Vitamin C Supplements

Aajonus described natural vitamin C not as a single chemical compound but as a very complex network of different nutrients that together constitute what the body recognizes and uses as vitamin C. He said the body always uses vitamin C properly only in the presence of five varieties of bioflavonoids, and that there are four varieties of vitamin C, all carried together in food. So when a person consumes natural vitamin C from a raw food source, they are receiving what amounts to four vitamins along with five varieties of bioflavonoids as a complete, integrated system. Attempting to isolate one fraction of this network and sell it as vitamin C is, in his framing, like selling the bran of a grain and calling it the whole grain. It is not what it is claimed to be and it will not function the way it is claimed to function.

He pointed to raw citrus, lemons in particular, as genuinely high in natural vitamin C, and noted that vegetable juices contain more bioavailable vitamins, enzymes, and minerals than could ever be fit into hundreds of bottles of supplements.

Every supplement Aajonus discussed, and he applied this specifically to vitamin C, is extracted from its food source using a kerosene derivative or hexane, which is a gasoline derivative. He explained that there are only two ways laboratories can get a substance into a form from which elements can be extracted: hexane and kerosene. He noted that kerosene is technically a natural substance, which is what allows manufacturers to use it while still calling their product natural.

He described the extraction as soaking the food source in kerosene for anywhere from 10 to 72 hours until it becomes a liquid, then rinsing it briefly, perhaps for 30 seconds to two minutes, and making it into the final product. He asked rhetorically how many people would soak their food in kerosene for 72 hours, rinse it off, and eat it, and said that is precisely what every supplement consumer is doing each time they take one.

He also described a longer, legitimate natural process for extracting vitamin C from food, involving soaking in water and fermenting with lime juice or a similar natural acidic agent over the course of about a week. He said supplement companies cannot afford to do this and instead complete the process in two to three days using kerosene, because the natural week-long process is too expensive. When the extracted material, even if it was originally real vitamin C, is then pressed into pill form, it crystallizes and becomes rock. He said this crystallized, kerosene-saturated rock has no relationship whatsoever to the original vitamin C in the food and will not behave the same way in the body.

The high that many people feel when taking vitamin supplements, including vitamin C, Aajonus attributed entirely to the kerosene content triggering an adrenaline response. Because adrenaline is 60 to 80 percent fat, and because fat is what the body uses to bind with and neutralize contaminants, the toxic kerosene causes the body to flood itself with fat-based hormones. This produces a temporary feeling of energy and wellbeing that the person interprets as the supplement working. He compared this mechanism directly to the experience of caffeine or nicotine, and said that supplements, by this logic, are drugs, not nutrients.

When ascorbic acid enters the bloodstream, it acts like broken glass moving through the system. Aajonus described it as lacerating blood cells, nerve cells, and any tissue it contacts. Because it is so large relative to natural vitamin C molecules and because its edges are sharp and crystalline, it cuts and slices wherever it travels, through the blood, the lymphatic system, neurological tissue, and the glands.

He specified the physiological mechanism: vitamin C operates in the body through the citric acid cycle, and the citric acid cycle exists to burn fat as fuel. The proper ratio for vitamin C to function in the body is 5 percent vitamin C, 80 percent fat, and 15 percent protein. Without that massive fat reserve to work with, supplemental ascorbic acid does not perform its intended function. Instead, it goes into neurological tissue and glandular tissue, pulls the fat out of those areas, and leaves behind holes and lesions. He described these as scars throughout the body, in neurological tissue, in the glands, and elsewhere, wherever the ascorbic acid reached and extracted fat without sufficient fat in the bloodstream to complete the process properly.

He said that because the body is completely occupied with the emergency of ascorbic acid cutting through its cells and tissues, it halts all other detoxification activity. Any cold, flu, or other natural detoxification process that was underway stops entirely, because the body must redirect all resources toward managing the damage from the ascorbic acid. This is why vitamin C appears to stop symptoms: the body suspends everything else to deal with the glass moving through it. He said this is not a beneficial suppression of symptoms but a dangerous diversion of the body's resources.

Aajonus stated clearly that supplemental vitamin C robs the blood of fat and calcium, and that because it robs fat it consequently robs calcium and then all the other minerals. He said this leads to progressive tissue degeneration. He named vitamin C as one of the worst things a person could take, and specified that this applied to any person who is not significantly overweight with abundant fat reserves. He said for a person who is fat, there may be some limited tolerance, but for thin people or people without substantial fat stores, it is among the most destructive supplements available.

He described watching people during 1977 and 1978 when he worked at a health food store, observing those who regularly took powdered vitamin C in large amounts. He said almost everyone who took high-dose vitamin C became very skinny and very irritable. He cited Linus Pauling, the scientist most publicly associated with high-dose vitamin C therapy, as dying a very skinny and irritable man. He said everyone he knew who took high levels of vitamin C got very skinny and very irritable, because the ascorbic acid was continuously burning through their fat reserves and depleting their tissues.

He documented specific psychological effects from supplemental vitamin C in his book "We Want to Live," noting that almost all people who took mega-dose vitamin C experienced irritability, psychological problems, and frequent, sometimes compulsive hunger for ice cream, chocolate, and other rich foods. He explained this compulsion as the body desperately seeking fat to replace what the ascorbic acid was destroying. The irritability and psychological instability he attributed to the neurological damage accumulating from the ascorbic acid lacerating nerve cells and depleting fat from the nervous system.

He connected this to a broader pattern: the nervous system, the brain, and bone marrow are the places in the body where fat is concentrated and most critical. When supplemental vitamin C enters the bloodstream without adequate fat available to engage with it through its normal metabolic pathway, it draws from these internal reserves, progressively eroding the fatty sheaths around nerves and depleting brain fat.

Aajonus cited Diane Cannon as a specific case study in vitamin C supplement damage. When he worked at what he called Anthony's health food store, she was a regular consumer of vitamin E supplements in very large quantities, sometimes going through two major bottles per week. He explained that her relatively large intake of vitamin E oils, acetates, and acetones provided enough fat-based material that her body could bind with some of the ascorbic acid. This means the vitamin E she was taking in large amounts, despite being the largely toxic Fuji-Kodak variety, provided some fat-binding capacity that partially buffered the damage from the vitamin C. However, even with this buffer, the ascorbic acid still thinned her skin, though it took her longer to become severely depleted than it did for other people who took the same doses of powdered vitamin C without such fat intake. He said she was damaged psychologically and physically for 25 years as a result of her supplement use, and that he tried to talk her out of it when she came to the store.

Aajonus explained that any apparent benefit from supplemental vitamin C follows the same mechanism as all toxic supplements: the body rushes hormones, primarily adrenaline, in response to the toxic intrusion. These hormonal rushes buffer, hide, or arrest symptoms without resolving the underlying disease and without producing actual cure. Because symptoms cease, people interpret this as increased health. He described this as a false reading that the pharmaceutical and supplement industry actively markets as if it were genuine healing.

He said this mechanism of apparent symptom relief through toxic stimulus is nearly universal in supplementation and extends to the logic that the more vitamin C you take, the longer and more thoroughly the body is occupied managing the ascorbic acid emergency, meaning that all other symptoms remain suppressed for as long as the body is in that emergency state. He compared taking high-dose vitamin C to the effect of cocaine, saying that some people can maintain this kind of drug-induced apparent health for years, but the underlying destruction is continuous.

Aajonus stated from laboratory research he funded, conducted at a laboratory in the San Fernando Valley, that only 2 to 12 percent of any supplement is utilized by the body. This means that 88 to 98 percent of everything in a vitamin C supplement must be processed by the body as waste, and because the substance is already altered, crystallized, and contaminated with kerosene, that waste stream is actively toxic. He said the body must alter and then eliminate this toxic remainder, which represents a significant ongoing burden. He generalized this to all supplements, and vitamin C was included as a primary example.

He noted that for someone eating mostly cooked food, even a partially damaged and partially contaminated nutrient might provide some marginal benefit compared to what cooking destroys. But for someone eating 50 percent or more raw food, he said supplements are mostly damaging because the raw food diet is already providing real bioavailable nutrients and the supplement's toxic fraction represents a net harm rather than a net benefit.

Aajonus repeatedly returned, across many workshops, to the visual evidence he used in presentations. He displayed photographs from a microscope showing the same magnification of natural vitamin C and supplemental ascorbic acid side by side. He described natural vitamin C in food as little bitty round balls, soft and spongy, in soft pastel colors, all very colorful and alive, with the appearance of vibrancy and cellular life. He described the ascorbic acid crystals as 50 to 100 times larger, appearing as pieces of broken glass or shattered mirror, sharp-angled, hard, and dead. He said the two substances have no relationship to one another structurally, behaviorally, or functionally.

He used this visual comparison repeatedly to make the point that it would take the same cellular organisms that created the vitamin in its original food form, over the full growing season of the plant, to reconstitute the processed ascorbic acid back into a true, bioactive vitamin C. Because that reconstitution cannot happen in the human body, which does not have those cellular organisms or that growth process available to it, the processed form cannot be converted into the real form and instead simply passes through the system cutting and damaging as it goes.

In response to a specific question about spider veins and cervical veins, and the person's practice of taking hundreds of units of vitamin C, Aajonus said directly that vitamin C is the worst thing a person can do for that condition. He said it robs the blood of fat and calcium, and that because it robs fat it simultaneously robs calcium and all the minerals, progressively degenerating tissue. He offered thyroid tissue as an alternative approach for thyroid-related problems, describing his own practice of obtaining a calf thyroid from a buffalo ranch, cutting it into three parts, blending it with milk, and consuming it.

Aajonus referenced Linus Pauling's work on vitamin C as a prominent example of the misleading conclusions that come from studying a toxic substance's effect on a toxic body. He explained that when a person's body is heavily burdened with accumulated toxins, the introduction of ascorbic acid creates such a total-body emergency that all other detoxification and symptomatic processes cease. This makes the person appear well by any observable measure. Pauling and others interpreted this cessation of symptoms as the vitamin C working therapeutically. Aajonus said instead that the body is so panicked about the glass-like ascorbic acid cutting through it that it has no capacity left to process anything else. He described Pauling as having died a very skinny, very irritable man, which he pointed to as physical evidence of the long-term consequence of high-dose ascorbic acid use.

Aajonus consistently offered fresh raw vegetable juice as the only true supplemental source of vitamins, including vitamin C. He said that one 12-ounce glass of raw vegetable juice per day provides more bioavailable vitamins, enzymes, and minerals than any quantity of supplements, and specifically more than could ever be contained in hundreds of bottles of vitamin supplements. He noted that even if soil quality has declined, the concentration of nutrients in juiced vegetables still vastly exceeds anything available from bottles, because the juice delivers real, bioactive, molecularly intact nutrients with full enzymatic activity, which supplements cannot replicate.

He stated that the proper way to obtain vitamin C is from raw foods in which it exists as part of its complete complex, together with its associated bioflavonoids and the full network of nutrients that allow it to function. Lemons he noted are high in natural vitamin C and also support probiotic activity and fermentation. He referenced carrot juice as providing enormous amounts of real vitamin A in one ounce relative to what a whole bottle of manufactured vitamin A would contain, making a comparable argument that extends to vitamin C: the quantity and bioavailability of nutrients in fresh raw juice makes supplemental forms irrelevant and harmful by comparison.

Aajonus situated vitamin C supplementation within a broader critique of the supplement industry's origins and economics. He noted that 40 years before he was speaking, medical professionals had been actively discouraging people from taking vitamins and supplements, saying they had nothing to do with health. Once the pharmaceutical and supplement industries entered the business of selling them, the position reversed entirely. He called this a racket, saying the shift was driven by profit, not by any new scientific understanding of nutrition.

He traced the financial relationships: pharmaceutical houses control medical schools, food companies like Purina, General Mills, and Kellogg's supply processed food waste as the raw material for supplements, chemical companies use kerosene derivatives to extract whatever portion of a nutrient they can get from that waste, and the finished product is sold to people who have been conditioned by decades of advertising to believe that supplements are a path to health. He said the process is designed not to get people well but to create ongoing customers, because supplements do not resolve disease and so people must continue purchasing them indefinitely.

He also described, as a related point, the one company he was aware of that uses bacteria in vats to pre-utilize the supplement material, which provides more enzymes. He said even this process is partially compromised because some steps along the way alter the nutrient value, and then the dehydration required to produce a shelf-stable product renders the enzymes inactive again. His laboratory testing found that even in these better-quality products, only 2 to 12 percent is utilized.