Tap Water

Aajonus was specific about what tap water contains. In Los Angeles, he said the water carries 192 or 193 chemicals by the time it arrives in the city, because the same water is used multiple times before it reaches residential taps. Heavy industry in the San Fernando Valley uses the water first, then it passes through Saugus, then through the valley again, and then arrives in the city of Los Angeles. He put the figure at 136 chemicals after the valley's first pass and 192 to 193 chemicals by the time it reaches the city of Los Angeles proper. He noted that municipal water treatment focuses on removing bacteria from fecal matter and urine that enters the water supply, but does not remove the industrial chemicals. The bacteria, in his framework, would be beneficial; the chemicals are what cause harm.

Fluoride received particular attention. He described it as a chemical poison added to the water supply, promoted on the basis of a study done in Massachusetts in the 1960s where subjects drinking fluoridated water had fewer cavities at the end of the test period. He said that the people administering this study did not tell you it was going to create tonsillitis in children, autism, learning disorders, schizophrenia, and other psychotropic problems. He attributed these outcomes to metal poisoning from radical minerals that disrupt the processes of light and electricity throughout the brain. Chlorine was mentioned alongside fluoride as a chemical additive people can smell in the water and intuitively do not want to consume.

He said directly: "Most people won't drink the water anymore. Tap water. And you shouldn't."

Aajonus's description of what tap water does when consumed is an extension of what he said about all water, but with the added burden of chemical contamination. Water in general he described as the universal solvent. It dissolves rock when it rains. It causes fungus, mold, and rust. It breaks things down so that plants can eat. Put inside the human body, it dissolves the mucus lining of the esophagus, throat, stomach, intestines, kidneys, bladder, and urethra. It dilutes hydrochloric acid in the stomach. It neutralizes acidic bacteria. It thins and breaks down the mucus membranes throughout the digestive tract. It dilutes nutrients and digestive juices. It leaches nutrients from the blood and intestinal tract and removes them from the body through the kidneys.

The specific cellular mechanism he described is that water cannot be absorbed into a cell without nutrients. A cell requires ionic connections to pull H2O across the membrane and into itself. Tap water, and plain water of any kind, carries almost no ions, and certainly not enough to enable cellular absorption. He said that only 8 to 10 percent of plain water is cellularly absorbable, and that the remaining 90 percent goes in and starts leaching good nutrients out of the body rather than delivering anything. This is why, he said, drinking water causes dehydration rather than preventing it. The more water you drink, the drier you become, because it dissolves and leaches the fats and nutrients out of the body.

When water is gulped rather than sipped, the problem compounds. He explained that gulping causes most of the H2O to separate and rush directly to the kidneys, where it is discarded through urination before it can be distributed with nutrients to the cells. The cells then have no H2O to absorb along with their nutrients and they dehydrate as a result. He said this is why people who drink two gallons of water a day cannot put on weight, cannot digest their food properly, and deteriorate very rapidly. He mentioned a specific pattern among women following weight-loss trends who drank two gallons of water a day for four or five years and then found they could no longer digest anything at all.

He described how the population was moved toward accepting fluoride and chlorine in the water supply. The bottled water companies needed people to distrust tap water so they would purchase bottled alternatives. The mechanism for achieving that distrust, in his account, was to contaminate the tap water in the first place so that people would smell and taste the chlorine and naturally avoid it. Fluoride came in as an additional additive promoted as a health benefit, but which he identified as harmful. He said the logic for fluoride's cavity-prevention claim originated from a Massachusetts study in the 1960s, the results of which were used selectively without disclosing the neurological and immunological harms.

Aajonus described his personal practice when he was living in Los Angeles and did not yet have access to a well. He said he would take the municipal tap water and add at least one cup of raw milk to it along with three tablespoons of vinegar and two tablespoons of something else he referenced but did not fully specify in the excerpted passages. The raw milk and vinegar served to neutralize the chemicals so they would not be absorbed into his system. He said he had used this approach to protect himself from the chemical content of LA tap water before he moved to the mountains of Malibu and had his own well.

He also described a separate experience with shaking after spending time in a body of water, which he identified as contaminated with LA city water chemicals including paints and various industrial waste. Within three minutes of being in that water, he said, he would shake as though he had drunk ten cups of coffee, his blood pressure would go sky high, and it would take hours to come down. Once he identified the chemicals in the water as the cause, he added protective ingredients to the bath water, after which the reaction never happened again.

When discussing a home filtration approach, Aajonus described a natural filter system he had recommended to his publishers. The system consists of three layers: sand first, then charcoal, then paper. He noted that conventional advice says to do it in the opposite order, paper first, then charcoal, then sand, but he said that if you want something approaching spring water quality, the sand layer should come first because it is all natural and will contribute some minerals and some bacteria, allowing the water to approximate what it would be in a natural rain stream. He said he did not charge his publishers for this advice because they had published his books when no one else would, and that he received an email saying the water felt so good after the filter was installed that they no longer needed to add milk and vinegar to it for their household and their baby.

Aajonus returned repeatedly across many workshops to the specific origin story of the eight-glasses-of-water recommendation, and he elaborated it in several versions. The core account is that in 1961, executives at Coca-Cola or Pepsi, depending on the version, were in a meeting and one bet the other that he could sell water for more money than their existing soda products. Another version frames it as a bet between two executives at competing companies. In one version he compared it to the plot of the film Trading Places, where men bet on whether they can make a homeless person into a stockbroker or vice versa, and he said Coca-Cola's executives made the same kind of bet about water.

The mechanism for making the bet work was hiring doctors and writers to produce literature saying that everyone needed eight cups or eight glasses of water per day. Athletes and coaches were paid to say that lots of water was necessary. The medical and alternative health communities then reinforced the message independently, with alternative therapists promoting water drinking as a way to flush toxins. He said the natural therapists got on the bandwagon as well, repeating the same claim without questioning its origins.

He noted that now bottled water costs more per liter than Coca-Cola or Pepsi, which are themselves mostly water with chemicals added. He described this as an extraordinary marketing achievement: getting people to pay more for plain water than for a flavored chemical product, when water can be had from any tap for nearly nothing.

Aajonus frequently contrasted the modern habit of drinking tap water or bottled water with the practices of indigenous peoples he claimed to have observed and traveled among. He said that the Africans he was with in South Africa, the Australian Aborigines, and various tribes in the Philippines do not drink water and consider it stupid to do so, because they know from experience that it causes more dehydration. Instead these groups take roots, grate them, and wring the vegetable juice out, drinking half a cup of that to sustain themselves for what he described as a hundred miles in the desert.

He described a specific account of two British people in the desert who became desperate for water, and an Aborigine guide who showed them how to extract water from a section of the ground using a long reed as a tube. The Aborigine guide himself did not drink the water but instead grated a vegetable and drank the juice wrung from it. The guide took these two people through hundreds of miles of desert without drinking tap or ground water himself. Aajonus used this story to illustrate that human beings are not physiologically built to drink water in the way the bottled water industry and the medical system claim.

Aajonus made clear that all water is problematic as a category, but tap water is worse than the baseline because it adds a chemical burden on top of the solvent problem. The solvent problem is that plain water leaches nutrients, dissolves mucus membranes, dilutes digestive juices, neutralizes acidic bacteria needed for digestion, and forces water to the kidneys before it can be used cellularly. Tap water adds to that the fluoride burden, the chlorine burden, and in the case of Los Angeles, more than 190 industrial chemicals that have been introduced by heavy industry using the water supply before it reaches residential use. He said the city does not care about removing those chemicals. The treatment plants remove bacteria because bacteria from fecal matter is politically visible and easy to test for, but the industrial chemical load is left in place.

His position was unambiguous: you should not drink tap water. If you must use it, the raw milk and vinegar additions are a protective measure, and the natural sand-charcoal-paper filtration system is another. But the ideal is to not drink water at all in significant quantities, to obtain fluids from raw milk which is 86 percent water in a fully cellularly absorbable and nutrient-bound form, from vegetable juices which are 96 percent water in the same absorbable form, and from raw fruits which are 90 to 92 percent water.

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