Testosterone

Every endocrine gland in the body, including the gonads, functions in Aajonus's framework exclusively for emergency purposes. The gonads produce sperm and ovum, and the hormones associated with that process, testosterone and estrogen, are meant to serve reproduction, which Aajonus described as an emergency of potential extinction. Outside of that reproductive emergency, testosterone has no business circulating in the bloodstream at significant levels.

He contrasted this with what modern people experience. Because virtually everyone consuming a conventional diet is in a continuous state of metabolic and toxic emergency, the endocrine glands, including the gonads, are perpetually stimulated. The body is not producing testosterone for reproduction. It is producing it because it needs the fat-rich medium that hormones provide to bind with and neutralize the toxins coming from food pollution, air pollution, water pollution, and chemical exposure. The pharmaceutical industry then reads the resulting hormonal fluctuations as disease states and sells medications to either suppress or supplement those hormones, while never addressing the underlying toxicity that caused the problem.

When Aajonus tested healthy wild animals, he found only trace amounts of testosterone and other hormones in the blood. High testosterone appeared only in two circumstances: when a male was engaged in a reproductive encounter after detecting the female in heat, or during episodes of high physical threat. Under genuine fight-or-flight conditions, testosterone could also rise alongside adrenaline. In domesticated animals fed processed and canned food, testosterone-related behaviors such as indiscriminate humping were common. After one to two years on a proper raw diet, those behaviors stopped, because the hormonal system came back into natural balance.

Hormones, including testosterone, are composed of approximately 60 to 80 percent fat, 15 to 35 percent protein, and approximately 5 percent carbohydrate. Aajonus was consistent across multiple discussions in specifying this ratio. He described this composition as the reason hormones are so effective at binding with toxins, because fat molecules are highly reactive with and capable of neutralizing a wide range of industrial poisons and heavy metals.

When the body is heavily polluted and lacks sufficient dietary fat to produce adequate clean detoxification vehicles, it will manufacture hormones to serve that detoxification function. This is why people who eat badly and live in polluted environments often have hormones raging through their systems. The hormones are doing the job that proper dietary fats would otherwise do. Aajonus described this as not a natural high but a toxic high, and he compared the resulting energy elevation to what someone experiences from cocaine or Benzedrine: a real stimulant effect but one that degrades the body over time rather than building it.

He extended this analysis to athletes who live on hormonal output. A small number of people on conventional diets maintain high energy and physical capacity because their bodies are overproducing hormones, including testosterone, and using those hormones as a substitute for the fat-based energy their diet fails to provide. This works for a period, but Aajonus said the result is that athletes on bad diets are spent by their late thirties. They run dry, lose energy, develop digestive problems, and can no longer function athletically, because they have burned through their glandular reserves producing hormones that were never intended for that daily purpose.

Beyond reproduction, Aajonus acknowledged that testosterone has a role in determining the character of tissue formation in the body. Higher testosterone levels correlate with the development of what he called male-type tissue, meaning harder, denser tissue. Higher estrogen levels produce softer skin and softer hair. This is a function of the gonads in influencing how cells are utilized across the body.

He was careful to note, however, that this tissue differentiation role does not make testosterone essential for bone density, strength, or energy in the way pharmaceutical marketing claims. He stated clearly that bones are made solid not by testosterone or estrogen but by fat combined with minerals. The specific recommendation he gave for bone density was cheese combined with butter, or cheese combined with honey to facilitate mineral digestion and absorption. The pharmaceutical claim that declining testosterone causes bone deterioration was, in his view, a fabrication designed to sell hormonal medications.

One of the most specific mechanisms Aajonus described in relation to testosterone involves the disruption of hormonal synthesis by plastic compounds, particularly phthalates and bisphenol-based chemicals. When food is stored in or processed through plastic containers, these molecules enter the food supply and are absorbed into the body. The problem is that phthalates and BPA behave like fats in the body and are used as raw materials in hormone synthesis. When the body attempts to manufacture testosterone using these contaminated fat-like molecules, it produces estrogen instead, and when it attempts to make estrogen, it produces testosterone.

Aajonus traced this to the shift from metal cans to plastic-lined cans in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the food industry, aware that metal was leaching into food and poisoning consumers, coated cans with plastic. This exchanged one poison for another. In animal studies he cited, male frogs exposed to these compounds became female and female frogs became male. Rabbits and other test animals became sterile. He connected this directly to the broad cultural changes in sexual differentiation he observed in industrialized societies, where the hormonal distinction between male and female has narrowed, and to the explosive demand for sexual performance drugs, which he contrasted with the situation 60 years prior when the concern was suppressing excess male sexual energy rather than restoring it.

Hydrogenated oils, which he called liquid plastic, produce the same hormonal disruption. They damage sexual drive and glandular function for the same reason, because they are chemically similar to plastic in their behavior inside the body and are used corruptly in hormone synthesis.

Aajonus gave a specific description of what happens when poisons accumulate in the testes. If a toxic substance enters the testes, the body attempts to eliminate it through the most available discharge pathway, which in males is ejaculation. The body will package the toxin into the sperm along with the fats and proteins that make up the seminal fluid. To drive that discharge, the testes become hyperactive, producing excess testosterone and making the individual feel overly sexual even if that is not their natural disposition.

He gave a specific case observation in which a man's left testis was shown to be in a state of breakdown from long-term accumulation of toxins, making it underactive, while the right testis was overactive as the body concentrated its discharge efforts there. The overall effect was that the man felt more sexually driven than he naturally would be, and was also physically hyperactive, which he associated with a generally large adrenaline production alongside the elevated testosterone. He noted that without the toxic burden, the person's natural state would be one of high physical energy without the overlay of excessive sexuality.

He also addressed the question of whether toxicity in sperm is passed to a sexual partner during ejaculation. He stated directly that yes, if a man's system is toxic and he ejaculates, some of the toxins bound into the sperm are transferred to the partner. He acknowledged that he himself, given his own history of toxicity, did not ejaculate into partners for this reason.

Aajonus was consistently and forcefully critical of the pharmaceutical industry's use of testosterone measurement as a diagnostic and commercial tool. The pharmaceutical community sets the reference ranges for what counts as normal testosterone, and then markets medications to anyone whose levels fall outside those ranges, regardless of whether that person is experiencing actual functional problems. He pointed out that no one decides what the measurement should mean except the pharmaceutical industry itself, which profits directly from both the diagnosis and the treatment.

He said that if someone has low energy, hair loss, or other symptoms attributed to low testosterone, the real cause is almost always industrial toxicity and poor nutrition, not a true deficiency of a hormone that was never meant to circulate in significant quantities in the first place. The solution is not synthetic testosterone or any other hormonal supplement but a return to eating proper foods, particularly raw fats and raw proteins, which give the body what it actually needs to produce genuine energy without borrowing from the emergency hormonal reserve.

He described the pharmaceutical approach as a circular trap. The patient eats toxic food, develops symptoms, is told they have low testosterone or some other hormonal deficiency, is given synthetic medication, and continues eating the toxic food that created the deficiency, while the pharmaceutical company profits at each step. The medical profession, in his view, has no financial incentive to recommend dietary correction because healthy people do not generate revenue.

Aajonus returned repeatedly to the olfactory-gonadal axis as the natural mechanism through which testosterone production is initiated. He described the nose and the gonads as directly connected despite being at opposite ends of the body. In his framework, 90 percent of sexual stimulation originates in the nose through scent detection, and it is this scent-based signal that triggers the testes to begin producing testosterone in preparation for reproduction.

This connection explains why in natural conditions, among healthy animals and tribal humans eating raw foods, testosterone is not chronically elevated. The male does not produce testosterone on a continuous basis. He produces it in response to the specific olfactory cue of the female going into heat, and only for the three to five days that window represents. Outside of that window, the male is not naturally oversexed, not naturally carrying elevated testosterone, and not naturally seeking sexual activity.

Among the many tribal peoples Aajonus reported meeting, more than 100 tribes across his lifetime, he noted that none of them were oversexed. They enjoyed sexual activity when it occurred but were not overwhelmed by it or driven to seek it compulsively. He attributed the chronic oversexuality of people in industrialized societies to the hormonal disruptions caused by processed food chemicals and plastics acting on the glandular system, and specifically on the gonads.

Aajonus described a physical assessment method involving what he called nerve rings or order circles in the iris of the eye, which iridologists had named as well. He interpreted these rings as indicators of the level of physiologically motivating hormones in the body, including testosterone and adrenaline. Each ring, in his reading, indicated approximately one additional hour per day of physical activity that the individual needed to burn off those hormones. People with 7 to 13 rings were naturally athletes, carpenters, ditch diggers, and people who must be physically active throughout the entire day. He specifically used this observation with athletes he worked with, noting that without the appropriate level of physical activity, the testosterone and other motivating hormones that those ring patterns indicated would not be properly expressed and would instead create problems if channeled into other outputs.

Aajonus described a mechanism by which the body uses testosterone and other sex hormones as substitutes for physical energy when diet is insufficient to generate that energy through normal metabolic pathways. Women and men who have chronically high testosterone and estrogen in the blood often display high physical energy levels, but this is not healthy energy production. It is the body borrowing against its emergency reserves. He grouped testosterone alongside adrenaline as examples of hormones the body uses to run itself when proper food is unavailable, and he compared this to the effect of stimulant drugs. The high is real, the energy is real, but the body is being degraded in the process.

He made the specific observation that some very thin athletes can maintain extraordinary energy and strength despite eating junk food, because their hormone production is so high it compensates. But this always ends, and it ends badly, because there is no fat reserve to sustain the glandular output and no dietary fat to rebuild the glands. By the late thirties, such athletes are exhausted, spent, and dealing with multiple degenerative conditions.

In one exchange at a workshop, Aajonus recommended buffalo testes as a dietary food source. He specified that while testes are primarily a testosterone-producing gland, men do not produce testosterone exclusively, and testes also contain significant estrogen. He said buffalo testes are available through North Star Bison or through farmers who can be contacted at the time of butchering, and he recommended requesting fresh testes rather than frozen, with the instruction to pick them up directly at the time of butchering. He described testes as a glandular product, useful as a raw food. He also recommended eating raw eggs alongside this, and suggested getting bull testicles from farmers if that was accessible.

One of the clearest positions Aajonus staked out regarding testosterone involved rejecting the pharmaceutical claim that testosterone is necessary for bone density and skeletal integrity. He stated plainly that testosterone does not provide bones with their solidity, and that estrogen does not either. What maintains bone density is fat combined with minerals. His specific protocol recommendation for anyone concerned about bone health was cheese combined with butter, or cheese combined with honey, the honey serving to facilitate mineral digestion by providing the enzymatic environment to process the high mineral concentration in cheese. He framed the pharmaceutical industry's use of bone loss as a selling point for hormonal therapy as another fear-based strategy targeting people already anxious about aging.

Aajonus distinguished between sexual appetite and testosterone-driven sexual compulsion. Sexual appetite is natural and healthy and does not require high circulating testosterone to exist or to function. The excessive sexual drive many modern people experience is not a reflection of natural hormonal health but of excess testosterone or estrogen or even adrenaline being recruited as a sexual drive hormone. The body under toxic burden runs these hormones at chronically elevated levels, and one consequence is compulsive or excessive sexuality that has nothing to do with genuine reproductive readiness.

He told the story of his own childhood, during which he masturbated as many as five times a day because his body was producing hormones intended for physical activity, but he was too sick and weak to engage in actual physical exercise. Masturbation was the only physical outlet available to him. He contrasted that with his adult life on the Primal Diet, in which those kinds of compulsive hormonal pressures are absent because his body is no longer operating in the same toxic emergency state.

He also described an elderly man, in his seventies, who had come onto the diet and found himself having sex several times a day, compared with the three times a week he had been having previously, which he had considered entirely normal. Aajonus presented this not as a testosterone story but as an overall restoration of physical vitality and circulatory health to the reproductive system.