The most common question I get after someone reads issue #01 is some version of "okay but what do you actually put in your mouth." Fair. Here's the real list, pulled from his own writing rather than the watered-down version that tends to circulate.

1. Meat, raw

Beef, lamb, poultry, fish, all raw. The reasoning he gave: cooking changes protein and fat structure and kills the enzymes your body would otherwise use directly. Whether or not you buy the enzyme argument, "eat it raw" is rule one, full stop.

Oysters get weirdly specific treatment in his writing — more specific than I expected, honestly. The claim is that they clear heavy metals out of the body faster than anything else, and the actual regimen he laid out is half to a whole cup of red meat with three oysters, twice a day, six days a week, one day off. He also had opinions on sourcing: skip Florida and Gulf of Mexico oysters, go farmed from open ocean water instead.

Beyond oysters, I haven't found anything in his writing naming a specific fish — no salmon, nothing like that. So raw fish generally fits the same logic as the meat above, but if you see someone claim "Vonderplanitz said eat salmon," that's not something I can back up.

2. Dairy, unpasteurized

Raw milk, raw cream, raw cheese, instead of whatever's pasteurized and homogenized at the grocery store. Pasteurization, in this framework, isn't a safety step — it's the thing doing the damage.

The word he actually leaned on wasn't just "raw" — it was "truly organic raw dairy" specifically. That's the sourcing bar he set, more than any grass-fed/grain-fed distinction. His own maintenance diet, by his account, was about as simple as this gets: raw milk, raw butter, and almonds. He did note needing to add meat back in when living somewhere cold or in a more polluted environment, so it wasn't presented as a rigid one-size-fits-all.

One thing worth knowing if you try this: he treated bloating after raw dairy as a detox symptom, not a sign of intolerance, and his advice was to cut back the amount rather than stop entirely. I'm not going to tell you whether that's right — I don't have a way to verify it — just flagging that it's his actual position if you hit that wall.

3. Eggs, whole and raw

I said this was the simplest rule on the list in an earlier version of this page. I was wrong — I just hadn't read enough of his writing yet. It's actually one of the more detailed rules once you dig in.

His framing: raw eggs are "brain fuel," supposedly the most digestible fat and protein source there is, digesting in around 27 minutes. He claimed they could shift someone's mood inside 10–20 minutes. Quantity scaled with body size in his own guidance — 6 a day for a smaller person, 12 for someone tall, with some men apparently going up to 28. He said he personally ate up to fifty a day. I'm just reporting that, not endorsing it.

The rule that actually matters if you try this: never blend eggs alone. Blending destroys the enzymes he cared about. If you're going to blend them at all, mix in cream or milk so it coats the egg white. Otherwise, eat them whole, or crack a small hole and drink it straight from the shell.

He also had a whole practice around aging eggs — "high eggs," aged three to four weeks with hairline cracks in the shell, which he claimed enhanced the neurological benefits. He pointed to century eggs (aged up to 25 years in some traditions) as the extreme version of the same idea. On sourcing, he preferred unwashed eggs specifically — his argument was that washing kills the bacteria on the shell the egg needs to be able to reproduce — and, more than I expected to be typing in a newsletter, considered a little visible mess on the shell a good sign rather than something to scrub off. Amish-raised eggs from farms feeding a meat-based diet were his top pick.

Combination rules: don't pair eggs with fruit, except papaya or pineapple specifically, because those two carry the digestive enzymes needed to handle the combination. Eggs eaten alone were linked to weight loss in his framework; eggs eaten with other food, to weight gain. They combine fine with meat, milk, cream, or honey.

4. Fat over carbs

Tallow, raw butter, the fat trimmed off raw meat — this is the fuel source, not carbohydrate. And he was oddly precise about quantity: up to 8–16 tablespoons of raw butter a day in his own formulas. His argument was that raw fat "cleanses, lubricates, protects and fuels the body easily," while heated fat just gets stored — cellulite, waxy deposits, whatever your body can't actually use.

5. Fruit, never solo

This is the one people usually miss. Fruit shows up constantly, but always paired with fat — oranges and bananas blended with raw eggs and dairy fat, strawberries with raw cream, unripe pineapple with raw garlic and butter. The logic ties back to rule 4: fruit sugar without fat isn't how he thought the body was supposed to process it.

Here's where I have to be straight with you: I went looking for his actual explanation of why fat needs to be there — something about sugar absorption, insulin, blood sugar, anything — and it's not in what's publicly available on aajonus.net. He gives the rule and the recipes, not the mechanism. So if you've heard someone present a specific physiological reason and attribute it to him directly, I can't confirm that's actually his.

The explanation you'll hear most often in the broader raw-food and ancestral-eating world — not sourced to Vonderplanitz specifically, just the common reasoning people give for this kind of pairing — is that fat slows down how fast sugar (fruit sugar included) hits your bloodstream, blunting the spike you'd get from fruit eaten alone. Whether or not that's why he actually built the rule this way, I can't say. I'm including it because it's the logic people reach for, not because it's confirmed to be his.

Honey gets its own weirdly specific rule too. "Unheated" means never warmed past hive temperature, 92.8°F — which is a different, stricter thing than "raw" or "uncooked" honey, both of which can legally be heated up to 160°F and still keep those labels. His claim was that 80–90% of genuinely unheated honey converts into digestive enzymes, something heated honey supposedly can't do anymore.

This is also why papaya and pineapple keep showing up specifically, not just as random fruit choices — they're the two exceptions he made for pairing fruit with eggs (see rule 3), because he attributed digestive enzymes to those two specifically that other fruit doesn't have. Same underlying logic every time: it's never really about the fruit on its own, it's about what enzymes or fat are sitting next to it.

6. Skip the processed stuff

Grains, refined sugar, seed oils, anything that came off a factory line or out of a hot pan — minimized or gone entirely.

7. Sun exposure, not sunscreen

Regular sun is part of the diet here, not a risk you manage around it. Straight rejection of the "avoid the sun completely" advice most of us grew up with.

This is also where rule 6 connects directly to sun exposure, and this part isn't from Vonderplanitz — I want to be clear about that up front. It's a mechanism that's actually well-documented in photobiology research, just not something he wrote about himself. Polyunsaturated fats — linoleic acid, the main one in seed oils, is the relevant one here — have unstable double-bond structures that UV radiation attacks directly, generating reactive oxygen species and triggering lipid peroxidation in your skin cell membranes. A 1992 animal study found that mice on high-PUFA diets showed measurably more UV damage than mice on saturated-fat diets. The mechanism is real chemistry, independent of anything he ever claimed — he just never gets credit or blame for it either way.

That's it! Not gonna pretend every part of it is easy to follow, but this is the actual framework. Next issue's about Goatis, and where his version of all this overlaps with what's above.

Fat, fruit, and honey details sourced from We Want to Live via aajonus.net. Dairy details from "Does Raw Milk Do A Body Good?". Egg details from "Benefits of Raw Eggs".