Veganism

Aajonus built his rejection of vegetarianism on a detailed comparison of human anatomy with that of true herbivores. He returned to this anatomy consistently across workshops and writings, treating it as the foundational evidence that settled the question before any clinical data were even needed.

Herbivores, he explained, have a digestive tract two and a half times longer than the human digestive tract. They have two to four stomachs. They have 60,000 times more enzymes than humans to disassemble the cellulose molecule and extract the fats and proteins stored within plant fiber. Food passes through an herbivore's digestive system in 48 hours, giving it twice the time to work on vegetable matter compared to the human 24-hour transit. And even with all of that capacity, when you examine the fecal matter of an herbivore, it still contains 30 to 35, even 40 percent undigested pulp and fiber. The animal with the most sophisticated vegetable-digesting equipment on the planet still cannot fully extract what is inside plant cellulose. A human being, with none of that equipment, was being asked by vegetarian ideology to do the same job.

Humans, in his analysis, digest approximately 2 percent of whole vegetables. That 2 percent consists mainly of enzymes and vitamins from the vegetable juices themselves, not from the structural material of the plant. The cellulose wall that contains the fats and proteins of vegetation simply cannot be broken down in the human gut. He recommended vegetable juice over whole vegetation for exactly this reason, because the juice bypasses the cellulose problem, but he was clear that vegetables in any form were a minor, medicinal component of the diet rather than a protein or fat source.

He was direct about what this meant: "We don't have a system for that. Our hydrochloric acid is built to break down meat. Our bile is to break down animal fats, not vegetable oils, not cellulose." The bile produced by the human liver is designed to digest animal matter, not plant oils or vegetation. If it were designed for vegetation, he said, we could live on vegetables. We cannot.

The teeth further supported this reading. Vegetarians commonly claimed that human teeth resemble those of herbivores, but Aajonus rejected that entirely. He pointed out that every tooth in a horse's, cow's, or sheep's mouth is a molar, a flat grinding surface designed to pulverize vegetation. In the human mouth, all the front teeth are cutting teeth, the canines are for tearing and ripping, and only a few teeth at the back are molars, and those, he said, are for crushing meat to a swallowable size, not for grinding plant material. He characterized the vegetarian claim about human teeth as something that could only be made by people who had never looked carefully inside an herbivore's mouth.

The saliva and oral bacteria extended the argument further. He described putting the bacteria from human saliva onto various foods and observing the results. The human oral bacteria had "almost no relationship" to vegetables, fruit, coconut, or avocado, but a direct and strong relationship to meat and dairy. The only alkalizing enzyme in human saliva is what he called "ptyalin" (referring to amylase), which in humans he described as a small fraction serving to handle the sugars naturally present in meat, not to begin the digestion of carbohydrates in the way herbivores require. In his reading, the human mouth is specifically configured for animal products. The fact that herbivores regurgitate and re-chew their food multiple times, cycling food back up and down through multiple stomachs, while humans swallow once and process in a single stomach with hydrochloric acid, was further evidence. Hydrochloric acid at the concentration found in the human stomach, he said, is a carnivore mechanism, not an herbivore one.

Beyond anatomy, Aajonus consistently cited his clinical experience with vegetarians and vegans across decades of practice. The numbers he gave varied slightly across different talks, ranging from 2,300 to 2,500 vegetarians observed, but his core finding was consistent: out of all of those individuals, only eight were able to maintain something approaching functional health on a vegetarian diet, and even those eight ultimately deteriorated.

He described those eight exceptional individuals as a specific type. They were all high-activity people with unusually elevated hormonal profiles. Seven of the eight were men, one was a woman. All had high testosterone, high adrenal output, high thyroid function, and in the men, high estrogen and progesterone as well as testosterone. He explained that this hormonal profile allowed their bodies to use those hormones for detoxification of the substances that accumulate when a person cannot properly assimilate nutrients from animal foods. The body, in his framework, was diverting hormonal resources away from energy production and toward the management of toxicity. This was, in a sense, a workaround, and it was not sustainable indefinitely. It also meant that these individuals were not thriving in the full sense because their hormonal resources were occupied with crisis management rather than normal function.

The female among the eight hit the wall first. Her spine began deteriorating at age 35 to 36. He described her as an athlete who believed herself to be strong, only to discover that 30 percent of her spine had disappeared. She was 36 years old. The male vegetarians lasted longer, but he said even those who made it furthest eventually developed severe spinal problems, including one 82-year-old man who by the time Aajonus knew him could not move without severe pain. One other case involved a man who had been a raw food hygienist for 52 years, heckling Aajonus at conventions and insisting that meat was unnecessary. In his 70s that man began Aajonus's diet privately, still publicly promoting fruit and vegetables only, while eating animal foods in secret because the deterioration had become undeniable.

The spinal problems were the consistent outcome among long-term vegetarians. He explained the mechanism as a mineral and protein deficiency: without adequate animal protein to bind minerals into bone structure, the bones begin to dissolve. Osteoporosis of the spine was so predictable in long-term vegetarian patients that he described it as nearly universal in that population. He mentioned one 46-year-old man, a vegetarian for 24 years, who walked in a stooped posture consistent with severe spinal deterioration. He mentioned another vegetarian of 18 years who at 46 was walking like an elderly person with obvious spinal compromise, who could not feel energy until 10 or 11 in the morning or sometimes noon.

His broadest statistical claim was that 50 percent of his cancer patients were long-term vegetarians or vegans. He repeated this figure in multiple workshops and in his newsletters, and he said it "says more than anything else" about the vegetarian diet as a health strategy. He noted that the cancer tissue he observed in these patients was often "hard as rock," and he connected this to the absence of adequate fat and protein from animal sources.

Aajonus identified what he called "the wall" that most vegetarians eventually hit, and he placed it consistently at around seven years. He said 99.9 percent of all the vegetarians he had known were hitting the wall at seven years at the latest. Some hit it sooner, within months or a year or two, depending on how strict they were and what their individual hormonal reserves were. Those who "cheat," meaning those who quietly consume animal products or dairy while still identifying as vegetarian or vegan, may extend their timeline to a decade or two before the wall becomes unavoidable.

He used David Wolfe as a specific case study, noting that when Wolfe was newly prominent in the raw food movement, Aajonus told him directly that he had not yet been at it long enough for the consequences to appear, and that he did not fit the profile of the eight individuals who had managed to sustain a vegetarian diet. He said to wait seven years. At approximately the seven-year mark, Aajonus began receiving reports from people close to Wolfe that he was drinking raw milk privately while continuing to publicly promote raw food veganism. At the eight-year mark, Aajonus reported hearing that Wolfe was relying heavily on stimulant-containing "superfoods" including what Aajonus called a "Coca-Cola bean" with "steel bromide and caffeine," because vegetarians and fruitarians "don't have any energy" and require stimulants to function. The description of someone who "can never be satisfied" and must seek out ever more exotic concentrated substances to compensate for the absence of animal-derived fat and protein was, for Aajonus, the archetypal picture of long-term vegetarianism.

He also stated that in his experience, vegetarians have constant cravings that are never satisfied. He described long-term vegetarians consuming "cheeses galore, even processed cheeses," unable to help themselves, reaching for animal products instinctively even when their ideology forbade it. He interpreted this as the body signaling unmistakably what it required.

Aajonus acknowledged a question that arose frequently: if the body is not suited to vegetarian or vegan diets, why do some people seem to improve when they adopt them, at least initially? His answer was specific. When a person stops eating chemically processed, industrially produced food and switches to raw plant foods, they are eliminating a major source of toxicity and replacing it with food that has more living enzymes and less contamination. The body can use that temporary reduction in toxic load to begin recovering. The improvement is real but it is not caused by the vegetarian aspect of the diet. It is caused by the removal of poisons and the addition of living foods. The limitation becomes apparent over time because the body cannot sustain itself without animal-derived fats and proteins, and the initial recovery eventually stalls and reverses.

He was willing to say that veganism is "temporary" healing at best, and "terrible for most people" as a long-term strategy.

Beyond individual patients, Aajonus described entire communities that demonstrated the failure of vegetarianism in practice.

He described the Earth Haven community in Asheville, North Carolina, a community of all vegetarians, some with 35 years of vegetarian history, which he visited regularly. He called it "the unhealthiest community I've ever seen in my life." The members presented with deteriorated spines, weakness, fatigue, black circles under the eyes, lethargy, fibromyalgia, and chronic fatigue. He specifically described a 36-year-old man who could barely work, whose skin was gray and who had deep charcoal-gray circles around his eyes from metal poisoning. Over subsequent years, as one member began the Primal Diet and showed dramatic changes, approximately 90 percent of the community transitioned away from vegetarianism, growing pigs, goats, and cows and moving into raw dairy and meats. The remaining holdout vegetarians, according to his account, eventually left the community or also converted.

He described a vegan community in Hawaii that was eating 60 percent fruit and suffering from widespread staph infections with sores across their bodies in the tropical climate. After several members adopted the Primal Diet, the changes were visible enough that within two years, three communities had transitioned from vegan or "Instincto" eating to the Primal Diet.

He described a famous Swiss actress who had been a 21-year vegetarian, was bleeding to death from cervical cancer, had traveled across Europe seeking treatment, and could not be helped by anyone. She encountered a patient of Aajonus who was buying raw dairy, meats, and cheeses in a health food store. Through that connection she reached Aajonus and, despite the profound conflict with her long-held vegetarian identity, began eating animal foods. Her bleeding stopped.

He described the situation of Fred Siegel, a wealthy man who had been turned vegan by his wife and was "wasting away," described as skinny as "an Auschwitz victim" at approximately 68 to 69 years old, always irritable, always diminished. Within a year of the Primal Diet, he was standing upright with dramatically improved vitality, and had gained approximately 40 pounds. His vegetarian wife, seeing the results, told him he would be out of the house if he ever went off the diet. Siegel subsequently took his experience to the Dalai Lama, who had been vegan or near-vegan for most of his life and became severely ill. The Dalai Lama began eating raw meat and publicly acknowledged it as medicine, which Aajonus held up as an example of moral honesty, contrasting it with figures like David Wolfe who Aajonus felt were privately eating animal foods while publicly promoting veganism.

He also described a 56-year-old man with roughly nine decaying and loose teeth remaining in his mouth, who had been vegetarian for 15 to 17 years, who began eating raw meat but had to do so covertly because he lived in a vegetarian household and could not bring meat inside.

Aajonus returned repeatedly to Linda McCartney as a specific illustration of the gap between vegetarian ideology and biological reality. He described her as a "diehard vegetarian" who had threatened to leave Paul McCartney if she caught him eating a hamburger, and who had publicly stated she would never get cancer because she was a vegetarian. She died of very aggressive breast cancer, underwent surgery, chemotherapy, and all of the conventional interventions she had said she would never need, and died what he called "a very nasty death." He used this case as evidence that the belief system itself was divorced from biological fact, not as a personal condemnation but as documentation of what happens when ideology overrides physiology.

One of Aajonus's central technical arguments against vegetarianism concerned the inability of humans to extract usable protein and fat from plant sources. Vegetarians, he noted, relied on combining nuts, grains, beans, and vegetables to create a theoretically "balanced" protein intake, working from the observation that plant foods contain amino acids that can be matched to approximate the profile of animal protein. He called this "all chemistry nonsense, because it doesn't work on 99% of them."

His reasoning was that herbivores eat nuts, grains, seeds, and beans because they have the digestive equipment to process them. Humans eating those foods get approximately 5 percent of the protein from nuts, and a large amount of starch, which is not what the body needs. Grains, beans, and seeds in cooked form allow marginally more digestion but at severely degraded quality. In raw form, the problem is only partially better because the human gut still lacks the enzyme profile to break down the cellulose and extract what is inside.

He said that 99 percent of vegetarians and vegans "cannot get enough protein and fats, and lack minerals and an array of nutrients from their diets," and that "99 percent of their bodies are unfulfilled and unsatisfied." He included himself in this group, describing his own six years as a raw vegan as characterized by constant hunger that could never be satisfied, eating enormous quantities of avocados and nuts with nothing digesting properly, and still deteriorating.

He noted that bile, produced by the human liver to facilitate fat digestion, is specifically constituted to break down animal fats, not vegetable oils or cellulose. When vegetable oils enter the digestive system, the bile is not well-suited to handle them, which he connected to findings about vegetable oils contributing to hardening of the arteries and the formation of soaps within the body. He noted that even raw food vegetarians were developing plaques "all over the system" despite not eating meat, because vegetable oils were producing these deposits.

A consistent finding Aajonus described across his vegetarian patients was progressive mineral loss, particularly from the spine and bones, eventually producing severe osteoporosis. He connected this to the protein deficit: without adequate animal protein, the body cannot bind minerals into bone structure and begins to dissolve the bones to meet other metabolic needs. The spine was consistently the first and most severely affected structure, which he attributed to the particular demands placed on spinal bone and the fact that it is not load-bearing in the same mechanical way as the long bones of the legs.

He cited work being done at Washington University Medical University as of the time of one workshop, where researchers following raw food vegetarians were finding what he called "astronomical" rates of osteoporosis in that population, confirming his clinical observations from an institutional research direction.

He described the vegetarian community in North Carolina as presenting with "deteriorated spines" as a nearly universal finding. He described 90 percent of his long-term vegetarian patients as having back and spinal problems due to osteoporosis. He described a 36-year-old female athlete who had lost 30 percent of her spine. He described the 82-year-old man who could not move without severe pain. He described the man in his mid-40s walking stooped and barely functional. The picture he drew from these cases was of a predictable, progressive structural collapse that vegetarian ideology could not prevent.

He explained that the body uses the hormonal system as a partial compensatory mechanism, diverting adrenal and thyroid hormones toward detoxification of the substances that accumulate in the absence of adequate animal nutrition. This is protective in the short term, preventing the worst accumulations from triggering cancer or other severe disease, but it means those hormones are unavailable for energy production and normal function. The person experiences fatigue, weakness, and diminished capacity even while the body is working hard to manage what the diet is producing.

Aajonus raised a specific observation about the large vegetarian population in India, noting that the existence of many vegetarians in India did not contradict his framework because most Indian vegetarians who maintained some level of health were doing so through mechanisms that vegetarian ideology in the West ignored. He pointed out that many Indians drink their own urine, recycling proteins and nutrients that would otherwise be lost. He also noted that most Indian vegetarians consume raw dairy, which he treated as a critical supplement that partially compensates for the absence of meat. His conclusion was direct: "They don't get by as vegetarians well unless they drink their urine if they're not eating meat." The Indian vegetarian population, in his reading, was not a counterexample to his framework but a confirmation of it, because their apparent functioning depended on urine recycling and dairy consumption, not on vegetation alone.

Aajonus distinguished between strict vegans and what might be called lacto-ovo vegetarians, those who consume milk and eggs but not meat. He acknowledged that some people could do "okay" on a diet of raw dairy and eggs without meat, and would not experience the same rate of deterioration as strict vegans. However, he was clear that in his clinical experience with very sick patients, those individuals "could not heal quickly without raw meats." The distinction mattered practically: if someone was already sick and needed to recover, dairy and eggs alone were insufficient. If someone was not severely ill and had a strong hormonal baseline, they might maintain a functional existence without meat for some period of time. But he did not classify this as a model for health, only as a less immediately damaging form of dietary restriction.

Aajonus engaged at length with the cultural and psychological dimensions of vegetarianism, particularly the claim that vegetarians are more spiritual, more calm, and more peaceful than meat eaters. He rejected this entirely from his own observation and from historical examples.

He noted that he had been a vegetarian for six and a half years and had "quite a temper" during that time, with blood sugar swings that would make him irritable instantly. He contrasted this with his state on the Primal Diet, saying that "you'd have to beat me into the ground to get me to become hostile." He acknowledged that cooked meat, with its heterocyclic amines and lipid peroxides, could irritate the nervous system and make some people more reactive, but he was careful to specify that this was about cooked meat, not raw animal food. The claim that vegetarians were calmer was not, in his experience, accurate as a general principle.

He used Hitler as a historical example of a vegetarian, noting that Hitler also consumed enormous quantities of sugar, and observed that "the vegetarians in history, including the Bible, were the most vicious of all evil." He pointed specifically to the story of Cain and Abel, describing Abel as a raw food meat eater and a passive person, and Cain as the vegetarian brother, who committed the first murder. He was not using this as theological argument but as a counter-narrative to the claim that plant-based eating produces nonviolence.

He described his experience at the World Food Health Convention in San Diego, where a large group of vegetarians and vegans came to confront him while he was discussing raw meat. He sat quietly and let them yell at him for an hour and a half, then held up a mirror and asked them to observe who was calm and who was foaming at the mouth. He described vegetarians as "heated," as people who "foam at the mouth" when their framework is challenged, while characterizing himself and others on raw animal food diets as substantially calmer.

He contrasted this with the Dalai Lama, who had publicly admitted that he had to begin eating raw meat as medicine and who told everyone openly what he had done. Aajonus held this up as genuine spiritual integrity, the willingness to accept what the body required over the requirements of ideology.

He acknowledged that the motivation behind vegetarianism, specifically not wanting to cause harm to animals, was something he had personally felt and understood deeply. He described loving animals, not wanting to hurt them, and this being one reason he had become a vegetarian in the first place. He addressed this directly in workshops by saying that everything is alive, that plants are "just as alive as any creature," and that the distinction between killing a plant and killing an animal is a form of "class distinction" between life forms that he did not accept as valid. He said he found everything equally highly evolved and argued that drawing a moral line at animals while disregarding plant life was an incomplete and philosophically inconsistent position.

Aajonus addressed several specific populations that vegetarians and vegans commonly invoked as proof that plant-based diets produce longevity. The most common was the Hunza people. He pointed out that the Hunzas were not vegetarians at all but were significant dairy consumers who ate more dairy than groups like the Maasai and others often cited in discussions of traditional diets. He also noted that the Hunzas fermented all of their meat because they did not have enough of it to eat fresh, making it highly predigested so they could extract maximum nutrition from small quantities. They also ate cooked goat once a month as a community event. The vegan movement's claim that the Hunzas were vegetarian was, in his reading, simply false.

He addressed the broader vegetarian claim about protein combining, where plant foods with complementary amino acid profiles are combined to produce a theoretically complete protein, calling it something that could be observed analytically in a laboratory but "didn't work for Owanza" and had not worked for any vegetarian he had seen clinically. The theoretical chemistry of protein combining could be demonstrated on paper but could not be made to function reliably in a human body that lacked the digestive machinery to extract those proteins from plant cellulose in the first place.

Aajonus was specific that the problems with vegetarianism applied even to raw food vegetarians, which he distinguished from the much larger category of cooked-food vegetarians. Raw food vegetarianism improved on cooked food vegetarianism in some ways, eliminating the additional toxicity of cooking, but it did not resolve the fundamental problem of inability to extract adequate protein and fat from plant matter. He described a cancer patient who had been improving on a modified macrobiotic diet and experienced a rapid health decline when he switched to an all-raw vegetarian diet. He described his own raw food vegan years as a period of continuous deterioration despite consuming raw food exclusively. He described the rates of osteoporosis in raw food vegetarians as "astronomical" according to institutional research, matching what he saw clinically.

He was blunt: "I haven't known any vegetarian who does well either raw food or cooked." The addition of raw preparation was not sufficient to overcome the anatomical mismatch.

Across many contexts, Aajonus brought these observations to a consistent set of quantitative statements. Ninety-nine percent of vegetarians and vegans cannot get enough protein and fats. Ninety-nine percent of the human race will develop some kind of problem on a vegetarian diet, with seven years being the most common wall. Eight out of 2,300 to 2,500 vegetarians he had observed did tolerably well for a significant portion of their lives, all were in the exceptional hormonal category, and none did well in their later years. Fifty percent of his cancer patients were long-term vegetarians. He summarized: "8 out of 2,400 who did well on a vegetarian diet until their later years...does not give us a very good record to say vegetarianism is good for humans. In fact, it just says not good for the human being."

He noted that even the small percentage who can manage a period of functional vegetarianism does not justify the practice as a recommendation: "If 5% or less can do it, that doesn't mean the rest of all of us should do that."

---