Pituitary Gland

The core of Aajonus's understanding of the pituitary is that it is not a gland the body should be using under normal, healthy, well-fed conditions. He stated repeatedly and in multiple contexts that in healthy animals eating their natural raw diet, pituitary hormone is absent from the blood or present only in trace amounts. He framed this as evidence against the pharmaceutical and medical industry's claim that measurable hormone levels in the blood indicate the body is functioning correctly, or that low hormone levels require supplementation.

His reasoning was direct: if a healthy wild animal on its natural diet shows no pituitary hormone in blood, neurological fluid, or lymph, then detectable pituitary hormone in blood is a sign of abnormal conditions, not a marker of health. The pharmaceutical industry, he argued, inverts this logic by establishing "normal" hormone ranges based on populations that are already eating poorly and living in toxic environments, then prescribing hormones to bring people up to those abnormal baselines.

Every scenario he described in which pituitary hormone becomes elevated is an emergency scenario. A forest fire destroys the food supply for hundreds of miles. A volcano wipes out animal populations. A drought eliminates the livestock that tribal peoples depend on. A child is injured and nutrients divert toward repair. A family is attacked and normal feeding is disrupted. In each case, growth cannot proceed normally because the dietary substrates that fuel cellular reproduction and stem cell activity are absent or compromised. The pituitary then secretes growth hormones to sustain at least some degree of cellular production, even under starvation or malnutrition conditions.

Aajonus described the pituitary's function as enabling rapid cellular production and growth during emergency conditions, specifically when proper animal foods are unavailable. He was careful to note that pituitary-driven growth does not mean healthy growth. The cells produced under pituitary stimulation will be of a quality dictated by the diet available. The pituitary enables the architecture of growth, not the quality of it.

He stated that the pituitary secretes hormones that allow the body to utilize whatever nutrients are available as building blocks for growth. In conditions of severe nutritional deficit, such as a tribe surviving on nuts, grains, grubs, and vegetation after a catastrophe, the pituitary hormones would help children continue growing by drawing on the body's internal resources, even at the cost of enzyme and vitamin depletion. He noted that such people could catch up on those deficiencies later when food supply improved.

Beyond growth in the strict sense, Aajonus also described the pituitary as involved in keeping the nervous system functioning during sleep and wakefulness. He said it is "involved in keeping the nervous system going all the time, sleeping or otherwise," which distinguishes it from some other endocrine glands that are more strictly activated by acute emergencies like injury or predator attack.

He also categorized the pituitary as part of what he called the psychological and neurological glands of the brain. When he described mental glands as a category, he listed pituitary and pineal as handling psychological and neurological hormone activity and brain function, in contrast to adrenal glands, which handle physical energy levels, and the thyroid and parathyroid, which regulate chemistry between the neurological and physiological systems.

One of Aajonus's more specific departures from standard medical understanding was his insistence that growth hormones are not primarily produced by the pituitary. He stated clearly that the main location of growth hormones and stem cells in the body is the bone marrow, not the pituitary. The pituitary, in his framework, is a secondary or emergency source that activates when the primary system is insufficient.

He described each individual healthy cell as carrying its own growth hormone. When a healthy cell divides, it uses its own internally produced hormone to grow. This is the normal mode of cellular reproduction under proper dietary conditions. The pituitary only becomes a significant contributor when the cellular machinery is compromised, either by toxic load, poor diet, starvation, or injury, and the cells can no longer sustain their own growth chemistry.

He also noted that stem cells in the bone marrow constitute the primary supply of growth-related activity, and that the pituitary is better understood as a hormonal override for situations where that primary system is overwhelmed or under-resourced.

Aajonus addressed what happens to pituitary activity across different life stages and under different dietary conditions. In humans eating conventional cooked diets, pituitary-driven growth hormone production tends to decline sharply around age 21. He observed that in wild animals eating raw natural diets, this decline does not occur in the same way. The pituitary reduces output, but does not stop producing growth hormones the way it does in humans on degraded diets.

He used cats and dogs eating processed kibble and canned food as a comparative example, noting that by age two, such animals have almost completely stopped producing growth hormones from the pituitary, mirroring what happens to humans in their early twenties. Animals fed raw meat, raw bone, and raw milk, by contrast, show no detectable pituitary hormone even in trace amounts, but they continue to produce growth hormones normally through their cells and bone marrow throughout life.

He observed that on a raw food diet, pituitary function continues throughout life, not just until early adulthood. He said explicitly: "If I eat properly, I can put 50 pounds on" at his age, attributing this to continued pituitary and cellular growth hormone function. He also cited wild Eskimos he encountered in the 1970s, who lived on approximately 92 to 95% animal matter year-round, as examples of people maintaining high cellular vitality throughout life, with approximately 90% of their cells alive at any given time, a ratio he said is normal for a newborn but lost early in people eating cooked and processed food.

He gave a specific example from African pastoral tribes, particularly the Fulani, the Samburu, and the Masai, who eat diets of 60 to 95% raw dairy products. He reported that in these tribes, growth hormones remain at high levels and pituitary function continues until age 22 to 25 years old, which he described as substantially better maintained than in people eating industrial diets, though still declining earlier than in wild animal populations.

Aajonus described conducting experiments in which he removed the pituitaries from live animals, including at least one African herbivore and what appear to have been domestic animals such as dogs or cats. His findings were consistent across these experiments: removal of the pituitary caused no harm as long as the animals were fed raw meat or their natural raw diet. Growth continued normally. Blood tests, neurological fluid, and lymph showed no trace of pituitary hormone, yet the animals developed without disruption.

The effect only became apparent when the animals were switched to a bad diet, specifically cooked or processed food. At that point, without the pituitary to compensate, the animals began losing growth factors and experiencing difficulty. Aajonus interpreted this as confirming his framework: the pituitary is a backup system that the body calls on when diet fails to supply the conditions for normal growth. A well-fed animal on raw food does not need the pituitary at all; a poorly-fed animal needs it desperately.

He also described removing the pituitary from adolescent animals placed on a bad diet, reporting that growth stops in those circumstances. This formed part of his reasoning about when the pituitary is essential versus when it is irrelevant. For a healthy adult animal on a good diet, the pituitary is effectively unnecessary. For a growing young animal eating degraded food, it becomes critical.

Aajonus described specific timing observations from his animal experiments regarding how quickly the pituitary activates during food deprivation. For a small young dog, significant pituitary secretions appeared in the blood after approximately two to three hours of starvation. For a small young cat, the onset was approximately two hours. He noted that in young developing animals specifically, pituitary secretion ramps up relatively quickly to sustain bodily development even through starvation.

He qualified these observations by noting that pituitary hormones in a starvation scenario can sustain growth for a limited period. He estimated this period at approximately six months for a human before the pituitary hormones become insufficient to do much. So the pituitary buys time, not indefinite growth capacity. Beyond that window, the body would need proper food to resume normal growth and repair.

He also noted that in this starvation-compensation scenario, the cells consuming themselves to support the growth that pituitary hormones enable are effectively cannibalizing internal resources. The organism can continue to develop in terms of structure, but the cells being produced will not be of good quality, and enzyme and vitamin reserves will be depleted in the process.

Aajonus described the biochemical composition of hormones in general, and this applies directly to pituitary growth hormones. He stated that hormones are approximately 60% fat, approximately 30 to 35% protein, and about 5% carbohydrate or pyruvate at maximum. This composition is why he connected hormonal health so directly to dietary fat intake. Without sufficient dietary fat, especially animal fat, the body cannot manufacture hormones in adequate quantities.

He noted that when the body is low on fats, it may begin consuming its own hormones for fuel. Skinny athletes eating poor diets, he observed, sometimes maintain apparent vitality and energy by running on their own hormone reserves rather than dietary fat, which he described as essentially running on a drug-like internal supply that degrades the glands over time. Hormones used as fuel rather than for their emergency signaling function represent a depletion of the system.

He framed this as another reason the pharmaceutical industry's hormone supplementation is misguided: if the patient is simply not eating enough dietary fat, the solution is fat, not exogenous hormones. Supplementing hormones while the body is still unable to produce or retain its own, due to fat deficiency, does not address the root problem.

Aajonus described a specific and unfortunate application of the pituitary's emergency function in modern children eating conventional diets. Because children eating processed, chemical-laden foods cannot rely on the normal bacterial and cellular mechanisms for growth, their bodies are forced to use the pituitary as a primary rather than emergency growth system. He stated that children on poisoned foods depend on the pituitary for their growth hormones precisely because the bacteria that would normally support cellular development are destroyed by the toxins in the food and environment.

He contrasted this with tribal children in healthy communities, where growth proceeds through bacterial activity and cellular growth hormone production, and the pituitary is not significantly activated. In modern industrialized children, the pituitary is chronically engaged to compensate for what diet and environment have made impossible to achieve through normal means.

Aajonus referenced two individuals whose pituitaries were not functioning. Both were extremely underweight men. One was 5 feet 9 inches and weighed 110 pounds. After being placed on the raw diet, this individual gained 28 pounds and then stopped gaining. The other gained 13 pounds and stopped. Aajonus presented these as edge cases within his clinical observations, noting they were two out of approximately 11,000 people he had seen over roughly 30 years, making a non-functioning pituitary a rare but real finding.

He did not elaborate on the mechanism by which a non-functioning pituitary limits weight gain in the context of a raw diet, but the implication is that without pituitary emergency growth hormone activity as a supplement to the cellular and bone marrow systems, the body reaches an equilibrium that is lower than it would be with a functioning pituitary.

Aajonus placed the pituitary within the endocrine gland system as the growth-regulating member, in the same way that the adrenals handle fight-or-flight, the thyroid and parathyroids handle heart and lung emergency function, the thymus handles intestinal emergencies and toxic insults, and the gonads handle procreation. Each gland has a specific emergency domain. The pituitary's domain is growth under compromised dietary conditions.

He acknowledged the medical claim that the pituitary regulates all other glands, and he partly agreed with this insofar as one hormone produced by one gland can affect the output of another. However, he argued that this inter-glandular signaling represents abnormal emergency cross-talk rather than normal healthy operation. In a healthy body on a proper diet, these glands should not be communicating urgently with one another because none of them should be significantly activated.

He listed the endocrine glands as: pituitary, pineal, thyroid, parathyroids, thymus, adrenal glands, and gonads. All of them share the same fundamental design principle in his framework: they exist to respond to emergencies, not to run the body's daily operations.

Aajonus was consistently critical of the pharmaceutical and medical framing of pituitary function. He argued that doctors who tell patients they have "low pituitary" or "low growth hormones" are interpreting an absence of emergency hormones as a deficiency, when in fact the absence of those hormones in a healthy person is exactly what should be expected. He said explicitly: "First of all, you're not supposed to have any glandular hormones in your blood when you're natural and level and healthy."

He described the pharmaceutical industry as establishing hormone ranges based on sick and toxic populations, then using those ranges as reference points against which individual patients are measured and found deficient. This generates a market for hormone replacement products that the industry profits from enormously, in his assessment, without addressing the actual cause of the dysfunction, which is diet quality and toxic load.

He also argued that because hormones are almost 60% fat, the body may begin using its own hormones as a substitute fuel source when dietary fats are insufficient. This means a person eating a low-fat or fat-deficient diet will systematically deplete their hormonal reserves, show up on tests as hormonally low, and then be prescribed exogenous hormones that do not resolve the underlying fat deficiency.

Aajonus was specific about what supports normal pituitary function and growth hormone production. The foundation is raw animal food, particularly raw meat, raw dairy, and raw fats. He said the pituitary "produces growth hormones all the time as long as it's getting the proper fats and proteins." He noted that hormones are 60% fat and 30 to 35% protein, making those dietary categories essential for hormone synthesis.

He observed that frozen glands suffer damage, noting that extremely low temperatures damage glandular tissue and that eating frozen gland does not help as much as eating it fresh. This suggests he considered raw glandular foods a relevant support for rebuilding glandular function, including pituitary function.

He described a gland shake he made from a deer he had hunted, blending brain, adrenal glands, ovaries, thyroid, thymus, pancreas, and lung together with raw milk and honey. He reported experiencing sustained energy and sexual vitality from this preparation, which he described as demonstrating the potency of raw glandular tissue. While this was not a pituitary-specific formulation, it reflects his general approach to supporting glandular function through raw glandular consumption.

For individuals looking to gain weight and build mass, he described a protocol involving a pound of raw meat twice daily with a lubrication formula after each meal, along with milkshakes made from raw eggs, raw milk, cheese, and honey. He reported a case in which a man using this approach gained four inches on his arms and six and a half inches on his chest in two and a half months without steroids, attributing this to the pituitary and cellular growth hormone response to proper raw animal nutrition.

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