Pinworms

The most detailed account Aajonus gave of direct pinworm ingestion involved a piece of salmon he retrieved from a fish market garbage can after a forty-two day fast, on a Sunday night when no food sources were open. Starving, he ate approximately one pound of the salmon outside near the garbage can in the dark. He found the salmon visually appealing by moonlight and did not initially notice anything unusual. When he brought the remaining portion home and unwrapped it, he saw that the flesh was inundated with pinworms, some of them large enough that when they stiffened they became rigid like a needle or a pin. The fish was undulating visibly with their movement.

Rather than discarding the food, he ate the rest of it the following day, watching the worms move through the flesh. He estimated he consumed a couple thousand live pinworms along with what he described as tens of thousands of their eggs. In some tellings of this story he revised the egg count upward to hundreds of thousands or even five to ten million eggs. Across multiple retellings, the core facts remain consistent: he ate large quantities of pinworms and eggs from garbage-sourced salmon, he was aware of what he was doing, and he treated it as a deliberate test.

Following this consumption, Aajonus had his feces, urine, and blood tested approximately every ten days for six weeks, and in some accounts every week for ten weeks, and in other accounts once every ten weeks for six months. The first two tests were done more frequently because he wanted to be certain. Not a single pinworm, egg, or trace of pinworm infection appeared in any of those samples. He also noted that in one iteration of his testing, he had cerebrospinal fluid tapped from his upper vertebrae near the brainstem specifically to check for signs of pinworm migration to the brain, and that too returned negative.

The incident occurred in approximately 1979 or 1980 to 1981, at a time when Aajonus was, by his own account, seriously ill. He had already undergone a vagotomy, a surgical severing of the vagus nerve that eliminated his stomach's capacity to produce hydrochloric acid. Medical authorities had told him that without hydrochloric acid he would certainly become infected with parasites if he ate any raw food, because hydrochloric acid was considered the primary barrier against parasitic infection. His failure to acquire any pinworm despite this surgically induced absence of hydrochloric acid was, in his view, decisive evidence that the entire hydrochloric acid theory was false.

Aajonus's explanation for why he and his laboratory animals never acquired pinworms from eating pinworm-infested meat rested on his broader theory of parasitic ecology. He held that a parasite from one type of animal does not automatically live in another animal, and that parasites only establish themselves in a host body when the internal conditions of that body create an environment the parasite requires. Pinworms appear in chickens fed processed pellet food because the damage that diet does to the intestinal wall creates exactly the kind of degraded cellular matter the pinworm exists to consume. A human or animal eating a clean, raw, high-protein diet does not present that environment, and so the pinworm has nothing to work with and does not colonize.

He extended this argument by noting that even when he deliberately fed parasite-infested meat to sick laboratory animals in a controlled experiment, none of those animals acquired parasites from the food. All of them actually became healthier over the ten-week period of being fed parasitic meat. He described hiring a laboratory in the valley, using very sickly animals, and feeding them parasite-infested meat for ten weeks with zero parasitic transmission occurring.

Aajonus described chickens raised on commercial processed feed as having a high rate of pinworm infestation in their intestines. The feed those birds receive, which he named as throwoff and byproduct from companies like Purina and General Mills, is entirely cooked, entirely denatured, and high in processed carbohydrates and sugars. This diet damages the intestinal walls of the birds, leaving behind large quantities of toxic, dead, or degraded cells. The pinworms move in to consume this material. Aajonus was explicit that the pinworms are not tearing the bird apart, not killing the bird, and not eating healthy intestinal tissue. They are eating the damaged refuse that the processed diet has deposited in the intestinal trough, performing a janitorial function, attempting to preserve the bird's digestive tract by clearing what the bird's own biology cannot properly manage.

He pointed out that consumers never see this because poultry processors remove and discard the intestines before the meat reaches the market. The pinworm infestation is hidden from view by standard processing.

He conducted a specific experiment to test whether pinworms transfer between chickens. He took a pinworm from one infected chicken and introduced it to another chicken of the same species. The transferred pinworm did not propagate. It did not multiply. However, when he placed a chicken on the same toxic processed diet that the original infected chicken had been eating, that chicken began producing pinworms on its own. His conclusion was that the pinworms did not come from an external source at all but arose from the bird's own cellular material. He held that every cell in every animal body contains the genetic memory and biological properties necessary to generate parasitic organisms when conditions call for it, and that this is the mechanism by which parasites arise even in apparently isolated environments.

Aajonus described pinworms as remarkable physical creatures. In their normal state they are soft and motile, undulating through flesh and moving visibly. But when handled or disturbed, they straighten and harden, becoming rigid like a pin or a needle. He noted that if you grab one, it will stiffen and become sharp enough to puncture skin. He called them amazing creatures in this respect.

Because Aajonus had undergone a vagotomy, he produced no hydrochloric acid in his stomach. This made him an extreme case for testing the conventional claim that stomach acid is what protects humans from parasitic infection. He ate thousands of pinworms and millions of their eggs across multiple incidents over years, had himself tested comprehensively and repeatedly, and never once developed a pinworm infection. He described the hydrochloric acid theory of parasite protection as "absolute horseshit" and characterized it as deliberate fear-mongering designed to prevent people from eating raw foods. His thirteen years of eating raw meat without a single parasitic infection, despite having no hydrochloric acid, formed what he considered an irrefutable personal demonstration of the theory's falsity.

Aajonus placed pinworms within a broader classification of parasites he considered beneficial. He distinguished between digestive parasites, which assist with breaking down food, and janitorial parasites, which consume damaged tissue at a rapid rate. Pinworms fall into the janitorial category when they appear in animals eating processed foods, eating the degraded intestinal material that the diet has produced. They are distinguished from tapeworms, which he associated specifically with excess carbohydrate consumption and which he worked for years to intentionally acquire, and from whipworms (trichinosis), which he described as the parasite most native to human intestinal ecology and most beneficial to digestion.

He contrasted his inability to acquire pinworms deliberately with the effort it eventually took to acquire a tapeworm. Despite eating mass quantities of pinworms and their eggs, he never became infected. This was not a failure in his view but a demonstration that a body eating correctly creates no habitat for them.

Aajonus referenced an episode of Ripley's Believe It or Not as public evidence of his eating practices. He cited the episode as having aired first on July 17, 2001 or July 17, 2002 depending on the telling, and stated that anyone who watched it and saw what he ate would have no remaining fear of raw foods or parasites.