural use kerosene derivatives. All others use hexane or are completely synthetic chemical fabrications not derived from any real food substance. In his words: "So all your supplements that are made are made with either gasoline or kerosene. All the natural ones are used kerosene and all those that aren't natural that still use food or gasoline, all the others beyond that are completely synthetic, you know, fabrications, chemical fabrications."

The implication was that the word "natural" on a supplement label, rather than indicating absence of petroleum contamination, actually indicated a specific category of petroleum contamination, kerosene-based rather than gasoline-based. Neither is safe or appropriate for human consumption. Aajonus illustrated this by asking his audiences whether they would soak their fish in kerosene for 30 minutes and then rinse it off and eat it, and whether they believed the kerosene would not penetrate deep into the tissue. His answer was that this is effectively what fish oil supplement consumers are doing, because the kerosene derivative penetrates the tissue during extraction and cannot be completely removed by rinsing or finishing processes.

Aajonus was explicit that no truly raw, chemically uncontaminated fish oil exists in commercial form, and that anyone claiming to produce one is lying. The reason lies in USDA and FDA regulations governing fish oil: "Fish and cod liver oils must have all proteins removed on which bacteria can feed, according to USFDA standards. That requires heat and/or chemical processes to separate and extract proteins." Because a true raw fish oil, cloudy and foul-smelling with all the compounds the fish contained, would support bacterial life, it cannot legally be sold as a purified product. Before approximately 1981, fish oil was sold in its genuine form. Aajonus described it as "stunk, it was cloudy, it had everything that the fish had, it was like juicing fish, and it was good substance. Then they outlawed it."

After that regulatory change, all fish oil became what he called "garbage" because the only way to comply with the no-bacteria requirement was to heat-treat and solvent-treat the oil to remove all proteins. The kerosene-based solvent does the protein separation, and the heat further sterilizes the product. Two companies claimed to produce fish oils without heat or chemicals but were adding processed oils as preservatives, and Aajonus pointed out that even small amounts of those preservative oils had been heat and chemically processed, contaminating the fish oil product to an unknown degree.

His verification standard for any oil producer's claims was demanding: he required a certified written statement on the producer's letterhead saying that at no time does the oil come in contact with any chemical including chlorine and alcohol, or any heat greater than 96 degrees Fahrenheit, from ocean or lake to commercial container. He noted that distributors cannot make verifiable claims because they do not know the production details, only the producer can speak to that, and he required the chemist rather than the executive to confirm it. Any oil encapsulated in gel capsules had additionally been subjected to high temperatures during capsule sealing and absorbed chemicals from the capsule material itself.

The only fish oil Aajonus regarded as genuinely raw and usable was oil extracted at home by putting fish livers through a food processor, letting the mixture sit for a day, and spooning the oil that rose to the top. He described the cost as a fraction of commercial fish oil and noted this method could be done with seal livers as well, for those who had access to them.

Aajonus gave a detailed account of why he concluded no commercial supplement can be non-toxic. He described going to companies that claimed to make raw, natural supplements and requesting a letter stating that their laboratory did not use kerosene or kerosene derivatives to extract the product from their organic food source. In every case, the companies either refused to provide the letter or stopped responding. He stated that the only natural solvents he knew of that could dissolve and break down matter were citrus juices, vinegar, and lemon juice, and that these take weeks or months to accomplish what industrial production requires in six hours.

He extended this point to wheat germ oil and vitamin E: "You can only extract wheat germ oil and get it stabilized by solvent extraction. If you cold-press it, it gets up to 170-some degrees and destabilizes it. But you're still getting your petroleum product when you get, in distillation, when you're solvent-extracting it." He said this caused massive headaches in people and produced significant contamination, and that eating butter or cream was a more effective way to obtain vitamin E than any supplement.

The companies supplying natural supplement manufacturers with raw extracted materials routinely lied to those manufacturers, and those manufacturers in turn either lied to consumers or genuinely did not know what was in the substances they purchased. Aajonus described this as a chain of dishonesty in which only the chemist at each stage knew the truth.

Aajonus documented his discovery that petroleum-containing wax was being applied to organic produce with the knowledge and permission of certifying authorities. He described picking up produce that smelled like petroleum, confronting the store's produce department, and being shown a sign that the store was actually proud of. When a supplier contacted him in response to his complaints, and the supplier called the grower, it was confirmed that "on the organic, we're allowed to put this because this is natural wax but it's got purple in it which is, you know, 3% petroleum product."

He said that the FDA permitted up to 50% petroleum content in a wax coating while still allowing the produce to be labeled organic. His test for whether produce had been waxed was visual: "Truly organic cucumbers are dull. There's no shiny finish on them. Very flat, dull finish. Anything that's slightly shiny has been, had petroleum on it." He was working on creating a new label called "Bio-Echo-Organic" that the FDA could not control, because unlike the word "organic" which had not been trademarked when the FDA began regulating it in the 1970s, his new label would be trademarked in a way that prevented regulatory capture.

While hydrogenated oils are addressed more fully in other contexts, Aajonus consistently framed the hydrogenation process in petroleum terms. He described how plastic itself was discovered when someone fell asleep during a hydrogenation process with margarine, woke up, and found a hard plastic had formed. He stated: "You take oil, whether it's petroleum oil or vegetable oil, and you subject it to the hydrogenation process, and you have plastic."

He further noted that mineral oils, meaning oils made directly from petroleum deposits, were being hydrogenated and sold as ingredients in products including olive oil blends. He stated that 90% of all olive oil on the planet was only 10% actual olive oil and 90% hydrogenated oils, with those being "mineral oils, not even vegetable oils." Rock oil from the earth could be purified, cleaned, and hydrogenated, giving it infinite shelf life because nothing biological remained in it, and it had the same molecular structure as plastic in liquid form. He was pointing out that the oil market had collapsed the distinction between vegetable-sourced hydrogenated oils and petroleum-sourced hydrogenated oils, with both producing the same plastic molecular structure in food.

Aajonus described the transition in soap manufacturing as a direct displacement of biological raw materials by petroleum derivatives. He stated that 50 to 55 years before his talks, 100% of all soaps contained coconut cream, because it was the most effective soap base. Harvesting, growing, and processing coconuts was labor-intensive, and at some point the industry substituted petroleum-derived compounds. He demonstrated the difference by noting that if you put coconut oil on a surface and wait, it turns gray quickly, whereas safflower or other vegetable oils take a week to turn gray, illustrating the superior cleaning and denaturing activity of coconut oil compared to vegetable oils, and by implication illustrating why petroleum substitutes were chosen: they were cheaper to produce, not more effective.

He stated that "now everything is petroleum and garbage and poisonous" in the soap market, and connected this to the broader structure of an industry that prioritized marketing over health. He also noted that the cholesterol the liver produces from fat digestion includes compounds that function like soaps for the body, and that "almost all soaps are made from petroleum or fat of some sort," framing the body's own detoxification chemistry as analogous to soap-making but entirely biological.

Aajonus was emphatic that the designation "food grade" as applied to petroleum-derived solvents by the USDA and FDA carried no meaningful safety guarantee. He illustrated this with an analogy: "Just because I dilute gasoline a hundred times, let's say I've got two ounces of gasoline and I dilute it by two liters, put two liters" of water with it, the gasoline does not become safe to consume. A kerosene derivative labeled food grade by a regulatory agency is, in his view, "no more food grade than gasoline is. Diluted gasoline." The regulatory category legitimizes the substance within the commercial and legal framework but does not change its chemistry or its effects on the human body.

He made the same point about the word "natural" as applied to kerosene: "Do you know that kerosene is natural? But would you drink kerosene? Would you put it on your food, a tablespoon or two on your cereals? Well, that's what goes into manufacturing food. A kerosene derivative cleans your food. It fractionates and separates." The naturalness of a substance's origin does not determine its safety in concentrated or chemically processed form.

Aajonus addressed essential oils, including Young Living Grade A therapeutic oils, in terms that connected them to the general problem of distilled oils as radical solvents. He stated: "Essential oils are distilled oils that penetrate cell walls, even if the cells do not want it. Like any distilled oil, Young's essential oils are radical solvents, but they can help arrest heavy metals." He noted that Young himself admitted in his book that nature distills plant oils between 57 and 62 degrees Fahrenheit, whereas even Young's own oils were distilled at 257 degrees, which Aajonus said was too high and "turns it into plastic" with "a very toxic vaporous reaction."

He was not equating essential oils with petroleum directly, but he placed them in a continuum of highly processed, solvent-like oils that penetrate cellular boundaries without the cell's consent, that are produced at temperatures far above what nature uses, and that produce drying and caustic effects in the body rather than lubrication. He recommended eating flower petals early in the morning before their oils vaporized, as the only genuine alternative for someone who wanted the fragrant and therapeutic properties of plant oils without the processing.

Aajonus addressed a specific question about coconut oil shipped in plastic jugs. His answer was that rinsed plastic containers do not leach into the coconut oil unless subjected to temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius, which is 104 degrees Fahrenheit. This was a conditional clearance: if the containers remained below that temperature threshold, the rinsed plastic was not a contamination concern. Above that temperature, the plastic would begin leaching into the oil, adding another petroleum-derived contamination pathway to a product that might otherwise be clean.

Aajonus situated the pervasion of petroleum into the food supply within a specific account of industrial power. He stated that the King and Queen of England, through over 200,000 trusts, controlled the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, and associated companies, and that this network owned 70% of food production in the world, most of the world's salt production, and controlled the oil industry. He described the shift from non-petroleum-based technologies to petroleum-based ones, including a reference to a car design from the early 1900s that did not use gasoline, as part of a deliberate suppression of alternatives in favor of the petroleum economy.

He connected this to margarine directly: "The King and Queen of England were responsible for that. They were responsible for World War II. The King and Queen of England owned 70% of all" vegetable oil production, and the promotion of hydrogenated vegetable oils, which he called plastic, was part of the same industrial consolidation that put petroleum into every corner of daily life. The food company telling consumers a product is organic does not make it that; the company buys substances from chemical factories, and "those chemical companies lie to those manufacturers," continuing the chain of deception downward.

Aajonus noted one specific physiological effect that petroleum-contaminated supplements produced which gave consumers a false impression of benefit: adrenaline stimulation. When asked whether there was any benefit to consuming supplements processed with kerosene or petroleum derivatives, he acknowledged: "There is toxic benefit. You will get your adrenaline going, you know, because you are putting toxicity in your body, and your adrenaline will make" you feel activated or energized. This adrenaline response was a stress reaction to ingested toxicity, not a nutritional benefit, but it was sufficient to make people feel that the supplement was "working," creating a feedback loop that sustained demand for products that were, in his view, harmful.

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