Long before "raw carnivore" was a TikTok trend, Aajonus Vonderplanitz was building the framework that most of today's raw-animal-food community still leans on. He's the name behind the Primal Diet — and the author of We Want to Live, the book that laid out his case for eating raw meat, raw dairy, and raw eggs instead of the cooked, processed diet most of the world grew up on.
He wasn't even born with that name
Aajonus Vonderplanitz was born John Richard Swigart in Denver, Colorado in 1947. "Aajonus" came later — he took the name from a toddler he met in his twenties — and "Vonderplanitz" came after that, a European ancestral surname he adopted because he simply didn't like the one he was born with.
The health crisis that started it all
Vonderplanitz described himself as self-taught in nutrition, with no accredited medical or scientific training. His approach came out of a rough run with conventional medicine: diagnosed with juvenile diabetes at 15, a stomach ulcer surgery that left a bad scar, then radiation therapy to treat that scar which he said caused bone marrow cancer. He stopped chemotherapy when it triggered psoriasis and other complications — and said it was raw carrot juice and raw dairy that turned his health around from there.
How raw meat entered the picture
The Primal Diet didn't start as a raw-meat diet — Vonderplanitz was raw vegan first. The turning point, by his own account, came in his late twenties while fasting alone in the wilderness: he watched wild dogs take down a jackrabbit, and they left him a piece of it. Raw. That's the moment he traces his shift to eating raw animal foods back to.
"We want to live" wasn't just a book title for him — it was the whole thesis: that the modern diet is slowly working against the body, and that raw, primal eating is the correction.
What he actually taught
He laid out the full framework in We Want to Live (1997, expanded in 2005):
- Raw meat and raw organ meats over any cooked preparation
- Raw, unpasteurized dairy — milk, cream, cheese
- Raw eggs, often blended into other foods
- Raw animal fats as a primary energy source
- Minimal to no cooked or processed food
- Sun exposure as part of overall health, not something to avoid
He didn't stop at writing about it. He founded a nonprofit, Right to Choose Healthy Foods, and built private food-buying clubs to get raw dairy and meat to people who wanted in — by some counts, dozens of these clubs operated nationwide, some with over a thousand members. For years he was one of the most recognized voices pushing back against the "cook everything, fear raw food" consensus in mainstream nutrition.
Why he still matters here
Vonderplanitz died in 2013, but his ideas didn't. The current wave of raw-meat and anti-vegan creators — Goatis among the most visible of them — are, whether they cite him directly or not, operating in the space he carved out first. If you're new to this newsletter, his work is the starting point for almost everything else we'll cover.