Bonjo

Aajonus Vonderplanitz was given weeks to live at twenty-one. He had gone through surgery for a stomach tumor, then radiation, then chemotherapy. The treatments left him with multiple myeloma, blood and bone cancers, and a body that was failing. Doctors stopped offering options. He stopped accepting them. He left the hospital and began drinking raw carrot juice and raw milk. The decline slowed. He later added raw meat. He said the change was the one that mattered. He spent the next decades eating the same way: raw beef, raw fish, raw eggs, raw cream, raw butter, and vegetable juices. He called it the Primal Diet. He wrote books describing what he had done and what he claimed others could do. He fought legal cases to keep raw milk available. He lived on the diet himself. In August 2013 he was at a farmhouse in Thailand. He walked onto a balcony to empty rinse water from a wound on his hand. The railing gave way. He fell and died days later at sixty-six. He had refused the last treatment the doctors offered. He had kept eating the food he said had kept him alive. The railing broke.