Aajonus Vonderplanitz

Aajonus Vonderplanitz (Born John Richard Swigart; April 17, 1947 – August 28, 2013) was an American alternative nutritionist and food-rights activist who focused on raw foods, particularly raw meat and dairy. He was a controversial figure who fought legal battles, implemented legal loopholes for consumer access to raw milk, and developed a diet based largely on raw meat: the primal diet. His later years, marked by his allegations of conspiracies and by his infighting within the raw food community, drew him notoriety even among advocates of alternative healthcare and food rights.

He claimed that he was diagnosed with terminal cancer in his early life, but later experienced remission and rejuvenation upon adopting a diet consisting of raw carrot juice and raw dairy by age 21. He later began informal nutritional counseling. By age 25, he had adopted a raw plant based diet; at age 29, he added raw meat, which he claimed vastly improved healing. After 1997, when his first book, We Want to Live, was published, he became a leading alternative nutritionist. He made miraculous claims of his clients' routinely curing their diseases, but did not publish any case documentation. To circumvent laws banning sale of unpasteurized dairy elsewhere, he invented "animal leasing", where a dairy farm is leased to a private food club, which elects to omit pasteurization. Vonderplanitz's legal defenses of RTCHF's farmers and club managers were mostly successful. In 2013, at his farmhouse in rural Thailand, he fell through a faulty balcony rail and died a few days later.

Biography

Early life

Vonderplanitz was born John Richard Swigart in Denver, Colorado. He spent most of his childhood and adolescence in the Cincinnati suburb of Finneytown, Ohio. He described himself as a misunderstood and abused sickly child. His older brother, allegedly resentful at the loss of maternal attention, "tortured [him] nearly daily". According to himself, being "dyslexic" and "borderline autistic", conditions "which no one understood at the time", Vonderplanitz "rarely played with other children", and "embarrassed and frustrated [his] parents", fueling paternal "discipline" that led to several hospitalizations. Their marriage was strained by their son's severe colic, her postpartum mood problems, his mood problems, and his extramarital affair with a female instructor at his trade school. They divorced when he was 19 and he moved to Los Angeles to work in computer programming.

Adulthood

Swigart developed a stomach ulcer, and the surgical treatment caused a keloidal scar that was treated by radiation therapy, which caused multiple myeloma. According to himself, once chemotherapy caused further illnesses, including psoriasis, bursitis, and severe periodontitis, he discontinued treatment of his terminal cancer, but a hospice worker, paying him volunteer home visits, gave him a small book on cancer treatment by raw carrot juice; within 10 days, the regimen ended his alleged dyslexia, and soon put his cancer in remission.

At age 22, Swigart began to promote himself as a nutritionist. About a year later, he met a toddler who called him Aajonus. Because he disliked his name, he accepted the new one and later took his European ancestors' last name, Vonderplanitz. He mostly attributed his health gains over the next two years to raw juices and raw dairy. By age 25, Vonderplanitz adopted a raw plant based diet. Two years later, he travelled by bicycle in search for answers to nutrition while "liv[ing] off the earth" across North America and into Latin America. Nearly three years later, he returned to Los Angeles with a proposed solution: eating raw meat. He claimed to have discovered raw meat's putative healing capacity when fasting in the wilderness, where a pack of coyotes killed, tore open, and offered him a jackrabbit, then watched him until he ate it. In 2000, Vonderplanitz trademarked the name Primal Diet. Unlike later diets called "primal", Vonderplanitz's Primal Diet principally includes raw meat, raw eggs, raw dairy, raw fats, and unheated honey. In 2002, his other book, the Recipe for Living Without Disease, was published. Around 2010, he claimed a higher-than-90 percent rate of cancer remission among his clients who followed it. and accompanying threat of legal action, persuaded the county's board of supervisors to end the ban on raw milk's retail sale. In early 2000, the McAfees' farm had switched to organic, but Organic Pastures still sold its milk wholesale to Organic Valley, which in turn supplied only pasteurized milk to stores. Meanwhile, he criticized the "herdshare" or "cowshare" model, where a consumer buys "shares" and thus "partially owns" the cattle, before buying dairy directly from the farmer, who may still sell to nonshareholders.

Vonderplanitz fought the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund (FTCLDF) by writing legal documents for farmers and consumers, despite not being an attorney. The FTCLDF was operated by attorneys also endorsed the herdshare model, which Vonderplanitz claimed to lack precedent, as shareholding can entitle one to profits without any ownership of property, whereas leasing held long precedent of full responsibility matching ownership. Vonderplanitz not being a lawyer appealed to Amish farmers, however, who traditionally avoid taking legal action. By 2010, Vonderplanitz's responses were well known for ending regulators' legal threats against RTCHF's farmers. Once threatened, some non-RTCHF farmers signed RTCHF contracts. By 2010, RTCHF's food clubs numbered about 80, each commonly having about 100 to 200 members, and a few having over 1000 members.

Around 2010, the federal government began to pressure state governments to enforce laws against raw milk. A dragnet was brought against farmers and club managers connected to Vonderplanitz; his attempts to defend them drew mixed results. In April 2011, the Food and Drug Administration filed in federal court against Amish farmer Daniel Allgyer of Pennsylvania. Unable to reach Vonderplanitz, who was traveling abroad, Allgyer dropped Vonderplanitz's RTCHF the next month and hired Karl Dahlstrom's ProAdvocate Group. Against Allyger's resistance, Vonderplanitz filed a motion to intercede, but the judge denied it, excluding Vondeplanitz from the case, and added that Vonderplanitz's arguments about health and rights were irrelevant to whether Allgyer were guilty of interstate commerce of unpasteurized dairy. In February 2012, ruling against Allgyer, the judge called it "a cow share" that was "merely a subterfuge".

Rawesome food club

The preeminent food club linked to Vonderplanitz's Right to Choose Healthy Food was the Rawesome food club, known for exotic raw foods, and its celebrity clientele, in Venice, Los Angeles. In 2001, James Stewart had founded a private food club, "The Garage". By 2003, it evolved into Rawesome, which Vonderplanitz wrote the contract for, invested in, and steered clients to.

Last day

Despite his role in Rawesome and other animal-leasing arrangements that he continued after Rawesome's debacle, Vonderplanitz was never prosecuted. By 2010, he believed himself to be the target of a governmental or pharmaceutical conspiracy to neutralize him.

In 2009, he had described the ongoing flu pandemic as a hoax mediated by flu vaccination. He later alleged apparent retribution by invaders of his hotel room in Thailand forcibly giving him injections that sent his "mercury, barium, and chromium readings off the charts", impairing his health, causing weight loss, and prematurely aging him. In another claim, he said that his car's brakes suddenly failed in Thailand, causing a potentially fatal car wreck that he likewise attributed to a plot against his life.

In August 2013, at his farm in Thailand, Vonderplanitz apparently leaned against his second-story balcony rail, which collapsed; he fell and broke his spine, which paralyzed him. At the hospital, he accepted pain-killing drugs, yet refused surgery to treat internal bleeding. After a few days, he lost consciousness and died. Despite rumors of conspiracy, two of Vonderplanitz's colleagues described local circumstances suggesting a genuine accident. Vonderplanitz authored two books: a memoir retracing his path to and introducing the Primal Diet, We Want To Live (1997/2005), and a follow-up recipe book, The Recipe for Living Without Disease (2002).