Macrobiotics - A Guide for the Perplexed

Macrobiotics is a difficult-to-define and often misunderstood term. Is it an adjective or a noun? Should the “m” be upper or lower case? Doesn't macrobiotics have something to do with Eastern religions? Isn't it that diet where you only eat brown rice? To alleviate the confusion, here's a concise overview of what macrobiotics is and isn't.

Modern macrobiotics dates from the late 19th century, when a Western-trained Japanese Army doctor named Sagen Ishizuka became frustrated by allopathic medicine's ineffectiveness treating his own chronic illness. He researched traditional Oriental medicine, and developed a therapy he called shoku-yo (“food-cure”). This treatment proved so successful that Ishizuka left the army and set up a private clinic.

When Ishizuka died in 1910, the shoku-yo torch passed to a young man named Yukikazu Sakurazawa, who had been cured of terminal tuberculosis. Sakurazawa, who later Westernized his name to George Ohsawa, integrated Ishizuka's shoku-yo theories with elements of Eastern and Western philosophy and called the resulting amalgam macrobiotics – which is Greek for “large or great life”.

Although shoku-yo/macrobiotics incorporates certain cosmological concepts common to several Eastern religions, it is not and never was religious in nature. Ohsawa's incorporation of Zen in the title of his first English-language book in 1960 caused no end of misunderstanding, but the prosaic truth is that he was attempting to coat-tail popular interest in Zen Buddhism on U.S. college campuses at the time. Serious Buddhists were not amused.

Ohsawa defined macrobiotics as a dietetic medicine-philosophy, which is as good a description as I've run across. His protégé, Michio Kushi, simply calls macrobiotic diets “a sensible way of eating”.

There are several prominent macrobiotic teachers and leaders, but no formal, official, organization or hierarchy. Macrobiotics encompasses a broad spectrum of theoretical and practical interpretations. There is no macrobiotic diet per se. Ohsawa proposed ten different diets (idiosyncratically numbered -3 to 7), ranging from one including 30 percent animal-derived foods, to the legendary 100 percent whole grain Diet #7. The latter was intended only as a short-term healing diet for serious illnesses – preferably administered under supervision.

In North America the two main schools of macrobiotics are based in Massachusetts and California respectively. The west coasters tend to be laid-back and intuitive in their approach, while the larger, eastern faction, led by Mr. Kushi, is more systematic and formulaic, although these are broad generalizations. The late George Ohsawa would no doubt be pleased, since his vision of macrobiotics was as a philosophic approach to eating, healing, and living, rather than a rigid orthodoxy.

The macrobiotic view is that eating proper varieties and proportions of foods helps us achieve balance and harmony. Therefore, appropriate food choices depend on variables like an individual's health, age, sex, geographic location, physical activity, ancestry, the season, etc. Theoretically, there are as many definitions of a macrobiotic diet as there are people practicing it.

Diets of traditional peoples were essentially macrobiotic, typically based on locally-grown, seasonably available, organically cultivated foods. Arctic-dwelling Inuit subsisting mainly on meat and fish are completely macrobiotic relative to their extreme climatic environment. So are South Pacific islanders living on fruit, roots, and vegetables.

For persons living in a four-season climate, diets based on cereal grains with minority proportions of vegetables, legumes, and seaweeds are ideal. Macrobiotic dietetics is predominantly, but not absolutely, vegetarian. As Ohsawa put it: “Do not make the mistake of considering macrobiotics to be merely another variety of puritanism or dogma; it is neither pro-vegetarian or anti carnivorism. We do not deny one kind of food or praise another .”

Macrobiotic theory makes general dietary recommendations, particularly that 40 to 60 percent of caloric intake should come from whole grains, including rice, millet, barley, wheat, oats, rye, corn and buckwheat. A comprehensive outline of macrobiotic dietary suggestions is beyond the scope of this article. Michio and Aveline Kushi's Standard Macrobiotic Diet represents a good point of departure for macrobiotic eating (see accompanying reading list).

Besides basic foods, macrobiotics makes several other diet recommendations:

— No processed, sugared, dyed, canned, bottled, or otherwise adulterated food.

— No foods produced using pesticides, chemical fertilizers or preservatives.

— No imported foods from a long distance – especially North-South.

— No vegetables or fruits out of season.

— No extreme yin vegetables, such as potatoes, tomatoes or eggplant.