Transcribed by Aajonus.net & Rawmeatgang

F = Fred, A = Aajonus

F: I'm talking with Aajonus Vonderplanitz. He's the creator of the Primal Diet. And my question for you today, Aajonus, is how did you evolve your diet? I mean, how did you... I know it's not a theoretical diet, like a lot of diets are. But how did your diet evolve? How did you create it?

A: Well, mine is an entirely empirical diet, from experience. I was dying of blood, bone, lymph, and stomach cancers at 20 years old. I was not supposed to live beyond my 21st birthday, which was 1967. I also had diabetes, psoriasis, angina pectoris, and bursitis, all so-called incurable. And on my deathbed, a young African-American fellow, I was only 20 years old, he was 18, and he introduced me to raw carrot juice and raw milk. I was dying and he was a volunteer at a hospice. And so he made the raw carrot juice and got the raw milk for me, mixed them together, and I drank them, sometimes apart and separate. And I had had chemotherapy and radiation and surgery, so all the bad things that the medical profession does, such as burn, poison, and butcher you. Which, you know, it's do no harm always. You don't have to do harm. You don't have to attack the body to heal it, to nurture it. There's no way to achieve optimal health of any sort. So I was dying, and I drank that raw milk, and I drank that raw carrot juice, and it was absolutely lovely and tasty. Because after you've had chemo and radiation, everything tastes like cardboard or postage stamp glue. And this raw milk and this raw carrot juice tasted phenomenal. And that's why I was drinking it, not because I thought it was good. I was relatively still autistic and really didn't understand language and couldn't communicate. So I didn't understand all that, but I understood the taste, you know, of those foods, that rich, delicious taste.

So as I got better over the years, you know, I would just explore more in the raw foods, branching out into eating more kinds of dairies rather than just the milk and the carrot juice. And then I got into raw eggs, and meat I stayed away from, because I was so brainwashed that meat would create, you know, brain parasites and stuff like that. So I stayed away from raw meats, but got into everything else raw. Then I became a fruitarian, and as I said in another interview we had, it destroyed my health. I went down to 96 pounds at the lightest. And wasting away, the blood and bone cancers resurged, and I was suffering terribly again. So, you know, I ate raw meat to kill myself, basically, because I was told it would kill me. And I just took it for granted, you know. And Indians had told me that I lived, when I lived in the wild, that I needed to eat raw meat. I just thought they were trying to kill the white boy and get back at him, taking away the land and their culture and everything. So I ate the raw meat to kill myself after living outdoors for two years. And it did just the opposite. It invigorated me. I was such a sickly child that I could never play sports.

I tried one year on a football team, and of course it was the guard where you don't have to do much, you don't have to run far, you don't have to do anything except, you know, crouch next to the center and the quarterback. And that was my experience on being physical. When I ate this raw meat, everything changed. I mean, I had energy, I had strength. I went from like 113 pounds, because I started eating some raw dairy again, I went from 113 pounds to 158 pounds in two and a half months, by eating all this meat and raw eggs and raw dairy. And I was vibrant and healthy. That's how I came to the diet, and then I was perfecting it over the years. Would foods affect this kind of ailment? And in 1977 I was talked into becoming the chief nutritionist at Aunt Tilly's health food store, and also at Aunt Tilly's two health food store. So I developed by watching people, experimenting with how many people a particular thing would work for.

So by the time I came to writing my book, and it was published in 1997, my first book, We Want to Live, the primal diet. By that time, 85% of all the remedies, I mean all the remedies, worked 85% on people. 85% of the people who tried those remedies, it was effective. So that's quite an accomplishment. And at that time, my cancer reversal rate grew over the time as I realized how better to, and I understood cancer better, why it develops. By the time my book was published, my reversal of cancer, or the foods, I don't reverse anything, I'm not God, but the foods that God did make, or nature make, if you don't believe in God, that was responsible for reversing disease. I am just the technician or the inventor that puts them together, the certain foods together that have the ability to reverse certain ailments easier and better.

F: Good, good. Well, thanks for that clarification.

A: You're very welcome.

F: Thanks.