13
More “Choosing under the Influence”
Concepts, Advice, and Dietary Trends
Today, more than ever before in history, people eat with their brains—especially that part of the brain that remembers and follows what one has been told to do or not do.
Food pyramids . . . macrobiotics . . . acid/alkaline . . . raw foods . . . low carb . . . vegan . . . vegetarian . . . paleo . . . instincto . . . fruitarian . . . Bible diet . . .
All of these are more or less elaborate concept structures that we ultimately end up reducing to the granddaddy of choice concepts: good and bad.
While there is always at least a germ of truth to a concept system, and often a large amount of value, the bottom line is that despite the best intentions, choosing foods according to conceptual systems often does not consider your individual needs as a whole person. Leaving little room to exercise common sense and intuition with foods not suggested in their guidelines can make such programs extremely difficult to maintain with any consistency, and in many cases downright dangerous.
Standard dietary guidelines, such as the government’s RDA and mainstream nutrition’s pyramid of “basic food groups,” are created by people who appear to have little concern for the quality of food but plenty of concern for quantity. All their suggestions are based on their supporters: the dairy industry, meat industry, agribusiness, and chemical companies. Having these people around your food is hazardous to your health. The proof of the pudding is in the eating: with all the advances made in nutritional and medical research, the mainstream approach to food and health has left a legacy of increased incidence of cancer, increased medical care, obesity, and rampant malnourishment.
For the past 150 years, this approach to food has culminated in the foundation of the biggest fad diet of them all, the standard American diet. And you know this one doesn’t work! Not only does it not work—it is getting progressively worse, with newly improved (and approved) artificial foods, such as synthetic fats, synthetic sweeteners, synthetic fibers, soy products made from the residue and waste of manufacturing, etc. These blatant examples of food madness have created so much confusion, it is no wonder we have so many reaction diets.
Much of the reasoning behind the natural foods and progressive nutrition approaches, while embracing an awareness of the complexity of nature and of the importance of better quality foods, is also severely limited by its fascination and indoctrination with quantitative nutritional analysis.
A Brief History of Dissection
The history of modern nutritional analysis is a relatively brief one—and it is the story of a field of study with two distinct threads or influences. On the one hand, it has been characterized by a genuine scientific investigation into nutritional components, their behavior and function, and relative value in human health. On the other, it has also been driven by the agendas of large corporations who through the power of funding have bought their own scientists to back their claims for their latest artificialized food fads. This schizophrenic nature has made modern nutrition almost a scientific Jekyll and Hyde, “pure” science contrasting and conflicting with “commercial” science. In the battle between the two natures, truth has too often been a casualty.
Food has been viewed from a strictly left-brain point of view only since the 1800s. From the 1800s through the 1950s modern science began to explore and exploit the basic components of food, including such breakthrough discoveries as these:
From the 1950s to the present, progress continued in the following areas of food science:
During this period of nutritional “progress,” malnutrition and obesity have increased, along with the incidence of degenerative diseases, in part due to this new way of understanding and presenting food.
Nutritional science continues to progress today, with new discoveries that go beyond the world of vitamins and macronutrition in the exploration of the great diversity of micronutrients, such as the study of phytonutrients and antioxidants.
Phytonutrients, also known as phytochemicals, are components that give plants their particular smell, taste, color, and immune properties. Many are used by the body to assist in making hormones and neurotransmitters. Some common phytonutrients include phenols, polyphenols, tocopherols, tocotrienols, and flavonoids.
Antioxidants are free-radical scavengers that help protect the body from cellular damage and contribute to the prevention of disease. Some antioxidants include vitamins E and C and the carotenoids betacarotene, leutin, and lycopene. There are more than six hundred antioxidants naturally produced by plants, but most in current usage are synthetically produced for inclusion in the formulation of multivitamin and antioxidant supplements.
There is no doubt that these and other nutritional discoveries have been extremely important in educating ourselves about the composition of food. But the one-sided perspective of nutritional research has culminated in a direction that is cause for concern: the foolish attempt to improve on nature.
Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have been shown to destroy biodiversity and create sterile land by eliminating vital microorganisms and soil nutrients. This leads to the destruction of natural genetic information vital to a food’s integrity. And this doesn’t stop with the contamination of maize and indigenous cereal crops. We now have herbicide-resistant soybeans, corn, and a host of other highly questionable pseudofoods, such as fruits and vegetables laced with animal DNA. . . . The list goes on.
This is an absolutely insane direction. It is essential that we rediscover the energetic approach to food so that we grasp what it is we are doing to our food supply.
The Misleading Power of Analysis
Modern nutrition determines the healthiness of a food by isolating its vitamins, proteins, minerals, fats, and other constituents. Choosing your foods based on the results of nutritional analysis, while it may help you become more aware of your health needs, does not help you to know food intimately. It is not the betacarotene found in squash or carrots that makes these vegetables important food choices. Vitamin C is not a valid reason to eat citrus fruits, nor should lycopene be the reason for eating tomatoes.
Can you imagine eating a food solely because it contains some single element that’s “good for you”? Well, many people do. People eat skinless chicken breast because it is lower in fat than beef, oranges because they contain vitamin C, salad because it has vitamins or enzymes, and—most absurd of all—bran because it is a source of fiber!
Eat bran? What about the rest of the grain? First we are encouraged by experts to eat grain that has had the fiber removed and discarded, then the same nutritional science suggests we eat the discarded bran separately, and after years of consuming refined and processed grain we end up back where we started, with the current suggestion to consume grains in their whole form. And then, to top it all off, a new nutritional fad sweeps the nation that discourages using carbohydrates, especially grains, altogether. All because of a few generations that consumed refined grain products—products that became what they are through advances in nutritional science.
For thousands of years, grains were consumed in their whole form or ground into meal. Why take a food that has a nutritional track record of sustaining traditional peoples for thousands of years, and through scientific “advancement” make inferior products that end up wreaking havoc on people’s health and the environment?
A good question—and one we all need be attentive to, since this has for the most part been the legacy of nutritional analysis. Add this ingredient, take away that ingredient, lace it with preservatives . . . basically, screw with it until it has completely lost its original identity.
How about milk, because it has calcium? Is that really a good enough reason to drink milk? The positive of calcium hardly outweighs the negatives of pasteurization, homogenization, or lactose intolerance.
Nutritional concepts focus on the ingredients of a food to the point where the food itself is less important than the one or two essential ingredients it has in it. Drinking milk for the calcium and orange juice for the vitamin C is missing the whole point of what a food is really about. This way of looking at foods does little to help us understand how to nourish ourselves. The concept is backward and limited to a kind of linear thinking that completely disregards essential qualitative factors.
To know food, you must perceive the food as a whole, before even considering its parts.
Choosing Professional Advice
More and more people today are opting to choose their food through the advice or recommendations of a dietary or health counselor. Western culture teaches us to depend on professional advice when coping with problems of any kind—physical, psychological, or spiritual. We have asked for and been given guidelines for living based on tradition, morals, economy, spirituality, and numerous other value concepts that are supposed to improve our lives and make the world a better place.
Some of our cultural maps for living are practical; others are outlandish, especially those that have to do with how we should eat and maintain our health. Our past dietary guidelines have been so ridiculous and unworkable that we have produced a desperate need for professionals and experts in the field of nutritional and health counseling—“qualified” people with enough experience to guide and reeducate the confused masses on how to eat.
Some health counselors have degrees and are medically or nutritionally qualified to do what they do. Other counselors have no degrees, but are qualified through years of experience and their knowledge of food. Some counselors are very strict with their advice while others can be very loose; some offer simple and practical advice, others complex and thought-provoking advice, and others outrageous and completely off-the wall advice.
A counselor who has studied conventional nutrition at a university may have received a document certifying one’s diligent work in memorizing the many intricate details of vitamins, amino acids, and other food constituents. However, this information and experience, while it may warrant degrees or signify a status of Certified Nutritionist, has little to do with the qualities of food—only the quantities. Furthermore, this person’s advice may not contribute to creative experimentation and responsibility on the part of the client.
On the other hand, the counselor who holds no degrees and is not recognized by an institution or medical doctor could have a wealth of experience in the energetic nature of foods from having lived with an indigenous tribe in the Amazon rain forest, yet little experience when it comes to technical nutrition.
Both forms of advice can be and often are helpful, but it is the client’s responsibility not to become dependent on the counselor and his or her suggestions.
When you go to a counselor, all you are doing is choosing his or her advice. After you go home, you still need to choose your food!
Fear and Health
Perhaps the most common reason people seek the experience of dietary counselors is the hope that the advice will heal a health problem. Dietary counselors often work from the belief that health problems, from mildly irritating symptoms to severe degenerative diseases, are caused partially (or even largely) by certain foods or food groups, and that dietary change can help the body heal itself.
No doubt about it—a healthy diet can help adjust the human body into a healing mode by enhancing immune functions. And certain foods can resonate with or energetically affect a particular organ in the body. But it is a specious oversimplification to assume that it is solely the food that is actually doing the healing. And “resonating with or energetically affecting” does not necessarily mean healing.
At this extreme, the theory of healing an illness with certain foods is not unlike the “magic bullet” theory of modern medicine. If I had a quarter for every time a client has asked me what specific food “is good for” a particular symptom, I could buy Manhattan and move it to Maine for a vacation home.
Drugs themselves, as I hinted at in part 1, are hyperspecialized, synthetic descendants of herbal remedies, which are themselves extensions of the healing lore of ancient food energetics. And just as drugs have their desired effects (eradicating or changing symptoms) and their undesired side effects, the same can be true for some specific “healing foods” and their effects, when consumed in excess.
A dietary counselor might say, “Brown rice heals the intestines; you should eat brown rice every day to heal your constipation, diarrhea, or enteritis.” Theoretically, according to traditional Chinese medicine, rice resonates with or affects the large intestine. And besides, it’s got bran.
But what if your intestines refuse to be nourished by brown rice because of your past eating habits? If your system is accustomed to large amounts of trans fats and processed animal foods, and has gotten its carbohydrate mostly from Twinkies and Wonder Bread, the resonating that brown rice does may turn out to mean that your large intestine is precisely where it creates lots of gas. For that matter, what if you just cannot stomach brown rice? So much for theories and concepts.
The healing power of any food is enhanced when it is placed in a context where it can work synergistically with other supporting foods. All foods are dependent on other foods for nutritional support; therefore, healing begins with balanced overall nutrition, not with one food for a specific problem.
Another common misconception among health practitioners is the promotion of a particular food or herb based on the idea that it “stimulates the immune system.” Stimulating the immune system is very different from supporting the immune system or enhancing immune function. Almost every toxic substance stimulates the immune system—but none support it. There are many scientific studies that have shown certain foods or supplements stimulate the immune system—but that doesn’t mean that particular product is “good for you” or that it supports your immune system.
To be healed, you must first have the desire and will to heal yourself. To create a foundation for healing to take place, you also need to nourish yourself with foods that work for you through your own capacity of absorption and assimilation.
And what is “healing,” anyway? It is not something separate or distinct from normal living. Everything in this world is in a constant state of change. In terms of health, this means that you are always moving forward or backward in some way—and often doing both at the same time on different levels. If you are living your life proactively, choosing and eating your foods with purpose, adventure, and constant new discovery, you are living.
Doing something that is truly “healing” simply means that you’re moving forward. That’s what choosing your food wisely is all about.
A physically, mentally, and spiritually nourished individual is healing!
Choosing Dietary Trends
Dietary trends have been around for years. Each new nutritional discovery becomes the catalyst for a new trend: iron, calcium, bran, phytonutrients, antioxidants, enzymes, vitamin C . . . each term represents a mini era in food fad lore.
The Standard American Diet (S.A.D.) and modern “health care” system are the principal reasons for these modern dietary trends. With their extreme imbalances and high-tech, low-touch qualities, modern conventional diets and medicine have served as the impetus for the many, sometimes rational, sometimes irrational, usually reactive, spin-off dietary trends of today.
And certainly, there is much cause for reaction.
Today’s “health care” system, which isn’t a system of caring for health so much as it is a system for dispensing pharmaceuticals, is cracking under the pressure arising from the rampant overuse of surgery and drugs, not to mention the creation of designer diseases formulated through the practice of chemical warfare, along with artificial foods, genetic manipulation, and irradiated foods. The rampant and deepening disorientation festering in many of society’s leading scientists, politicians, and members of our health care system can only further intensify the natural reaction of a “call to arms”—or more accurately, a call to farms—by responsible individuals who wish to reclaim their freedom from this social madness.
If enough people had the desire to eat in a more natural, qualitative, and balanced way—and put the effort into doing so—it would have a powerful impact on society. In fact, it could literally redirect the course of destiny for the planet. Now that is revolutionary.
But are these nutrition-inspired dietary trends an avenue for effecting such a change? How effective are dietary trends at influencing positive change?
Unfortunately many of them, while they may represent an improvement over the S.A.D., suffer from much of the same quantitative shortsightedness as their mainstream nemesis. These “alternative” diets often rationalize their position with promises of guaranteed weight loss, cures or recovery from minor and major health problems, antiaging, or increased spiritual awareness.
How valid are these claims? Are their rationalizations for following a particular diet sensible or even realistic?
Let’s observe some of the pros and cons of a few of the more popular and most commonly followed dietary trends.
The Vegetarian Idea
The vegetarian approach has been around for a long time; vegetarian organizations and publications produce impressive lists of famous vegetarian people through history. However, it is within the past several decades that vegetarianism has gained a widespread following. Historically, this newfound popularity of avoiding meat follows the post–WWII era, with growing awareness of the conditions under which animals were being factory-farmed and subsequent reactions to excessive consumption of these animals among various subcultures.
Interestingly, energetics reveal that this is as much a physiological response as it is a historical and social one.
To say that vegetarianism, as a lifelong way of eating, is superior to a diet including animal flesh dangerously misses a critical point: people vary widely in their basic psychophysical constitutions. Most people simply are not well suited to a diet completely devoid of animal protein (or even one including dairy or eggs, which some forms of vegetarianism allow).
This is not to say that vegetarianism is without significant value. But a strong undercurrent of reaction does contribute to the driving momentum for vegetarianism.
Vegetarianism has emerged as a key lifestyle response to the prevailing global environmental crisis. However, as I pointed out in chapter 11, this is an overly broad generalization. There is nothing inherently “bad” about including a variety of animal foods in one’s diet—neither physiologically nor environmentally. The importance and “rightness” of vegetarianism is to some extent colored by our individual place on the pendulum of dietary change.
Vegetarian Diets
The lacto-vegetarian diet includes a variety of raw and cooked vegetables, grains, fruits, seeds, nuts, dairy products, soy products, and, in the case of lacto-ovo-vegetarianism, eggs. Though dairy products are of animal origin, they are often rationalized as being supportive supplemental nutrition (i.e., calcium and protein) in an otherwise plant-based diet—and besides, you don’t have to kill animals to get them.
A vegetarian diet can theoretically be nutritionally satisfying if practiced with a wide variety of whole foods. In practice, though, many vegetarians follow a diet based on industrially produced fast foods that actually contains far fewer vegetables than the vegetarian diets of the sixties and seventies. Unfortunately, this modern version is inferior to the earlier forms of the diet, where advocates regularly consumed more carefully thought out, balanced meals of whole foods.
The lactovegetarian diet has a long history in India, where many believe the diet supports nonviolence and spiritual development and is the ultimate diet for those seeking the path to enlightenment. Part of this philosophical leaning is due to the traditional sanctity of the cow in India (its flesh is forbidden food by some widespread religious sects).
This may be partly a spiritual issue, but anthropologist Marvin Harris points out, it is also a practical lifestyle choice. In densely populated India, the cow is far too important for its role in agriculture to allow it to be used as a food. India’s population relies on cattle for heavy labor in the fields. To consume them would put an impractical burden of labor onto its people, causing further stress on the already heavily stressed population.
Let’s consider some pros and cons of the vegetarian diet.
Positive Qualities
The diet introduces people to a variety of whole foods and seasonings (herbs and spices) and appetizing and inventive ways to prepare them. Recipes incorporating a wide variety of plant foods from around the world help expose people to new preparation methods and tastes.
Negative Qualities
Health problems that arise among vegetarians tend to focus around allergies, Candida (a systemic yeast infection), and lymphatic problems. These problems can be due to an excessive consumption of dairy products and carbohydrates; or they can arise from the modern version of vegetarianism, where the original food sources of protein and fat (dairy and eggs) have to some extent been replaced by large quantities of less healthy soy products, plant oils (soy, canola, and safflower), and margarine. Strong cravings for sweets often lead to excessive consumption of sweetened flour products (cookies, cakes, pastries), dairy and soy-based ice creams and sugar, acceptable foods in many vegetarian diets that also contribute to health problems for vegetarians.
The Vegan Diet
The vegan diet is essentially the same as the vegetarian diet, only without any dairy products and eggs; some vegans also consume only raw foods. Followers of the vegan diet are generally strong supporters of animal rights. They believe animals are sentient creatures and thus not meant to be eaten by humans, and that humans also should not take the milk of another animal, as that milk is designed for that animal’s offspring.
For many vegans, the ideology of veganism can take precedence over the quality of food they consume. This is evidenced in the large quantities of packaged foods and soy-based products, along with stimulants in the form of lattes, coffee, and chocolate, that often make up a large portion of vegan diets. Naturally there are exceptions, and some vegans do attempt to consume meals of more consciously prepared foods; but many lean toward the convenience of processed and packaged foods as their main sources of nutrition.
Positive Qualities
Introduces one to whole natural foods and how to prepare them.
Negative Qualities
Vegans, especially children, often suffer from nutritional deficiencies, including vitamin B12 deficiency, hormone problems (especially thyroid), tooth decay, hair loss, loss of bone density, chronic yeast infections, fatigue, loss of muscle tone, digestive distress, weight gain, emotional instability, and compulsive eating habits due to lack of nutritional satisfaction. A lack of traditional whole foods very often leads to dependency on stimulants (coffee, tea, etc.) and an excessive consumption of sugar and chocolate for energy support. Quality foods are often replaced by “natural” processed soy foods and other poor-quality protein substitutes.
Vegans can be extremely defensive, often to the point of being hostile toward those who question or expose the often faulty logic surrounding some of the sacred principles of the vegan diet and philosophy.
Raw Foods Diet (Plant-Based)
This particular vegetarian approach to food includes a diet composed solely of uncooked foods, particularly vegetables, fruits, seeds, nuts, and sprouts. Animal products of all types are avoided, as are cooked plant foods. Proponents of this diet use the following reasons, among others, to rationalize their belief in raw foods:
A raw foods diet can be an efficacious approach for cleansing the body of accumulated wastes resulting from the overconsumption of processed animal products and excess dairy products. However, there is no historical evidence that human beings ever existed or thrived on a raw foods diet, especially a plant-based raw food diet.
As with any conceptual system, there are holes in the concepts. For example, cooking does not “kill” foods—at least, no more than eating them does. And that statement is not flip: cooking actually is an extension of the eating and digesting process. While cooking may destroy some enzymes, enzymes are not the only substance in a food that is important for health maintenance. In fact, traditional cultures derived ample amounts of enzymes from both raw and fermented food used in combination with cooked foods.
Toxic components often found in some raw foods are neutralized through cooking. Cooking is also known to enhance bioavailability of some nutrients, especially phytonutrients. Cooking food can make many foods easier to digest by breaking down cellulose fibers and altering or changing the cellular and nutritional components of many plant foods, making them more suitable to the internal human environment. The manipulation of food molecules and nutrients through cooking (real cooking, that is, and not factory processing) is more of a process of transformation than one of destruction.
Raw foods certainly have a place in the human diet—but all food gets “cooked” one way or another. If it is not cooked externally through conventional cooking methods, it must be done internally through vigorous digestion.
Ingested food is digested and metabolized at relatively high temperatures in the heated environment of your digestive tract until it is ready to be used as nutrition. The ability to digest (cook internally) largely depends on the vitality of your digestive system and your degree of physical activity. The majority of animals that exist on a raw food diet have these abilities. They chew their plant food for long durations, eat continuously, and are active. They also have radically different digestive systems from ours (even apes and monkeys, considered by many raw food enthusiasts to be our ancestral links, and both of which regularly consume small animals and insects).
Cooking some percentage of your food simply reduces much of the work and effort required by the digestive system, and thus results in improved digestion and metabolism overall.
A raw-food vegan diet has a cooling effect on the body and can temporarily be balancing for overheated conditions or for those with an extensive history of heavy animal food consumption. However, in such cases, after one has cleansed much of the accumulated excess from one’s body, one may tend to become oversensitive to cold weather, often to the point of becoming very thin and less adaptable to environmental changes.
As far as the killing of animals and inhibition of spiritual development is concerned, it is instructive to remember that even within many spiritual traditions, animals have long been used for food. In cultures with an awareness of the quality of life—including both nomadic and settled, traditional peoples—taking the life of an animal was done with respect and gratitude for the animal and the environment.
On the other hand, the way potatoes and lettuce are mechanically slaughtered en masse for fast-food chains and the frozen-food section makes me shudder. Now that’s murder in the kitchen. The same goes for the way chickens, beef cattle, lambs, and other animals are “raised” and killed for modern mass-food appetites.
There are as many definitions and qualifications for spiritual lifestyles as there are people, and it is not unusual for followers of a particular dietary trend, especially those who advocate natural foods, to have their own spiritual belief system. Some Buddhist monks who live in the mountains, estranged from the busy life of urban dwellers, eat a vegetarian diet, and it works for them in their spiritual quest. Additionally, some Tibetan monks thrive in their spiritual development on a diet that includes animal products, both flesh and milk. On the other hand, a businessman living in the city with a desire to supply the masses with a needed product may choose to eat a nonvegetarian diet, yet he may experience spiritual fulfillment from his business venture by simply being of service to people.
Diet alone does not determine a person’s spirituality. Some people believe that living in isolation from others is more spiritual than living and working with others. While this may work for some, it does not work for others. Both need be ready spiritually to change their position on whatever they believe, for change is a spiritual and dietary certainty. It is not so much a matter of belief as it is a matter of choice, and one’s choice is always susceptible to change.
Another form of raw foodism is a diet comprising both raw plant foods along with high quantities of raw animal foods. Compared to the plant-based diet, however, this animal-based raw foods diet has received little attention and has fewer followers. This is partly due to the taboo placed on animal products because of their saturated fat content, an issue that finally has come full circle and turned out to be more hype than hope for the big refined vegetable oil companies. But the raw-foods animal-food diet is as unrealistic as its opposite, and far too expensive for most people to follow using quality foods.
Positive Qualities
In addition to introducing one to a wide variety of edible plant foods high in enzymes and vitamins and highly creative ways of preparing them, the raw foods diet encourages the very important practice of consuming lacto-fermented vegetables and it extols the health benefits of coconuts, including the beneficial health aspects of coconut oil, a highly saturated fat. The raw food diet generally discourages the use of processed soy foods, poor-quality oils, and other unhealthy foods so commonly prevalent in other plant-based diets.
Negative Tendencies
Raw fooders tend to suffer from many of the same nutritional deficiencies and health problems as vegans, although the causes are different.
Like vegans, they are under the delusion that children can thrive on such a diet. Another common trait among raw food groups is a lack of hygiene, and this can affect their attitudes toward food. Some believe food should be eaten raw directly from the soil, tree, or whatever source it comes from without washing it. Parasites are common among raw food advocates and many have to resort frequently to strong toxic pharmaceuticals in order to remedy the problem, only to find it returning for another round of toxic treatment.
Constipation due to reduced peristalsis or overworked intestines is common. Binge eating and eating disorders in general are also common within these groups. Most raw fooders consume high quantities of sugar in the form of fruits; other sources of sugar are also common, especially chocolate. Coffee is another indulgent substance.
Some extremist followers of these diets believe the ultimate form of raw foodism is to consume only fruit. Every food cult has extremists, but the raw food groups may have the most extreme of all of them. Like vegans, raw fooders can become highly defensive when their sacred beliefs are exposed or questioned by others with valid points of view.
The Macrobiotic Enigma
A macrobiotic way of eating differs from what is conventionally known as “the macrobiotic diet” or dietary regime. Choosing and eating foods macrobiotically means consciously choosing and managing one’s diet in a way so as to create balance within oneself and between oneself and one’s environment. Since a basic premise of macrobiotic eating is to nourish oneself properly and to adapt flexibly with one’s environment, the possibilities can be endless.
The “macrobiotic diet,” on the other hand, represents a set of specific dietary guidelines emphasizing a circumscribed variety of whole foods, some of them chosen according to season, and plant based, with the exception of fish and seafood, which can be eaten on occasion if one’s health permits.
Most people who decide to incorporate the “macrobiotic diet” into their lives do so because they perceive it to be a natural means of regaining their health. However, there are also people who perceive macrobiotics to be more than simply diet alone. These people see macrobiotics as a broad-based philosophy that they believe is a viable and commonsense way to live and further develop their spiritual awareness.
There is no doubt that a diet primarily consisting of whole cereal grains, vegetables, sea algae, beans, fruits, nuts and seeds, and fish and seafood, can be instrumental in establishing a sound foundation for health. However, like other dietary trends that promise spiritual enlightenment and freedom from disease, macrobiotics tends to attract its share of fanatics and blind believers who refuse to question pertinent issues. (This is ironic, as one of the basic tenets of macrobiotics as it is generally taught is having a spirit of “noncredo.”)
Though it is based on a practical approach to eating, macrobiotics is often criticized for its limitations. The macrobiotic diet is an experiential diet that, depending upon personal interpretation and one’s individual ability to assimilate the food, can provide a sound foundation from which the responsible person can begin to discover his or her individual dietary needs.
However, when taught or interpreted as a fixed set of guidelines, with its experts, authorities, its “rights and wrongs” and “good foods and bad foods,” the “macrobiotic diet” becomes just like any other conceptual choosing: choosing under the influence.
Moreover, because of the diet’s present association with health recovery and the fear-of-illness mindset that often accompanies its practice, followers are especially prone to abdicate their own proactive choosing and to follow the rules and dictates of others whom they perceive as knowing the truth.
Unraveling the Macrobiotic Dilemma
In the sixties, when macrobiotics was first gaining a following in the West, its adherents were associated with fanaticism and zeal. There still exists today a subcurrent of fanatic zeal, and a significant number of those seeking to recover health are encouraged to cling to eating guidelines that are impractical and overly strict. Perhaps this is due to the assumption common among many followers of macrobiotics that all illnesses tend to be caused by excess and that people who are ill therefore need to follow strict dietary guidelines in order to discharge excess accumulations or fat, protein, and other wastes in their bodies.
While many people who suffer from serious illness do indeed have conditions of excess, and a strict macrobiotic diet can temporarily be beneficial, there are equally as many people who suffer from conditions of deficiency, and unfortunately, if these people follow strict macrobiotic guidelines, this can result in their becoming more malnourished than hale and hearty.
This is not, strictly speaking, due to anything inherent in macrobiotic principles per se. True, a strict “macrobiotic diet” tends to create a dry and cold condition due to a lack of reasonable amounts of fat and protein. But the cause of people becoming unbalanced through the “macrobiotic diet” is the same as with any other dietary trend: people choosing their food from an extremely dictated, limited set of criteria.
Those who intuitively have a sense of the qualities of food might use macrobiotic principles and adapt them to their own needs and desires and can do very well, indeed.
While macrobiotics does claim to have its philosophical basis in global dietary traditions, it tends to lose this essence and sensibility when its proponents relegate many traditionally healthy foods to the “bad” food category.
The idea of “civilized” agricultural peoples who based their diets on a variety of whole foods (both plant and animal) in remote antiquity is a well-established fact. In fact, the practice of agriculture (and especially that of growing grain) is something that historians are consistently updating from the originally held theory of 10,000 years ago as an original timeline. What is important to understand, in the context of macrobiotics, is that animal products of varying types also played an equally important role in global food traditions as plant foods. Whether this is something macrobiotic adherents have missed out of simple ignorance or is something intentionally skipped over because it doesn’t fit their set of preexisting guidelines, it is a point of historical fact that strains the macrobiotic “traditional diet” claim.
Macrobiotic food is often described as bland and tasteless and rationalized as such by its proponents as a “sensitivity” issue—meaning that spices, herbs and other seasonings (except for a chosen few, such as scallions, ginger, raw radish, and a few others) are either overstimulating or simply unnecessary for good health. In other words when one has eaten “well” for some time, one’s taste will become more refined and purified to the point where one will no longer need or desire such interesting, flavorful, and satisfying food preparations.
In this regard, the vegetarian diet has more to offer in its embrace of genuinely global cuisine.
When macrobiotics goes global—that is, away from its typical Japan-centric focus—proponents tend to substitute tofu for dairy, carrots for tomatoes, and wheat gluten for meat. (In other words, when it goes global, it doesn’t really.) This does little to improve its reputation for bland and flavorless foods.
In fact, substitutions of traditional natural foods with less nutritious ingredients mimics the extremism of the agenda-driven science of the natural foods industry, where junk foods disguised and labeled as “natural” are created from soy products to produce soy hot dogs or soy cold cuts.
If it is true that, as macrobiotic followers commonly claim, “Man can eat anything,” then the only real problem with macrobiotics lies in the interpretation and often dogmatic beliefs of its adherents.
Positive Qualities
Macrobiotics has a strong focus on traditional methods of food preparation. One of the few natural diets that stresses chewing well, regular whole meals, and fermented foods.
Philosophically, macrobiotics has its own interpretation of the principles of traditional Chinese medicine, especially yin and yang and the five elements theory. These serve as helpful educational tools for followers and offer important ways of understanding food and its relationship to health. Macrobiotic proponents also discourage the use of pharmaceuticals and other drugs unless necessary.
Negative Tendencies
There is a tendency to have a limited understanding of the role of animal products in traditional diets that leads to classifications of foods in terms of good and bad. (For example, fish is good and most all other animal products are bad.)
Another area lacking in understanding among macrobiotic adherents is that of fats and oils. Healthy tropical oils are misunderstood as being bad and saturated fats are called “cancer-causing,” whereas poor-quality and nutritionally inferior vegetable oils (canola, soy, safflower, corn, etc.) are considered okay to use in moderation. All animal fats are considered bad.
This kind of weirdly limited understanding also holds true for many herbs, spices, and garlic (considered extreme yin and stimulating). This misunderstanding of herbs and seasonings in traditional diets fails to acknowledge the antiviral, antibacterial, and other beneficial qualities of these essential ingredients.
Macrobiotic practitioners have a tendency to binge eat, especially with sweets and overeating in general. Coffee and other stimulants are also common indulgences beyond moderation.