Raw Vegan Diet

Aajonus's trajectory into raw veganism began following a vagotomy, a stomach surgery that severed his vagus nerve and eliminated his ability to secrete hydrochloric acid. After that surgery, eating any form of cooked meat caused a severe systemic reaction. His skin would erupt in boils and pustules from his scalp down to his knees, described on one occasion by a friend as looking like raw hamburger. Because raw meat was being treated by his body the same way as cooked meat at that point, he concluded he could not eat meat at all, and the fear that bacteria and parasites in raw meat would kill him, reinforced by his surgeons' warnings, made him deeply averse to it.

He began as a raw lacto-ovo vegetarian in February 1972, eating raw eggs and raw dairy. Then, influenced by vegetarian and vegan travelers he encountered on his bicycle journey through Mexico, the Yucatan, across the United States, and up to Alaska, he stopped eating dairy and eggs and became a complete raw food vegan. He described this as a slide toward being a fruitarian, eating primarily fruits, avocados, nuts, and vegetables. He noted that the sugar in fruit gave him some energy coming from a state of extreme depletion, but that over the years the deterioration mounted.

After approximately six and a half years on this diet, he was at 113 pounds, skeletal, and had developed bone cancer. He also noted that his long fruitarian period had progressively destroyed his ability to digest properly, leaving him with almost no enzymes for anything more complex than simple sugars. During the time he lived with the Inuit in Alaska in September of that period, he was becoming weaker and weaker as the cold approached. The Eskimos, among multiple tribal groups he had visited including the Yaqui in northern Mexico, the Mayans in the Yucatan, and the Sioux in South Dakota, all told him directly to eat raw meat. He refused for a long time. He eventually ate fermented meat that had been wrapped and buried by the Inuit, and within roughly 24 hours his condition began to improve.

He described his later shift completely away from the raw vegan framework and into the Primal Diet, including raw meat, raw dairy, and raw eggs, as the resolution of all his major disease conditions, reversing bone cancer and multiple other diagnoses he had accumulated.

Aajonus's explanation for why raw veganism fails most people is grounded in his understanding of human digestive anatomy and biochemistry. He drew a clear distinction between herbivores and humans. Herbivorous animals have two to four stomachs, digestion taking 48 hours, and approximately 60,000 times more enzymes than humans to break down the cellulose molecule in plant matter. Humans have none of that. Less than half the enzymatic and digestive capacity of herbivores is present in the human gut.

When a human eats raw vegetables, those vegetables are alkaline. Ninety percent of human digestive bacteria and ninety percent of human digestive juices are acidic. When alkaline plant matter moves through the digestive system, it neutralizes the acidic bacteria and the acidic digestive fluids. By the time the partially undigested vegetable matter reaches the sigmoid colon, it has not been properly broken down, and the acidic environment required to digest denser foods like meat has been disrupted. This is why, in his observation, people who eat meat alongside raw vegetables stop digesting the meat properly within a few days. Lawrence, a client he referenced in this context, ate raw meat well for a few days but then stopped digesting it because he was consuming vegetables alongside it and did not understand why.

He also pointed out that the longer a person remains on a fruitarian or vegan diet, the fewer enzymes of a complex nature they develop, because the diet demands so little of the digestive system. This creates a compounding deficiency: the body loses the capacity to produce the enzymatic output required for more complex foods, so the person is eventually reduced to eating mono meals and cannot tolerate combinations. When these individuals attempt to add protein back, they often struggle initially, but once proper protein is reintroduced the digestive capacity begins to recover and more combinations become possible again.

From a nutritional standpoint, the raw vegan diet cannot, for most people, deliver adequate protein or fat in bioavailable form. Aajonus noted that vegetables contain the proteins and fats that herbivores can access using their specialized anaerobic bacteria, multiple stomachs, and vastly superior enzymatic output, but that the human body cannot replicate that process. The protein available in grains, beans, nuts, and vegetables is therefore largely inaccessible to the human digestive system in the forms and quantities needed for tissue regeneration. The vegetarian argument that humans can get complete protein by combining different plant foods he dismissed as "chemistry nonsense" that does not work in practice on 99 percent of people who try it.

He also addressed vegetable oils in the context of veganism. In a herbivore with a body temperature of 101 to 105 degrees Fahrenheit and specialized anaerobic bacteria, vegetable oils remain fluid and useful. In the human body, which runs at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit and lacks those bacteria, vegetable oils that become part of the cell structure begin to crystallize and dehydrate, causing hardening of tissue. This does not happen in herbivores but does happen in humans, making vegetable oils physiologically incompatible with the human cellular environment in ways that animal fats are not.

Over his career observing more than 2,300 vegetarians and vegans, Aajonus identified only 8 who he considered genuinely healthy on a vegetarian diet. He referenced this figure repeatedly as a way of establishing the scale of the failure rate: 8 out of 2,300 is not a viable model to hold up as a template for human health. Of the 8, he noted that 7 were women and one was a woman. One of the women he described saw her spine begin to dissolve at around 36 years old despite having managed relatively well until then. One was an elderly male raw food hygienist and fruitarian of 52 years who had heckled Aajonus at conventions, insisting meat was unnecessary, but whose spine began deteriorating around age 76. He then began eating raw meat and raw dairy to reverse it.

The physiological explanation Aajonus offered for why these 8 were able to maintain health longer than most was that they had extremely high adrenal, thyroid, and testosterone levels. This elevated hormonal output gave them the capacity to handle the toxicity and nutritional inadequacy that resulted from the vegetarian approach. It was not that the diet was sufficient; it was that their particular physiological profile provided a buffer that most people lack.

He was explicit that even this small group eventually reached a point of deterioration, with the timeline varying based on the individual's constitution. Most people, he observed, cannot sustain a pure vegetarian diet for more than two and a half to three years before hitting a wall where the diet simply cannot sustain them any further.

Aajonus acknowledged that some people do experience real improvements when transitioning to a raw vegan diet, at least initially. His explanation for this is specific. When a person stops eating highly processed, cooked, and chemically contaminated food and replaces it with raw, living food, they remove a large burden of industrial toxins from their intake and simultaneously begin consuming food that contains living enzymes and more intact nutrients. The body, relieved of that toxic load and supplied with more bioavailable nutrition than before, can show significant recovery. There is more life in the food, and for people coming from a heavily processed diet, even the limitations of raw veganism represent an improvement.

But he characterized this benefit as temporary rather than foundational. The body's initial recovery draws on reserves, and as those reserves are depleted without adequate protein and fat to replenish them, deterioration sets in. He described the trajectory as: stop the poisoning, improve briefly, then begin a slower but steady decline. He referenced a community he visited in Hawaii that had been vegan and was eating approximately 60 percent sweet fruit. Many of them had staph infections, sores all over their bodies, and other signs of systemic breakdown despite living in a warm, jungle environment. A few of them transitioned to the Primal Diet and within six months showed complete transformation. Within two years, three communities had shifted from the vegan or Instincto diet to the Primal Diet after witnessing those results.

The claim that vegetarians get adequate protein from nuts, grains, fruits, and vegetables was something Aajonus addressed in detail. His argument was that the comparison only holds for herbivores, which have the biological machinery to extract and utilize protein from those sources. Humans do not. When protein is cooked it becomes somewhat more digestible in the sense that cooking breaks down some barriers, but the resulting protein is degraded in quality and form. When protein from plant sources is raw, it is largely locked behind cellulose that the human body cannot break down, so it remains inaccessible.

He noted that fruitarian and vegetarian people have very little protein, which means they develop very few enzymes of a complex or specialized nature. This creates a feedback loop: less protein means fewer enzymes, fewer enzymes means less ability to digest anything complex, which means less nutrition available from whatever is eaten. The system degrades progressively the longer the person maintains the diet.

He also pointed to the behavior of vegetarians and vegans as evidence of chronic unsatisfied hunger. In his observation, vegetarians have uncontrollable cravings, nothing ever fully satisfies their hunger, and they frequently break their dietary rules in ways that are not conscious choices but physiological drives. They consume processed cheeses, foods they have declared off-limits, and other items not because of weakness of will but because their bodies are screaming for nutrients the diet cannot supply. He framed this as proof that the body knows what it needs even when the mind has adopted an ideological framework that prohibits those foods.

Aajonus observed that veganism is often framed as a more spiritual or morally elevated way of living, with the claim being that refusing to eat animals demonstrates a higher consciousness or compassion. He engaged with this directly and disagreed with it. He said he observed less spirituality in vegans and vegetarians than in people who ate animal foods, noting that they frequently "foam at the mouth," become heated in discussions, and have great difficulty accepting differences. He contrasted this with what he described as honest, humble behavior, using the Dalai Lama as an example of someone who eventually began eating raw meat out of medical necessity, acknowledged it publicly as medicine, and told others that many people need it.

He also described his own earlier ideological commitment to veganism, in which he "stretched and contorted what foods were truly raw, trying to force reality to conform to my adopted concepts of vegetarianism and veganism." He described this as irrational belief rather than empirically grounded understanding, and said he had accepted false information about human digestive tracts being more alkaline like other primates and herbivores, which was not accurate.

He took a particularly critical position on prominent raw vegan advocates who he said were privately consuming raw dairy and raw meat while continuing to publicly promote veganism and sell superfood products to followers. He framed this as both a commercial decision and a failure of integrity, contrasting it unfavorably with figures like the Dalai Lama, who was forthright about what he had to eat.

In the context of raw veganism, Aajonus specifically identified soy as a serious additional hazard. He noted that soy protein extract requires a solvent, specifically a petroleum-derived product, to process, since there is no water-based extraction method for soybeans. This means the protein in soy products is solvent-extracted, and those solvents do not simply dissolve isolated problem tissue. They dissolve tissue broadly throughout the body. He described this as a scenario where the solvent extracted from soy would not only break down targeted material like warts but would also dissolve good tissue throughout the body. A raw vegan diet that includes soy would, in his framework, carry this specific hazard on top of the general inadequacies of the diet.

One of the most specific physical consequences Aajonus associated with long-term raw veganism was deterioration of bone and skeletal tissue. He identified this in his own case, noting that after six and a half years on a raw food vegetarian and fruitarian diet, it started decomposing his bone and other tissue. He referenced multiple vegetarians he observed whose spines began dissolving. The elderly raw food hygienist whose spine began deteriorating at 76 after 52 years on the diet, the woman who began losing spinal integrity at 36, and Aajonus's own bone cancer diagnosis during his fruitarian period all point in this direction. He also noted that a prominent raw vegan advocate's dietary approach "disintegrates your bones" and "deteriorates" the body.

The explanation within his framework is that bone regeneration requires raw protein and raw fat together, particularly raw meat paired with raw fat, to provide the building materials for cellular and structural tissue. Without adequate animal protein and fat, the body has nothing to build replacement bone with, and the ongoing metabolic demands of the body begin drawing on existing bone tissue as a source.

Aajonus stated directly and repeatedly that approximately half of his cancer patients were long-term vegetarians. He used this to counter the belief, which he called "the whole fictitious thing," that vegetarianism prevents cancer. He cited Linda McCartney as an example of a public figure whose cancer death demonstrated the myth. His framework does not treat vegetarianism as inherently cancer-causing, but as a diet that leaves the body nutritionally insufficient for proper detoxification and cellular regeneration, which over time creates conditions in which cancer can develop. The removal of animal fats and proteins eliminates the raw materials the body needs to clean and rebuild itself, and the accumulated environmental toxins that would otherwise be neutralized and eliminated by raw fat remain in the tissues.

Aajonus was explicit that what a raw vegan diet lacks most critically is raw fat and raw animal protein. Raw fat performs specific functions in his framework: it cleans the body, fuels cellular processes, lubricates tissues, protects cells, and ensures that cellular reproduction is possible when raw meat is consumed. Raw fat, heated above 104 degrees Fahrenheit, loses these functional properties and is rarely digested, assimilated, or utilized properly. A raw vegan diet typically lacks adequate raw fat from animal sources, and the vegetable fats it provides are, for the reasons described above, incompatible with human cellular physiology.

Most people, in his framework, cannot regenerate cells to reverse or prevent the aging process of deterioration without eating plenty of raw meat in combination with raw fat. The raw vegan diet provides neither in the form and quantity the human body needs. Raw vegetable juices are an important supplement and mineral source, but the vegetable pulp does not provide what the body requires, and the juices alone cannot substitute for the structural and regenerative capacity that raw meat and fat provide.

He also noted that children born and raised on vegan diets may never develop the enzymatic capacity and physical constitution needed to later adopt a meat-based raw diet. Their bodies never develop the systems required. He observed children raised by a vegan mother who liked the milkshakes from the Primal Diet but could not eat the raw meat because their bodies had never built the appropriate digestive infrastructure.

In environments where raw dairy is not available, Aajonus described using medium-ripe coconuts as a partial substitute. Scraping the meat from the coconut shell and blending it with the coconut water produces a smooth, milk-looking mixture that he said provides some of the same soothing and calming properties as raw milk and butter. He was clear this was not a complete substitute and that nothing fully replaces raw dairy. This was relevant to his discussions of raw veganism in tropical settings where communities had attempted to live on fruit-heavy diets: the absence of both dairy and meat left them with the kinds of infection and deterioration he described.

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