Regeneration

Aajonus described human health not in terms of symptoms or disease labels but in terms of what percentage of the body's cells are alive and functional at any given time. A healthy newborn infant is approximately 90 percent alive, meaning 90 percent of its cells are living and functioning. Most people by the time they reach 60 years old are lucky if they are 30 percent alive. Aajonus stated that people generally drop dead when they fall to approximately 22 percent living cells, because 22 percent of the body's cells cannot sustain the full weight and metabolic demands of the organism for very long.

The visual marker he used repeatedly was watching an elderly person shuffle slowly across the street. That person, in his framework, has perhaps 25 percent living cells carrying 100 percent of the body's structural weight, which he compared to asking a mouse to be an elephant. The reason people age, in this framework, is not time itself but the progressive accumulation of dead cells that were never replaced because the body lacked the raw building materials and enzymatic support to reproduce them.

At age 60, Aajonus stated he had approximately 90 percent living cells, the same ratio as a healthy infant, and described this as the result of nearly 40 years of raw food eating with raw meat as the central protein. He described being able to do things physically he could never do as a child, and attributed this directly to ongoing cellular regeneration.

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The 40-year figure is the backbone of Aajonus's regeneration timeline and derives from the animal research of Francis Pottinger and Edward Howell. Pottinger studied 900 cats over 10 years, feeding some raw food diets appropriate to their carnivore nature and others cooked and processed food. When the diseased animals were returned to raw food diets, it took five generations for them to reach optimal health, meaning no symptoms whatsoever and fully functioning, vital bodies. Howell conducted parallel work with rats and arrived at the same conclusion: five generations to restore optimal health from disease.

Aajonus translated this into human terms by calculating that it takes seven to seven and a half years for the human body to replace every cell, including the slowest-regenerating cells in bone. Blood cells are the fastest, requiring a minimum of 60 days, and more realistically 45 days in a healthy person. Soft tissue throughout the body takes approximately two and a half years to replace every cell. Cartilage and tendons take approximately four and a half years. Bone takes seven to seven and a half years. So the cycle from blood to soft tissue to cartilage to bone spans roughly seven and a half years for a complete single-pass replacement of every cell in the body.

Because the diseased animals required five generations, not one, to reach optimal health, the implication for humans is that the body must cycle through every cell five times before the accumulated damage, toxicity, and malformation stored in those cells is fully resolved. Five times seven and a half years gives approximately 37.5 to 40 years. Aajonus rounded to 40 years consistently. He was careful to note this does not mean a person must wait 40 years to feel well; he described himself at roughly the 23-year mark as already vibrantly healthy, stronger than he had ever been, with three-fourths of his non-scar-tissue toxicity already cleared. But complete optimal health, in the fullest sense, takes the full 40 years.

The reason five generations are required, in Aajonus's explanation, is that a deformed or toxic cell reproduces deformed or toxic cells. Each generation of the same cell line is less toxic than the last, but it is only at the fifth generation that the line has purified itself enough to function at optimal capacity. This applies whether the "generations" are animal offspring in Pottinger's and Howell's experiments or successive cell cycles in a single human body eating properly.

Aajonus also reported that this 40-year process can be shortened by certain techniques he developed. Using cheese to absorb toxins that would otherwise cause damage during detoxification, adding hot baths at 105 degrees for 90 minutes to accelerate metal removal, and using bone marrow for its regenerative stem cells all increased the speed of the process. He stated that using these approaches tripled the rate of improvement compared to raw diet alone, and that people using cheese for metal detoxification cleared metals at two times the normal rate, with the addition of 90-minute hot baths bringing that to three to five times faster metal removal per year.

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The most foundational claim in Aajonus's teaching on regeneration is that raw meat is the only protein that drives new cellular growth, meaning cellular division, the splitting of a living cell into two living cells, as opposed to merely rebuilding and reconstituting cells that already exist. This distinction is critical in his framework. Eggs, milk, cheese, and other dairy proteins can repair and reconstitute living cells, can maintain them in good condition, and can help cells that already exist become stronger, but they do not trigger the increased rate of cellular division that produces a net gain in living cells in the body.

Aajonus described this as what he called the only thing that induces human growth hormone production after age 21. He stated that somewhere between ages 21 and 25, the body stops producing the growth hormones that allow regeneration amid the toxicity of a typical human environment. Raw meat rekindled that production. He found this to be true in laboratory settings: when he gave humans raw meat, cellular production rates measurably increased, with healing speeds of at least two times and sometimes up to five times faster compared to other protein sources. No other protein source produced this reaction.

He made this point repeatedly to counter the perception that eggs are adequate as a primary healing protein. Eggs allow the rebuilding of cells that are still alive, help them reconstitute and get strong, and supply protein in a form the body can use efficiently. However, in the analysis, eggs did not increase cellular division. The protein in eggs is not mature enough to generate enough healing and growth hormone to drive new cell production. This is why Aajonus said that if a person is mainly a milk and egg eater, they will get healthy, they will get strong, and the cells they have will reproduce at a good normal rate, but if they need increased healing or want to accelerate the regeneration process, raw meat is necessary.

He described approximately eight people out of 6,000 whom he observed being able to regenerate tissue without eating raw meat. One of them, a man in his 70s, eventually developed osteoporosis and began eating raw meat. Aajonus used this as evidence that the exceptional cases still ultimately required meat for full structural regeneration.

When he says "raw meat," he is explicit that this encompasses all flesh foods regardless of species or color category. Beef, buffalo, venison, lamb, chicken, turkey, other fowl, fish, shellfish, seafood of all kinds, all of these are meat in the regenerative sense. Canned meat of any kind, including canned tuna, is always cooked and therefore does not carry this regenerative effect.

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While all raw meats drive cellular division in general, Aajonus taught that specific types of raw meat more readily support the regeneration of particular tissues. He organized this primarily along the red meat and white meat distinction, using these as class categories rather than color descriptions.

Red meats, meaning four-legged animals such as beef, buffalo, venison, and lamb, most efficiently regenerate glandular tissue, blood, and muscle. When someone has degenerated glands, red meat is particularly important, and Aajonus further specified that eating the gland of an animal that corresponds to the person's degenerated gland accelerates that organ's regeneration specifically. For example, he told people with stomach problems to eat tripe and stomach. For someone with severely degenerated glands, he would direct them toward the corresponding animal organ first, with any red meat as the next best option.

White meats, meaning birds and fish and seafood, serve different regenerative priorities. Fowl such as chicken and turkey most readily help build and regenerate connective tissue, nerves, lymph, skin, and tissue in general. White meats from ocean wild-caught fish and seafood most specifically reconstitute nerves, including the brain. Aajonus stated that fish and beef together are the most important combination for rebuilding glandular tissue, and that fish provides fatty content important for nerve regeneration in addition to its protein and mineral content.

He was also specific in clinical recommendations: for someone needing nerve regeneration, particularly optic nerve or neurological tissue, fish is especially important because of its fatty content. For someone building back from near-complete physical depletion, with almost no muscle, he would direct them toward red meat to strengthen the whole system and start the muscle cells developing again. For virility and potency issues, oysters and scallops specifically, primarily for their minerals, address the mineral toxicity that Aajonus said was the root issue for most non-vegetarian men with potency problems.

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The medical profession stated, in Aajonus's account, that nerve cells cannot regenerate. Once nerve damage is done, it is permanent. This was the consensus he confronted directly and rejected based on his own laboratory work with animals, his personal recovery from severe injuries, and his clinical observation of patients.

In his animal experiments, raw meat was the only food that helped animals regenerate nerve tissue. No other food produced this result. The mechanism, as he understood it, is that nerve cells, like other cells, regenerate through cellular division, and raw meat is the only protein that enables that division at a meaningful rate in adult humans. Without raw meat, the chemistry and toxicity of the body are such that nerve cells and neurons simply cannot divide.

His son, who destroyed a third to a fifth of his brain in a car accident, went on to complete college. Aajonus used this as a central case study for nerve and brain regeneration, noting that had nerve cells been truly incapable of regeneration, his son would be a vegetable or dead. The brain itself contains no nerves, only neurons, ganglia, and synapses, and Aajonus stated these can all be reproduced through raw meat consumption.

He described his own experience after being mugged in Bangkok, where a ball-peen hammer broke bone from one part of his jaw to another, driving bone downward with three teeth attached, and severing the entire hose of nerves along the bottom of the jaw on both sides. Three specialists told him the bone would not regenerate from that severity of damage and the nerves would not regenerate either, that everything would rot in his mouth. He refused removal, insisted the jaw be wired in place, and managed the healing with raw food. He reported that the bone and nerve tissue did regenerate, against what the specialists predicted.

For optic nerve regeneration specifically, he addressed glaucoma as a case where the underlying problem is hormonal, involving a saturation of tissues with sugars and hormones such as insulin or adrenalin that eat away at the nerve sheaths. The structural regeneration in that context requires resolving the hormonal environment first, which is a longer process.

He stated that even dead nerve cells can regenerate if the person is not too old, not too damaged by drugs such as LSD or speed, and eats the appropriate foods. He gave the example of a 57-year-old man whose nerve cells he believed could be regenerated, noting that LSD use of only one or two times was not significant enough to prevent regeneration.

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The body's first major project when a person begins eating properly on this diet, Aajonus taught, is the glands. He stated that for the first two to two and a half years on the diet, the body primarily spends its regenerative resources rebuilding the glands. Until the glandular activity is balanced and the glands are rebuilt, the body does not make meaningful momentum in the broader regeneration of the rest of the body.

He was careful to distinguish between a gland improving in symptoms quickly and a gland being genuinely regenerated. Someone might notice improvement in the prostate within 10 days, for example, but what happened in those 10 days was that inflammation was cleared and accumulated debris was cleaned out. Actual regeneration of the glandular tissue itself takes up to two years, or longer if the gland is severely cirrhosed.

After glandular reconstruction is complete, Aajonus said a person can then gain from one and a half to two percent of cellular life per year. Once that person reaches approximately 12 to 15 years on the diet, the rate can increase to two to two and a half percent per year. He used this progression to give people concrete expectations, noting for example that someone at 42 to 57 percent cellular life would see their percentage rise once glandular activity was balanced, building slowly toward a condition of genuine and increasing vitality year by year.

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Enzymes are described as catalysts for every metabolic process including cellular regeneration, and they are the reason why raw food is foundational to the entire regenerative process. Every bodily function, from thinking to smiling to healing to cleansing to cellular reproduction, requires enzymes. When food is cooked, those enzymes are destroyed. The body then has to leach its own enzymes from other systems and redirect them to the digestive area, pulling workers from elsewhere and using them at reduced capacity because they are out of their optimal context.

Raw food provides what Aajonus called trillions of helpers: the enzymes, vitamins, minerals, sugars, fats, and proteins that allow the body to accomplish its innumerable tasks efficiently. Dead cells must be collected, transported, dissolved or disassembled, sorted for usable components, and the byproducts discarded. Regenerating cells requires proteins for building blocks, fats for lubrication and membrane construction, enzymes for every step of the structural assembly, and minerals for stability in every tissue type. Aajonus stated that as long as minerals are present, the body can build anything from protein, including bone, glandular tissue, organ tissue, skin, ears, and anything else.

When enzymes are absent because food is cooked, the body ages rapidly because the work of regeneration cannot be completed with the nutrient supply available. This is why, in his framework, cooked food accelerates aging and raw food allows the body to run in the opposite direction.

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Aajonus was explicit that detoxification and regeneration are not the same thing and do not always happen simultaneously, though they can overlap, particularly in the neurological system where they often must happen together to prevent the body from shutting down entirely.

The standard sequence he described is: toxins must be removed from an area before that area can be truly regenerated. This is the same logic as tearing up an old road before laying a new one. The body has to tear up old, damaged, or toxic tissue, cart it away, and only then can it rebuild with healthy new cells. He compared the body's situation to rebuilding New York City after the collapse of the Twin Towers, noting that even just those two relatively small structures took 20 years to address. The body, running at 2.5 percent overall improvement per year once the diet is established, is doing proportionally far more than any city reconstruction project.

During the detoxification phase that precedes or accompanies regeneration, a person will feel worse before feeling better. They may experience fatigue, pain, temporary loss of function, nausea, and periods of what looks like disease. Aajonus described these episodes as the body clearing out old debris to make room for new tissue. He himself experienced periods of complete lower-body immobility lasting up to three or four days, times when the communication between his brain and his lower limbs ceased entirely as neurological tissue was simultaneously being dissolved and rebuilt. He emphasized not panicking during these periods and not running to a doctor for medication that would interrupt the process.

The detoxification process also explains the phenomenon he called retracing, in which as the body moves through its regenerative cycle, it revisits old injuries and illnesses in reverse chronological order, clearing out the areas that were never properly cleaned out at the time because the person was not eating properly when they originally occurred. Going back to eat correctly means the body finally gets the tools to clean and regenerate those stored problem areas.

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**Bone marrow and stem cells.** Bone marrow is the only food source Aajonus identified that contains non-adult stem cells, meaning stem cells that have not yet committed to becoming a particular tissue type. Adult stem cells, already mature, can only reproduce their own kind. Bone marrow stem cells, when they enter the body, allow the body to direct them toward whatever cell type is most needed. Aajonus obtained bone marrow from producers slaughtering animals, often from North Star Bison in Wisconsin, getting cuts of meat with marrow-containing bones that he would saw open and eat raw. Each bone typically yields about one and a half to two tablespoons of marrow. He ate it with a meat meal. He described it as tasting like warm butter, delicious, and stated it helps regenerate cells faster. He also noted that applying butter and bone marrow together to the scalp appeared to support hair regrowth, as stem cells without a committed DNA blueprint can become nerve cells or other needed tissue.

**Unfrozen vs. frozen raw butter.** In his animal experiments, Aajonus divided sick animals into groups receiving unfrozen raw butter and frozen raw butter. The group receiving unfrozen raw butter healed three to five times faster than the group receiving frozen butter. Both groups were improving, but the difference in speed was dramatic. He concluded that freezing causes some degree of damage to the butter that slows its healing properties significantly.

**Cheese.** Cheese does not drive new cellular division, but it makes living cells much stronger because of its mineral concentration and its unique capacity to act as a sponge for industrial chemicals, metals, and other toxins throughout the digestive tract and tissues. By using cheese strategically, Aajonus found that metal detoxification happened at twice the normal rate compared to diet alone, and that this protected the body from the kind of damage during detoxification that could otherwise require subsequent scar tissue repair. Cheese enables the toxic material to be removed without causing as much collateral damage, which in turn allows the regenerative process to proceed more cleanly.

**Eggs.** Eggs provide mature proteins that rebuild and reconstitute cells that are already alive. They help replace proteins more easily than it takes to regenerate tissue, and Aajonus used the metaphor of getting pregnant and waiting for a baby to gestate: replacing proteins with eggs can happen in roughly half the time it takes to fully regenerate tissue. Eggs are therefore appropriate to eat alongside raw meats in a comprehensive regenerative protocol, particularly for someone who needs to rebuild strength in existing cells quickly while the slower process of actual tissue regeneration proceeds in parallel.

**Milk.** Milk, in Aajonus's observation, did not increase cellular division in the same way as meat unless conditions were right. Dairy products broadly, including milk and cheese, support cleansing and provide nutrients that keep existing cells healthy, but they do not replace the regenerative drive that raw meat provides. A person eating mainly dairy will get healthier and cleaner but will not be growing younger and more alive at the rate that meat produces.

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Aajonus drew a direct distinction between true regeneration and the formation of scar tissue. Proper healing is when the body reproduces cells to repopulate areas where toxins or injury destroyed cells. Improper healing is when the body cannot reproduce cells due to deficiencies and instead relocates dead or mummified cells from elsewhere in the body to fill the gap. The result is scar tissue, which he described as using dead cells like bricks, producing structure but not function, and weakening the entire body because living tissue from elsewhere has been sacrificed.

Scar tissue is not healed tissue. It is patched tissue. The body, once it has more resources, must return to areas of scar tissue, dissolve it, and then go through the proper regenerative process to fill those areas with living cells. This second pass adds time and metabolic cost to the overall 40-year regeneration timeline.

Aajonus gave a personal example involving skin grafted onto his thumb area after a chemical burn destroyed the skin. The hardened grafted tissue remained for 27 years. Within one year of starting raw meat consumption, the grafted tissue blistered and fell off. New skin grew back with sensitivity, and the nail formed properly. He described this as the body rejecting tissue that did not belong there and growing its own living tissue in its place.

He also described a man who had been burned deeply on a large area of his body, with muscle gone in places and bone exposed. The man cleaned the wound with lime juice, applied honey and meat, and 14 days later the skin was completely healed and regrown with only slight pinkness remaining. Aajonus used this case to argue that grafting is unnecessary, and that skin grafts only produce scar tissue that stretches and causes chronic pain, whereas the body given proper raw food resources will regrow its own living tissue.

For dissolving existing scar tissue, Aajonus mentioned using pineapple juice or papaya juice topically, applied once per day, with the duration depending on the thickness of the scar tissue. He noted his own abdominal scar tissue from stomach cancer surgery was up to an inch and a half wide and three-quarters of an inch high in places.

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One of the key mechanisms Aajonus described in the decline of regenerative capacity with age is the cessation of what he called youth hormones and growth hormones. Between ages 21 and 25, the body stops producing the growth hormones that allow regeneration amid the accumulated toxicity of a typical human life. Once these hormones stop, cellular division slows to a minimal maintenance level. Without raw meat, this process is essentially permanent, and the slow accumulation of dead cells accelerates from that point forward.

Raw meat, in his framework, rekindles the production of these growth hormones. It does this in a way no other food does. He stated that without raw meat, most people cannot regenerate cells after age 21, and that this is what the conventional wisdom of "it's all downhill after 21 or 25" actually reflects. It is not an inevitable biological clock but rather a nutritional deficiency that produces the decline.

He also noted that cellular division theory, which holds that a cell line can only divide approximately 50 times before the capacity for division ends, is a theoretical construct he never saw proved in laboratory or theoretical settings. He considered the division potential of cells on this diet to be potentially indefinite.

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Surgeries that cause RNA and DNA problems may prevent regeneration in specific ways, and Aajonus acknowledged that some people will not get well in some areas due to surgical damage. However, he maintained that even in those cases, the person will always get healthier overall and never get worse as long as they remain on the diet.

He described radiation therapy as something that produces what he compared to fusing light clay into hard ceramic at a molecular level in the bones, causing the bones to fuse and preventing normal flexibility. He described his own spine being affected by radiation to the point that for decades he could not bend his back beyond a very limited range. At the time of reporting, he had only recently reached the ability to bend forward significantly more than he had been able to for 40 years, and he stated that complete resolution, meaning the ability to bend back and touch the floor, remained his marker for having completed his own regeneration at the spinal level.

He explicitly rejected the medical framework in which healing is seen as something done to the body by an external agent. His position was that the body always tries to heal itself, and that the role of food, particularly raw food, is to supply the tools the body needs to do what it is already trying to do. Medical interventions that suppress symptoms, kill bacteria, or apply chemicals often interrupt or reverse the healing and regenerative processes the body has initiated. The case of polio he cited repeatedly illustrated this: the patient receiving antibiotics had low bacteria levels throughout the body, which medicine considered a positive sign, but the patient was weakening every day. The patient at home with a raw food diet had high bacteria levels, which the body was using to dissolve degenerative tissue in the spinal cord, and she improved every day, completing the cleaning of her spinal cord in six weeks and recovering sufficient mobility within ten weeks.

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The rate of improvement Aajonus described for someone on the diet is approximately 2.5 percent overall improvement per year once the diet is established. He offered a way to understand this scale by comparing the body to New York City and noting that just the Twin Towers required 20 years for their site to be addressed. The body, clearing and regenerating at 2.5 percent per year, is working at approximately one-thousandth of one percent of the complexity of New York City, and doing so continuously. He found this figure to be a realistic representation of what his observation of thousands of people showed him.

For someone entering the diet at a lower cellular life percentage, the first two to two and a half years are primarily glandular rebuilding before general regeneration accelerates. After glandular reconstruction, the progression of approximately one and a half to two percent per year begins. After roughly 12 to 15 years on the diet, the rate can increase to two to two and a half percent per year. These rates are for someone committed to the full raw food approach including raw meat.

He emphasized repeatedly that regeneration is a lifetime process, not a destination reached at a particular point. Getting healthier, cleaner, and more alive continues for as long as the diet is maintained. He also emphasized that the discomforts of detoxification and regeneration, the periods of fatigue, pain, temporary loss of function, and apparent worsening, are not signs of failure but signs that the process is active. Celebrating detoxification crises, as he described his own approach, is appropriate because they represent the body clearing something old and making space for something new.

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