Spring Water

Before any specific discussion of spring water makes sense, it is necessary to understand how Aajonus characterized water in general, because his position on spring water cannot be separated from his broader framework about water as a substance.

Water is classified in every archaeological and scientific reference, Aajonus repeatedly noted, as the first and primary solvent on the planet. When it rains, water dissolves rock so that plants can eat. That is its function on earth. It breaks things apart. It does not build or nourish. It is a hungry substance that picks apart whatever it contacts. Ships rust and decompose in the ocean. Rock erodes. Soil washes away. These are demonstrations of what water does when it comes into contact with matter.

Inside the human body, this same dissolving action operates in ways Aajonus considered destructive when water is consumed beyond minimal amounts. Water dilutes digestive acids and enzymes. It destroys and drowns bacteria that are necessary for digesting food and whose byproducts constitute usable nutrients. It thins the mucus lining of the stomach, esophagus, throat, intestines, kidneys, bladder, and urethra. It dissolves intestinal flora. It causes dehydration at the cellular level because H2O cannot be absorbed into a cell without being ionically bonded to other nutrients. If plain water enters a cell without those nutrients attached, the cell dehydrates. The more water a person drinks, the more dehydrated they become at the cellular level, which triggers more thirst, creating what Aajonus called a catch-22 or a rat trap.

He was emphatic that the recommendation to drink eight glasses of water a day was a marketing invention, not a health finding. He traced it to a specific moment in 1961 or 1962 when Pepsi-Cola or Coca-Cola executives made a bet that water could be sold for as much money as soda. They hired doctors and writers and paid athletes and coaches to promote the idea that the human body required eight glasses of water daily. Before that moment, Aajonus said, no one drank water. Children at school in the 1940s and 1950s went to the fountain and took two or three sips a day. Athletes might have managed half a cup. The rest of the liquid intake came from milk, orange juice, and later soda pop. Water was simply not a beverage. The eight glasses recommendation was a commercial strategy, not a physiological truth, and Aajonus called it "absolute bullshit."

He also pointed out that once this marketing campaign began, the water supply was deliberately contaminated with fluoride and chlorine to make tap water undrinkable, driving people to buy bottled water instead. Fluoride, he noted, cannot even be removed by distillation because it converts to a gas during the distillation process and reconstitutes in the water as it cools. This was part of what he described as a systematic effort by the same corporations and interests to control and profit from water globally.

One of Aajonus's central arguments against drinking water was that raw foods already contain all the water a person needs, and that this food-bound water is fundamentally different from drinking water because it arrives in the body bonded to nutrients.

Raw meat is approximately 45 to 55 percent water, and that water is entirely cellularly absorbable because it is bound within the food's protein, fat, and enzymatic structures. Raw milk is 86 percent water, also entirely absorbable in the same way. Raw fruit runs 90 to 93 percent water. Everything a person on a raw food diet consumes is already saturated with water in its most bioavailable form, where the H2O is carried by nutrients or the nutrients are carried by the H2O into the cells. Plain drinking water, by contrast, is cellularly absorbable at roughly 10 percent, and that 10 percent, lacking the ionic bonding that nutrients provide, causes cellular dehydration rather than hydration.

Aajonus drank up to two quarts of milk a day, which represented almost two quarts of highly absorbable water. He ate fruit meals that were 93 percent water. He drank a quart of vegetable juice daily. In his own accounting, he had no need for additional water and went for extended periods without it, sometimes two weeks at a stretch, sometimes drinking only a half cup a month, sometimes during cold weather not a drop.

Aajonus identified three categories of animals that are actually adapted to drink water: camels, elephants, and birds. Camels can drink 25 gallons at a time and then go two to three months without water because they have a storage pouch for it. Elephants can drink up to 55 gallons and go two to six months without additional water, releasing only small amounts from their storage system daily. Birds have a gizzard, consume a great deal of dry food such as grain and seeds, and drink water frequently, which is why large concentrations of birds are always found near water sources.

Humans do not have a water storage pouch. When water enters the human system, it does not store. It dilutes, damages bacteria, dissolves digestive juices, and creates systemic dehydration. The more it does this, the more the body craves additional water, which only extends the problem.

He noted that milking cows, because so much fluid is being extracted from them continuously by forced milking, do need some additional water. But even they do not benefit from the salt blocks typically given them. A farmer in Iowa or Omaha who removed the salt blocks from his cows and cut back on water produced a noticeably richer, healthier, more energizing milk that Aajonus said he could personally feel the difference from when he drank it.

Aborigines in the Australian outback, traveling in heat up to 126 degrees, covered 100 to 120 miles a day and did not drink water. They pulled roots from the ground, grated them, wrung out the juice, and drank only that small amount of vegetable juice. Aajonus cited two films, one about three aboriginal children who traveled 1700 miles through the desert without drinking water, and another called Walkabout from the late 1960s, where an aboriginal teenager guided two lost British teenagers through the desert without water, showing them how to extract root juice instead.

Aajonus was specific about his own water intake at different times of year. During fall and winter, he said he drank no water at all, not a drop. In summer, he might drink a half cup to a cup per week, and in very hot conditions he sometimes went up to a cup and a half per week or a couple of liters per week. He noted that at one point in his life he drank up to a gallon a day but reduced that to a half gallon once he started pulling saliva into the water he drank, and eventually came down to roughly half a cup a month. He characterized two ounces of water per week as a reasonable winter intake for himself.

He acknowledged that people who are heavily toxic may need some solvent in their system to break down accumulated poisons, and water is a solvent. That is the legitimate use of a small amount of water. But as a person gets cleaner through the raw diet, the need for water diminishes further.

Within the context of all forms of drinking water, spring water occupied a relatively favorable position in Aajonus's framework because of its natural bacterial content and its unprocessed condition. The key passage from his writing on this subject appears in his response to a question about Gerolsteiner water receiving an "F" grade from the Environmental Working Group. He explained that Gerolsteiner received that rating precisely because it does not treat its water and does not remove any bacteria that naturally exists in it. This, to Aajonus, was the reason Gerolsteiner was one of the better waters to drink, not one of the worst. He pointed out that the organization giving Gerolsteiner an "F" simultaneously gave its best endorsements to Gerber, Nestle, and Penta, among the most polluting food companies in the world, which told him everything he needed to know about whose interests that rating system served.

Rainwater, he noted, is especially abundant with bacteria. No other water can foster agricultural growth like bacteria-rich rainwater. The bacterial life present in naturally occurring water sources is not a contamination problem but a biological feature that makes water more useful.

When Aajonus was going to drink water, Gerolsteiner was what he chose. He described it as a naturally sparkling mineral water that uses the carbon dioxide layer naturally occurring in the well, pumped together with the water, so that the carbonation is not synthetic. He contrasted this favorably with San Pellegrino and Perrier, which he said had switched to synthetic carbonation in recent years.

He drank it in small quantities. During fall and winter, his intake was one cup a week. During summer and spring, he might drink a couple of liters a week, which averages roughly a cup a day at most. He would mix things into it rather than drinking it plain, such as when he described pouring a blended mixture of coconut cream, dairy cream, honey, lemon juice, and cucumber into sparkling water, mixing it briefly with a finger, and sipping it slowly rather than gulping it.

Beyond spring water, Aajonus expressed a particular appreciation for naturally occurring water that was rich in algae, bacteria, and other organisms from ponds, lakes, streams, and reservoirs. He stated in a newsletter that the very best water, if one is going to drink water, would be algae-rich lake water containing all of its bacteria and other organisms intact. He had consumed water from ponds and reservoirs rich with cattle urine and feces and, like cattle drinking such water, found it beneficial rather than harmful.

He described being in streams in Southeast Asia, in Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Burma, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia, consuming water from green, organism-rich mountain streams. He described a spring on a friend's property on the Hamakula Coast in Hawaii where water emerged from rock into a small lagoon that had to be waded through to collect the water. He described this water's effect on the skin as "unbelievable," characterizing it as water that was like food because of the life and material it contained. He used that spring water in a hot bath and found the experience extraordinary.

He was skeptical of the widespread fear of malaria in tropical waters, describing it as a myth like most medical information, designed to keep people taking medication rather than healing. He said he had never gotten sick from any chemical-free natural waters, even when those waters were organically rich with animal waste and biological material.

When Aajonus was asked about making tap water more spring-like through home filtration, he described a specific order of filtration layers intended to approximate the natural passage of water through earth, which is exactly what a spring is.

He said the correct order is paper filter first, then charcoal (specifically coconut charcoal, which addresses mercury and thallium), then sand, and that sand should be last. This was the reverse of what most commercial and conventional systems recommend, which put sand first, then charcoal, then paper. His reasoning was that if you want spring-type water, the sand last approach mimics what happens in a natural spring: water passes through paper to remove oil-soluble particulates, through charcoal to remove heavy metals, and finally through sand where minerals and bacteria are naturally introduced, giving the water back some of what it lost and approximating the bacterial and mineral character of spring water.

He described implementing this system for his publisher, who had done him the favor of publishing his books when no one else would. After installing the system in their basement, water flowed through paper first, then charcoal, then sand, and went everywhere in the house. His publisher emailed him to say that the water felt so good they no longer needed to add milk or vinegar to it for themselves or their baby. Aajonus noted he did not charge his publisher for this advice.

He also described a four to five tier filtration system for municipal water as the only reliable way to address the toxicity in treated water supplies. The first stage is a paper filter to catch oil-soluble contaminants. The second stage is coconut charcoal for mercury and thallium. The final two stages are sand filters. Sand, he said, is an incredible cleanser.

He specifically addressed fluoride and the impossibility of removing it through distillation. Fluoride converts to a gas when water is distilled and then reconstitutes into crystallized form as the water vapor cools, so it is never actually removed. It simply transforms from dissolved to gaseous to crystallized and ends up back in the water. He said he had believed he was removing fluoride through distillation while in West Palm Beach and discovered he was not. No amount of distillation solves the fluoride problem.

In the context of bathing, Aajonus made a clear distinction between well water or spring water and municipal tap water. When describing his own bathing practice in well water, he noted that even with good quality well water he would add a little coconut cream to the bath so that when he got out, his skin was coated with a thin layer of fat and water-soluble nutrients, like the wax spray at the end of a car wash. He noted that bathing can be drying to the skin even in good water because of the perspiring out of toxins during a hot bath, and that the coconut cream mitigated this.

When bathing in municipal water, the protocol was necessarily more involved: one to one and a half cups of raw milk, two heaping tablespoons of sun-dried sea salt, and approximately three tablespoons of raw apple cider vinegar added to the bath water before getting in. He sometimes added coconut cream or coconut oil. The milk and vinegar and salt in the water prevented the dissolving action of plain water on the skin and body, and allowed a person to soak for hours without wrinkling or losing nutrients from tissues. He said you could stay in a properly prepared bath for 12 hours and never wrinkle.

He described personally experiencing a violent reaction to Los Angeles bath water before he understood what was happening, including teeth chattering, uncontrolled shaking, sky-high blood pressure, and a state resembling severe hypoglycemia that took hours to resolve. He attributed this to the 192 chemicals in the LA water supply, water that had been used in the Saugus area, then in the valley where industrial discards, grease, and chemical runoff were introduced, and then recycled back through the system. Once he began adding the milk, vinegar, and salt to his bath water, the reaction never recurred.

He described his own hot tub, a 500-gallon tub built like a small Greek round pool that could fit 14 people, which he filtered through sand. He noted that his tub water contained bacteria from rain and from the natural environment, and that he would sometimes drink from it, using that water as a base when he had no milk available, adding coconut cream, dairy cream, honey, lemon juice, and blended cucumber to make it nutritionally viable before consuming it.

Aajonus used urine color as a direct indicator of whether a person was appropriately hydrated or over-watered. He said urine should be thick and at least dark yellow. His own urine came out amber unless he was drinking heavy amounts of vegetable juice, in which case it came out a deeper yellow. He was explicit that people who drink excessive water produce very light-colored urine, and that this pallor represents nutrients being washed out through the kidneys. Light urine is not a sign of health; it is a sign that the body is dumping fluid it cannot use and taking minerals and nutrients with it.

For people on the Primal Diet who are reasonably healthy and eating well, Aajonus recommended no more than a half cup a day of water, and for many people even that is too much. If a person is an athlete and sweating heavily, they might take up to a cup and a half a day, but only in small sips, never gulped. Gulping sends the water directly to the kidneys for elimination, bypassing the cells entirely and leaving the cells without the H2O they need to carry nutrients.

For a specific person who had been creating excessive rigidity in their body through their habits, Aajonus made an exception to his general no-water recommendation and told them to drink two quarts a week. He also told them they needed more milk. Two quarts a week works out to roughly one cup a day or a little more. He said to that person that spring water is "for spring," meaning it is not a year-round license to drink freely.

For someone asking whether water could be improved by adding honey, lemon juice, or ginger to increase its cellular absorption, Aajonus's position implied that yes, adding nutrients to water does make it more useful because it provides the ionic bonding needed for H2O to enter cells. His own practice when he had no milk available was to blend coconut cream, dairy cream, honey, lemon juice, and cucumber into water before drinking it, so that the water had the nutrient matrix necessary to carry it into the cells rather than letting it strip nutrients out.

He described a sport drink formula made of watermelon, cucumber, and other high-water raw foods as the ideal replacement for drinking water during athletic activity, along with sips of milk between sips of the sport drink. He said he had worked with the two top high school tennis players in their division in 2009 and had kung fu masters and tennis champions who drank no water at all, using only the sport drink during activity.

This phrase appeared in direct advice to a person who said they drank gigantic amounts of water and who considered spring water a naturally justified beverage. Aajonus's response was unambiguous: "Spring water is for spring. Doesn't matter, two quarts a week, because it's drying out your system and helping you buckle up." The implication is that no form of spring water, regardless of how natural or unprocessed, is exempt from the basic problem that water is a solvent that dries out the body when consumed in quantity. Even the best spring water causes dehydration if a person is relying on it for their fluid intake rather than getting fluids from milk, vegetable juice, and raw foods.

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