Cholesterol, according to Aajonus, is not a problem, a disease marker, or a danger signal of any kind. It is the most important substance the body produces, and the entire framework of "good" and "bad" cholesterol, of dangerous "high" levels, and of cholesterol-lowering intervention is a fabrication designed to sell pharmaceutical drugs.

Aajonus taught that the body synthesizes not two kinds of cholesterol, not the LDL/HDL binary that conventional medicine offers, but 60 to 65 distinct varieties of cholesterol, all of them beneficial, all of them necessary, and all of them serving critical functions in a toxic world. Every single one of those cholesterols is good. There is no bad cholesterol produced from raw food. The framing of LDL as "bad" and HDL as "good" is a marketing construct, not a biological reality.

The liver manufactures these 60 to 65 varieties of cholesterol through a process that begins in the duodenum. Food passes from the stomach into the duodenum, where the liver dumps bile, bile that contains many poisons, to begin disassembling fat molecules. That disassembly allows the body to synthesize the full range of cholesterol varieties. The body must convert fats into cholesterol before it can properly utilize them. As Aajonus stated directly: an animal's body does not utilize any fat properly until it is converted into a cholesterol. This means cholesterol is not the enemy of fat metabolism; it is the mechanism of fat metabolism.

The three primary categories of cholesterol function, according to Aajonus, are:

1. Cleansing the body, approximately a third of all cholesterols are used to make solvents, soaps, and cleansing agents that dissolve toxicity and remove it from the system. This includes the solvents that cells produce (which he refers to as viruses) as well as the solvents produced by the lymphatic system.

2. Energy and fuel, approximately a third of all cholesterols provide the body's primary energy source. Fat provides two and a half times more calories than carbohydrate or protein, and the cholesterol synthesized from fat is the most potent energy substrate available to the body.

3. Lubrication and protection, approximately a third of all cholesterols lubricate every system, joint, and cellular membrane in the body, and also absorb poisons to prevent them from penetrating into cells. These cholesterols act as a buffer, arresting toxins in the fat layer and keeping them away from more sensitive cellular structures.

So in Aajonus's framework, a "high cholesterol level", meaning simply a large total quantity of cholesterol in the blood, is evidence that all three of these processes are occurring at high capacity, which is exactly what a person living in a toxic environment needs.

Aajonus described the LDL/HDL distinction as a pharmaceutical industry retreat from an earlier, even more dishonest position. For thirty years, the medical and pharmaceutical establishment said that all cholesterol was bad. Then enough people went to tribes that ate almost exclusively animal fats, and had no heart disease, that the claim became completely untenable. Rather than admitting the entire premise was wrong, the industry invented the HDL/LDL distinction: "we made a little mistake, but we didn't make a total mistake." Aajonus rejected this entirely. LDL and HDL are both good. They are all good.

What conventional medicine calls "bad cholesterol", LDL, is, in Aajonus's framework, old toxic cholesterol that has been stored in tissues and is now being released into the bloodstream for removal. The body uses fresh, good cholesterol to harness and cleanse that old, toxic cholesterol, and then moves it out through the urine, bowels, and skin. A high LDL reading does not mean you are manufacturing dangerous cholesterol from what you are currently eating. It means your body is successfully cleaning out the old, cooked, toxic, hardened cholesterol from your past, which is exactly what you want it to be doing. Seeing high LDL on a test, if you are eating well, should be cause for celebration, not alarm.

Aajonus made a specific and repeatedly emphasized biochemical point: the only food that contains cholesterol already formed is the egg yolk. Meat does not contain cholesterol. Milk does not contain cholesterol. Blood contains cholesterol (which Aajonus noted is phenomenally energizing). But in standard food sources, only the egg yolk delivers cholesterol in pre-synthesized form.

When you eat fat from any source other than egg yolk, your body must take that fat, mix it with bile, and then convert it into one or more of the 60 cholesterol varieties. That process takes time, milk, for example, takes 6 to 10 hours to digest precisely because the body must perform this fat-to-cholesterol conversion. Eggs, by contrast, digest in 27 to 30 minutes, because a large portion of their fat is already arranged as cholesterol and ready to use without the full conversion process.

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There are two distinct scenarios that produce a high cholesterol reading on a blood test, and Aajonus treated them as completely different situations requiring different interpretations:

Scenario One: Toxic cholesterol being expelled

When a person goes on the Primal Diet and begins consuming large quantities of raw fat, the body gains the biochemical resources it needs to begin drawing old, toxic, cooked cholesterol out of the tissues where it has been stored, sometimes for decades. This old cholesterol was formed from cooked fats, processed oils, hydrogenated oils, margarine, and chemically treated foods. It has been sitting in tissues, cells, and arterial walls, largely inert and unusable. When raw fat is introduced in abundance, the body now has both the materials and the energy to begin mobilizing this old stored cholesterol, pulling it from wherever it has been lodged and routing it into the bloodstream for excretion via the kidneys, bowels, and skin.

At this point, a blood test will show both the fresh, new cholesterol from current raw food intake AND the old toxic cholesterol in transit. The combination of both produces what appears to be a very high total cholesterol reading. Aajonus said that on a good diet, at least half of the cholesterol in your blood at any given time is old toxic cholesterol on its way out. It is not a product of what you are currently eating. It is garbage leaving the building.

Aajonus commissioned a specialized laboratory test, at a cost of approximately $6,000 per test (no insurance would cover it, and doctors do not order it routinely), that could differentiate between cholesterol that had been stored in the body for years, one year, five years, ten years, twenty years, thirty years, and cholesterol that had been freshly synthesized from recently consumed food. When this test was applied to people on the Primal Diet, half of the cholesterol in their blood was consistently identified as old, stored, toxic cholesterol on its way out of the body. The standard $30 to $40 blood lipid panel makes no such distinction. It simply measures total LDL and HDL and declares the result dangerous if it exceeds an arbitrary threshold.

Scenario Two: Genuine individual physiological requirement

Some people simply need very high cholesterol levels to function, regardless of detoxification processes. These individuals have elevated cholesterol not because they are cleaning anything out, but because their particular physiology requires more cholesterol to perform optimally. The case studies Aajonus cited most frequently, the Hall of Fame basketball player and the Olympic gymnast, illustrate this. Their high cholesterol was not transitional or detox-related; it was their functional baseline.

Aajonus treated low cholesterol as genuinely dangerous, far more so than high cholesterol. When cholesterol is low, the body does not have adequate fats in the three functional categories, cleansing, energy, and protection, to operate properly. Deficiencies develop. The body cannot dissolve and remove toxins efficiently. It cannot lubricate joints and cellular membranes adequately. It cannot fuel itself at peak capacity. It cannot protect cells from poison infiltration.

Cholesterol is used for the development of sex hormones and adrenal hormones. Without adequate cholesterol, these hormone pathways cannot function. Aajonus noted that the body needs high cholesterol levels to handle the toxic load of modern industrial society, and that artificially suppressing cholesterol with pharmaceutical drugs directly undermines this capacity.

Aajonus was emphatic that cholesterol does not cause hardening of the arteries, heart disease, or arterial occlusions. The substance that causes hardening and plaquing is hydrogenated vegetable oil, pressed vegetable oils, safflower oil, seed oils, margarine, and any oil that has been hydrogenated. These are plastic-like substances. To illustrate: if you take vegetable oil and pour it into dirt, it turns the soil into rock over the next 6 to 10 months. If you take animal fat and pour it into dirt, it will mold and turn into earth, feeding the soil. This is the physical difference between the two categories of fat in terms of their behavior in biological tissue.

All tribes that eat predominantly cooked meat and animal fat, even exclusively, have no heart disease, no hardening of the arteries. The only tribes that develop arterial disease and heart disease are those oriented toward vegetarian or grain-based diets, or those whose diets include processed vegetable oils.

The vegetable and seed oil industry was responsible for propagating the myth that animal fat and cholesterol cause heart disease, because they needed a framework within which to market their products. The claim was never proven. It was marketing, and the myth persisted for decades until Harvard eventually conceded that people on fat-free diets get 36% more disease overall.

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Cholesterol fits primarily within the following principles of Aajonus's framework:

Cooked Food, The root problem is that cooked and processed fats create toxic cholesterol that cannot be properly utilized, gets stored in tissues, and must eventually be expelled. The entire cholesterol crisis in modern medicine stems from the shift away from raw animal fats toward cooked, processed, hydrogenated vegetable oils.

Terrain Theory / Raw Food, The proper condition of the biological terrain includes high circulating cholesterol, because a healthy terrain is one that is actively cleansing, fueling, lubricating, and protecting itself. Cholesterol is the currency of that activity.

Detoxification, The rise in cholesterol levels that people experience on the Primal Diet is a detoxification event. The body is finally equipped, thanks to the raw fats being consumed, to pull old toxic cholesterol from storage and route it out. This is the detox process made visible on a blood test.

Sovereignty, The cholesterol myth is one of Aajonus's clearest examples of pharmaceutical and medical industry manipulation. The cholesterol measurement system was designed specifically to generate prescriptions. The thresholds are fabricated. The chemistry is selectively presented. The entire framework exists to capture patients into lifelong drug dependency.

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A high cholesterol reading on the Primal Diet is not a symptom of disease. It is evidence that the body is:

• Actively manufacturing all 60 varieties of cholesterol it needs for cleansing, energy, and protection
• Successfully mobilizing and expelling old, stored, toxic cholesterol from tissues
• Operating at high metabolic capacity in a toxic world

Aajonus said he would throw a party if someone's cholesterol reached 700. He said he wanted everyone's cholesterol to be "sky high." The higher the cholesterol, the faster the old toxic cholesterol is being removed from the body.

Symptoms that conventional medicine attributes to high cholesterol, arterial disease, heart attacks, strokes, are not caused by cholesterol in Aajonus's framework. They are caused by hardened vegetable oils and deficiencies in utilizable raw fat.

A high ratio of LDL to HDL is interpreted in conventional medicine as dangerous. Aajonus reframed this: if you are eating raw fat and making fresh, good cholesterol, your body will simultaneously be removing old, toxic stored cholesterol, and those old cholesterols are what registers as LDL. A high LDL reading means your body is cleaning out toxic cholesterol faster than it is distributing fresh cholesterol to immediate needs. This is not a crisis. This is exactly what you want.

Aajonus did acknowledge that there is a genuine symptom set that can be called a "cholesterol problem", but it is not the one conventional medicine describes. The real symptom of a cholesterol imbalance would be the inability to breathe and the inability to walk upstairs combined with a heart problem. Without those specific symptoms, regardless of what the number on a blood test shows, there is no cholesterol problem. As he put it, he did not know anyone with those symptoms from high cholesterol, but he knew people with cholesterol "off the roof" who were outperforming people decades younger.

Low cholesterol is the genuine problem:

• The body lacks the fats required for cleansing, energy, and cellular protection
• Toxins that would otherwise be arrested in fat molecules migrate into cells and cause damage
• Energy production is compromised
• Hormonal production (sex hormones, adrenal hormones) is undermined
• Lubrication throughout the body decreases

When the Hall of Fame basketball player's cholesterol was brought down by medication, he could not function on the court. When the Olympic gymnast's cholesterol was pushed below her functional range, she became weak, could not perform, and fell ill repeatedly. These are examples of the actual cholesterol problem: too low.

Aajonus addressed triglycerides specifically. He noted that when he had his own tests done, his triglycerides were very high. He wanted them high. High triglycerides on a good diet, in his framework, mean that the body is throwing off a large quantity of trans fatty acids accumulated from years of eating cooked food. High triglycerides are, in this context, a detox indicator, evidence that old, toxic, trans fatty substances are being expelled from the body. He said: "I want my triglycerides to be high."

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The entire cholesterol protocol in Aajonus's teaching reduces to one principle: eat as much raw fat as possible. This is what enables the body to:

1. Synthesize the full range of 60 cholesterol varieties 2. Mobilize and expel old toxic cholesterol from tissues 3. Maintain high circulating cholesterol for all functions

Specific raw fat sources emphasized:

• Raw unsalted butter, Aajonus himself ate up to a pound of butter a day and noted that his cholesterol levels had reached 900 at Washington University Medical Center in St. Louis. He considered this ideal.
• Raw eggs, The only food containing pre-formed cholesterol. Egg yolk delivers cholesterol already synthesized, bypassing the full conversion process and digesting in 27 to 30 minutes. Aajonus frequently cited 10 raw eggs a day as a baseline in various protocols.
• Raw cream, Approximately 4 ounces per day was mentioned in the banker case study alongside a stick of butter and 10 eggs.
• Raw milk, Requires 6 to 10 hours to digest because the fat must still be converted to cholesterol, but is a major source of fat for cholesterol synthesis.
• Raw meat, Provides protein and fats; the animal has already made and used its own cholesterol, so meat does not deliver pre-formed cholesterol but provides the fatty substrate for cholesterol synthesis.
• Raw coconut, Listed as a raw fat that supports utilizable blood fat, lacteal fat, and lymphatic fat.
• Avocados, Listed alongside raw dairy and coconut as supportive fats.
• Stone-pressed olive oil, Referenced as a small-amount fat source.

A banker, approximately 6'3" and very overweight, presented with a cholesterol level of 267. Aajonus put him on:

• One stick of raw butter per day (approximately 4 ounces)
• Approximately 4 ounces of raw cream per day
• Approximately 10 raw eggs per day

Three weeks later, his cholesterol tested at 167. It dropped 100 points in three weeks by dramatically increasing raw fat intake. This case demonstrates that eating more raw fat can lower cholesterol when the body is able to properly utilize the new fats and does not need to mobilize stored toxic cholesterol at the same time.

A female figure skater, approximately 5'3" to 5'4", came to Aajonus at 28 years old, chronically fatigued, ready to retire, unable to sustain more than an hour and a half of practice. Her cholesterol was around 210. Aajonus gave her twice the amount of cholesterol she was previously eating. Her cholesterol level dropped from 210 to 187. She went on to train for five to six hours continuously, outperforming teenagers on the ice. She was still skating at the time of Aajonus's account.

This is another example of increased raw fat intake producing a lower cholesterol number, because the body was receiving exactly what it needed and was not required to mobilize stored toxic reserves.

When the Olympic gymnast came to Aajonus with a cholesterol of 324 to 327 and was getting colds and flus every two to six weeks on a cooked diet, Aajonus put her on the raw fat and raw food diet. Her cholesterol stayed at 327 to 370. Because the cholesterol was now coming from raw fats, it was functional and non-inflammatory. She won a silver medal. She stopped getting sick every six weeks. She could work out 10 to 12 hours a day without fatigue.

When someone is too ill to eat normally, when foods are not working, Aajonus instructed them to suck raw eggs. Yolk and white together, sucked directly from the shell. This delivers pre-formed cholesterol directly, bypassing the entire conversion process, and allows the body to begin healing without taxing digestive capacity. From eggs, the person could graduate back to regular food protocols.

Aajonus specifically warned against walnuts in the context of cholesterol, noting that walnut oil has a tendency to lower other fat levels in the body, including cholesterol levels. On the Primal Diet, where the goal is the highest cholesterol level possible, walnuts work against that goal. Other softer nuts, pecans, pine nuts, are somewhat more acceptable, but nuts in general are difficult to digest because humans lack the enzymes to properly break down nut proteins and fats.

Aajonus mentioned that eating blood, specifically half blood and half milk, delivers a massive cholesterol hit directly from the bloodstream of an animal, since blood is the one tissue in an animal body that circulates cholesterol actively. The energy from this combination was described as "absolutely astounding," comparable to feeling like Superman.

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When a person transitions to the Primal Diet and begins consuming large quantities of raw fat, the cholesterol level typically does one of two things:

In many cases, cholesterol rises dramatically. This happens because the body now has the resources to begin pulling old toxic stored cholesterol from tissues. The combination of fresh cholesterol from current food intake plus old toxic cholesterol from storage produces high total readings. Aajonus described this as normal, healthful, and desirable. He wanted this to happen. He wanted to see 600, 700, 900.

In some cases, cholesterol drops quickly. The banker's cholesterol dropped 100 points in three weeks. The figure skater's cholesterol dropped when given twice the raw fat. These cases represent situations where the body was simply undernourished in raw fat and, once supplied with it, began utilizing cholesterol efficiently without needing to mobilize stored reserves simultaneously.

Aajonus acknowledged that the timeline varies enormously between individuals:

• In most cases, high cholesterol levels begin to moderate within approximately six weeks of starting high raw fat intake, as the body efficiently processes and eliminates old stored cholesterol.
• In some cases, high cholesterol levels persist for years while health continues to improve. The Olympic gymnast maintained elevated cholesterol for at least two years on the diet and continued performing better the entire time.
• The process of fully cleaning out decades of stored toxic cholesterol takes years. Aajonus stated multiple times that this is a multi-year process, not a weeks-long event.

Aajonus tracked his own cholesterol over decades and described it as a moving target that reflected his own healing progress:

• When he was very sick and toxic early in his raw food years, his cholesterol was high, in the 370 to 390 range.
• He described keeping his cholesterol in the range of 270 to 300 as preferable for himself, with 300 to 500 as his range during middle years.
• At Washington University Medical Center in St. Louis, his cholesterol tested at approximately 900 when he was eating up to a pound of butter a day.
• In later years (returning from Asia, having consumed less food and fat), his cholesterol dropped to 198, which he described as "terribly low."
• More recent accounts placed his cholesterol at around 205 to 230, which he acknowledged was "pretty low" for him personally but reflected that he had been on the raw diet long enough to have cleaned out much of the old toxic burden.
• He still kept his HDL and LDL in what he considered a desirable balance, with high "good" cholesterols and many "bad" cholesterols (which he interpreted as old toxic cholesterol still being expelled), while his triglycerides remained high, which he wanted.

Aajonus stated a general target for people on the Primal Diet: he liked to see cholesterol "get up to 600." He said that 350 is low. He wanted cholesterol to double and triple. The higher it went, the more old toxic cholesterol was being expelled.

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