Date: 20 June 2011
Transcribed by Aajonus.net & Rawmeatgang
A = Aajonus, J = Jimmy
Intro: Coming up, Aajonus Vonderplanitz and Dr. Joe Mercola. It′s the Livin' La Vida Low Carb show with Jimmy Moore. And now, here′s Jimmy.
J: Hey, and welcome back to the Livin' La Vida Low Carb show with Jimmy Moore, episode 481. Well guys, hang on to your hats today, because I have two outstanding podcast interviews to share with you. First up is a gentleman by the name of Aajonus Vonderplanitz, and he is a well-known raw primal nutrition expert. He′s got a website, wewant2live.com, wewant2live.com, and is the author of a book called We Want to Live, The Primal Diet. And man, oh man, this guy has quite the interesting story about his own health, and how it was turned around thanks to a raw primal diet, which you'll hear about today. Now, the audio is a little funky because we were doing this interview over Skype. He was in the jungles of the Philippines, and I got to tell you, the whole time we were recording it, about every five to ten minutes, we started getting cut off. So I'd have to call him back, and so anyway, we pieced it together as best as we could. I do hope that that does not deter you from the message of what Aajonus has to share, because it's truly remarkable, and we'll have that for you here in just a moment.
[ad]
J: And now without further delay, let's get into my interview with Aajonus Vonderplanitz.
[jingle]
J: Welcome back to the Livin' La Vida Low Carb Show with Jimmy Moore, and today we have someone here with us who knows all about what it's like to be a sick and accident-prone kid. His name is, and I'm going to try not to slaughter his name because he's got a very interesting name, Aajonus Vonderplanitz. And he is here today to talk about two books that he has written. The first one is called We Want to Live, The Primal Diet. And then he's got another book, The Recipe for Living Without Disease. The website is wewant2live.com. And he's got a very interesting story to share with us that I can't wait for you to hear. Aajonus, welcome to the show.
A: Well, thank you, Jimmy. Thank you for having me.
J: Well, tell us a little more about your story and who you are, where you came from, and why you got so interested in the subject of health.
A: Well, it wasn't a choice. I was a very sickly child. I developed autism and learning disorders from a tetanus shot that I got at 18 months old. And that was a big block in my entire life. I was sick and bedridden for about three months yearly. I received my third polio injection, which gave me juvenile diabetes and angina. So I had about 300 heart attacks between the age of 15 and a half and 22 until I changed my diet. And I was diagnosed with a stomach ulcer and cancer at 19. With treatments for that, the radiation gave me blood and bone cancer. And then the treatment for that gave me lymphoma. So it was a trying time for me. So it wasn't a choice. It was survival to learn everything I could about nutrition. And a volunteer at the hospice introduced me to raw foods, raw dairy and raw carrot juice. And that seemed to make a big improvement. In fact, it turned off my autism within 10 days of beginning that diet. So for the first time I could read. So the first time I read a book was at 22 years old. And from there on, I just was infatuated with the nutritional field of health. And I got a tutor that tutored me for three and a half years. And then he was, because he had a weight problem, he was always a bit fatphobic. Although he always ate fat, he was fatphobic. And that seemed to impede my progress because the more fat I ate and the fatter I got, the healthier I became. So I went off in my direction. I went off into raw food fruitarianism for six and a half years, and that nearly destroyed me. And, you know, I have taken my journeys, and I am where I am now. I'm on a raw diet, completely raw. But it's a raw primal diet, which means that I eat basically raw meats and raw dairy, a little bit of fruit, and a little bit of vegetable juice.
J: Yeah. Wow. So what kept you going? I mean, you went through so many things in your teenage years and early 20s that most people wouldn't deal with in a lifetime. What was it that kind of kept you going? Most people would become very despondent and give up.
A: Well, I was suicidal every day. If I died, I would have been very happy. However, as long as I'm alive, I can't turn off my brain nor this need to be better. If I were alive, I was always going to go in the direction of better because I'd seen a lot of people who lived as invalids throughout their lives and I did not want to live that way. So the choice of maybe remaining sickly all my life or getting better.
J: Right. Now, how did you...
A: Dying would have been okay. Dying would have been a relief. But it wasn't. It didn't happen.
J: I mean, everything that you described from the cancer to just everything, that would just devastate most people. They'd be like, okay, God, what did I do wrong? Why am I being struck with all these sicknesses? And it's like, okay, you're trying to send me a message. It would conjure up so many discouraging thoughts. I just can't imagine what all you had to go through. But the good thing is this story has a happy ending. And today you are very healthy thanks to your primal diet. Now I've got to ask you, what led you to a primal way? I mean I know you said that this friend had the fear of fats. What got you over that? Or was it just the fact that you had all these incredible things you had to overcome that that didn't really seem so bad?
A: Well, the raw fats, every time I ate them and he could tell that I was gaining a lot of weight. I'd eat a lot of raw butter, a lot of raw cream. And he could see me gaining a lot of weight and he would chastise me for it. That I was doing too much too frequently.
J: You probably needed to gain some weight.
A: I felt better.
J: You probably needed to gain some weight at that point, I would think.
A: I needed a lot of fat.
J: Yeah.
A: Fat binds to the poisons in the body. Fat protects you. People who are fat, even though it's unhealthy fat, are still more protected than people who are thin. Poisons store in fat. If the body doesn't have fat, those poisons go into the cells and damage cells.
J: Wow.
A: When I got on to the Primal, finally, I'd been on a fruitarian diet for six and a half years. My multiple myeloma, my cancer in the blood, started resurging. I was in a lot of pain. If the temperature dropped below 50 degrees, I was aching in every joint in my body, every bone in my body. And I decided to fast myself to death. And I chose an old Indian burial ground in the desert in California, southern desert, to fast. And this den of coyotes lived up in the foothills where I planted myself. And they'd come down every night and howl and bark and sound like crazy people. And it went on for about ten days. And then they befriended me. And they killed the jackrabbit and brought it to me. And this thought went through my head. When I was a child and autistic, I didn't understand what was being said. But my uncle was telling his sons and my brothers that were going rabbit hunting that if they killed a rabbit, they needed to cook it until it was brown inside and out. You have to cook it thoroughly because there's a microbe in wild rabbits that could take over your intestines and kill you painfully in 48 hours. So when these coyotes offered me this wild rabbit, that dialogue went through my head. And I thought, oh, that's what he was saying. So these coyotes want to help me die quickly because fasting could take 45, 60 days. So I began eating the rabbit. It was the first meat I had eaten in six and a half years, and it was difficult. I vomited the first few bites. It was raw rabbit, like the Easter bunny. And another reason I became vegetarian was because I loved animals. So here I am eating this rabbit, and finally I just psyched myself out. It took five minutes, and I said, okay, this is what I have to eat. I'll treat it like the awful vegetables my mother made me eat all those years. And just try to get it down and keep from vomiting. So the more bites I had of this rabbit, the better it tasted. So I went through about three and a half pounds of a seven-pound jackrabbit. And the coyotes finished the rest, and they went on their way, and I went back to my campsite to die. And I knew I was dying because I felt good as I was walking back. And I only felt that way on three near-death experiences, two on the operating table where I died and they revived me. And when I left the body, there was no pain, and that's what I felt like after eating that rabbit, I felt like my body was leaving all of that pain and suffering. So I thought I was dying, and I went into my sleeping bag. I woke up the next morning still in my sleeping bag, not dead, and still not feeling pain.
Even the cold of the night didn't bother me as much as it normally did. Normally I have to wait two hours with the sun beating down on the sleeping bag before I can get out of the sleeping bag. That morning after eating the rabbit, I was out in 45 minutes, baked in the sun naked for 10 minutes, and was up and functional. So that was quite an improvement. So I waited two more days and no diarrhea, no vomit, no illness, just felt more energy. In fact, I felt better than I had in my entire life, and I was 29 years old at this time.
J: Wow.
A: And after three days, no problems, and still felt energy, I said, you know, all of my travels, because I lived on a bicycle for three years, traveling, living with Indian tribes from Yucatan all the way up to Canada, I mean Alaska, with the Inuit. And they all told me to eat raw meat, and I just wouldn't go there. I was for raw and everything else, but not with meat. You know, when they had done the stomach surgery on me, they had committed a vagotomy, which means they severed all the vagus nerves to my stomach, so I had never again secreted hydrochloric acid. So I was very afraid of eating meat. You know, parasites and stuff like that could take over my body. And then I realized it was a fallacy, and I had eaten another 13 years of meat before I realized, well, let me go find out the studies that they did proving that people who eat raw meat get disease. Not one, not one test anywhere. No evidence anywhere, just postulated nonsense.
J: Wow.
A: Theorized nonsense. So, you know, I've been eating raw meat now since 1976, September of '76, without ever having a problem with it, without ever having a parasite from it.
J: Wow. Just the thought of raw meat, though, sometimes in people's minds, it's like, really, you're eating raw meat? But tell us why the raw part of it is so important. What's wrong with the cooking process?
A: Well, in cooking, you destroy and cauterize nutrients. You alter them. You create 32 known toxins that I address in my recipe book in the last 50 pages. That has all the science in it. I put all the science after I put all the good information, because most people don't need the science. Those who are intellectually inclined need the science. I put that in my second book at the end for them. You know, the results is what I'm after.
J: Sure.
A: So, in that book, I have all the toxins that are formed from cooking, and there are a tremendous amount, and we know 32 have been addressed, and there are all kinds of other compounds, byproducts of those toxins, that form other toxins. So there are a myriad of toxins that are formed from cooking. You cauterize phosphorus at like 98 degrees. You cauterize calcium at like 121 degrees. So even when you pasteurize dairy at its minimal of 141 degrees for 15 seconds, you destroy half of the calcium utilization.
J: Hmm. Which is why they need to fortify it with.
A: When you cook meat, you alter many things in it. You alter many things in any food when you cook.
J: Right. So tell us about the time that you returned to Los Angeles to start researching and experimenting. And you actually kind of went around and did presentations and seminars and classes on what you've discovered. Tell us about that period.
A: Well, that was the period following the coyote incident and the raw rabbit.
J: Right.
A: And after that three days when I realized raw meat was the answer, just as all the Indian tribes had told me, four Indian tribes. Yaqui in Northern California, the old Mayans in the Yucatan, the Sioux Indians in the Dakotas, and the Inuit in Alaska.
J: Right.
A: They all told me to eat raw meat. And I thought they were just trying to kill the white man. And here, after eating the raw rabbit, you know, and discovering that raw meat was the answer, I began, I rode my bicycle around and made a deal with three different farms to milk the goats, cows, shovel manure, whatever I could in exchange for raw rabbit, raw chickens, raw eggs, dairy, all that raw stuff I could. And I gained, like, I was down to about 96 pounds, and I went up to 150 in two and a half months. And I was stronger than I'd ever been. So I went back to Los Angeles to spread the word, and everybody said, Are you nuts? You're going to get a brain group, and you'll be an idiot. And I said, Well, I've been there and done that. This raw meat thing is doing good for me. You know, I'm going to continue it. Until somebody proves me differently.
J: Yeah.
A: Until my body proved me differently, and it didn't.
J: Right.
A: So I've been eating the raw meat since September 76.
J: Now, you did have a near-death experience again after you discovered the raw meat, regarding the mushroom poisoning and how it reactivated the leukemia, and your liver was almost shot, and you took a long time to recover from that. Tell us that story.
A: Well, I was walking to the beach. I was living on Jekyll Island, Georgia, at the time. I was about 18 months there. And there were these beautiful mushrooms that were growing out of somebody's yard, and I checked the seat of them, and there was no cup at the bottom to show me that they were an Amanita. So I picked one that was quite large, probably about 3 1⁄2 inches in diameter, and ate it. And I had a terrible reaction. I began vomiting four hours later. I went into complete spasms in every muscle in my body, cramping. The pain was excruciating. I would pass out after 20 minutes of it. And then I would awaken after 20 minutes of sleeping. And then I had 20 minutes before I would begin again, unless I moved anything from my torso down, even a toe. It would put me right back into the cramps. I could move my arms and head and talk, but I couldn't move any lower part of my body. I couldn't make any muscle activation on any lower part of my body. So, I mean, I could drag my body, but I couldn't initiate muscular activity in the lower part of my body. So it went on for ten and a half weeks. I forced myself to eat one to two pounds of raw butter daily so my liver wouldn't be completely destroyed. It took me about six and a half years to recover. At that time I was eating meat only three days weekly, so it was three meat meals weekly. After a year and a half, of very slow progression, I decided to step up meat eating to daily, twice daily. And the reactions were astronomical. I went in about four months improvement to what it took me a year and a half to improve. So after another two and a half years eating that diet, I was completely recovered. But that was six and a half years gone on eating a death cap. I went back to the location where I'd picked the mushrooms. And the mushroom had been deformed, probably some kind of chemical used on the lawn. The cup was not at the base, right at the lawn level. It was way underneath, about an inch and a half, almost two inches underneath the dirt level. And that's a deformed mushroom, that's not a properly formed amanita. So I knew that we'd be going through some pretty nasty stuff. After I saw that it was the death cap that I ate. But I survived 15 times the amount that kills a person my size.
J: Wow. Wow. So during that six and a half year period where you basically had to heal yourself from that whole experience with the mushrooms, you continued to research and continued to do experiments with food and counseling other people, which led you to your book, We Want to Live. Tell us about why you wrote that book and the extraordinary tale of how you helped many people recover from diseases just by using these common sense approaches that you'd learned yourself.
A: Well, just by applying them to other people and their situations, I could... Because I was autistic, I had a different sense of the body, I wasn't miseducated about the system. Because I didn't understand what they were saying in the first place, I just followed whatever the doctors did. But then when I got my conscience and my consciousness working when I was 22 years old, then everything changed. I didn't accept anything. When you're an autistic child, you can read people's truthfulness. 95% of everything that comes out of an adult's mouth is a lie. Period. Especially if it's a parent talking to a child. And even children, after they reach the age of 6 years old, it incredibly declines. The lies are innumerable. So I knew early in my life, never take anyone's advice at face value. You do what works, what really, you know, what empirical evidence shows you is reality. So when things work, I utilize them. And then after 28 years of experimentation, I felt it was time to write a book. I'm not one of those who jumps into anything just talking about anything. Whenever I'd suggest anybody, I said, well this and this has worked for that, maybe it'll work for this. And after 28 years of doing that, it came to the point where I could say, do this and do this, and that will happen. So that's when I wrote the book. When I had 28 years of experience in, of successes, then I decided that I was knowledgeable enough to share the information.
J: Well, and you documented all along the way the people that you helped to counsel and give basically your experience to them. Tell us about some of the cancer patients. How many came to you with terminal cancer and how many survived? Same with some of the other health conditions that you helped them overcome. It was a pretty significant number, right?
A: Oh, yes, definitely. Those numbers were calculated by the neuroscientist, what was her name? She called all my patients and followed up on everything. I don't know why... Elnora Van Winkle.
Q: Okay.
A: She was a neuroscientist with Columbia University that was responsible for documenting all the chemicals that were in the brain, human brain. And when she got on the diet, my diet, when she heard about it in her 70s, you know, it was a breakthrough for her. So she called my patients. I gave her the list, the cancer patients, the other patients. She called all of them and followed up. So those were her statistics. I don't recall them offhand, but out of about 242 cancer patients, 232 completely reversed. And that was anywhere from 12, let's see, anywhere from 6 to 12 years following the diet.
J: Wow.
A: That was a long, there wasn't anybody she called that was short term. I gave her people who had been six years or more on the diet. And then the people who had other heart problems and things like that, something like 1,400. And then the recovery rate was about 1,399 out of about 1,459, even those with heart bypasses. I have a 79-year-old woman who had three heart bypasses and has been on the diet 11 years now and never has had a problem. She says she has no pains, no aches, no anything. She's 79 years old and vibrantly healthy.
J: Wow. That is incredible. That is really great. Have you presented this information to be published in a journal somewhere or any kind of epidemiological study for inclusion in some kind of a journal?
A: Because I'm not an MD, I won't even be considered.
J: Do you have an MD?
A: I put it out in the books. In the books, that doesn't need to be in any journal.
J: I agree with you.
A: I read the latest report on the tests that are done by pharmaceuticals. Ninety percent of them are false and fraudulent. Ninety percent.
J: Yeah.
A: And that's by a researcher MD who checked on 42 of the main drugs that were tested and found that there was fraud in 90% of them.
J: Wow. So do you have any doctors or PhDs within your sphere of influence who could maybe take up that cause or you're just not worried about it?
A: They will be lambasted. Remember, the medical industry is run by the pharmaceutical industry. They want to make money.
J: Yeah.
A: If they don't make money, they're not in business. They want people sick and taking medications. A program benefits is [cutting out] is to reduce their financial [cutting out] probably over 150 MDs. The MDs and PhDs are on the diet, probably about 150, do not make their presence known because they will be outcasts. So, no, the MDs and PhDs are not going to do much. Now, Dr. Mercola, he advocates people eat raw dairy and raw meat.
J: Sure.
A: He was my patient.
J: Yep.
A: He follows my program to a great deal, but he uses supplements, which I don't agree with. But he's one that advocates the eating of raw meat and raw dairy, and he does make himself visibly known.
J: Oh, yeah. That is great. And now your cancer has been in remission for many years. Actually, you say it's been completely reversed, as did all the rest of your diseases that you dealt with. And you were actually given a death sentence many, many decades ago now, and you've outlived all of that, enjoying really excellent health. You don't really exercise a lot. You really do believe in this because it changed your life.
A: Correct, and other people's, not only mine. If it only changed mine, then I would only be an advocate for me.
J: Right.
A: But it's changed tens of thousands of people's lives. I get emails every day from, let's say, 15 people. 15 people, you know, 365 days a year, every year, you know, since the book's out... It's a lot of people.
J: Yeah, that's awesome. So you published We Want to Live in 1997. It was updated in 2005. And you also wrote a recipe book in 2002 that came out called The Recipe for Living Without Disease. Tell us about what you included in that book for people to read.
A: Well, the first 50 pages is how to do the diet. And on page 40 and 41, there's even dietary programs to follow. Then for the next 100 pages are recipes to make raw foods taste and look really great. And then the last 50 pages are science to back up the diet.
J: Right.
A: To support the diet. In 2009, a five-camera video of my workshop, which tells about the physiology and anatomy of the human body, not a medical perspective, but from a dietary perspective, including all of the bacteria in the mouth and the stomach, everything going all the way down to the rectum, what we should be eating and how we should eat. And that's about five and a half hours. Then I just finished a DVD on recipes, so there's two hours and about 20 minutes of a DVD where I make recipes.
J: Right.
A: To show you how to make good, tasty raw meat recipes. Now, there's many people in the world that eat raw meat on a regular basis. Carpaccio, ceviche, sushi, kibbeh, all of those are raw meat dishes. No cooking involved in those meat dishes. So it's cultural all over the world. It's just that it's not readily known.
J: Well, you're certainly doing your part to make it readily known, and you've actually had some pretty major media appearances. You've been in Disney's Epcot magazine, which had an episode on you about you are what you eat. Ripley's featured you on an episode where you were called the rotten meat eater. And the Doctors TV talk show named your program one of the ten most extraordinary health programs. You definitely have gotten the message out there. And I think it's very admirable that you're not only advocating this, but you yourself are living it. And as you said at the beginning of the interview, you have to do this because this is your life. But for this way of eating that you figured out on your own, you may not be with us today. So we're so very thankful that you're spreading the good word. His name is Aajonus Vonderplanitz, and you can visit his website, WeWant2Live. It's called WeWant2Live.com, where you can learn all about the great work that he's doing there. Well, thanks so much for joining us here today on the Livin' La Vida Low-Carb Show.
A: Thank you, Jimmy.