Many years ago I used to deal a lot with the macrobiotic diet, once introduced by Georges Ohsawa from Japan, who died of a heart attack. The big question is whether it is beneficial for our health. Nowadays a lot of these points turned out to be not so healthy in my opinion. The main points that are at least food for discussion:
- Drink less and drink only when you are thirsty <— recent studies show that a lot of people don’t drink enough, elderly in particular, and drinking more (good) water is beneficial in general.
- Eat mostly grains <— it turns out that these grains, and particularly wheat, have foodstuffs in them as a defense by nature, to slow down digestion and lots of people have difficulties digesting the gluten in the grains.
- Use a lot of sea salt <— sea salt contains much more minerals than “kitchen salt”, but at the same time it is important to keep the work of the kidneys within moderate levels, without too much sea salt.
- Every kind of food can be put on a scale of yin and yang and used accordingly <— well, the world appears to be much more complicated than yin and yang. You can’t say this condition or that food is more yin or yang, because they are very complicated combinations and this simplistic yin-yang taxonomy just isn’t enough to be useful.
So after all, we learned a lot about healthy diets and personally dismissed this macrobiotic diet. Judge for yourself though. Nevertheless it’s quite possible that people increased their health with macrobiotics, because if you are living the average way of life with heaps of refined sugar, unhealthy fats, coke, beer, additives, meat, non-organic food, etc., any change in diet will be an improvement.
What are your experiences with macrobiotics? Your comments are much appreciated.
