Raw bone marrow occupies one of the most singular and irreplaceable positions in the entire Primal Diet. It is not merely another fat source, it is, according to Aajonus, the only reliably accessible food in the human diet that contains what he called regenerative, non-adult, embryonic-like stem cells. This distinction elevates raw bone marrow above every other food in its category, because no amount of butter, cream, coconut oil, or any other fat can replicate the regenerative stem cell activity that raw bone marrow delivers.

Bone marrow is the soft, fatty substance residing in the center cavity of bones, most abundantly found in the long bones of animals, primarily the femur and tibia. Aajonus consistently described it as looking and behaving like butter: hard when cold, soft and creamy at room temperature, and fully liquid and melting at body temperature (around 101–102 degrees Fahrenheit). He described eating it fresh and warm directly out of a freshly slaughtered animal as one of the most delicious food experiences of his life, "like butter, just like butter, delicious," said while describing pulling it from a cow that had died in childbirth on his farm, with a group of fifteen people watching him eat it raw.

Aajonus ate raw bone marrow every single day that he was in Los Angeles, going through an entire package, approximately four to five bones, yielding somewhere between one and a half tablespoons to two tablespoons of marrow per bone, totaling roughly one pound of marrow or approximately one and a half sticks of butter in volume, every day when he was there. He attributed a significant portion of his personal recovery from multiple myeloma (cancer of the blood and bone), leukemia, and the extensive radiation damage done to his skeletal system to the consumption of raw bone marrow as a consistent, daily, therapeutic food.

He used it both internally as a food eaten with meat meals and externally as a topical skin treatment, and he described both applications in detail across many seminars and consultations.

---

Bone marrow is approximately 60 to 80 percent fat, depending on what the animal has eaten. Aajonus consistently stated this figure, "60% or better, like the brain", and sometimes gave the range as "60 to 80% fat." This extremely high fat concentration is precisely what makes bone marrow so valuable therapeutically, because it provides a substrate rich enough to support both cell regeneration and the lodging of regenerative stem cells within its matrix.

This same high-fat composition also makes bone marrow, like the brain, one of the primary storage sites in the body for fat-soluble toxins, heavy metals, and other poisons. Because the body must sequester fat-soluble toxins somewhere, and because bone marrow and the brain represent the two greatest concentrations of fat inside the body (as opposed to subcutaneous fat on the outside), toxins are shunted into these areas preferentially in thin people or in people who do not have adequate external fat stores. This is one of the reasons Aajonus said "usually in thin people, it's in only the bone marrow and brain, concentrations of fat. That means that the bone marrow will be highly toxic."

Bone marrow is the exclusive site where red and white blood cells are bred and matured in the body. Aajonus was emphatic and repetitive on this point across all his seminars. The red and white blood cells divide inside the bone marrow, mature there over a process he described as taking anywhere from 40 to 65 days (he gave the range variously as "40 to a 60 day process," "45 to a 60 day process," and "a 45 to 60 day process," noting that "it probably depends on the health of the individual"), and then once mature, they enter the bloodstream to perform their work.

The largest production sites in the body, according to Aajonus, are the knee joints first, then the femur joints, then the other major bones, ribs, spine, shoulders, hip bones. He said the knees produce roughly 50% of the body's red and white blood cells from their bone marrow.

If the bone marrow is contaminated with heavy metals, aluminum, tin, lead, cadmium, or other poisons, those red and white blood cells are bred in a toxic environment and emerge weak, damaged, or mutated. Aajonus gave the specific figure that aluminum and tin contamination in the bone marrow can reduce blood effectiveness by up to 30%, with the average he observed being about 20%. This means the body's ability to transport oxygen and remove carbon dioxide is reduced by up to 30%, which he said translates to losing 60 to 70% of energy because the blood is used as the feeding vehicle for the entire body.

He said: "You have this blood which can't carry all the oxygen nor remove the carbon dioxide that they were meant to, the quantity that they were meant to. So another reason we don't have the energy and vitality that we're supposed to."

This is the most critical and repeatedly emphasized property Aajonus attributed to raw bone marrow. He made an absolute distinction between two categories of stem cells:

Adult stem cells: Cells that have already matured and can only reproduce their own kind. A heart cell stem cell can only produce more heart cells. A blood stem cell can only produce more blood cells. Adult stem cells have what he called a "blueprint", they are restricted to a particular tissue type.

Regenerative (embryonic-like) stem cells: Cells that have not yet received instructions telling them what to become. When these cells enter the body through consumption of raw bone marrow, the body itself determines what they will be used for, nerve cells, skin cells, organ cells, whatever the body most needs to rebuild. Aajonus also referred to these as "non-adult" stem cells.

He stated with complete conviction that raw bone marrow is the only practical food source of these regenerative stem cells: "It is the only place where you can get regenerative stem cells. Not adult stem cells." The only other places he identified were sperm and the ovum, but he immediately dismissed these as impractical sources for regular human consumption. "How can you farm that?" he said. "Who's going to manufacture sperm and ovum? It would be rather impossible."

He illustrated the power of these stem cells by describing what they did for a man who had had heart surgery, whose adult stem cells were all already committed to their specific functions, versus what undifferentiated bone marrow stem cells could accomplish. He said: "That's what stem cells can do, whether they're adult or, I forgot the term for the ones that are not adult, the ones that can be anything, any kind of cell. Bone marrow is full of it."

He also described stem cells from bone marrow as helping the body regrow hair, noting: "With the new formula of butter and bone marrow, you can do it. Now, I noticed that just using butter helps too, it helps thicken the hair, and with the bone marrow, because cells that can be, that have no DNA to tell them, it doesn't restrict the bone marrow cells, stem cells can become nerve cells, it can be anything."

Because bone marrow is 60–80% fat, the body uses it as a dumping ground for fat-soluble poisons that cannot be eliminated rapidly. This creates a feedback loop: the very organ responsible for manufacturing the immune cells (white blood cells) and oxygen carriers (red blood cells) becomes compromised by the body's own attempts to neutralize and sequester toxins.

Aajonus described this vividly: "If you've got metallic poisons and other chemicals in the bone marrow, are those red and white blood cells going to be born into a healthy environment? Very weak. Very damaged. Mutations."

He gave specific examples of what specific poisons cause in bone marrow: - High amounts of lead and cadmium → bone cancer, bone marrow cancer (leukemia) - Aluminum and tin → blood effectiveness reduced by an average of 20–30% - General metallic toxicity → anemia, weakness, lack of energy, secondary anemia (where red blood cells exist in adequate numbers but are too immature or damaged to function)

He described how the body, when the bone marrow becomes overwhelmed, will sometimes redirect immature blood cells to the spleen as an alternative maturation site, what he called a "way station", but said this creates additional complexity and problems because the spleen is normally only a reservoir for mature blood already made in the bone marrow, not a manufacturing site.

Eating raw bone marrow, in Aajonus's framework, helps address this problem by providing the body with clean, functional stem cells and highly bioavailable fat that can displace and buffer the toxic environment in the bone marrow, allowing healthier cell production.

Aajonus was asked directly and repeatedly whether beef stock made from boiling bones was equivalent to or useful as a substitute for raw bone marrow. His answer was unequivocal and consistent: cooking destroys the bone marrow and everything in it. "You're destroying the bone marrow and everything that's in the bone." He said this in multiple sessions without qualification. The stem cells, the living fat structures, the enzymatic content, all destroyed by heat.

He also clarified in a consultation: "There's nothing in a bone that will do anything different or better. Marrow is different. It's the only place you're going to get a lot of stem cells." This is a distinction between cooked bone broth (useless or harmful in his framework) and the marrow itself (uniquely valuable when raw).

Aajonus noted that every time a cooked meal is eaten, one-third to half of the body's circulating white blood cells rush into the intestines to deal with the toxicity of cooked food, a phenomenon called leukocytosis, documented in medical literature and mentioned by Sally Fallon. This destroys large numbers of white blood cells. Those white blood cells then have to be replaced, which is done exclusively in the bone marrow. Every cooked meal therefore places a burden on the bone marrow to produce replacement white blood cells.

By eating raw foods, including raw bone marrow, Aajonus said you reduce this demand on the bone marrow and allow it to maintain healthier, more robust blood cell production.

Aajonus placed raw bone marrow within the broader category of raw meat proteins as one of the foods capable of accelerating cellular division and tissue regeneration. "So fat, the meat proteins are the only ones that speed regeneration of cells. Bone marrow is part of the meat." He noted that when he had a bone marrow massage applied to his body and bathed in it for seven days, his skin had no odor even after seven days without bathing (except slightly in the armpits), and there was no itchy skin, no dry skin problem, results he attributed to the stem cells feeding and regenerating skin tissue from the outside.

---

Aajonus described the physical state of bone marrow in careful detail because its consistency directly determines how it is used:

• Cold/refrigerated: Hard, like hardened meat fat or hard butter. In this state it must be dug or scraped out of the bone.
• Room temperature (after approximately 8 hours): Soft, like warm butter, "like butter when it's room temperature and soft." In this state it can be easily scooped out with a knife or popped out of the bone, and it blends easily.
• At body temperature (101–102°F, such as when just removed from a freshly slaughtered warm animal): Melts completely like warm butter, almost liquid. He described this as the most delicious state, "fresh, warm out of the bone marrow. It's like butter. Just like butter. Delicious."
• He also said: "If that's a temperature like this your bone marrow is wet like butter. Well, like more yogurt. But if it gets very warm like 101, 102 degrees it'll melt like butter."

The practical instruction he gave was: if you want to pop the marrow out of the bone easily, leave the bone at room temperature for about eight hours overnight, and it will release from the bone and can be popped out whole. If you don't do this, you have to dig it out with a knife or a utensil. He noted it is "much tastier when it's warm."

Bone marrow goes off quickly. Aajonus warned that bone causes quick bacterial manifestation and oxidizes the marrow rapidly. He described the outer layer of the marrow turning brown as it oxidizes. The practical instruction he gave was:

• As soon as you get the marrow home, leave it out for a few hours to reach room temperature, pop the marrow out of the bones, put it into a jar, and then refrigerate it. This will keep it fresh longer than leaving it in the bone.
• When applying bone marrow to skin, use only fresh marrow, cut off and eat the portion that is starting to turn brown on the outside, and use the inner fresh portion on the skin.
• Once bone marrow starts to turn, it has "a foul odor." He said if you put rancid bone marrow on your skin, "your skin's going to smell a little stinky. So it has to be very, very fresh bone marrow."
• He described the smell of fresh bone marrow going off as simply a "foul odor," distinguishing it from, for example, aged musk (which he described as "musk oil" once processed).

He also mentioned in one session: "Maybe if you left the bone marrow rot and get stinky, then you know, would you be able to be social? It might work then, I don't know, I haven't tried it." This was clearly exploratory/humorous, not a protocol.

The distinction is absolute in Aajonus's framework. Cooked bone marrow, whether via boiling for stock, roasting, or any other heat application, destroys the stem cells, destroys the enzymatic activity, and destroys the bioavailable fat structures. Only raw bone marrow contains the properties he described. This distinction is non-negotiable in his teaching.

---

Aajonus identified his primary personal source as North Star Bison in Rice, Wisconsin (R-I-C-E, Wisconsin), available on the internet. He mentioned this source by name in multiple seminars. He described North Star Bison as a reliable source for bone marrow sections.

He also sourced bone marrow from: - His own Amish farmers (beef) - Any producer slaughtering animals, he said "you can get it from any producer that's slaughtering animals" - Buffalo/bison sources generally - Directly from animals he butchered himself, including a cow that died in childbirth on his farm, from which he personally extracted and ate the marrow fresh and warm

He described two ways to obtain the marrow itself: 1. Purchase sections of femur or tibia (the long bones with the most marrow) that have already been cut into sections by the farmer or butcher 2. Get a cut of meat that has bone with marrow in it, noting "you don't get much, but you still get something"

Aajonus was specific: the femur and tibia have the most marrow. These are the long bones of the leg. He cautioned that at the knuckle (the joint end of the bone), "it's all cartilage and bone. There's nothing in it." The marrow is found in the middle shaft of the bone, "about from here to here on the animal will be the rich bone marrow inside it. So at the knuckle you're not going to get anything."

He said each section of bone from a package typically contains "this much bone marrow in each one", approximating one and a half to two tablespoons per bone, depending on the size of the bone.

Aajonus described using a knife to scoop the marrow out. He mentioned in one email consultation that he uses chopsticks for pushing bone marrow out. He also referenced a surgical steel ice pick that someone found on eBay as a potential tool that "would poke right through bone marrow."

The basic method: take the bone section, allow it to reach room temperature (or leave overnight for about 8 hours), and either scoop/scrape the marrow out with a knife or pop it out whole once softened.

Aajonus gave a specific safety warning about handling bone sections: "But watch out with your fingers because you can get a very deep cut" from the cut edges of the sawn bone sections. The bone ends are sharp and can cause serious wounds.

Once extracted from the bone, marrow should be placed in a glass jar and refrigerated. This extends freshness beyond leaving it in the bone, because bone contact accelerates oxidation and bacterial activity. He was emphatic: "As soon as you get home, leave it out for a few hours and pop them out and put them in a jar and then refrigerate that. And they'll keep longer."

• Do not boil the bones for stock, destroys everything
• Do not cook the marrow in any way
• Do not use marrow from conventionally stored bones if they have been previously frozen, he noted that fresh and unfrozen is specifically better for therapeutic purposes ("eating fresh and unfrozen organic bone marrow with raw beef speeds healing")
• Glands and certain organs from non-organically raised animals store more toxins than muscle meat, marrow from non-organically raised animals is also identified as a toxin storage site. He said: "most toxins store in glands, some organs and bone marrow because of the concentration of fats in glands, bone marrow, and some organs. I don't recommend eating glandular tissue and certain organs and bone marrow" from non-organically raised animals.

---

Aajonus consistently and repeatedly specified that raw bone marrow should be eaten with a meat meal, not alone, not as a separate snack. The instruction appears in nearly every discussion of bone marrow: "I eat that with my meat meal," "you eat it with your meat meal," "bone marrow should be eaten before meat; have 1–2 bone-marrow sections per day at your evening meat meal" (from his written Q&A correspondence).

The reasoning in his framework is that bone marrow is "part of the meat", it is categorized as a meat food, not purely as a fat food. The protein of the meat meal works together with the fat of the bone marrow to support cellular regeneration. He said specifically: "So fat, the meat proteins are the only ones that speed regeneration of cells. Bone marrow is part of the meat."

When eating bone marrow with a meat meal, Aajonus said you do not need your full butter portion. He specified: "You don't need butter with the meat meal then. Maybe a half a tablespoon of butter still, but you don't need much butter when you're eating bone marrow with your meat meal." The bone marrow provides sufficient fat to fulfill the role that butter would otherwise play in protecting the meat proteins and facilitating digestion and assimilation.

In a specific written consultation, Aajonus instructed: "Bone marrow should be eaten before meat; have 1–2 bone-marrow sections per day at your evening meat meal." This is the most precise dosing instruction he left in the sources, one to two sections, at the evening meat meal, before the meat itself.

---

Aajonus began experimenting with topical bone marrow after observing its effects on his own skin following a bone marrow massage. He described the experience: "I had a massage with bone marrow one time. That was an incredible week, that week for my bath for seven days, had no odor, except right in the pits. And it was great. Usually I'll go four or five days without a bath, but here I went seven days without a bath. No itchy skin, no dry skin problem, after seven days from having that bone marrow massage."

He attributed this not merely to the fat content of the marrow lubricating the skin, but specifically to the stem cells in the marrow regenerating skin tissue from the outside.

Aajonus described a hairdresser who was "almost 50 years old" and had persistently dry skin. He asked her to experiment with applying bone marrow directly to her skin every day. He traveled to Asia for two months, returned, and found: "this one girl with this dry skin, this hairdresser, her skin was completely different. She lost 10 years off of her face. She's almost 50 years old now. Now she looks like she's 40, just from using the bone marrow on the skin directly." He noted she continued using it every day rather than eating enough fat to lubricate the body from the inside, because she simply would not eat enough fat.

Aajonus stated: "you can put bone marrow every day on the skin, and within six weeks, 80% of your wrinkles will be gone." He contrasted this favorably with nanotechnology cosmetics, which he said poison cells to force them to relax (causing wrinkles to disappear), but which he said creates a cancerous condition in the skin. The bone marrow approach, by contrast, uses stem cells that regenerate the skin tissue rather than poisoning it.

For massages, Aajonus described using "half butter and half bone marrow." He also developed a more complex formula for the primal facial body care cream: "Now I put bone marrow as well in with those other fats. For her I said I'd like to experiment with something." The basic facial care cream formula was coconut cream, dairy cream, and butter, to which he added bone marrow as a stem cell component.

Since bone marrow oxidizes quickly and develops a foul odor as it turns, Aajonus gave specific instructions for topical use: - Use only very fresh bone marrow - Cut off the outer portion that is starting to turn brown (eat that) - Scrape off the inner, still-fresh portion and apply that to the skin - At room temperature it becomes soft like oil, "like butter. When it's room temperature, it's very soft and blends in" - The stem cells in the fresh portion will work to regenerate skin cells when applied topically

When using pineapple, papaya, or vinegar to dissolve tumors or abnormal tissue, Aajonus instructed: "you need to apply butter or bone marrow around it to make sure that those cells are protected, that you don't start breaking the cells down surrounding the tumor." The bone marrow serves a protective function, its fat and stem cell content protect the surrounding healthy tissue while the enzymatic substances work on the target tissue.

Aajonus mentioned: "I think that with the new formula of butter and bone marrow, you can do it" for regrowing hair. The stem cells in bone marrow can potentially become the nerve cells or follicle cells needed for hair regrowth when applied to the scalp. He noted: "just using butter helps too, it helps thicken the hair, and with the bone marrow, because cells that can be, that have no DNA to tell them, it doesn't restrict the bone marrow cells, stem cells can become nerve cells, it can be anything."

---

Aajonus's personal daily dose when in Los Angeles was one full package of bone marrow per day, approximately four to five bone sections, yielding roughly one and a half tablespoons to two tablespoons per bone, for a total of approximately six to ten tablespoons, or roughly one pound of marrow, or "about one and a half sticks of butter worth." He stated: "I still eat all my butter, too," indicating that even at this dose he maintained his other fat intake.

When not in Los Angeles (he was there only about six weeks per year), he ate two bone marrow sections per day if available, noting "that's it" for those days.

"Just eat one bone marrow per meat meal, and that's plenty." This is his prescription for people who are not treating a serious condition. One section per meat meal is sufficient.

In a specific written consultation: "have 1–2 bone-marrow sections per day at your evening meat meal." The marrow should be eaten before the meat in that meal.

Daily is appropriate. He ate it every day he was in Los Angeles and recommended it as a daily food for those with access to it, particularly for cancer history, bone conditions, and general cellular regeneration.

He was clear that the digestive system has a limited ability to process bone marrow, requiring approximately 10 times more bile than most other fats. Beyond roughly one section per meal, the excess passes through undigested. Eating a full package (four to five sections) produces "bowel movements galore" that are so greasy "I can't even flush them down the toilet, because they float so much." This is not dangerous but is wasteful and indicates the practical upper limit of digestive absorption.

Each bone section contains approximately one and a half to two tablespoons of marrow, depending on the size of the bone and which animal it came from. A package from North Star Bison typically has four to five bones.

---

The most common and simple preparation described by Aajonus was to scoop the raw bone marrow out of the bone with a knife and eat it directly, at room temperature. He said it is "much tastier when it's warm", so allowing it to come to room temperature or eating it fresh from a recently warm animal is preferred. "Just pop it out, eat some of it, rub it on your skin, whatever you want to do."

Bone marrow is eaten as part of a meat meal. It is not mixed into the meat but eaten alongside it. He consistently said "I eat that with my meat meal." The marrow accompanies the meal as the primary or sole fat component, with butter reduced to perhaps half a tablespoon.

Aajonus mentioned that bone marrow "may be made as part of a meat sauce", referring readers to The Recipe For Living Without Disease for raw meat sauce recipes that incorporate bone marrow.

Aajonus described the optimal culinary experience as eating it fresh and warm directly from a recently slaughtered animal: "I take out the bone marrow raw and they're all fascinated by this, you know. But it was delicious. Fresh, warm out of the bone marrow. It's like butter. Just like butter. Delicious." This experience occurred when one of his cows died in childbirth and he butchered it with approximately fifteen people, extracting and eating the marrow raw on the spot while others took their portions home to cook.

For topical use in a blended cream formula: raw bone marrow is combined with coconut cream, dairy cream, and raw butter. Aajonus described this as an experiment he developed with a specific patient, adding bone marrow to the previously existing facial care cream formula.

---

The documented derivation described in the sources is a massage preparation using "half butter and half bone marrow." Aajonus used this personally and described it as the product he had applied during the seven-day experiment in which his skin remained odor-free and without dryness. This is not a processed derivative but a simple blended topical combination, mixed at the time of application.

---

Aajonus's relationship with raw bone marrow emerged directly from his medical history. In 1968 he received 10 weeks of intensive radiation therapy for a keloid tumor at his surgical incision site. The radiation cauterized his entire spine, "they burned me all the way to my spine", and damaged bone marrow throughout his ribs, spine, shoulders, hip bones, and femur joints. He described the result: "So the radiation, of course, creates bone cancer. And leukemia as a result of damaging the bone marrow...I got multiple myeloma, which is cancer of the blood and bone. So I was basically a crippled minimalist. I was a worm because I could barely move my body from the ribs down. And my back was in constant pain. And I would crawl on the floor on my elbows."

He had been a raw food vegetarian-fruitarian for six and a half years before the multiple myeloma surged again. He then spent time with the Eskimos (Inuit) in Alaska in late August and early September, and with multiple Indian tribes including the Yaqui and Sioux, all of whom told him to eat raw meat. He resisted for three years before finally accepting. The Eskimos before the arrival of Europeans with their cooking implements and foods had no degenerative disease, the first degenerative disease found in an Eskimo was found after they adopted cooked foods.

Aajonus contrasted his dietary approach directly with the medical profession's use of bone marrow transplants: "Very few bone marrow transplants are successful without side effects. About 2%." He said that eating fresh, unfrozen raw bone marrow with organic raw beef offers a 96% chance of remission and recovery from leukemia, a direct repudiation of the medical approach and its near-total failure rate.

Aajonus addressed the widespread belief that bone broth or bone stock (made by boiling bones) is nutritionally equivalent to or substitutable for raw bone marrow. He rejected this categorically. When asked "Is beef stock good for you? Boiling the bones?" he responded: "You're destroying the bone marrow and everything that's in the bone." He acknowledged the cultural popularity of bone broth and the claims made for it but maintained that heat renders the marrow's components, particularly the stem cells and enzymatic structures, biologically inert or harmful.

---