Probiotics

The most specific and damaging claim Aajonus made about commercial probiotics concerned how digestive enzymes and probiotic preparations are manufactured. He stated directly that products like bromelain and papain extracted from papaya and pineapple are dissolved in kerosene for two to four days as part of the extraction process, leaving kerosene residue inside the final supplement. He extended this same observation to commercial acidophilus and other probiotic preparations: "Same thing with the probiotics that they offer? Absolutely. All that acidophilus? All of it's treated."

The consequence he described was not merely reduced effectiveness but active toxicity. Kerosene is a solvent that destroys tissue at the cellular level. He compared it to putting gasoline on the skin, where it dissolves and kills cells. Internally, he said, it contracts the adrenal glands and poisons the body. The economics driving this practice were explained plainly: to extract nutrients or bacterial cultures in concentrations sufficient to be commercially viable and profitably produced, manufacturers have to use industrial solvents. Without them, Aajonus said, the cost per unit would be so high that the product would be economically impossible. He gave a specific example of a company that approached him wanting to produce a probiotic supplement without solvent extraction, and calculated that to do it properly would require charging a thousand dollars per pill, at which point the company abandoned the project. This price point makes it impossible to manufacture real probiotics at commercial scale, meaning everything currently on the market reflects the compromised process, not the ideal one.

Beyond the solvent issue, Aajonus addressed the heat sensitivity of probiotics extensively. Many commercial probiotic preparations are derived from soil bacteria, what he sometimes called HSOs (homeostatic soil organisms), and he specified precise temperature thresholds at which their value degrades.

He stated that probiotics made from soil bacteria are barely effective when processed and pressed into pills. In powdered form they retain some effectiveness, but only if they were not heated above 92 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celsius) during the drying process. Above that temperature, most soil organisms are altered and eventually killed. He specified that probiotics would be more effective if sun-dried below 82 degrees Fahrenheit (28 degrees Celsius). And the most effective state is fresh and alive in moist dirt or clay, meaning the further removed a probiotic preparation is from that living, moist, ambient-temperature state, the less effective it becomes.

For compost-derived probiotics, he added another caveat: plastic-covered or plastic-contained compost piles can reach temperatures up to 168 degrees Fahrenheit (76 degrees Celsius), at which point most soil microbes are killed. This rules out many composting operations as sources of living probiotics. The plastic containment itself is part of the problem because it traps heat.

He also addressed the HSO category specifically. When someone asked whether HSOs were an exception to his critique of commercial probiotics, his answer was unambiguous: no. He held that even soil-organism preparations fail because they need both an acidic environment and animal tissue in order to grow and remain active. When rain lowers probiotic activity in soil by diluting acidity, the organisms decline. The same principle applies to consuming them: if taken with water, the bacteria are simply washed through the system. He said, "If you have it with water you're just going to destroy the probiotic activity. So you're just going to be washing most of it out of your system." To be effective, any probiotic must be taken with meat, something with proteins and fats that bacteria can actually feed on and grow on.

A related argument Aajonus made concerned the nutritional substrate that bacteria require. He was asked what bacteria in soil live on, and he answered that they live on proteins, specifically worm casings (worm feces), not on sugars or simple carbohydrates. This has direct implications for probiotic supplementation: you cannot activate or sustain soil bacteria in the human intestine by taking a pill with a glass of water or eating it with fruit or vegetables. The bacteria need animal protein and fat to survive, proliferate, and do their work. Without that substrate, even a partially viable probiotic preparation will fail to establish or persist.

He applied this thinking to commercial acidophilus as well, though the specific substrate argument was made most explicitly in the context of soil organisms. The broader principle holds: bacteria are living organisms with specific environmental requirements, and processing them, pressing them into pills, and consuming them in contexts that do not supply what they need to grow means the commercial probiotic enterprise is fighting against biology on every level simultaneously.

Aajonus was particularly dismissive of the intellectual framework underlying commercial probiotic development. He contrasted people who worked from theory, meaning researchers and supplement formulators who constructed logical arguments about what bacteria should do in the gut, with people who worked from observed practice. His assessment of the former was blunt: "I don't care what they say. They're all theoretical. They don't do anything from practice. They get this into this theoretic bullshit."

This was not merely rhetorical dismissal. He was pointing to a structural problem: the researchers and formulators developing commercial probiotics are operating within a paradigm that treats bacteria as either beneficial supplements or pathogenic threats, depending on the strain, and that seeks to isolate, concentrate, stabilize, and deliver specific strains. But his empirical framework held that this entire approach misunderstands what bacteria are and how they function. You cannot separate one strain, process it with industrial chemicals, kill most of it with heat, press it into a pill, and then expect it to restore the living bacterial ecology of a human intestine. The system is too complex, too living, and too dependent on environmental conditions that the pill form cannot replicate.

Despite his broad rejection of commercial probiotics, Aajonus did make one exception in the workshop transcripts. He mentioned a probiotics company based in Florida, run by a man named Reuben, whose soil bacteria preparations he found valuable enough to recommend in at least one case involving a person with a mismatch of molds in their system (from cooked food, antibiotic exposure, and childhood pharmaceutical interventions). He described the preparation as containing soil bacteria that he thought would help knock out the molds. He declined to give the company's name in the transcript itself, instead directing the person to call him directly for that information. This represents the only instance in the source material where he acknowledged a commercial probiotic product as potentially useful, and even here the recommendation was case-specific and handled outside the public record.

Because Aajonus rejected commercial probiotics so thoroughly, his framework offers multiple real alternatives that he considered superior on every practical and biological measure.

High meat, meaning raw animal flesh that has been allowed to ferment and develop high concentrations of bacteria through a controlled aging process, was one of the primary real probiotics he recommended. The bacteria in high meat are alive, unprocessed, in a form the human digestive tract can directly use, and embedded in the animal protein matrix that supports bacterial activity.

The fermented bowel of an animal with its contents intact was described as "a true probiotic" that "works 100 times better than any probiotic supplement on the market." He suggested this for serious conditions including psychotropic illness, seemingly irreversible cancers, and severe indigestion with non-assimilation and malabsorption.

Personalized kefir made by adding a teaspoon of one's own saliva to a quart of raw milk was presented as a probiotic perfectly designed for the individual body, containing the exact bacterial strains native to that person. He contrasted this explicitly with commercial kefir grains or yogurt cultures, which use rennet or bacterial strains from other animals that are suited to those animals, not to humans.

Terramin clay, pre-soaked for at least four days in slightly fermented warm milk, was described as generating good bacteria for digestion and as a practical alternative to commercial probiotics for people with poor intestinal microbe populations. The preparation protocol specified: four ounces of Terramin clay into a glass jar with five ounces of good mineral water bottled in glass (not plastic), loosely lidded, left for four to five days in a dark cupboard, stirred before each use. If using naturally carbonated water, the carbonation must first be removed because it destroys microbes; this is done by shaking the water in a jar until all bubbles are gone. Clay in this preparation was described not only as a probiotic vehicle but as something that provides bacteria with properties that only exist in that shape-shifting, stem-cell-like substance.

Eating dirt and clay directly, as naturally living animals do, was his most elemental recommendation for people needing to repopulate intestinal microbes. Animals eat lots of dirt with everything they eat, ingesting soil microbes continuously. People who grow earthworms and eat the black rich soil in which they are grown were cited as practicing exactly this principle.

Sauerkraut was addressed specifically and qualified carefully: it is an acid but a vegetable acid, and as such it tends to wipe out putrefactive bacteria that the body uses to digest meats and animal products. He said it is not appropriate for people eating a carnivore-heavy Primal Diet. It may help people who eat primarily cooked foods, cooked vegetables, and cooked grains, because it replaces some enzymes and provides digestive acids suited to that type of food. But for someone on a meat-centered Primal Diet, sauerkraut as a probiotic is counterproductive.

Aajonus consistently placed his critique of commercial probiotics within his larger analysis of the pharmaceutical and food-processing industries. These industries profit by convincing people that bacteria are dangerous and that only processed, bacteria-free food is safe. The commercial probiotic industry occupies a peculiar but coherent position within this system: it simultaneously acknowledges that bacteria are useful (in order to sell a product) while having been built on manufacturing methods that destroy or compromise the bacteria being sold.

He pointed to the bills moving through legislatures that he was actively fighting at the time of these seminars, bills that would classify food without bacteria as the safe standard, effectively eliminating organic food's biological complexity in favor of sterile, pathogen-free, shelf-stable processed goods. In that context, even the concept of a probiotic supplement is a concession to a framework that has already accepted the elimination of living bacteria from food as the norm and is now trying to add it back in a controlled, commercialized, processed form. His position was that the original living food, eaten in its raw state with all its native bacteria intact, is not a probiotic. It is simply food. The word probiotic only becomes necessary once you have accepted that killing bacteria in food is normal.

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