Urine

The kidneys perform one primary task: they produce ammonia. That ammonia functions like a negative magnet. When blood passes through kidney tissue, the ammonia repels red and white blood cells, preventing them from entering the kidney and being lost in the urinary stream. Without this mechanism, every act of urination would cause anemia, because the body produces only approximately two ounces of red blood cells per day and red blood cells take a long time to mature and replace. Immature red blood cells entering the bloodstream do not transport oxygen efficiently and instead consume nutrients from the blood without providing transport function.

The red and white blood cells that are repelled remain in circulation. Everything else in the blood, the serum fraction carrying all nutrients, passes through the kidney, collects in the bladder, and is eventually excreted as urine. The result is a fluid that is compositionally identical to blood plasma except that it contains very few red or white blood cells and carries a small additional load of ammonia. Because the ammonia is produced by the kidney specifically for the purpose of cell separation, it is present in relatively small, non-toxic concentrations under healthy conditions. Aajonus distinguished this natural kidney-produced ammonia from industrial ammonia such as Mr. Clean, which he described as dangerous and toxic.

A small number of red and white blood cells do escape into the urine even in a healthy system. This is why urine has a yellow color rather than appearing colorless. The yellow, orange, or brown tones come from the nutrient density of the fluid, not from contamination. If red blood cells are escaping in significant numbers, the urine will appear pinkish or take on a red-orange tint, which Aajonus identified as a sign that the kidneys are not functioning well or that there is a tear bleeding into the bladder or urinary tract.

Aajonus inverted the conventional medical guidance on urine color entirely. The conventional instruction that urine should be clear or very pale yellow, and that dark urine indicates dehydration or a problem, he called an absolute myth and the exact opposite of the truth. In his framework, dark urine is healthy urine because it reflects a high concentration of nutrients in the blood.

His own urine was brown at times. He observed that the more eggs he ate, the browner his urine became. The more milk he drank, the more yellow or orange it would appear. The concentration and type of nutrients in the blood directly change the color and density of urine. Clear urine indicates very little nutrient concentration in the blood, which means the person is not feeding their body adequately and is simultaneously flushing out whatever nutrients were present. He stated that no animal in nature has clear urine. Animals that are not drinking excessive amounts of water will urinate infrequently and in small amounts, and their urine will be deep yellow to dark orange to brownish-orange.

He described his own urine prior to adopting his raw diet as brownish-black or blackish-brown with an amber tinge, and said it smelled foul because of the toxicity he was carrying. As his health improved, the color shifted but remained in the dark range. He had a urinalysis performed and was asked to retake it because the technician said the sample looked too dark. He identified this reaction as an example of the medical profession's inverted framework. A person reporting that their urine was clear before adopting the Primal Diet, and dark afterward, was in his view experiencing an improvement, not a problem.

Aajonus also noted that when a person drinks large amounts of water, the kidneys work hard to remove the excess fluid from the bloodstream, producing increasingly dilute urine. The urine gets lighter and lighter as the kidneys try to dump excess water without losing blood nutrients. But the water passing through every tissue of the body as it moves toward the kidneys is simultaneously leaching out minerals and nutrients from cells. Water is a solvent. It dissolves what it contacts. This is why he associated high water intake with increased urination and nutrient loss, and why he described urinating frequently with very pale urine as a sign that the body is being depleted rather than cleansed.

The bladder exists solely to prevent continuous involuntary urination. As the kidneys continuously remove fluid from the bloodstream, without a storage organ a person would be dripping urine constantly throughout the day and night. The bladder collects and holds the fluid until a sufficient volume, roughly two cups in a person with a healthy bladder, triggers the urge to urinate. People with a weak bladder may feel the urge at half a cup or less. People with a strong bladder can hold six to ten hours of fluid production.

Some people, particularly vegetarians in India, deliberately hold their urine as long as possible so that the bladder reabsorbs it, recycling the proteins and nutrients without any of it being lost. Aajonus described this as a functional physiological strategy rather than an unusual practice.

Aajonus was explicit that the urinary tract is not the body's primary detoxification pathway. Toxins exit through the skin as the primary route, through the mucous membranes as a secondary route, and through the bowels in acute situations of excess toxicity, when diarrhea occurs as an emergency dump. The bloodstream, he argued, does not normally carry high levels of toxins because toxins are typically sequestered in fat tissue and other storage sites rather than circulating freely. Since urine reflects the blood serum, and the bloodstream is not normally a toxin transport medium, the urine is not normally a toxin-laden fluid.

He stated that feces and urine are not supposed to be toxic substances at all. They are supposed to serve as fertilizer. He described his own urine as non-toxic and said that when he urinated on plants and trees, the leaves did not curl or turn brown, and the roots were not burned. By contrast, he said that someone eating a cooked diet would produce urine so over-acid that pouring it on a plant would burn the roots and leaves. The difference was in the quality of the blood from which the urine derived. He described putting twelve gallons of his collected urine around two dying palm trees and watching them return to full health. At his Malibu property, he applied his urine to ferns and they doubled in size in the first year.

For garden use, he described mixing one part urine with nine parts water and spreading it over his garden. His spearmint, which normally grew to a certain height, grew substantially larger. His lavender bush reached a size he described as enormous. He attributed this to the nitrogen, protein, and full nutrient content of the urine. He contrasted this with commercial urea fertilizer, which is collected cow urine that has been processed and sterilized to destroy the bacteria in it. That processing, he said, eliminates the enzymes and living chemistry that make urine beneficial to soil. What remains after processing is only the mineral and protein fraction, without the biological activity, and the processing itself introduces toxic elements into what was originally a clean substance.

Aajonus approached urine therapy as a specific tool with specific applications rather than a universal recommendation. Its primary use in his framework was protein recycling for people who were not getting adequate protein through their diet, and secondarily as a support for people experiencing digestive problems, particularly difficulty breaking down and absorbing proteins.

Vegetarians in India and Asia drink their urine because their plant-based diet does not supply enough complete protein on a single pass through digestion. The proteins come through partially processed and are excreted in the urine. By drinking that urine, they get a second, third, and fourth opportunity to extract those proteins. He described at least two-thirds of the population in India as drinking their urine for this reason. He said that monks in particular would drink all of their urine throughout the day. He himself drank his urine every day for four years during his vegetarian period and said he would not have survived without it.

He described the mechanism: people living on grain do not digest the protein the first time through, so the protein is lost in the urine. Drinking the urine allows those proteins to circulate again. This is also why urine therapy works for some people but, in his view, does not work as well for people on a raw meat and dairy diet, because those people are already too acid and the urine adds to that acidity.

For people on the Primal Diet who are experiencing digestive difficulty, particularly persistent constipation and failure to absorb proteins properly, Aajonus sometimes recommended drinking urine once a day, two or three times per week, always consuming urine that was produced at least six hours after a meat meal. The reason for the six-hour window was to ensure the urine carried a concentrated load of protein-derived nutrients. The whole purpose of drinking urine in this context was to give the body a second chance to absorb those proteins. He attributed the failure of initial protein absorption to inadequate E. coli populations in the intestine, meaning the bacteria responsible for breaking down protein in the gut were not functioning well enough for complete absorption on the first pass.

He did not recommend urine therapy for people eating a good raw diet with plenty of raw meat and dairy, because the urine in that state is too acidic. He did recommend it as an overseas adaptation when he could not obtain sufficient dairy while traveling in Asia. In those circumstances he drank his own urine once a day, always following the six-hours-after-meat rule.

He described a personal fasting comparison. He once did a 32-day fast on nothing but water, drinking approximately two gallons of water per day, and dropped to 96 pounds. Then he did a separate fast in which he drank nothing but urine and no water, which lasted 45 days, and he only dropped to 123 pounds. The recovery after the urine fast was also substantially faster than after the water fast, which took two and a half years.

Aajonus described numerous traditional and anecdotal uses of urine as a topical antiseptic and wound agent. He described tribes bathing newborn babies in water buffalo urine to repel flies and mosquitoes, and said the insects stopped immediately and the baby calmed.

He recounted a story from a workshop he gave on Jekyll Island, Georgia in 1982, where a retired Miami police officer described the pre-1928 practice of pouring urine on wounds when someone was bleeding heavily. According to this officer, urine poured on a serious wound would stop the bleeding within a minute or two. In 1928, or in some telling 1927, the medical profession banned this practice on grounds of uncleanness. The officer described watching hundreds of people subsequently bleed to death from injuries that would previously have been controlled with urine. Aajonus cited this account repeatedly as evidence of the medical suppression of effective natural treatments.

He described another case in which a man healed a horse with a severely damaged, gangrenous leg that the owner had intended to put down. The man wrapped the leg in rags soaked in the horse's own urine, changed the dressing daily by wringing out the rags and resoaking them with fresh urine, and in ten days the leg had completely healed.

He described old, stinky urine as particularly effective for breaking down the rash from poison ivy, poison oak, and poison sumac, saying that applying aged urine to the skin would resolve the reaction within 24 hours. The age matters because as urine oxidizes the ammonia concentration increases, and it is this higher ammonia content that breaks down the plant toxins.

Aajonus referenced the development of a cow urine soda in India, describing it as a product developed to compete with Coca-Cola and Pepsi, which he characterized as entirely chemical with no nutrient value. The Indian soda, described as made primarily from cow urine mixed with ayurvedic herbs and sugar cane, represented to him the logical application of understanding that urine is blood serum without red and white blood cells, meaning cow urine is a full-spectrum nutrient fluid derived from the cow's blood.

He expressed the view that this would be the only commercially sold soda in the world with genuine health value, though he said he personally would not buy it because it was still processed. He noted uncertainty about how the ammonia flavor would be managed in the commercial formulation.

He also described how the agricultural industry collects urine from large dairy operations and sells it to Monsanto, Dow, and other chemical companies, which process it into liquid nitrogen fertilizer. He described this processing as destroying the bacteria in the urine so that the final product adds no enzymes to the soil, only minerals and proteins. He contrasted this with the raw application of his own urine diluted in water, which he said maintained all the living biology and was dramatically more effective for plant growth.

Aajonus addressed the question of whether urine should be measured as acid or alkaline and whether its pH indicated anything meaningful about blood pH. He stated that it does not matter whether urine is acid or alkaline because urine and blood will not always match in acidity level. By the time a person on a raw diet is urinating, the blood has usually already balanced whatever acid or alkaline state existed earlier. He said his own urine, saliva, and blood had maintained a pH of 5.5 for thirteen years, which would conventionally be read as dangerously acidic, and that he was in excellent health. He described the natural health recommendation to raise urine and saliva alkalinity to around 6.6 or 6.7 as garbage information and the exact opposite of what is physiologically appropriate for a person whose bacteria are putrefactive bacteria feeding on animal cells, which are acidic by nature.

If urine after drinking bee juice or certain foods appears pinkish or orange-brown with a reddish cast, Aajonus identified this as a sign that the kidneys are discarding too many red blood cells and are not working well, or that there is a bleeding tear somewhere in the bladder or urinary tract allowing red blood cells to enter the urine directly.

Aajonus described his own urination frequency as approximately three times per day with a total volume of roughly three to three and a half cups across the day. He contrasted this with his prior period of drinking two gallons of water per day, during which he was urinating constantly throughout the day and in far greater volume. He attributed the reduction in urination frequency and volume to sipping rather than drinking in large amounts, and to the fact that his body was absorbing and retaining nutrients from food rather than flushing them out with excess water.

He described the body's behavior in temperature changes as directly affecting urination frequency. Moving from a hot outdoor environment into an air-conditioned space triggers increased urination because the kidneys need to remove water to thicken the blood for warmth. Going from cool indoor conditions to a hot outdoor environment reduces urination because the body wants to retain fluid to keep the blood thin for cooling. In heavy air conditioning on a hot day, a person might urinate four or five times in five hours. Outside in the heat, they might not urinate at all for a full day.

Healthy animals, he noted, urinate very infrequently, perhaps twice per day in small amounts, and their urine is deep orange to brownish-orange as a result of the high nutrient concentration.

Aajonus described having what he said was identified as the largest bladder stone in history, which had been growing in him since approximately age two or three. He attributed the stone's origin to mercury from childhood vaccines collecting in the bladder and beginning to form a calcified deposit.

From earliest childhood, his urination had been extremely slow and restricted, taking three to five minutes to begin a stream and a similar amount of time to finish, with a very narrow stream throughout. His mother was frustrated by how long it took him compared to his brothers. He held his urine for hours at school because of the difficulty. None of these symptoms caused him significant pain for decades, which he said was because the growth was gradual and he had no baseline comparison. The stone was not diagnosed until he was 59 years old, when he suddenly found he could not urinate at all unless he physically lifted his leg like a dog to shift the stone's position in the bladder.

He described the stone as larger than his thumb and the bladder wall as four inches thick at the time of diagnosis. Four urologists and approximately twenty nurses at the clinic where he was examined said they had never seen a stone of that size. The procedure to remove it involved inserting a tube approximately an inch in diameter through the urethra, stretched from its natural small diameter to accommodate the instrument. Inside the tube were four separate channels: a camera for visualization, a laser for fragmenting the stone, a fluid system for irrigation, and a vacuum tube for removing the fragments. The urologist had to work very carefully because the laser, if it missed the stone and hit nerve tissue, would cause severe damage. The stone's center, when finally reached, was particularly dense and required careful incremental chipping.

He also mentioned having seven kidney and bladder stones removed in total during this procedure, and that the urinary tract itself had never developed normally, remaining very narrow throughout his life, which compounded all his urination difficulties from childhood onward.