Well Water

The most extensive discussion Aajonus provided about well water concerns its use in baths and hot tubs rather than as a drinking source. He drew a sharp contrast between well water and municipal water for bathing, describing his own experience before he had a well when he was living in Los Angeles. He explained that when he got into a bath using LA municipal water, within ten minutes his teeth were chattering, his body was shaking, and his breathing became erratic and hyper. He described it as resembling a hyper diabetic state. He tested this multiple times and eventually understood it was the industrial chemicals in the water. Los Angeles water at the time contained, by his account, 192 to 193 chemicals, the result of water being used twice by heavy industry in the San Fernando Valley and in Saugus before reaching the city. The chemicals included industrial waste from trucks, painting operations, and various manufacturing discharges that were recycled back into the municipal supply.

Once he moved to the mountains of Malibu and had access to a well, the situation changed entirely. He described being able to bathe in well water without needing the protective mixture of raw milk, vinegar, and sea salt that he recommended for people using chemically treated municipal water. The principle behind that bath mixture was that the minerals in the milk bind with the acidity and chemicals in treated water so that those compounds are not absorbed through the skin during perspiration. With well water that is not contaminated, he stated directly: "You don't have to put anything in that water if you have well water, and it's not contaminated."

Aajonus described his hot tub as being filled from his well, and he treated the bacterial content of the water as something positive rather than a liability. He recounted a specific occasion when he had no milk available and was thirsty. He took water from his hot tub, which had been colonized with bacteria from the well and from rain that had brought additional bacteria into the area. He described taking approximately a cup and a half of that water, adding coconut cream, dairy cream, honey, lemon juice, and blended cucumber, then combining everything together as a nutrient-dense drink. The bacterial content of the hot tub water was not a concern to him and was implicitly viewed as beneficial, consistent with his broader position that bacteria-rich water is far preferable to sterile or treated water.

Aajonus addressed the phenomenon of well water that smells strongly because of high sulfur content. His position was that sulfur well water, despite its unpleasant odor, is therapeutically valuable rather than something to be avoided or corrected. He explained that sulfur in well water helps pull toxic sulfur from the body, particularly the sulfur-based antibiotics that he described as very damaging because they dehydrate the system. Sulfur-based antibiotics were used for bladder and kidney infections, but in his analysis they stop symptoms without correcting the underlying condition, leaving toxins stored in the urethra, bladder, and kidneys and creating a worse long-term outcome. Sulfur water, by contrast, assists in drawing that stored sulfur out.

His statement on this was direct: smelling horrible in well water due to sulfur is "a good thing."

While Aajonus's baseline position was that uncontaminated well water requires no treatment or additives, he identified specific contamination scenarios that change the protocol. He described two primary contaminants that may appear in well water and require response.

For arsenic or copper contamination at high levels, he recommended adding a small amount of raw milk to the water, describing it as "not a lot" and stating that "it won't take much." The mechanism is the same as in the bath formula for municipal water: the minerals in milk bind with the metallic contaminants so they do not absorb into the system.

For high iron content, he recommended adding a small amount of sea salt or Epsom salt to the water. His reasoning was that this prevents the iron from irritating the skin and drying it out on the surface during bathing. He clarified that the iron does not penetrate the skin but that it dries the surface, and the salt addresses this without requiring the full milk-and-vinegar treatment used for chemically treated municipal water.

Even when well water is clean and uncontaminated, Aajonus noted that bathing can be drying to the skin because of the perspiration of toxins out through the skin during soaking. His solution was to add a small amount of coconut cream to the bath water. He described this as similar to the spray wax at the end of a car wash, coating the skin with a thin layer of oil and raw water-soluble fats as you exit the bath. He described the result as very pleasant, providing softness and moisture to the skin immediately upon leaving the water.

He also mentioned that even with well water, putting a little bit of the protective substances in the bath is reasonable, though not strictly necessary in the way it is with treated water.

Aajonus's overall position on drinking water was that even the best water should be consumed in very small quantities, and he rarely used well water as a stand-alone drink. His consumption of drinking water in general was described as roughly half a cup per month during fall and winter, increasing to perhaps a cup or two per week during summer and spring. He stated he would never drink water alone unless in an extreme survival situation.

When he did describe using well water as part of a drink, as in the hot tub incident, he always combined it with substantial quantities of fat, protein, and other nutrients. This aligns with his general principle that H2O cannot be absorbed into cells without accompanying nutrients, and that drinking isolated water simply causes it to flood to the kidneys and be excreted, taking nutrients with it.

He also contrasted well water favorably with commercially processed waters. His preferred commercial drinking waters were naturally sparkling mineral waters such as Gerolsteiner, Ramlosa, San Pellegrino, San Faustino, and Perrier, where the carbon dioxide from the same well is pumped together with the water into the bottle without synthetic carbonation. He described Gerolsteiner as a favorite for this reason and noted that it contains natural mineral content that gives it mild cleansing and dissolving properties. Well water from a clean source shares this natural mineral profile, and unlike bottled waters, it requires no processing or shipping.

In one Q&A response, Aajonus addressed a person who was working on installing a three-stage water filtration system for dogs but had not yet completed the installation. His interim recommendation was to fill half a bucket with sand and a cup of topsoil, then fill the rest with municipal water if well water was not available, and let it stand for 24 hours before giving it to the dogs. The explicit framing was "if you do not have well water," indicating that well water was the preferred baseline for dogs as well as humans, with the sand-and-topsoil method serving as a partial remediation for municipal water in the absence of the well option.

Aajonus described a three-stage water filtration system he recommended to his book publisher, who also did not have access to a well. The stages were paper first, then charcoal, then sand, with the reasoning that this order allowed the final sand stage to return some natural minerals and bacteria to the water, approximating the qualities of spring or rain stream water. He noted that the conventional recommendation is to run water through sand first, then charcoal, then paper, but he reversed this order deliberately. The result he reported was that the publisher's family no longer needed to add milk and vinegar to their water, suggesting the filtered water was clean enough to not require the protective treatment used for raw municipal water. This three-stage filtration is positioned as a step toward the quality of well water for people who do not have a well.

Aajonus placed well water in a broader hierarchy of water quality. At the top he placed algae-rich lake water and fresh unpolluted rainwater with high bacteria content, which he described as "the only naturally distilled water I would ever recommend." Rainwater, in his framework, is H2O combined with abundant bacteria, and that bacterial content is what makes it useful rather than purely damaging. Below that, naturally sparkling mineral water from unprocessed wells was recommended for those who need to drink water. Well water that is uncontaminated sits close to spring water in his hierarchy, above any treated, bottled, or processed source.

He also noted that Gerolsteiner received a failing grade from consumer watchdog evaluations precisely because it does not treat its water and does not remove the naturally occurring bacteria. From his perspective, this is exactly what makes it one of the better commercial options, because the bacteria are desirable rather than dangerous.