• Dairy products
• Tropical or semitropical fruits, juices, soda
• Coffee, commercial tea, and“ aromatic stimulant teas,” such as mint or chamomile
• Tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, peppers; sometimes green beans, zucchini, spinach
• Sugar, honey, corn syrup, saccharin
• All artificially colored, preserved, sprayed, or chemically treated foods
• Canned or frozen foods, refined( white) grains and flours
• Hot and aromatic spices, white vinegar, and commercial salt IT IGNORES: No major foodstuffs. THE MACROBIOTIC TABLES OF OPPOSITES EXPANSIVE, COOLING CONTRACTIVE, WARMING
Salad Fruit Apple juice
Grains Beans Baked, deep-fried foods Lightly steamed foods Oil Salty condiments( miso, tamari, gomasio, tekka) Seaweeds Raw, steamed fish
Broiled, baked fish
Tempeh
Tofu ALKALIZING Vegetables Sea vegetables Salt, condiments
ACID-FORMING Grains, flour Beans Oil
NUTRIENT PROPORTIONS In this diet, the relative proportions of nutrients can, with some care, be close to the ideal. A major imbalance can occur if there is an excess of carbohydrate foods, namely, a high consumption of sweets— even“ natural” sweets, such as whole wheat baked goods with honey, maple syrup, or barley malt— in addition to the grains and beans. This in turn would set up a relative protein and mineral deficiency, and then cause related health problems.
BALANCE This is fairly easy to achieve on a macrobiotic diet, insofar as the foods consumed are whole foods, and neither overly expansive nor overly contractive food is consumed: Caution must be exercised to avoid an excess of salt, miso, shoyu, tamari, spices, and even of eating too much grain and not enough fish, beans, and vegetables, as this would bring on a condition of over-acidity, perhaps a minor protein deficiency. EFFECTS Of all the dietary schools of thought that I’ ve encountered, I find that macrobiotics offers the only truly holistic theoretical approach. In theory, the diet is tailored to the complete set of an individual’ s circumstances— environment, heredity, present condition, native constitution, and also goals and work activity. Therefore, an Eskimo eating whale meat and a Jamaican eating fried plantains are both“ macrobiotic.” This need to adapt diet to individual circumstance is one of the core concepts of this book. In the temperate zone, a broadly applied macrobiotic diet includes whole grains, beans, vegetables of all kinds( except nightshades, see