Food addiction, in Aajonus's framework, is defined explicitly as the frequent craving for a particular food or foods. He distinguishes between two fundamentally different types of craving: those rooted in genuine physiological need and those rooted in habituation, chemical dependency, and neurological impairment caused by cooked and processed foods.

He is direct about this: "FOOD ADDICTION is the frequent craving for a particular food or foods. Most people can't digest, assimilate, and utilize what their bodies need from cooked foods, so they overeat."

This is the essential tension at the heart of his definition, what appears to be addiction is almost always the body's inability to extract what it needs from nutritionally dead or mutilated food, driving it to signal hunger again and again, creating the cycle of craving and consumption that the industrial food system profits from. The body is not malfunctioning. It is desperately attempting to satisfy real biochemical needs through food that structurally cannot deliver those needs.

However, Aajonus also acknowledges a second category: true chemical addiction stemming from the psychoactive and habit-forming byproducts of cooked, processed, and artificially flavored foods, as well as substances like caffeine, chocolate, refined sugar, alcohol, and nicotine. These create neurological dependency that overrides the body's cleaner instinctual signals.

He separates these two categories with precision: - Nutritional craving: the body genuinely needs a nutrient and signals for it repeatedly because the food consumed does not supply it in bioavailable form - Chemical/addictive craving: the food or substance contains compounds that generate neurological dependency, irrespective of whether the body's nutritional needs are met

He also describes a third layer, psychological and habitual addiction, where the mind has conditioned itself to associate emotional relief, comfort, or stimulation with particular foods (coffee, cigarettes, sugar, refined carbohydrates), and these mental pathways fire automatically in response to certain emotional states, regardless of what the body biochemically requires.

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Aajonus identifies multiple interlocking root causes operating simultaneously in food addiction.

The foundational cause of what most people experience as food addiction is the structural inability of the human body to extract complete, bioavailable nutrition from cooked and processed food. Aajonus states this repeatedly and unambiguously: "Most people can't digest, assimilate, and utilize what their bodies need from cooked foods, so they overeat."

When food is cooked, enzymes are destroyed, proteins are denatured, fats are oxidized into lipid peroxides, and the synergistic relationships between nutrients are broken. The body receives a distorted, incomplete nutritional signal and continues to register hunger, not because the stomach is empty, but because the cells are starved. The person eats again. And again. And the craving never fully resolves. This is the mechanism of what the industrial food world calls "cravings" and what Aajonus identifies as the body's desperate, unfulfilled attempt to nourish itself.

He frames this as deliberate from the perspective of the food industry: "They want you eating cooked foods. They want you sick and going to the doctors and taking medication. They want you eating and eating foods that don't gratify you so you'll keep eating." And: "They know that if they denature foods your body's never going to be satisfied. So you're going to be hungry all the time."

Processed food additives, chemical preservatives, artificial colors, pesticides, and the heterocyclic amines and lipid peroxides generated by cooking all cause direct neurological damage. Aajonus references a Canadian university study spanning the 1950s to 1960s and a Wisconsin study beginning in 1997, both of which documented that processed food and food additives caused major mental and behavioral problems. He notes that certain man-made food colors caused more behavioral problems than other additives.

Once the neurological system is impaired, the brain cannot clearly read bodily signals. Cognitive ability is reduced. The person cannot reason clearly about what they need. The brain reverts to pattern-based craving, seeking whatever previously produced a neurochemical reward or relief, whether that was sugar, refined carbohydrate, salt, caffeine, or nicotine.

Aajonus describes this cycle explicitly: "Once the body gets chemically imbalanced, it's neurologically impaired. It means the brain won't function. Your cognitive abilities are removed. You would think you know they're bad for you, since in some way or another you're repulsed, vitamins and sugars are not that light. It turns you to the point where you binge on them. Right. Because you keep getting low blood sugar. And low blood sugar can cause all kinds of problems in the system. So it kind of sets up a cycle."

Aajonus identifies liver malfunction as a direct cause of two extreme manifestations of food addiction, compulsive overeating and anorexia, presenting them as opposite poles of the same underlying dysfunction:

"You're going to eat fats galore and never be satisfied. You're going to eat and eat and eat and eat and eat. Eating disorders. If that liver doesn't function properly."

"If the liver malfunctions, you could also be at the other end. Anorexic, inability to eat because you're so acidic, you're nauseous all the time because acidity dumps into the stomach."

The liver's role in producing bile determines whether fats are properly digested and whether the nutrients from food reach the cells. If bile production or flow is impaired, the body cannot metabolize fat properly, and the person perpetually craves fat without ever feeling satisfied. Excess bile is stored in the gallbladder, and the entire system remains in a state of metabolic frustration.

Aajonus identifies excess carbohydrate intake, particularly from grain products, fruit, and carrot juice, as a significant driver of cyclical craving and addiction-like behavior:

"If most people eat too much carbohydrate, the blood-fat level drops, the blood-sugar level soars, and the pancreas overworks to regulate the sugar level. That often results in manic behavior and hyperactivity. Then that energy drops quickly and leaves us mentally and emotionally fatigued, irritable, sleepy and/or depressed."

He experienced this personally: "I was so addicted to high-carbohydrate fruits, I could not envision my diet without lots of it. However, I occasionally felt extremely overemotional."

This blood sugar rollercoaster creates a physiological demand for the next carbohydrate hit to bring blood sugar back up, mimicking drug dependency cycles. The person reaches for sweets or starches not because the body needs carbohydrates per se, but because it has been destabilized by the previous consumption of them. The cycle is self-reinforcing.

Aajonus makes a careful distinction throughout his work between instinct and habituation. He states that appetite is "either habitual or instinctual, or both." In our industrial-food world, most people are operating from a muddled combination of the two, and most instincts have been so corrupted by years of processed food consumption that they cannot be trusted to guide the person toward health.

He writes: "When conditioning prevails on hunger, we eat what we are used to eating and may not consider what helps our bodies to function best. Most people are conditioned to eat processed food that lacks enzymes, vitamins and unadulterated minerals, proteins, fats and carbohydrates."

He also notes in The Recipe for Living Without Disease: "Unfortunately, in our industrial-food, carbohydrate-addicted, bacterial-phobic society, we eat from the muddled combination of instinct, habituation and addiction."

This is why Aajonus does not simply say "follow your cravings" without qualification. On a raw diet, cravings are largely reliable signals. In the context of years of cooked food consumption, they are often corrupted signals that lead the person further into deficiency.

Aajonus describes a specific research-based explanation for why people on the Primal Diet, who are largely satisfied, suddenly experience overwhelming cravings for pasta, bread, or other starches. He attributes this to work done by a patient named Elora Van Winkle, who had approximately 47 to 48 years of research behind her:

"People crave starches. It took me a long time to figure out why people still crave starches. Usually they're very satisfied with everything on this diet. But all of a sudden, this raging monster that wants pasta or breads or something will come up and make you crazy. Bananas."

He does not complete the full explanation in the provided passages, but the implication is clear: bananas serve as a substitute starch craving-resolution tool within the Primal Diet context.

Aajonus identifies mineral imbalance as the underlying driver of compulsive salt craving specifically, and by extension, as a driver of food addiction more broadly:

"It's usually such an overall mineral balance, but then they crave the salt to try to remedy everything, and it doesn't work. That's why they keep craving it."

The body registers a deficiency, in this case, overall mineral depletion, and attempts to correct it by reaching for salt. But salt alone cannot remedy a broad mineral deficiency, so the craving persists, intensifies, and becomes compulsive. The person keeps eating more and more of a substance that provides only temporary or partial relief.

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Food addiction sits at the intersection of multiple principles in Aajonus's causal framework:

Primary placement: Cooked Food, The definitive root of food addiction in his framework is the structural failure of cooked and processed food to deliver complete, bioavailable nutrition. This is the principle where the mechanism originates.

Secondary placement: Root Cause / Terrain Theory, Food addiction is a manifestation of systemic nutritional deficiency and toxicity. The body's terrain has been so degraded by years of nutritionally empty food and toxic chemical accumulation that the neurological signals governing hunger and satisfaction are themselves corrupted. The "terrain" of the nervous system and the liver is damaged, and this damaged terrain generates the craving cycles.

Tertiary placement: How to Eat, The resolution of food addiction is fundamentally a matter of eating correctly, specific combinations, timings, and food pairings that satisfy the body's actual biochemical needs and break the craving cycle.

Also relevant: How to Live / Sovereignty, Aajonus frames social pressure, emotional conditioning, and psychological habituation as major forces that keep people in addiction cycles. the principle on sovereignty, taking control of one's own dietary choices against social and commercial pressure, is directly implicated in his discussion of how people fall off the diet (meeting a partner who eats cooked food, social dining, etc.).

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Aajonus reframes constant hunger and inability to feel satisfied not as weakness of will or excessive appetite, but as the predictable and unavoidable consequence of nutritional starvation. "Cooked processed foods will always keep you hungry and malnourished." The hunger is real. It is the body accurately signaling that its needs are not being met. The problem is not the person, it is the food.

Aajonus uses himself as a case study here. When he was a fruitarian: "I was bulimic. I would eat sometimes 27 pounds a day and be vomiting and still hungry." This is not a psychological disorder in isolation, it is the terminal manifestation of the body's desperate, perpetually unfulfilled search for nutrients that the food it is consuming cannot supply. He states that people who were bulimic and constantly starving on cooked food, upon switching to the Primal Diet, "all of a sudden, oh my god, they're not hungry all the time. They're satisfied. They can go a day sometimes without eating... when they used to eat all day long until they vomited."

Aajonus identifies a specific triggering mechanism for binge eating: allowing oneself to get too hungry before eating. "If you make yourself have meals, two eggs and some milk and some honey, if you do that, you won't binge on anything. It's when you let yourself get too hungry and then you start binging, you're going to binge on whatever you're eating at the time."

When Aajonus himself smells cooked or burned meat, he experiences salivation and craving for it. He is explicit: "I smell cooked, burned meat and I say, oh God, it's salivating. I'd love to have that. But there's no way I'm going to go there. I will have to sleep eight hours for three days. I'll have half the energy." He distinguishes this craving, which is conditioning and memory, from an actual bodily need. The craving for cooked food is a symptom of the body's conditioned associations, not a signal that cooked food would serve it.

On the other hand, cravings within the framework of a raw diet are largely trustworthy and should be followed. "Everyone should trust his or her cravings. Cravings are the body telling a person that it needs the nutrients in the food(s) craved." The key distinction is whether the craving is arising from a body whose signaling system has been partially or fully restored by raw food consumption, or from a body still operating on corrupted, cooked-food-conditioned signals.

Overconsumption of carbohydrates, including fruit, generates emotional symptoms that look psychiatric: manic behavior, hyperactivity, emotional volatility, irritability, depression, fatigue. Aajonus experienced this himself: "I occasionally felt extremely overemotional. When I auditioned for commercials, TV and films, I could not help but revert to my childhood fears." He attributes this not to psychological weakness but to the neurochemical disruption caused by carbohydrate-driven blood sugar swings.

Aajonus describes craving his raw carob fudge recipe to the point that "someone could have called it an addiction. However, since carob does not have any addictive chemicals in it, it could not have been an addiction." Instead, he identifies what the craving was actually communicating: "Consider instead that my body craved all of that butter mixed with some cream, protein in eggs and digestive enzymes in honey. When my body had had certain deficiencies satisfied intensely and repeatedly for about 3 months, the craving subsided. My skin, nerves and entire body were much healthier."

This is a critical reframe, what looks like food addiction is the body intensively drawing on a rich nutritional combination to repair specific deficiencies. Once the deficiencies are corrected, the craving dissolves naturally.

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The master protocol for food addiction is simple in principle: feed the body completely with raw, bioavailable nutrition so that the craving mechanism is satisfied at the cellular level. Once this happens, the constant hunger, the cravings, and the binge cycles naturally dissolve.

"When people start this diet all of a sudden all those cravings go away. You're not hungry all the time. After eating you're satisfied."

And: "Once your body is satisfied and happy, 99% of the people who go on this diet for once say, 'Oh my God, I'm not thinking of food all day long. I'm calm. I can think of other things. I can be happy. The first time I've been satisfied in my life.'"

Aajonus provides a specific formula for preventing binge eating and maintaining metabolic stability. He states this directly and also has it documented in his article on binges:

"Two eggs, and some milk, and some honey, if you do that, you won't binge on anything. It's when you let yourself get too hungry and then you start binging, you're going to binge on whatever you're eating at the time."

This combination, raw eggs, raw milk, and unheated honey, provides protein, fat, and enzymatic activity in a form that rapidly satisfies the body without generating the blood-sugar spike and crash cycle. The key is regularity and not allowing extended periods of hunger to develop.

When the overwhelming craving for pasta, bread, or other starches arises, even in people who are largely satisfied on the Primal Diet, Aajonus prescribes bananas as the raw resolution. He describes this as the answer he eventually arrived at after considerable puzzlement: "this raging monster that wants pasta or breads or something will come up and make you crazy. Bananas."

For compulsive salt craving driven by overall mineral imbalance, Aajonus prescribes a specific combination:

"If she ate the cheese and tomatoes and butter together, it should satisfy it."

He specifies this may require approximately five days of consistent use of this combination to fully break the craving cycle. The reasoning is that the cheese provides a concentrated, bioavailable mineral complex, the butter provides fat needed to transport and utilize those minerals, and the tomatoes provide the acid and additional mineral profile that helps restore overall balance. Salt craving persists because salt alone cannot resolve a broad mineral deficiency, the complete combination is required.

Aajonus provides detailed guidance on the chocolate craving specifically. First, he makes clear that the craving for chocolate, whether on a raw diet or off, almost always represents a deficiency in raw fats, egg proteins, and honey enzymes:

"Most people who crave raw chocolate to the point of wanting it daily are people who are very deficient in raw fats and the egg-proteins and honey enzymes help to digest those needed fats."

His protocol is to eat the raw carob fudge recipe in whatever quantities are craved, without restriction:

"I say, if you have a craving for chocolate, eat as much as you want. Eat as much as you want. You can pig out on it and all of a sudden after a few days, you are losing weight from it, and you've got no more craving for it. It never returns like that. Never returns."

The key components driving the resolution are: butter, cream, egg protein, and honey enzymes. These satisfy the deficiency that the chocolate craving is pointing to. After approximately a few days of unrestricted consumption, the craving dissolves completely and permanently.

He contrasts this with raw cocoa: when he first began eating the raw carob combination 38 years prior to writing the newsletter, he craved it intensely. After approximately 3 months of intensive consumption, the craving fully subsided and his skin, nerves, and entire body were much healthier. This demonstrates that the timeline for full deficiency correction and craving resolution varies, a few days for some, up to 3 months for deeper deficiencies.

For those who use raw cocoa instead of carob: Aajonus distinguishes that raw cocoa does contain chemicals that could constitute a true addiction, but notes that when eating it with unheated honey and raw cream in moderation (approximately 2 tablespoons of pure cocoa as a safe dose for most raw dieters), he himself has not experienced addiction, having eaten the mixture approximately 10 times yearly for 2 years.

Aajonus addresses someone who feels they cannot control their fat cravings:

"You crave fat a lot. Why? Because you can't control yourself? Yeah, it will level out. But if you make yourself have meals, two eggs and some milk and some honey, if you do that, you won't binge on anything."

The fat craving will stabilize once the body is receiving regular, complete meals. The craving for fat is real and legitimate, the body needs fat, but the binge pattern is driven by irregular eating and allowing hunger to escalate.

He also notes a specific caveat: if lactose (the sugar in milk/honey) is appearing to drive excessive consumption or a liver or gallbladder detoxification response, cutting out the honey may be appropriate temporarily.

The honey and butter combination is central here. He states that "once they get the honey and butter, no more carbohydrate, no more candy cravings. There it goes." Unheated honey provides the enzymatic support and bioavailable carbohydrate that stabilizes blood sugar without generating the pancreatic overload that cooked sugar or fruit juice does. Butter provides the fat that slows sugar absorption and satisfies the cellular need for fuel at a deeper level.

For people with squeamishness about raw meat, which Aajonus identifies as a psychological block contributing to continued addictive cycles with cooked meat, the protocol is gradual exposure:

"Squeamishness toward eating raw meat, especially raw chicken, was a psychological block in some instances that was overcome by those people eating a few bites of raw meat several days weekly until their bodies developed a craving for it."

Once the body develops a genuine craving for raw meat, the addiction to cooked meat flavors typically diminishes because the body's actual protein needs are being met in a bioavailable form.

For those who find raw meat completely unpalatable, Aajonus suggests: "A lot of the people who are repulsed by meat, they can just wash it down with a lubrication formula or milk. No problem."

For those who struggle to desire raw meat and thus remain caught in cycles of other food cravings: "Parsley juice will help increase your appetite for meat. Pineapple will help increase the appetite for meat, not an overabundance of pineapple."

When on the weight loss diet, intense cravings for bread, pizza, and other starches are expected and documented. Aajonus's guidance: "Eat every hour for 3-5 days, then reduce. Usually, hunger lasts 5-7 days, unless you eat every hour. Creating more poisons while trying to lose weight will create a need for more nutrients and cause more hunger."

This means eating raw foods every hour for 3-5 days to satisfy hunger continuously and prevent the craving escalation that drives binge consumption of starchy cooked foods. If the person gives in and eats the bread or pizza, they generate additional toxins, which create additional nutrient need, which generates more hunger, a worsening spiral.

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For most people switching to the Primal Diet, the basic resolution of constant hunger and craving, the fundamental feature of food addiction, occurs rapidly and is experienced as dramatic relief:

"When people start this diet all of a sudden all those cravings go away. You're not hungry all the time. After eating you're satisfied."

Aajonus receives emails describing this experience constantly: "The first time I've been satisfied in my life."

The timeline depends on the depth of the deficiency being addressed. For the specific carob/butter/honey/cream/egg combination:

• A few days of unrestricted consumption may be sufficient for the craving to completely dissolve and never return, as Aajonus describes in the training context
• Approximately 3 months of intensive consumption was required for Aajonus himself when he first used the carob formula 38 years prior, after which the craving fully subsided, his skin cleared, nerves improved, and overall body health markedly improved

Using the cheese, tomatoes, and butter combination consistently: "Maybe about five days of doing that." This is the specific timeline Aajonus gives for resolving the mineral-deficiency-driven salt craving cycle.

The intense hunger and starch/bread cravings that arise on the weight loss diet typically resolve within 5-7 days, unless the person eats every hour, in which case hunger resolves faster.

No specific timeline given, but the implication is that banana consumption satisfies the neurological demand being expressed as a starch craving relatively quickly.

Once honey and butter are integrated regularly, the candy and carbohydrate cravings dissolve: "Once they get the honey and butter, no more carbohydrate, no more candy cravings. There it goes." The timeline implied is relatively rapid, within the first days of consistent use.

Aajonus describes his own craving evolution over years. By 1974, he had committed fully to raw food (having started in 1972). He notes that after years on the diet, many cooked food smells that previously generated craving now generate revulsion: "A lot of the other foods now, if I smell them, repulse me. If I smell a cooked vegetable, I just want to vomit. Just from the smell of it now. Even some pastries, you know, a heavy pastry."

This suggests that with sufficient time on the Primal Diet, the conditioned associations that generate cooked-food cravings are progressively replaced by new associations, including genuine revulsion toward the toxic foods.

For people who have been on the diet two or more years, Aajonus notes: "Some bodies are so starving for nutrients that some people eat twice as much on a raw diet as they do on a cooked diet. However, most people's hunger is easily satisfied on the Primal Diet. Eating excessively usually lasts only 1-2 months."

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