Agoraphobia on the Primal Diet
Agoraphobia on the Primal Diet

Aajonus did not define agoraphobia by name in these source passages. However, he framed all fear-based psychological and neurological states, including extreme, irrational, or debilitating fear of environments, people, and situations, as fundamentally physiological in nature, not psychological. In his framework, what the medical establishment labels as psychiatric disorders, phobias, and psychosomatic conditions are actually the result of chemical toxicity in the nervous system, nutritional deficiency, blood sugar instability, and neurological damage from industrial poisons, particularly heavy metals introduced through vaccines.

Body System{Body System}
Root Principle{Root Principle}
Onset{Onset}
Detox Pathway{Detox Pathway}
Aajonus's Definition

Aajonus's Definition

Aajonus did not define agoraphobia by name in these source passages. However, he framed all fear-based psychological and neurological states, including extreme, irrational, or debilitating fear of environments, people, and situations, as fundamentally physiological in nature, not psychological. In his framework, what the medical establishment labels as psychiatric disorders, phobias, and psychosomatic conditions are actually the result of chemical toxicity in the nervous system, nutritional deficiency, blood sugar instability, and neurological damage from industrial poisons, particularly heavy metals introduced through vaccines.

The pattern of behavior that might be described clinically as agoraphobic, an extreme terror of being outside one's controlled environment, of facing crowds or open spaces, of being exposed and vulnerable, was something Aajonus lived personally in his own childhood and early adult life. He described his own experience of chronic, pervasive fear:

"I lived in fear. I didn't sleep at nights because I was afraid that there were other things... I was afraid to look under the bed. I was afraid to go to sleep. So I rarely slept maybe a few hours a day and a night and was pretty much exhausted all the time."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

He also described a state in which his sensitivity to his environment became so extreme that ordinary sounds, smells, and stimuli became sources of panic and fury:

"Most everything smelled repulsive. Noise drove me crazy... The sound of barking instantly drove me into panic and fury."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

In Aajonus's framework, this level of environmental hypersensitivity and fear-driven reactivity is not a psychiatric condition originating in the mind, it is a body that is poisoned, malnourished, and overloaded with neurological toxins producing psychotropic chemical byproducts that the nervous system cannot properly buffer or clear.

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Root Cause

Root Cause

Aajonus identified several interlocking causes for extreme fear states, neurological hypersensitivity, environmental terror, and the kind of debilitating anxiety that confines a person to perceived safety:

Heavy Metal Neurotoxicity, Primarily Mercury from Vaccines

The single most detailed causal explanation Aajonus gave in these passages for severe neurological and psychological dysfunction, including fear states, was mercury poisoning from thimerosal in vaccines. He described this with great specificity from his own experience:

"The third one, mercury went to my brain, turned me autistic. I was unable to fit my brain around the idea of language and communication."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

"Thimerosal, which is liquid mercury, in every vaccine. Liquid mercury is a known poison. And it has been linked in the last ten years with autism."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

"It causes about 6 to 800 times more autism."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

He extended this causal logic beyond autism specifically to all neurological conditions, stating that when mercury and other vaccine components damage neurological tissue, the result is an inability to properly process and buffer stimuli, including fear stimuli. The brain loses its capacity to modulate input, and ordinary environmental cues become overwhelming or terrifying.

He described the components of vaccines he received:

"All of them are poisonous individually. And when you put the soup together, they're very poisonous."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

The reference to squalene as one of those poisons appears in the passages, indicating the cumulative toxic load on the nervous system from multiple vaccine ingredients combined.

Stored Psychotropic Chemical Byproducts from Neurological Trauma

Aajonus repeatedly cited the work of neurological scientist Elnora Van Winkle of Columbia University (also described as working at Milhouse Laboratories and New York City University Medical Center) whose paper "The Biology of Emotions" documented the physiological basis of fear-driven emotional states. Aajonus described her findings and their implications:

"She found that when she found people going to a lot of emotional turmoil for no direct cause with no direct cause in their life for stress and anxiety she found certain chemical properties that were the byproduct of earlier times of trauma or anxiety or angst floating in the blood. So it showed that these byproducts of neurological trauma when the body produces these psychotropic compounds store in the body like any other toxin. When they get removed, the body goes back into the same kind of behavior as when it was produced."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

This is a critical point in Aajonus's framework for understanding agoraphobia-like fear states: the body stores the chemical residues of past traumatic fear experiences. When those stored psychotropic compounds begin to be detoxified and released back into the bloodstream, the person re-experiences the original fear state, not because anything in their present environment is actually threatening, but because the chemistry of the old trauma is circulating through their system again. This produces apparently irrational terror, panic, and extreme reactivity to environmental stimuli that has no logical present-day cause.

Blood Sugar Instability from High-Carbohydrate Diet

Aajonus identified blood sugar problems as a direct physiological cause of psychological dysfunction, psychoses, and extreme emotional reactivity. In the Q&A section of the source materials, he was asked about a woman with severe psychological problems including difficulty functioning, procrastination, inability to manage time, and extreme emotional dysregulation. He responded:

"Simply eliminating carbohydrates should help. But, most people who are carbohydrate-allergic are also carbohydrate addicts."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

"Yes it could, if she has a blood-sugar level problem." [in response to whether her condition could be caused by diet and nutrition]

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

He also described his own experience of how high-carbohydrate consumption drove extreme emotional states:

"I occasionally felt extremely overemotional... I could not help but revert to my childhood fears... Adrenalin soured in my body and I stood dumbfounded in fear of usual discipline/abuse."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

The pattern he described, eating too much high-carbohydrate fruit and juice, then experiencing fear states, emotional instability, and reversion to childhood trauma responses, is directly applicable to agoraphobic fear patterns. Blood sugar crashes produce neurological instability, and in that state, old fear chemistry stored in the nervous system resurfaces.

Adrenaline and Activity Hormone Imbalance

Aajonus explained that a significant portion of anxiety, which he placed at approximately 95%, is caused by the accumulation of activity hormones (testosterone, estrogen, adrenaline) in people who need to exercise but are not doing so:

"95% of anxiety is created because you need to exercise. Now if you're in a state where you're fatigued and you were a highly active child and now you've grown into this feeble, deteriorated, painful person and you can't exercise because it's too painful or you don't have the energy to..."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

This is directly relevant to agoraphobia because the condition frequently produces a cycle: extreme fear of leaving safe environments → no exercise → accumulation of adrenaline and activity hormones → increasing anxiety → even more extreme fear of the outside world and more confinement.

He elaborated:

"People who have that kind of energy had better be physically active... or you're going to be in high anxiety and an unhappy person, and the people around you are going to be unhappy. So anxiety means you need to exercise."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

Neurological Damage from Industrial Chemicals and EMFs

Aajonus described a condition he experienced himself and observed widely, chemical hypersensitivity and electromagnetic sensitivity, that produces extreme neurological reactivity to the environment:

"I had it back when I was about fifteen years old. If my mother got on anything with a mung on it, I'd have a seizure. An angina attack."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

He also described how EMF exposure caused symptoms including:

"Tinnitus, hyper-allergic, hypersensitivity, soreness, hyperactivity, ADD, ADHD, and even anger, joint soreness, muscle soreness or tightness and/or fatigue, insomnia, nausea and chronic fatigue."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

In his framework, when the nervous system is sensitized by industrial chemical damage, the person becomes hypersensitive to their environment in ways that can manifest as extreme avoidance, which is the behavioral core of agoraphobia.

Fear as a Weapon of Control, Institutionalized Phobia

Aajonus had a broader philosophical argument about how the medical and pharmaceutical establishment deliberately cultivates fear as a control mechanism:

"The way the doctors, the pharmaceutical industry hooks you in is fear. It's like it got us into an Iraq war and all of those other wars... Fear generates all of the stuff that you do basically."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

"If you understand the human body, you won't be afraid of it. You'll see how it works itself if you take care of it. If you feed it properly, it does very well."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

In this sense, Aajonus framed all institutionalized fear, including the medical profession's use of dire prognoses, the news media's use of threat narratives, and religion's use of hell and damnation, as creating a population of people living in chronic fear states, which he saw as both physiologically damaging and as the precondition for many extreme psychological conditions including phobias.

He described how this operated in his own life:

"I was terrified of something under the bed getting me because I'd had nightmares. Every night I had nightmares so I didn't want to sleep."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

"I was raised Catholic and, you know, they told me about the devil and stuff like that. So, you know, I was afraid to look under the bed. I was afraid to go to sleep."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

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Why This Happens

Why This Happens

Based on the framework Aajonus laid out, agoraphobia and extreme fear states fall primarily under:

Root Cause / Terrain Theory, because the condition originates in neurological damage from vaccine mercury (thimerosal), chemical toxicity, and nutritional deficiency that prevents the brain from properly buffering fear stimuli and clearing psychotropic byproducts of old trauma.

Detoxification, because a significant portion of the fear experience in this context is the body attempting to remove stored psychotropic chemical compounds that were produced during past trauma, with those compounds recirculating through the blood and nervous system during detox cycles, recreating the original fear states.

Cooked Food, because blood sugar instability from high-carbohydrate diets directly produces the neurological and emotional instability that feeds extreme fear responses, and because cooked, processed food fails to supply the fats, proteins, and enzymes needed to rebuild and protect neurological tissue.

Raw Food / How to Eat, because the solution Aajonus proposed for neurological healing and the resolution of fear-based states is the raw food diet, specifically raw animal fats and proteins that rebuild the nervous system and provide the biochemical substrate for stable neurological function.

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Symptoms Reframed

Symptoms Reframed

Aajonus did not explicitly reframe agoraphobia as a named set of symptoms in these passages, but he consistently reframed several categories of symptoms that are clinically associated with agoraphobia:

Irrational Fear with No Present-Day Cause

Conventionally, this is called a phobia or anxiety disorder. In Aajonus's framework, it is the body detoxifying stored psychotropic compounds from past neurological trauma. The person is not experiencing a mental illness, they are experiencing the chemistry of old trauma being recirculated and discharged from the body. He stated this explicitly:

"These byproducts of neurological trauma when the body produces these psychotropic compounds store in the body like any other toxin. When they get removed, the body goes back into the same kind of behavior as when it was produced."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

Environmental Hypersensitivity and Reactivity

The inability to tolerate ordinary environmental stimuli, sounds, smells, crowds, open spaces, is not a psychological weakness in Aajonus's framework. It is neurological damage, specifically to the nervous system's capacity to buffer input. He described his own experience:

"Most everything smelled repulsive. Noise drove me crazy... The sound of barking instantly drove me into panic and fury."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

He attributed this to the toxic state of the body following medical interventions (chemotherapy, radiation, surgery) that destroyed his neurological buffer capacity.

Inability to Sleep, Constant Vigilance

Aajonus described this state in detail as part of his own history:

"I rarely slept maybe a few hours a day and a night and was pretty much exhausted all the time."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

"I didn't sleep at night because I was afraid my brother would come and hit me in the stomach and knock the wind out of me... Also there was always the boogeyman under the bed."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

In his framework, chronic sleep deprivation from fear-driven hypervigilance depletes the nervous system and creates a feedback loop where the body cannot repair itself, generating more fear chemistry, more reactivity, and more confinement.

Panic and Fury in Response to Ordinary Stimuli

Rather than labeling this as a panic disorder, Aajonus framed it as evidence of a poisoned nervous system that has lost its capacity to modulate input. The solution is not psychiatric medication but rather rebuilding the nervous system through raw animal fats and proteins.

Procrastination, Inability to Function, Dithering

In the Q&A exchange, these symptoms were presented to Aajonus in the context of a woman with severe psychological dysfunction. He identified them as symptoms of blood sugar instability and possibly brain damage from accident or dietary causes:

"Accidents only cause that kind of condition if a part of the brain was damaged, causing too much stimulus to the anger center of the brain, or an inability to buffer neurological impulses to the anger center."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

The Medical Dismissal of These Conditions as "Psychosomatic"

Aajonus directly addressed how the medical profession handles conditions they cannot diagnose or register:

"Anything that they cannot diagnose or register becomes psychosomatic."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

He referenced the film "Safe" starring Julianne Moore as a depiction of chemical sensitivity being dismissed as psychosomatic, and stated he had experienced the same thing himself at age fifteen. This is directly applicable to agoraphobia, which has historically been dismissed as psychosomatic or as a character deficiency.

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Food Protocol

Food Protocol

Aajonus did not prescribe a specific protocol for agoraphobia by name in these source passages. However, based on what he stated about neurological healing, fear-state chemistry, anxiety, and psychological dysfunction, the following food approaches are directly drawn from his statements:

Raw Animal Protein and Fat for Neurological Rebuilding

The foundation of his approach to all neurological damage, including the damage that produces extreme fear states and environmental hypersensitivity, was raw animal protein and fat. He described how raw carrot juice combined with raw milk reversed his own autism (his most extreme neurological condition) within ten days:

"Within 10 days of drinking the raw milk and raw carrot juice, the autism snapped off. I woke, prepositions, adverbs, all those words that I'd heard and connected with diagrams on a chalkboard, all of a sudden started making sense."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

"I started drinking all this carrot juice and raw milk. And within 10 days of doing that, autism turned off."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

This same neurological rebuilding logic applies to all conditions rooted in neurological damage, including those that manifest as extreme fear states. The raw milk provides raw animal fat and protein that directly feed and rebuild nervous system tissue.

High Meat for Depression and Severe Emotional States

Aajonus described the use of high meat (aged raw meat) for depression and severe emotional/psychological conditions. He described one case directly:

"She eats high meat every other day to control her depression. And it works. Like, 10 minutes after you take it, you giggle."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

"A psychologist and psychiatrist from Santa Barbara came down after he heard about it. And he did an experiment."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

The frequency described was every other day. The effect was described as rapid, within 10 minutes. He also noted that psychologists and psychiatrists were themselves drawn to try it because they had emotional problems. He did not specify the exact quantity in these passages, but the context implies a small amount taken as a therapeutic dose.

He also specified that high meat should not be consumed indoors:

"Because you don't eat it in a house, in a stinking house, for 24, 48 hours. You'll hang it in a curtain or whatever you have. So I went back to the porch and ate it."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

Meat (Raw Animal Flesh) for Anxiety and Nervous System Support

"Depression means you need to feed the brain and the nervous system... Meat, any flesh food. I don't care if you're eating insects."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

He described meat as the primary food for the brain and nervous system when in a depressed or fear-dominated state.

Cooked Starch with Raw Fat (Historical Protocol, Later Revised)

In his earlier writings, Aajonus recommended a small amount of cooked starch to help neutralize psychotropic waste products accumulating in the nervous system:

"In my first write of the book, We Want to Live, I encourage people to eat a little bit of cooked starch every day or several times a week with lots of raw fat."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

However, he revised this recommendation after observing that people were consuming too much cooked starch and it was damaging their intestinal tract through acrylamide and advanced glycation end product accumulation:

"After seven years of observing what people did, they were eating cooked starch every day and eating a lot of it. I realized that when I looked into their irises and photographed them... they were collecting a lot of acrylamides and advanced glycation end products in the intestines."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

This represents a conflicting guidance situation, the first protocol recommended cooked starch with raw fat, the revised protocol reduced or eliminated it.

Raw Fat Specifically for Absorbing and Neutralizing Neurological Toxins

Aajonus repeatedly emphasized raw fat as essential for absorbing, binding, and transporting heavy metals and other neurotoxins out of the nervous system without allowing them to cause further damage. He referenced the mercury accumulation data:

"Through 80, eight percent, of that mercury, stayed in their body... I don't have a problem with my meat meal, or some other kind of fat, to make sure that I don't absorb any..." [mercury]

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

Raw fat consumed with or around sources of mercury exposure, or during detoxification of stored mercury, was his strategy for preventing those toxins from re-damaging neurological tissue during their exit from the body.

Singing as a Substitute for Physical Exercise

For people who are too weak or fearful to exercise but who have accumulated adrenaline and activity hormones driving anxiety, Aajonus proposed singing as a physiological equivalent:

"20 minutes of singing is an hour on a treadmill. It is the most strenuous activity of the human body. You have to control the air, the tone, the pitch, everything. You've got the brain and the whole body working."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

This is specifically relevant to agoraphobia because the condition prevents exercise outside the safe environment, leading to adrenaline accumulation and worsening anxiety. Singing can be done indoors, alone, without exposure to feared environments, while still physiologically addressing the hormonal imbalance driving the anxiety.

Eliminating Carbohydrates

For conditions with a blood sugar component driving psychological dysfunction:

"Simply eliminating carbohydrates should help."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

This was presented as a foundational dietary change for anyone experiencing severe psychological dysfunction, procrastination, inability to function, and extreme emotional reactivity, all features of severe agoraphobia.

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What to Avoid

What to Avoid

  • i

    Aajonus described his own experience of how excessive carbohydrate consumption drove extreme fear states and emotional instability:

  • ii

    > "Eating too much high-carbohydrate fruit and juices was deleterious... I occasionally felt extremely overemotional... I could not help but revert to my childhood fears... Adrenalin soured in my body and I stood dumbfounded in fear."

  • iii

    For anyone in a fear-dominated neurological state, high-carbohydrate eating that destabilizes blood sugar is directly contraindicated.

  • iv

    > "He gets anxiety. He gets depressed by eating McDonald's. That's highly processed food. It has long shelf lives. They're poisons."

  • v

    Any food that cannot support neurological stability, highly processed food with long shelf lives, cooked food stripped of enzymes and fats, worsens the neurological environment that produces extreme fear states.

  • vi

    Aajonus explicitly rejected primal therapy (primal scream therapy) as a treatment for anxiety and fear states, despite finding its scientific basis in Van Winkle's work theoretically interesting:

  • vii

    > "I don't because as she says in her paper that when she found people going to a lot of emotional turmoil for no direct cause with no direct cause in their life for stress and anxiety she found certain chemical properties that were the byproduct of earlier times of trauma or anxiety or angst floating in the blood... To me, logically, my mind says, okay if you want to get rid of it and not have it again, you don't do the same thing over and go through the same rage again because that's going to create more of it and store in your body again."

  • viii

    > "When I tried that as a therapy, it just kept the momentum going."

  • ix

    Instead:

  • x

    > "So I feel if you've got high anxiety go take a walk among..." [the passage trails off, but the implication is physical activity in nature]

  • xi

    Aajonus argued that going to doctors, receiving dire prognoses, and being subjected to pharmaceutical interventions specifically creates and amplifies fear states:

  • xii

    > "Then you get paranoid. I'd better listen to what he says. He says, take this chemistry, this chemistry, this chemistry, and this chemical. What are you? You've been terrorized to being a laboratory animal taking chemistry instead of food."

  • xiii

    In his framework, the medical encounter itself, with its emphasis on worst-case scenarios, its dismissal of symptoms as psychosomatic, and its use of pharmaceutical compounds, contributes directly to the physiological fear state.

  • xiv

    Since mercury from vaccines was Aajonus's primary identified cause of the neurological damage that underlies extreme fear states:

  • xv

    > "There are thimerosal, which is liquid mercury, in every vaccine. Liquid mercury is a known poison."

  • xvi

    > "It causes about 6 to 800 times more autism."

  • xvii

    Continued vaccine exposure would, in his framework, continue to damage the neurological buffers that prevent ordinary stimuli from producing extreme fear responses.

  • xviii

    Aajonus described EMF exposure as producing neurological hypersensitivity symptoms directly relevant to environmental fear states:

  • xix

    > "EMFs are the newest addition to those symptoms, causing severe diseases."

  • xx

    Symptoms he listed included hypersensitivity, hyperactivity, insomnia, and nausea, all of which create or worsen the physiological substrate for agoraphobic fear responses.

  • xxi

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Recovery Timeline

Recovery Timeline

Aajonus did not specify a recovery timeline for agoraphobia as a named condition. However, based on his descriptions of neurological recovery in his own case and in cases he described:

Rapid Initial Response (9–10 Days)

The most dramatic neurological reversals Aajonus described occurred within approximately nine to ten days of beginning raw food consumption, specifically raw milk and raw carrot juice. He described this repeatedly:

"Within 10 days of doing that, autism turned off."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

"About nine to ten days, I was no longer autistic again."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

"Autism came back within about nine days." [when he stopped the diet]

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

"My dyslexia disappeared... within about 10 days of drinking it."

Aajonus Vonderplanitz

This rapid timeline applied to neurological conditions that were actively being supported by ongoing diet. When the diet was removed, the condition returned within the same timeframe (nine to ten days). This suggests the initial change in neurological function is relatively rapid once the raw food substrate is introduced, but that it requires consistent maintenance.

Long-Term Stabilization

For more deeply embedded neurological damage, including mercury toxicity that had been present since infancy, full recovery was a multi-year process. Aajonus described his own recovery from the full constellation of his conditions (autism, dyslexia, cancer, diabetes, angina) as taking years of consistent raw food consumption and lifestyle adjustment.

For high meat as a treatment for depression and severe emotional states, the effect was described as occurring within 10 minutes of consumption, with a frequency of every other day for ongoing management.

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Questions Aajonus Answered

Questions Aajonus Answered

  • The source passages contain one direct Q&A exchange that is most relevant to the kind of psychological dysfunction associated with severe agoraphobia:

    Question (paraphrased from the Q&A source): Would a car accident have caused the psychological condition, or is it more from diet and nutrition? She also has a problem getting on with things, procrastinates, spends hours dithering, can't keep time or appointments.

  • Aajonus's Response:

    > "Accidents only cause that kind of condition if a part of the brain was damaged, causing too much stimulus to the anger center of the brain, or an inability to buffer neurological impulses to the anger center."

  • > "Simply eliminating carbohydrates should help. But, most people who are carbohydrate-allergic are also carbohydrate addicts. Byron Katie's work could help her out of her conditioned dysfunctionality."

    > "Anyway, certainly there were elements in her upbringing that would have affected her badly psychologically and emotionally, but not probably enough to cause such psychoses. Yes it could, if she has a blood-sugar level problem."

  • This exchange directly addresses the question of whether extreme psychological dysfunction, including the inability to function, extreme fear, avoidance, and dithering, has a physiological dietary cause or a structural brain cause. Aajonus's answer was that it is most likely blood sugar driven and that eliminating carbohydrates is the primary dietary intervention, while also acknowledging the role of upbringing and psychological conditioning (pointing to Byron Katie's work as a non-dietary supplement to the dietary protocol).

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Cross-References

How this condition connects to the rest of the platform

Relevant principles

Terrain Theory, and Raw Food.