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.Chris Norris, "The gastronauts", Spin, 1999 Feb;15(2):86–95.Greg Presto, "20 most controversial figures in health and fitness" , Rodale Wellness, 28 Dec 2011. He was a controversial figure who fought legal battles, implemented legal loopholes for consumer access to raw milk,Sarah Gilbert, "The war over raw milk: A battle heats up", AOL News, 20 Jul 2010. and developed a diet based largely on raw meat: the primal diet.Sandor Ellix Katz, The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America's Underground Food Movements (White River Junction VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2006), p 182.Susan Bourette, Meat: A Love Story (New York: Berkley Books, 2009), ch 9.Ben Hewitt, Making Supper Safe: One Man's Quest to Learn the Truth about Food Safety (New York: Rodale, 2011), p 181.Burkhard Bilger, "Nature's spoils", New Yorker, 22 Nov 2010, collected in Tim Folger, ed, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011: The Best American Series (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), and in Francis Lam & John T Edge, eds, Cornbread Nation 7: The Best of Southern Food Writing (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014). 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. His protocols are untested by medical scientists and remain controversial.
Vonderplanitz founded the nonprofit organization Right to Choose Healthy Foods (RTCHF). In 2001, his effort led to the end of Los Angeles County's ban on the retail sale of raw milk.Ron Schmid, The Untold Story of Milk: Green Pastures, Contented Cows and Raw Dairy Products (Baltimore MD: New Trends Publishing, 2003), p 273. 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. By 2010, food clubs under RTCHF numbered about 80 across the United States, including a few with over 1000 members.
In 2010, Vonderplanitz accused a non-RTCHF farmer of misrepresenting food source and quality when supplying certain foods to RTCHF's preeminent food club Rawesome, which had been attracting celebrity membership, in Venice, Los Angeles. Waging negative publicity and a lawsuit against the farmer and Rawesome's owner, Vonderplanitz fostered the club's debacle while the government prosecuted the farmer and Rawesome's owner for distributing raw dairy.Victoria Bloch, "Mourning what could have been at Rawesome Food Club", The Complete Patient blog, 16 Jul 2013. 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.Regina Meredith, interviewing Aajonus Vonderplanitz , Consciousness Media Network, Jun 2010. 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.
Around his 10th birthday, Swigart claimed his alleged peritonitis was misdiagnosed as appendicitis, and his appendix was removed. He also stated that his bones were brittle, that he "regularly" broke limb bones, and that at age 15 he was diagnosed with "juvenile diabetes". Swigart first received family and community support, he recalled, when he found his first girlfriend in his junior year at Finneytown High School, whom he married two years later and had a child with. Once he graduated, the new family moved elsewhere near Cincinnati.
While renting a small apartment at a business intersection, Swigart's wife worked as a utility-company secretary, and he as a short-order cook while attending the Cincinnati Institute of Computer Technology.Anonymous writer, "Aajonus Vonderplanitz, author", webpage for speaker # 38 at 39th Annual Cancer Control Convention, held 3–5 Sep 2011, Cancer Control Society, website visited 27 Sep 2017. 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.
Vonderplanitz claimed a diverse résumé, as by the time he was 40, he still had marginal income as a nutritionist. He recalled that in 1971, he refused to be made the Winston Man for seven years, which he claimed would have earned him $7.5 million. In the 1980s, he earned money painting murals inside homes and acting on the soap opera General Hospital. He claimed to have created a diet for a client demanding quick weight loss who allegedly published it for profit as the Beverly Hills Diet. After overturning a traffic ticket at age 22, he sought to develop legal expertise by private study. After 2000, he wrote business contracts and legal responses for farmers. In his last years, he owned a farm in the Philippines and another in a remote area of Thailand, near its northern border with Laos.
Nutritional career Vonderplanitz claimed to have been tutored by a Southern California nutritionist named Bruno Corigliano, after which he travelled by bicycle across North America and into Latin America in his late 20s while studying biology and medical textbooks, Native American indigenous healthcare, and wildlife habits.Ben Hewitt, Making Supper Safe (Rodale, 2011), p 177. 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 his early 20s, among the outdoor purveyors at Venice Beach, he set up a table with the banner NUTRITIONIST, and began counseling in a raw-food niche. In hindsight, he claimed that his advice had often been ineffective, and sometimes even harmful until he included raw meat. Around age 30, he became a staff nutritionist, advising customers, at a health food store, Aunt Tilly's Too. Although not in his 1997 book, he used the title PhD, specifying nutritional science, in a 2001 research report on milk, cowritten with William Campbell Douglass II MD and thereafter. In 2009, he was reported to lack accredited scientific or medical training.
In September 1986, Vonderplanitz returned to Cincinnati, Ohio, after living in a Beverly Hills "slum" while freelancing in nutrition. His son, estranged for about 20 years, had been in a severe car wreck, and drove straight into a tree without a seatbelt. Vonderplanitz claimed to have sabotaged his son's conventional medical treatment in Mercy Hospital's intensive care unit, and used raw foods to awaken and save his comatose son from imminent death, and to reverse his paralysis and brain damage.
Upon the 1997 release of Vonderplanitz's first book, We Want To Live, Robert Atkins interviewed him on Atkins's nationally syndicated radio show. Vonderplanitz claimed his own protocol had cured over 200 clients of cancer.Ralph Moss, "From the Planets", The Cancer Chronicles, Fall 1997. In 2000, Vonderplanitz trademarked the name Primal Diet.U.S. Department of Commerce, Patent and Trademark Office, Official Gazette of the United States Patent and Trademark Office: Trademarks, 2003;1274(4):688. Unlike later diets called "primal", Vonderplanitz's Primal Diet principally includes raw meat, raw eggs, raw dairy, raw fats, and unheated honey.Edwin Rensen, Vlees Magazine (Netherlands), 14 May 2009. 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. Despite mainstream dismissal, his Primal Diet gained a sizable underground following.
Food activism
Although Vonderplanitz dated it to the 1970s, his food-rights campaign more clearly began closer to 2000. In 2011, Vonderplanitz and an ally, James Stewart, were the raw-milk movement's de facto leaders.
California In 1997 or 1998, Venice, Los Angeles, resident James Stewart, in poor health, discovered Vonderplanitz's Primal Diet. By 2000, Stewart was a southern California distributor of raw milk for Claravale Farm, which had only eight cows, but was the state's only farm still licensed to supply unpasteurized milk to retail stores. While Claravale Farm added cows for Stewart's distribution reaching 30 stores in four counties—Orange, Ventura, San Diego, and Los Angeles—one county, Los Angeles, was the only one in the state where the retail sale of raw milk was illegal. By 2001, county regulators were pulling Stewart's milk from stores.