Aajonus Vonderplanitz, Date of Birth, Date of Death
TweetAajonus Vonderplanitz
American nutritionist
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About Aajonus Vonderplanitz
- Aajonus Vonderplanitz (April 17, 1947 – August 28, 2013) was an American nutritionist and activist who was prominent yet controversial in the raw food movement.
- He is especially known for legal battles and legal workarounds for consumer access to raw milk, and for developing a diet based largely on raw meat, the Primal Diet.
- Yet his later years, marked by his allegations of conspiracies and by his infighting within the food-rights community, drew him notoriety even among advocates of alternative healthcare and food rights. Upon his putative recovery from terminal cancer at age 22 by regimen of raw carrot juice and raw dairy, Vonderplanitz began informal nutritional counseling.
- By age 25, he had adopted raw veganism.
- Yet at age 29, he added raw meat, which he claimed to vastly improve healing.
- After publication of his first book, We Want to Live, in 1997, he would become a leading alternative nutritionist.
- He made apparently miraculous claims of his clients' routinely curing their diverse diseases, but he never documented these cases.
- Untested by medical scientists, his protocols remain controversial.Vonderplanitz founded the not-for-profit Right to Choose Healthy Foods (RTCHF).
- In 2001, his campaign ended Los Angeles County's ban on raw milk's retail sale.
- Vonderplanitz also originated the "animal-leasing" model, whereby a farmer's dairy operation is leased to, thus effectively owned by, and supplies all of its dairy to a private food club that, rejecting legally mandated pasteurization, takes it unpasteurized.
- Vonderplanitz's defenses of RTCHF's farmers and club managers from legal threats were mostly successful.
- At his death, food clubs under RTCHF numbered about 80, including thousands of members, across the US. In 2010, Vonderplanitz accused a non-RTCHF farmer of misrepresenting food source and food quality when supplying certain, non-dairy foods to RTCHF's preeminent food club, Rawesome.
- Vonderplanitz's defamation and lawsuit, despite its failure, may have fostered Rawesome's debacle and weakened the food-rights movement.
- His claims of governmental or pharmaceutical plots against him seem implausible.
- In 2013, he died a few days after a fall from a balcony at his farmhouse in a remote area of Thailand.
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