Smoking addiction is rarely, if ever, an addiction to nicotine in the conventional sense. According to Aajonus, the entire premise of nicotine addiction as understood by psychologists and the medical establishment is a manipulation, a fabrication that serves to make people feel guilty and controlled rather than addressing what the body is actually asking for.

As he states directly: "Smoking addiction is rarely an addiction to nicotine. It is always a need for enzymes and blood sugar."

The craving to smoke is a legitimate biological signal, a body-language communication that must be translated, not suppressed. Just as every craving originates in a genuine physical need, the craving for a cigarette originates in the body's urgent need to raise blood sugar and obtain enzymes. The body uses the toxic response triggered by smoking as a roundabout, destructive shortcut to accomplish what proper food should accomplish directly. The rush of energy that a smoker feels is real, but the mechanism used to produce that rush poisons and destroys cells in the process.

In Aajonus's framework, there is no such thing as a purely psychological addiction, no such thing as an addiction that is disconnected from a physical, nutritional deficiency. The craving is always the body speaking. The job of the nutritional counselor, and the individual, is to translate that craving into its real nutritional meaning, then satisfy the actual need directly with food.

Aajonus himself was a heavy smoker from age 8 through age 24, smoking two packs of Lucky Strike non-filters every day by age 16, and he states unequivocally, repeatedly throughout his seminars, that he loved smoking and would still be smoking if it were not detrimental to health. This is not a moralistic anti-smoking position. He does not judge people who smoke. He treats it as a nutritional and biochemical issue, not a moral failing.

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Smoking causes a toxic response in the body. That toxic response forces the liver to produce hormones that call for stored sugars. The blood sugar that results, the rush of energy smokers feel, is the real object of the craving. The body is not craving nicotine for its own sake. The body is craving an energy boost, a blood sugar elevation, and the enzyme activity that accompanies it.

The preferred blood sugar in the body is glycogen. Glycogen is made from the protein sugar pyruvate, which Aajonus states is best obtained from eating raw meat. Raw meat can enter the blood and help arrest the monoxides and tars that enter with cigarette smoke. The raised blood sugar level causes the rush of energy.

The fundamental root cause is therefore chronic low blood sugar combined with enzyme deficiency. The body discovers early, sometimes in childhood, as in Aajonus's own case, that smoking is one way to force the liver to release stored sugars and temporarily boost energy. Once this mechanism is established, it creates a cycle:

1. Blood sugar drops 2. Energy crashes 3. Craving for a cigarette arises (interpreted as nicotine addiction) 4. Smoking triggers toxic response 5. Liver is forced to release stored sugars 6. Energy rises temporarily 7. Blood sugar drops again 8. Cycle repeats

This is mechanically similar to the cycle created by coffee, alcohol, cocaine, or any other stimulant substance. Aajonus describes this explicitly in the context of his own childhood: he used cold leftover coffee, cigarettes, and eventually alcohol to manage energy and sleep, all because his body had no adequate nutritional supply of the raw materials needed to produce glycogen and sustain natural energy.

Aajonus describes his own experience in extraordinary detail as the prototype case. By age 8, he was chronically fatigued, in pain from the cold, unable to get out of bed without assistance. His father, coming from a farming background, turned off the heat at night. Aajonus had fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. Even lifting his arm felt like burning from fifty repetitions of weightlifting.

He began sneaking into the kitchen at night to steal the coffee his parents had left in the pot, roughly three-quarters of a cup, pouring it into a jar and keeping it under his bed. He would drink it in the morning to get enough energy to get out of bed. The cold coffee, stale as it was, functioned as a stimulant that temporarily elevated his blood sugar enough for him to function.

When the coffee's effect wore off at school, roughly an hour before lunchtime, he would need another energy boost. He observed other children smoking and was made to smoke by an older brother. Despite coughing and vomiting, the nicotine wired him, gave him energy. He immediately recognized its utility and began smoking between classes, going out into the forested or pine-needle area outside school to take a few hits, tucking the cigarette into a small can buried under pine needles for later.

By age 16, this had escalated to two packs of Lucky Strike non-filters per day and eleven cups of coffee per day. By this time, the stimulant load was so high that he could not sleep at night, requiring him to begin drinking alcohol, eventually a fifth of gin or bourbon nightly, simply to come down enough to sleep.

By age 19, he had a bleeding ulcer from which he was vomiting projectile blood, and he was simultaneously consuming a fifth of liquor per night, two packs of non-filtered cigarettes, eleven cups of coffee, and Benzedrine.

The entire cascade, coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, amphetamines, was not pleasure-seeking in any moral sense. It was a desperate physiological attempt to generate enough energy to function in the absence of adequate nutrition.

The tobacco industry deliberately treats cigarettes with ammonia-based compounds and approximately 300 additional chemicals specifically to release nicotine more efficiently and create stronger addiction. Aajonus makes this explicit:

"They create addiction. And the doctors are paid off. $30,000, $50,000 a year in kickbacks."

"You think the tobacco industry wasn't putting addictive stuff in their cigarettes? We had a whistleblower who came out 10 years ago and proved it. He was one of the scientists."

This means that commercially produced cigarettes are far more addictive than the tobacco plant itself would be in its raw, untreated state. Regular chewing tobacco and snuff are also chemically treated to increase addiction. American Spirit cigarettes are mentioned as supposedly more natural, but Aajonus suggests that even these are treated and that truly raw, green tobacco from a farm that does not treat its crop is what would be genuinely free of these addictive chemical enhancements.

Aajonus presents a nuanced position that is absent from all conventional anti-smoking frameworks. He acknowledges that for some people, particularly those with certain bile-production capacities, the body may actually be able to convert the vaporized oils in tobacco smoke into a usable fat, specifically, into cholesterol, via bile conversion:

"Even in some people, I found that cigarettes are good. If their liver can make a bile, several different kinds of bile, to use that vaporized oil as a fat converted into a cholesterol."

He knew five people, two of whom had been on the primal diet for 16 years, who smoked and refused to quit, and who showed no tars accumulating in their bodies. Their systems were apparently capable of processing the smoke in a way that prevented crystallization and buildup. He contrasts these individuals with non-smokers raised around secondhand smoke who had massive tar deposits visible in iridology.

This does not mean smoking is recommended or safe for the general population. It means the body's response to smoke is not uniform, and some individuals' biochemistry handles it more effectively than others.

Aajonus frames smoking directly within his dietary framework: "Smoking is a diet of smoke tars. It's part of the element that goes into your body that your body has to deal with and eat and utilize. And try to utilize this as a fat. And it's very difficult because it's very thick."

The body treats the tars from cigarette smoke as a fat, a very dense, difficult-to-process fat, and attempts to metabolize them using bile and whatever fat-processing capacity is available. When insufficient raw fat is present in the diet to facilitate this process, the tars accumulate, harden over years, and crystallize. They then clog and dry bodily systems, with particular impact on the kidneys and lungs.

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Smoking addiction as Aajonus defines it belongs primarily to the Root Cause / Terrain Theory of his framework, with significant overlap into Detoxification and How to Eat.

• Root Cause / Terrain Theory: The addiction is not to nicotine, it is to the blood sugar elevation and enzyme stimulation that smoking produces through a toxic mechanism. The real root cause is nutritional deficiency, specifically deficiency in raw protein (pyruvate/glycogen precursors) and enzymes. The terrain, a body depleted of proper fuel, is what creates the vulnerability and the craving.

• Detoxification: The crystallized tars that accumulate over years of smoking represent a major detoxification challenge. The tar deposits must be dissolved and expelled, a process that can take years even after smoking cessation. The body may expel these tars through the skin, lungs, or other channels depending on what pathway is available. Aajonus describes his own body expelling decades of smoke tar through his skin rather than his lungs, which would have caused his lungs to fill with fluid.

• How to Eat: The specific foods, timings, and combinations that resolve the blood sugar and enzyme deficit at the root of the craving are central to the practical solution. Honey, butter, dates, raw meat, and raw tobacco are the primary interventional foods.

• Sovereignty: Aajonus explicitly and repeatedly states that smoking is a personal choice, not a moral issue. He does not tell people to stop smoking. He provides nutritional tools that allow the body to naturally drop the craving when its actual needs are being met. Sovereignty principle, that an individual's choices about their own body are valid and should not be met with guilt, runs through all of his smoking-related guidance.

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Conventionally interpreted as: nicotine withdrawal, psychological dependence, habit.

Aajonus's reframe: The craving for a cigarette is the body's request for blood sugar and enzymes. The body has learned, through repeated experience, that smoking will force the liver to release stored glycogen, producing a temporary energy surge. The craving is therefore a legitimate, biologically meaningful signal. It should not be suppressed or judged. It should be translated and answered with the appropriate food.

Conventionally interpreted as: nicotine stimulating dopamine and acetylcholine receptors.

Aajonus's reframe: The rush is real, but it is a blood sugar elevation caused by the toxic response forcing the liver to produce hormones that call for stored sugars. It is not healthy because the mechanism, monoxides and tars, poisons and kills cells and clogs the body. The rush is the body's emergency response to poison, not a pleasurable neurological event in isolation.

Conventionally interpreted as: alcohol dependence, addiction, insomnia.

Aajonus's reframe: The inability to sleep was directly created by the extreme stimulant load (coffee + cigarettes + Benzedrine) taken to maintain function in a chronically energy-depleted body. The alcohol was a crude tool to forcibly lower the nervous system activation enough to allow sleep. The root of the entire cascade was the original chronic energy deficiency.

Conventionally interpreted as: carcinogenic deposits causing cancer.

Aajonus's reframe: The tars are heavy, difficult-to-process fats. The body attempts to metabolize them as it would any fat, using bile. If the body produces adequate bile, the tars may be processed without crystallizing. If not, they crystallize over years and clog systems. The body, when given adequate resources, will eventually push these crystallized tars out through the skin, through the lungs, or through other elimination channels, a process Aajonus experienced personally as his skin expressing decades of accumulated smoke tar as a detoxification event rather than his lungs filling with fluid.

Aajonus describes his own bronchials as being 90% scar tissue after stopping smoking. He describes this not as a permanent irreversible condition but as a long-term healing process. Raw meat, raw fats, and the primal diet generally are the tools for gradually restoring tissue.

He also describes his lungs as still containing significant scar tissue comparable to another person's damaged lungs, even years after stopping. The recovery from decades of heavy smoking is extended and incomplete for a very long time, but directionally improving on the primal diet.

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The foundational protocol Aajonus gives for anyone who wants to reduce or eliminate smoking is elegantly simple and entirely non-coercive:

Every time you feel the urge to smoke, eat honey and butter first. Then, if you still want the cigarette, smoke it.

The specific formulation is honey with butter together. He states: "Honey and butter is better. I just say, 'It's okay for you to smoke.' Every time you have the craving have the honey/butter before you have the cigarette. Just incorporate this. And the other will be eliminated."

The mechanism: The honey and butter together directly satisfy the actual physiological need, the blood sugar elevation and the fat/enzyme requirement, that the body was using the cigarette to address. When the body has what it actually needs, the drive to smoke evaporates. Aajonus observes that people following this protocol typically get through only one-third of a cigarette before throwing it out. As the pattern repeats, they find themselves smoking less and less without willpower or conscious effort, until they are simply no longer smoking.

Honey alone is given as an alternative when butter is not available: "Or just have the honey." But honey with butter is described as superior.

A date is offered as another alternative to honey in the simpler version of the protocol: "So I don't say, 'Stop smoking.' I just say, when you want a cigarette, have some honey or a date. Go do that first. They will get through a third of the cigarette and then throw it out."

Honey provides immediate, highly bioavailable sugars that the body can utilize directly. In Aajonus's framework, raw honey contains the enzymes needed to properly metabolize these sugars. The butter provides fat, which is what the body also craves, the smoke tars are essentially the body trying to use vaporized oil as a fat source. Real fat from butter satisfies this need properly.

While honey and butter address the immediate craving, the deeper, more complete solution is raw meat. Aajonus states that the preferred blood sugar glycogen is made from the protein sugar pyruvate, which is best obtained from eating raw meat. Raw meat can enter the blood and help arrest the monoxides and tars. Over time, regular consumption of raw meat resolves the underlying blood sugar deficiency that drives the entire smoking cycle.

"The preferred blood sugar glycogen is made of the protein sugar pyruvate that is best obtained from eating raw meat."

Raw meat is thus the foundational nutritional solution, addressing the root cause rather than just the craving in the moment.

For those who have been habitual smokers, particularly those who have used marijuana, which has 16 to 20 times more tars than regular cigarettes, the accumulated tars in the body are described as extremely difficult to dissolve and remove:

"Those tars are very difficult, because they burn at twelve hundred to sixteen hundred to eighteen hundred degrees when you are smoking it. The ash gets that hot."

The only method Aajonus has observed to be reliably effective at deliberately dissolving these tars is eating or chewing raw green tobacco:

"The only way that I've seen people can deliberately break down those tars is to eat raw tobacco. Chew on it and spit the pulp out."

He also mentions: "Even chewing it up and then letting it mold and then eating it also will help dissolve some of those tars."

The rationale is that the natural fats in the raw, unburned tobacco plant act as a solvent, breaking up tars of their own chemical likeness through a fat-solvent mechanism. Smoking burns the tobacco at 1,200–1,800 degrees, converting the natural fats into tars. Eating the raw tobacco provides those same compounds in their original fat form, which the body can use as a solvent to break down and remove the crystallized tars.

Will raw green tobacco make you sick? Aajonus states: "No, I've never heard of anybody getting nauseous on raw green tobacco." A small amount of nicotine will give a mild high, described as a brain stimulation via vitamin B-niacin, but it will not cause the nausea and sickness associated with eating cured or treated commercial tobacco.

How to obtain raw green tobacco: Aajonus acknowledges it is difficult to obtain commercial raw tobacco that has not been treated. He suggests: - Finding a farmer in the South (where tobacco grows in the humid climate required) who does not treat their crop - Going to a grower's source and requesting green, untreated tobacco - Growing your own

Commercial chewing tobacco and snuff are also treated with addiction-enhancing chemicals and are therefore NOT suitable substitutes.

Duration of the raw tobacco protocol: For habitual heavy smokers and especially for marijuana smokers (whose tars are much thicker and accumulate faster): "Six months to nine months." The protocol should be maintained for this duration to ensure the tars are adequately dissolved and removed.

Frequency: They can have the raw tobacco as often as they want. If they are specifically trying to withdraw from smoking marijuana, they should have it once a day.

Aajonus gives specific attention to marijuana tar accumulation:

"Marijuana has approximately 16 times more tars than regular tobacco. Because the tars are cooked at temperatures between 500-1000 degrees F., they may crystallize and harden in various parts of the body. There can be an array of unhealthy conditions that could result, depending on individual weaknesses."

Elsewhere he gives the figure as 16 to 20 times more tars. He notes that those who make excessive bile may not experience as much tar congestion and therefore less hardening. But for those who do not produce abundant bile, the tar accumulation from marijuana is significantly more severe than from cigarettes.

The raw tobacco protocol (six to nine months) is specifically indicated for marijuana smokers who have heavy tar accumulation. Because marijuana tars come in more densely and quickly, they can block up harder than cigarette tars accumulated gradually over years.

In addition to the tar-dissolution use, Aajonus describes raw tobacco as a tool that creates a repulsion response to smoking:

"Yeah, chewing raw tobacco. It makes them repulse to smoking very quickly."

This is described as a specific method to help people quit smoking by making the act of smoking repulsive, presumably because experiencing the tobacco in its natural, unburned form shifts the body's relationship to the substance.

For those with heavy tars in the bile and body, Aajonus recommends cream as superior to butter for absorbing toxins. When asked whether butter is adequate: "No, it doesn't do the same. It would be okay, but it'd be probably a third better. Work a third better to absorb the toxins than butter."

Vinegar is mentioned as a topical and possibly internal aid for dissolving tar deposits: "Vinegar will help dissolve that a little bit."

In the case of Malcolm Gold, the guitar player and singer who developed a cancerous growth near his eye from years of exposure to vaporized hydrogenated oil smoke on stage, Aajonus prescribed alternating applications of fresh pineapple and vinegar on the affected tissue topically. He also notes the pineapple and vinegar treatment for external tar-related tissue damage.

"If a person stops smoking, stays away from airborne toxins, including synthetic fibers, and eats a raw diet with plenty of raw fat and raw meat, he or she may have a good chance of living with emphysema."

The raw fat and raw meat are the primary nutritional tools for the lungs.

For those whose smoking addiction originated in or is compounded by chronic fatigue and inability to produce sufficient energy through normal metabolism, Aajonus recommends waking during the night to eat protein. This prevents the blood sugar crash that creates the morning desperation for stimulants:

"You wake sometime during the night and you eat something with protein in it. I don't care if it's a little meat, it's a meatball, if it's an egg, if it's half of a milkshake or half a cup of milk, it's enough to do it."

For highly energetic people who might not be able to go back to sleep after five hours: set an alarm for three hours, wake and eat, then go back to sleep for five hours.

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When smokers follow the honey-and-butter-first protocol, Aajonus observes that they typically get through only about one-third of a cigarette before losing interest and discarding it. This happens from the first application of the protocol. Over time, with consistent repetition, they simply stop smoking without a dramatic cessation event. The body, having its actual needs met, naturally drops the craving.

For habitual smokers and marijuana smokers with heavy tar accumulation, the raw tobacco protocol should be maintained for six to nine months to ensure adequate dissolution and removal of crystallized tars.

Aajonus describes his own bronchials as 90% scar tissue even after years on the primal diet. He acknowledges that his lungs took a very long time to heal from two packs of non-filtered cigarettes per day smoked from age 8 to age 24. The healing is real and directional but extremely slow for severe cases.

He describes the moment when his bronchials finally began actively detoxifying as a significant event: "I had an actual bronchial cold. My bronchials have been 90% scar tissue since I stopped smoking... all of a sudden I smelled and tasted the smoke tox. It went on for days... that's smoking from age 8 to 24. All that smoke tar started breaking down."

Significantly, the tar expelled through the skin rather than the lungs during this event, a protective routing by the body to avoid flooding the lungs with the dissolved material, which would have caused serious respiratory problems. This skin-based expulsion is presented as the body intelligently choosing the safest available exit route.

To another seminar attendee with lung damage comparable to Aajonus's: "I smoked two packs of Electrostrike non-filter a day, and I smoked marijuana every day for two and a half years. My lungs were as bad a shape as yours, and it took me a long time."

Aajonus presents this as a notable exception to the general pattern: "I only have one woman on the diet 100% for three years and has a cigarette addiction. She's just now deciding to kick it." He notes that most other people on the diet naturally and easily drop addictions. But for her, even three years of 100% dietary compliance had not eliminated the smoking addiction. He does not fully explain this case but presents it as an edge case, suggesting that for most people the addiction resolves naturally on the diet, but for some individuals additional intervention or time is required.

In the context of drug addiction generally (not smoking specifically), Aajonus describes a crack cocaine patient who, if he goes off the diet for six to nine months, returns to crack use. This establishes the general principle that dietary adherence is the foundation of addiction freedom, and that going off the diet for extended periods can restore the biochemical vulnerability that drives addictive behavior.

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