Seed Oils

Aajonus described the discovery of plastic as an accidental outcome of the hydrogenation process. He said that someone fell asleep while hydrogenating and heating margarine and woke up to find plastic. From that point, the process was refined through the late 1940s and into the 1950s, with experimenters discovering that adding other chemicals and extending the process produced harder and harder materials. The same basic chemistry that produces common household plastic, including the carpet and other synthetic materials he pointed to in his workshops, is the chemistry that produces margarine when applied to vegetable oils.

He specified that the molecular structure of hydrogenated vegetable oil is identical to plastic. This was his core claim, repeated across many years of talks and writing. He extended it to include the observation that once those plastic-structured fat molecules enter the body and become part of cellular architecture, they stop exchanging molecules in the way living fat does. The molecular exchange that keeps living fat fluid and functional simply does not happen with plastic-structured fat. He said this process of hardening within the body after incorporation into cells takes roughly four to five years, but the damage begins from the first exposure.

He also explained the process chemically in terms of what happens to fat molecule links during hydrogenation. He said the fat molecule links become "very, very, very elongated" and completely non-malleable. These elongated, rigid molecular chains cannot perform the functions of normal fat inside the body: they cannot lubricate, they cannot flex, they cannot be broken down by bacterial digestion, and they cannot be converted into fuel in the ordinary way.

Aajonus was emphatic that the problem of hydrogenated oils was not limited to margarine or obvious processed foods. He stated consistently that 99 percent of all oils used in food manufacturing and restaurant cooking are trans-fatty acids, meaning plastic oils. He said that 95 percent of packaged foods on store shelves, including those sold in health food stores, contain hydrogenated vegetable oils. His reasoning for this was economic: truly natural cold-pressed oils would reduce profits to minimal. Hydrogenated oils have a shelf life he described as nearly eternal as long as the food remains in its packaging, because there is no bacteria and nothing alive in the oil. That indefinite shelf life is precisely what makes them commercially attractive.

He drew attention to the labeling fraud around this issue. Food labels claiming a product contains no trans-fatty acids are lies, he said, when the food has been fried. The manufacturers who use the oils to fry foods do not hydrogenate the oils themselves. They purchase oils that were already hydrogenated before they received them. This means the hydrogenation happens upstream of the manufacturer, which allows the manufacturer to truthfully claim it did not hydrogenate anything while still using hydrogenated oils throughout its production process. Every donut, every chip, every French fry, and virtually every fried food in every market including health food stores, he said, is fried in plastic oils.

He extended this analysis to olive oil, which many of his audiences assumed was a safe alternative. He said that roughly 90 percent of all olive oils on the market are only 10 percent actual olive oil, with the remaining 90 percent being hydrogenated mineral or petroleum oils. He explained this economically: there are not enough olive groves in the world to supply the current global demand for olive oil. His estimate was that existing olive groves could feed approximately 30 million people per year with genuine olive oil, at roughly two quarts per year per person, which is a small quantity of fat. To meet demand beyond that, producers mix genuine olive oil with cheaper hydrogenated oils, often not even vegetable oils but mineral oils derived from petroleum that are refined and then hydrogenated to give them an appearance and shelf life consistent with commercial olive oil. He said this means people who switched from margarine to olive oil specifically to avoid hydrogenated oils are often still consuming hydrogenated oils.

He made the same point about organic packaged foods. The organic certification may apply to the raw ingredient from which the oil was extracted, but once the processing is complete, the oil is no longer organic in any meaningful sense. The processing itself introduces the toxicity regardless of what the source material was.

Aajonus was careful to establish that even non-hydrogenated vegetable oils present a serious problem in the human body, and that hydrogenation simply makes an already problematic substance catastrophic. His argument about non-hydrogenated vegetable oils rested entirely on the body temperature mismatch.

He described what happens physiologically when vegetable oil is eaten and incorporated into human cellular structure. First, at human body temperature, the oil takes on the consistency of refrigerated butter or refrigerated margarine: it turns solid. Then the water separates from it. Then it becomes a crystallized substance. If the body has used those oils as its fat supply for cellular building, those cells harden. The lymphatic system, which must flow freely to carry nutrients to every cell and carry waste away, becomes blocked. The skin, through which he said 90 percent of toxins are supposed to leave the body, becomes blocked and malnourished. Once the lymphatic system is blocked, the blood is forced to compensate by transporting nutrients to cells, a job it is not designed to do.

He compared vegetable oil in the human body to the tree resin that becomes amber. Tree resin is an oil from vegetation. Left to its natural aging process, it crystallizes into stone. He said the same thing happens inside the human body with vegetable oils when incorporated into cellular structures: they crystallize and cause problems including arterial hardening, bone spurs, kidney stones, and similar calcification conditions. He said that vegetable oils cause more arterial plaquing than animal fats, even when animal fats are cooked.

He also addressed why he said humans cannot digest vegetable oils: human beings are not herbivores and do not have the digestive equipment herbivores possess. Herbivores have a large array of specific enzymes to break down cellulose fats, in addition to their higher body temperature. Birds have the gizzard and associated enzymes to handle grain and seed fats. Squirrels have the enzymes for seed fats. Humans have none of these adaptations. When humans consume vegetable oils, he estimated that 90 percent of those oils are used by the body as solvents and soaps to detoxify, break down toxic tissue, and eliminate stored compounds, rather than being used as nutritive fats. He said the maximum percentage of vegetable oil the human body can handle without serious accumulation is about 2 percent of dietary fat, but that people eating modern diets build up to 25 percent vegetable oil content in their tissues.

Aajonus placed the lymphatic system at the center of his analysis of what hydrogenated oils actually do once they enter the body. He described the lymphatic system as the body's primary circulatory system for feeding every cell and removing waste products, with the bloodstream serving a secondary role. The lymphatic system, he said, bases 60 to 80 percent of its work on fats. When that system becomes loaded with plastic fat molecules, which he said cluster together and are completely resistant to bacterial breakdown, it becomes jammed.

He said this jamming of the lymphatic system is the primary mechanism behind cancer. His specific statement was that most blockages causing cancer, and most blockages causing tumors, originate from hydrogenated vegetable oils. The lymphatic system is responsible for producing the biological solvents that dissolve dead cells. When it is blocked and malnourished from plastic fats, it cannot make those solvents, dead cells accumulate rather than being dissolved, and tumors form. He also said that most blockages causing cancer are from hydrogenated vegetable oils specifically because the hydrogenation process turns the oil into liquid plastic, and plastic molecules cluster together inside the lymphatic system and connective tissue in a way that makes them nearly impossible to remove.

He described the accumulation of these plastic fats in the connective tissue as the reason that 90 percent of toxins, which he said should be leaving through the skin, instead route through the bowels and intestines. The skin pathway requires an open, functioning lymphatic system and unblocked connective tissue. Once the connective tissue is jammed with plastic fats accumulated from a lifetime of eating donuts, chips, French fries, and anything else fried in hydrogenated oils, that pathway closes.

He connected the jamming of the lymphatic system historically to the introduction of margarine. Before margarine became widespread in the late 1950s and 1960s, the lymphatic system was generally able to function. The blood was not required to take over the job of feeding cells. Once margarine became the standard cooking and table fat, the lymphatic system began accumulating plastic fats and gradually lost its capacity to do its work.

Aajonus argued that the relationship between fat and heart disease had been inverted in public health messaging. The conventional claim that animal fats cause hardening of the arteries and heart disease was, he said, precisely backwards. He pointed repeatedly to tribal populations to support this position: the Maasai, Samburu, and Fulani of Africa eat primarily raw animal fat in large quantities and have no heart disease. Tribes in Borneo and New Guinea who live on cooked meats also have no arteriosclerosis and no heart disease. Even human populations who were historically cannibalistic never showed heart disease or arteriosclerosis in the historical record. Heart disease as a common cause of death was rare before hydrogenated oils entered the food supply.

He cited a 20-year study showing that men who consumed margarine had 77 percent more heart attacks than men who did not eat margarine, while butter consumption was associated with substantially decreased heart attacks. He cited University of Auckland research showing that children who ate margarine daily had significantly lower IQ scores by age 3.5 compared to those who did not eat margarine, with underweight children who consumed margarine showing even lower IQ scores by age 7.

His mechanistic explanation for why vegetable oils and hydrogenated oils cause arteriosclerosis while animal fats do not was the same crystallization argument. Animal fats remain fluid at human body temperature because the human body is the correct temperature for processing and utilizing animal fats. The body has the enzymes, the bile varieties, and the thermal conditions to keep animal fats fluid and functional. Vegetable oils do not remain fluid; they crystallize and harden into the arterial walls, the heart tissue, and other structures where they have been incorporated. Hydrogenated vegetable oils, being structurally identical to plastic, produce this crystallization immediately and completely.

He noted that before margarine and Crisco entered the market, the rare cases of heart attack he was aware of historically occurred in people who were very thin and dry and worked in coal mines or smoldering factories, who had dried out internally from toxic exposure. Heart attack as a mass phenomenon began only after the hydrogenated oil industry established itself.

Aajonus described plastic oil as nearly impossible to remove from the body without what he called exceptional natural therapies. He was explicit that he placed quotes around "natural therapies" because, as he put it, disease is not natural and therefore the therapies are not technically natural either.

He said that in his laboratory work, the only way to rid the body of plastic fats that had accumulated was specific approaches, and he pointed readers to his book "We Want to Live" for detailed protocols around lymphatic congestion. He described plastic fat molecules as clustering together inside the lymphatic system and connective tissue in a way that resists ordinary metabolic processes. Because 99 percent of digestion is bacterial, and bacteria cannot feed on plastic oil, the body has almost no pathway for breaking these substances down through normal digestive chemistry. This is the core of why he considered plastic fats so dangerous: they accumulate without being metabolizable.

He described raw animal fats as the most important countering approach, both because they provide the lymphatic system with the materials it needs to function and because animal fats, when mixed with earth, mold and decompose back into soil. He contrasted this with raw vegetable oils mixed with dirt, which he said turn into rock after a year. Animal fats are biodegradable in the body in a way that vegetable oils are not, and hydrogenated vegetable oils are absolutely not.

He also discussed coconut cream as particularly useful for removing arterial plaquing, saying it helps remove plaque more quickly than other fats. He distinguished coconut cream from coconut oil, noting that coconut cream contains water-soluble vitamins, enzymes, bacteria, and a full spectrum of nutrients, while pressed coconut oil is 90 percent solvent-reactive and lacks those components.

Aajonus extended the plastic analogy beyond margarine to other processed foods. He described marshmallows as literally styrofoam, not as a rhetorical device but as a structural claim. Marshmallows are made by taking oil and sugar and corn syrup and processing them in a way that creates a styrofoam-like substance. He said that when you take an oil and hydrogenate it, it has the same molecular structure as styrofoam, and marshmallows are styrofoam.

He observed that the vegetable oil industry had largely moved away from marketing hydrogenated oils as food because those oils now have so many industrial uses in manufacturing plastic materials. Carpet, containers, and other household plastic items are made by the same basic process. He said the food manufacturers no longer need consumers to eat margarine because they have found more lucrative industrial applications for hydrogenated vegetable oils, making the dietary marketing push less necessary than it once was. This did not, he noted, reduce the toxicity of the substance.

He also described attempts to relabel or reformulate hydrogenated oils to avoid regulatory scrutiny. He said food companies devised new processing methods that produce a slightly different molecular structure but still result in a form of plastic, then gave the resulting substance a new name and sold it as a replacement for the now-restricted trans-fatty acids. He considered this the same plastic substance under a different commercial identity.

He also pointed to the industrial uses of hydrogenation to show that the process itself is understood to produce solid, non-biodegradable materials. Pine needle fiber used in some textiles, he noted, requires subjecting pine needle material to the same kind of hydrogenation and high-temperature processing that turns vegetable oil into plastic. The result has the same molecular structure as plastic regardless of the starting material.

Aajonus identified specific historical and economic forces behind the promotion of hydrogenated vegetable oils. He mentioned that the King and Queen of England owned 70 percent of some relevant interest and that they bore responsibility for World War II and for the introduction of plastic vegetable oil substitutes for butter and animal fats, though he did not elaborate extensively on the specific historical mechanism. He framed the entire hydrogenated oil industry as a deliberate project to control the population through dietary manipulation, not simply as a commercial misstep.

He described the shift from butter and lard to Crisco and margarine as a coordinated campaign in the late 1950s and 1960s that told the public animal fats cause heart disease and that margarine was a healthful alternative derived from vegetables. He said this was completely fraudulent. The industry knew or should have known that hydrogenated oils were plastic and that their promotion as heart-healthy was false. He regarded the ongoing acceptance of this narrative in medicine and public health as a continuation of deliberate deception.

He also identified the cholesterol narrative as a creation of the vegetable oil industry. The concept that animal fat raises cholesterol and causes heart disease was, he said, invented to support the commercial position of vegetable oil manufacturers. His counterargument was that the body makes approximately 60 varieties of cholesterol, all of which are important, and that high cholesterol indicates the body is actively digesting, cleansing, lubricating, fueling, and protecting itself. Low cholesterol was, in his framework, the more alarming sign.

Aajonus addressed several specific oils that were marketed as alternatives to hydrogenated oils and offered his assessment of each.

Safflower oil he described as terrible, one of the most acrid vegetable oils, and completely unsuitable for the human body whether raw or cooked.

Flax oil he described as technically toxic because of its caustic, solvent nature, requiring very small amounts (a tablespoon per day was his suggested maximum) and only useful because it is anti-carcinogenic in the sense that it helps dissolve dead cells. He said flax oil should be considered an emergency or medicinal substance rather than a dietary fat, and that having it without animal fat alongside it will make people irritable, potentially unable to sleep, and extremely acidic.

Borage oil he identified as nothing other than cottonseed oil under a different name, and very toxic, making animals very sick.

Sesame oil he said cannot be cold-pressed below 160 degrees Fahrenheit, making it unsuitable.

Castor oil he described as a poison: a toxic substance from the castor bean that causes diarrhea because you are drinking an oil poison, not because it has any laxative virtue in the normal sense.

Rapeseed oil (canola) he grouped with castor oil as one of the worst oils you can eat.

Olive oil he described as 90 percent solvent-reactive, meaning its primary action in the body is to cleanse and dissolve rather than to nourish, protect, or build. He said it should never be consumed without animal fat alongside it, because as it starts dissolving compounds in the body, protective fats are needed to chelate and safely eliminate what is released. He also repeated his position that 90 percent of commercial olive oils are adulterated with hydrogenated mineral or petroleum oils.

Coconut oil, pressed, he described as probably the least problematic of the pressed vegetable oils because it does not become acidic in the body the way other pressed oils do and does not crystallize as readily. However, he said it is still 90 percent solvent-reactive when pressed into oil form, and that it blocks skin respiration when applied externally. He consistently preferred coconut cream over coconut oil because the cream retains the full array of water-soluble vitamins, enzymes, bacteria, and nutrients that pressing removes.

Aajonus described the scope of hydrogenated oil exposure as encompassing nearly all manufactured food products. He said cereals, including those marketed as healthy or organic, are among the most toxic foods on the planet because they are high in carbohydrates and fried or processed in hydrogenated oils. The acrylamides from cooked carbohydrates combine with the plastic oils in these products to create compounded toxicity. He said that care packages sent anywhere on the planet typically consist of cereals and powdered milk, which he identified as among the most disease-producing foods possible.

He described powdered milk separately as having hydrogenated vegetable oils added to it during manufacturing to restore flavor after the original milk solids have been boiled, bleached with chlorinated and fluoridated water, and sterilized into a blue, brewery-mash-smelling liquid. The chalk or dolomite added to restore the white appearance can constitute up to one-quarter of the total weight of the product, and hydrogenated vegetable oils are added for flavor.

He stated that hydrogenating was also being applied to mineral oils, not just vegetable oils, expanding the range of plastic-oil-containing products beyond the traditional margarine and Crisco category into many other manufactured foods and even some products previously assumed to be petroleum-derived rather than food-grade.