Stem Cells

Aajonus described stem cells as essentially growth cells. The non-adult, embryonic-like variety can morph into any cellular structure within the body, from toenails to heart cells, from bone to brain tissue. Adult stem cells, by contrast, are already differentiated: they carry a blueprint, as he put it, that tells them what type of cell they must become. Blood contains many stem cells, but those cells are all committed to particular body parts. Bone marrow, however, contains stem cells that "have no address about what to be," meaning the body retains full discretion over what those cells will be used to build. This lack of restriction is what makes bone marrow stem cells so valuable for regeneration.

He used the blood as an illustration of the adult stem cell limitation: "Your blood has all kinds of stem cells, but they're all particular to a particular kind of body part, a body cell." Bone marrow stem cells do not carry this constraint. When they enter the body, the body itself determines how they will be directed, which means they can be deployed to rebuild damaged or deteriorating tissue wherever regeneration is most urgently needed.

Aajonus identified bone marrow and sperm (and ovum) as the only two places where concentrations of non-adult, regenerative stem cells can be found in a form accessible through diet or topical application. He stated this repeatedly and with emphasis: "Those are the only two places where we can find concentrations of stem cells." He treated this as a practical fact that anyone seeking faster tissue regeneration needed to understand.

He acknowledged that ovum also contains these stem cells, but dismissed it as a practical source because there is no realistic way to cultivate ovum in sufficient quantity for use. Similarly, obtaining sperm is subject to significant limitations, including the problem of heavy metal contamination. If a man's testicles are heavily loaded with mercury or other metals, the sperm will be toxic and unsuitable for consumption or topical use. He was direct: "If sperm smells like metals, do not swallow them. I'm serious, do not swallow them." He suggested that toxic sperm could still be used externally, even if only to fertilize soil, but he was emphatic that internal consumption of metal-contaminated sperm was dangerous.

Bone marrow, therefore, became his primary recommended source of stem cells for most people. It is the most reliably accessible, can be sourced from a range of animals, and does not carry the same contamination risks as sperm from an unknown source.

Bone marrow is the soft, fatty interior of bones, and Aajonus described it as the place where red and white blood cells are bred, mature, and then enter the bloodstream. He noted that bone marrow is composed of approximately 60 to 70 percent fat, which makes it structurally similar to the brain and nervous system, and also means it attracts heavy metals and other toxins as a storage site. Despite this contamination risk in modern people, he regarded raw bone marrow from healthy animals as the best dietary source of regenerative stem cells available.

At room temperature, he described fresh bone marrow as having the texture of butter or soft yogurt. At higher temperatures, around 100 to 102 degrees Fahrenheit, it melts like butter. He found it delicious eaten raw, directly from the bone. He described obtaining bone marrow by getting cuts of meat that include bone with marrow inside, having the farmer or butcher cut the bone into sections, then scooping out the marrow with a knife. He compared the experience of eating fresh, warm bone marrow directly after slaughter to eating rich butter.

When in Los Angeles, Aajonus reported eating one pound of bone marrow per day, in addition to his normal butter consumption. He ate it as part of a meat meal. He sourced his bone marrow primarily from North Star Bison in Rice, Wisconsin, though he also obtained it from his Amish farmers, who provided beef bone sections. He noted that anyone slaughtering animals could provide bone marrow, and that even cuts with a small marrow cavity would still yield something useful, even if the quantity was modest.

He described a specific consumption method: allowing the bone to come to room temperature, then extracting the marrow. He warned that the bone edges could cause deep cuts to the fingers during extraction and advised care in handling.

For topical use on the skin, Aajonus described rubbing bone marrow directly into the skin. He stated that applied daily, "within six weeks, 80% of your wrinkles will be gone." He observed this result in a woman in her late 40s who ran a beauty salon in Los Angeles. She had been on the Primal Diet since her mid-30s but would not consume enough fat to adequately lubricate her skin from the inside. After Aajonus suggested applying bone marrow topically, and after he left for a two-month trip to Asia, he returned to find that her skin had completely changed in appearance, losing what looked like ten years off her face. She continued to apply bone marrow to her skin daily thereafter.

He also described using bone marrow topically on the scalp to help stimulate hair regrowth, noting that combining butter and bone marrow created a formula he believed could restore follicle function, including in people who had suffered hair loss from chemotherapy or environmental toxin exposure. He himself had experienced hair regrowth, though gradually, following his own history of AZT and chemotherapy treatment.

For massage, Aajonus described using a mixture of half butter and half bone marrow as the massage medium when at places where massage was available.

Aajonus's experimentation with sperm as a therapeutic stem cell source was extensive, and he documented it in both newsletter writing and in workshop discussions. He first described noticing, years before the Howard Hughes Medical Research findings on spermatogonial stem cells, that sperm applied to the skin had revitalizing effects. He observed it revitalizing skin, follicles, eyes, and lips, and he documented seeing it remove wrinkles slowly when applied once or twice weekly.

The Howard Hughes Medical Research findings confirmed for him what he had already seen: that spermatogonial stem cells can morph like embryonic stem cells, something the scientific community had previously said was impossible for adult stem cells. He referenced ScienceDaily coverage of this research and noted that it had taken science approximately twenty years from Playboy magazine's report on the nutritional value of sperm to begin seriously exploring semen as a medical resource.

His most detailed self-experiment with sperm involved a tumor that developed on the back of his left hand. He explained that he had been exposed to rat poison for several weeks without realizing it, and a tumor grew rapidly to 1.6 inches in diameter under the skin. He tested a range of substances applied to the tumor individually and in combination, including coconut cream, honey, lime juice, lemon juice, papaya, and pineapple. Each of these produced only 1 to 2 percent shrinkage with daily application. He then applied his own sperm to the tumor twice weekly, and it shrank by 3 to 5 percent with each application. He concluded from these results that sperm "is unusually therapeutic" and conjectured that sperm produced on the Primal Diet may be "exceptionally therapeutic" because, as he observed, nerve cells can reproduce on the Primal Diet but not on the standard American diet, suggesting that diet significantly affects the quality and potency of sperm stem cells.

He was also asked about applying sperm directly to a damaged eye. He described his own cautious experimentation: he applied sperm several times directly to a damaged eye and found it made things worse for the first two applications. After that, he shifted to applying it very thinly to the corners and lids only, twice weekly. After a month he stopped. He noticed some favorable results that did not persist beyond three months. Because he needed all available eyesight, he did not continue experimenting at the time but indicated he intended to return to it when he had time.

A beauty salon owner in Los Angeles, who is described as having very dry skin and being reluctant to eat enough fat to nourish her skin from the inside, became part of his extended observation on bone marrow and sperm topical use. He described sperm and bone marrow as both effective for removing lines and wrinkles, and repeatedly paired them as the primary topical stem cell sources available.

He warned explicitly about the quality of sperm. Toxic or metal-contaminated sperm should not be consumed internally. Only sperm that does not smell of metals, from a man without heavy metal accumulation in the testicles, is appropriate for internal or topical therapeutic use. He framed this as a matter of sourcing, parallel to his insistence on obtaining bone marrow from healthy, well-raised animals rather than industrially raised or diseased ones.

Aajonus addressed the question of obtaining stem cells from fertile, developing eggs, specifically the Asian practice of eating eggs in which the chick has begun to develop, sometimes to the point where cartilage, rubbery tissue, and partial skeletal structures are visible when the egg is opened. He acknowledged eating these in China and noted that in Asia the tendency is to allow the egg to develop further so the chick is more advanced at the time of consumption.

However, he was careful to qualify the usefulness of this source. He described stem cells from developing eggs as "a theory that hasn't been proven" in the sense that most people are not capable of digesting a developing egg effectively enough to extract the stem cell material. To do so requires either twenty or more years on the Primal Diet, the ability to generate a sufficient quantity of hydrochloric acid, or blending the egg into a solution. He noted that once sinew and tendons begin developing, the material becomes increasingly difficult to digest without long dietary preparation.

He provided a general framework for obtaining stem cells through food: eggs, bone marrow, testes, or sperm, all requiring a healthy animal or, in the case of sperm, a healthy person as the source. He emphasized that feeding chickens a vegetarian diet was "the worst thing you can do" because chickens are not naturally vegetarian; they are scavengers who prefer rotten meat and carcasses, similar to vultures. Healthy, naturally-fed chickens produce far more nutritious eggs, and this quality of base nutrition affects the value of whatever stem cell material the egg may contain.

Aajonus described a detailed case involving the Hawaiian entertainer Don Ho as an illustration of what stem cells can accomplish in cardiac regeneration. Don Ho had undergone three open-heart surgeries and multiple bypasses and was close to death, given approximately ten days to live, before being connected with a scientist in Switzerland whom Aajonus described as a friend. This scientist had developed a technology for separating cardiac stem cells from a patient's own blood.

The process involved drawing the patient's blood in the United States, sending it to a laboratory in Israel where cardiac stem cells were separated and cultured in the patient's own blood serum, and then sending the cultured cells to a hospital in Bangkok where they were injected all around and into the heart. The result was that the heart grew new natural bypass vessels, rebuilt arterial structure, and reconstructed the damaged heart tissue. Don Ho lived an additional year and a half after this treatment, returned to work singing publicly, a level of activity he had not been capable of since his first heart surgery.

Aajonus used this case to demonstrate the regenerative potential of stem cells when properly isolated and reintroduced, and to illustrate that the technology for using a person's own stem cells to rebuild damaged tissue already existed, at least in the cardiac research context, even if it was not widely accessible.

Aajonus connected the production and maintenance of non-adult stem cells directly to the consumption of raw animal products, particularly raw meats. He stated that nuts, grains, grubs, and worms, the kinds of foods populations were sometimes forced to rely on when cut off from animal hunting, are "not enough to help reproduce stem cells." He framed this as a biological fact: "We need animal products to produce certain, most of your, not adult stem cells, but the other stem cells. We need meats to do that."

He distinguished this from the role of eggs and milk. Eggs, in his laboratory work, allowed for restructuring and rebuilding of cells already alive but did not increase cellular division or accelerate the production of new cells. Milk behaved similarly. Raw meats were the only protein source in which he consistently observed accelerated cellular reproduction, with healing speeds of two to five times faster than with other foods. He connected this to stem cell generation specifically: the body requires raw animal flesh to produce the conditions that generate these undifferentiated growth cells in meaningful quantity.

He also noted that children raised on inferior or plant-dominant diets might temporarily rely on increased pituitary hormone secretion to compensate for the reduced stem cell availability, but that this compensatory mechanism could only be sustained for a limited period, perhaps six months in human-equivalent terms based on animal experiments, before the regenerative deficit became consequential.

Because bone marrow is where red and white blood cells are bred and mature before entering the bloodstream, and because bone marrow is the primary accessible food source of regenerative stem cells, the health of the bone marrow has double significance in Aajonus's framework. When the bone marrow is damaged or contaminated, both the blood cell quality and the stem cell availability suffer simultaneously.

He identified the bone marrow as a major fat-rich storage site for toxins, including aluminum, lead, cadmium, and other heavy metals. He described his own history with multiple myeloma, cancer of the blood and bone, as a direct consequence of radiation damage to the major bones that produce blood cells: the ribs, spine, shoulders, hip bones, and femur joints. He said the radiation from his cancer treatment "damaged two-thirds of my body," destroying the bone marrow's ability to produce healthy red and white blood cells and eliminating the stem cell environment that would otherwise allow the body to regenerate.

When toxins accumulate in the bone marrow, the red and white blood cells that develop there are weak and mutated, incapable of carrying adequate oxygen or removing sufficient carbon dioxide. In extreme cases, the body begins evicting immature blood cells from the bone marrow prematurely, or routing them to the spleen as an alternative maturation site, which Aajonus described as a sign of significant systemic toxicity rather than a normal function. The spleen is not designed as a primary blood cell maturation site; it takes on this role only because the bone marrow environment has been so severely compromised.

He connected high concentrations of aluminum in the bone marrow specifically to anemia, blood cancers, and multiple myeloma, and identified the bone marrow's 60 to 70 percent fat content as the reason it accumulates these poisons so readily, the same reason the brain and nervous system, also fat-rich, absorb and hold heavy metals at high concentrations.

Aajonus was sharply critical of the institutional framing of stem cell research, which he believed was shaped almost entirely by financial incentives rather than genuine scientific inquiry. He pointed to the insistence on embryonic stem cells as the only valid source of morphing stem cells as a strategy to capture the commercial value of miscarriage and abortion byproducts. He described the number of miscarriages in the United States as "astronomical" and said the profit a hospital could generate by selling that biological material to laboratories for stem cell production was equally astronomical.

He acknowledged that there were "factions" using moral arguments to prevent this commercialization, but he did not regard the moral objection as the only or even primary reason to reject the embryonic stem cell approach. His alternative was simpler and more direct: "Just get bone marrow."

He also described the Howard Hughes Medical Research finding on spermatogonial stem cells as a vindication of what he had already observed and practiced, noting that it took science approximately twenty years to move from the first public reporting on sperm's nutritional and biological value to serious scientific investigation of its stem cell properties. He did not regard this delay as accidental, attributing it to the same institutional preference for patentable, sellable laboratory products over freely available natural sources.