Review of The Macrobiotic Path to Total Health: A Complete Guide to Naturally Preventing and Relieving More Than 200 Chronic Conditions and Disorders (Paperback)

To those who understand its significance, this is a profound and revelatory book.

Like all living things, food has energy in it. Macrobiotics is eating according to the energy in food, which allows us unprecedented control over our health.

The "vague" quality the previous reviewer objects to is inherent in Chinese medicine and is in fact one of its greatest strengths, permitting a view of health and disease based on concepts rather than data. (And in fact, the book isn't vague at all--this is just a reflection of her unfamiliarity with the ideas.)

Nor do the authors "mention all types of alternative therapies." For each category of illness, they outline the conventional medical treatment, provide references to medical studies (for those who feel the need for this sort of thing), and then discuss the macrobiotic approach.

The same goes for the comment that "a more specific macrobiotic way of eating would have been nice." This is a highly specific book on how to use macrobiotics to treat over 200 health problems without recourse to the toxic, invasive, and expensive techniques of conventional medicine. Nevertheless, the authors devote over 100 pages to macrobiotic philosophy and practice and another 20 or so to recipes. Anyone who feels the need for more information should investigate the numerous books on the subject by Michio Kushi and others.

As for repetitiveness, this is inevitable in a book intended even for those with no exposure to macrobiotics, because each condition requires modifications of the diet. Rather than giving the basic diet in one place and requiring readers to flip back and forth through the book and put it all together themselves, they've quite reasonably done so for us.

As far as wanting you to "buy more from their website," this 500-page book has a two-page resource list at the end, presumably for those without convenient access to natural-food stores. If that constitutes a shameless hard-sell, I'd like to see more of that attitude in the marketplace.

I've been macrobiotic for over 20 years and find this an extraordinary book, like all Michio Kushi's works. I buy copies and give them away to people I know who are sick, because my two decades of experience with this diet have convinced me that vegetarianism is essential to good health--and if you're going to be a vegetarian, I can't imagine doing it any other way.



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