Macrobiotics

The book I read to research this post was Macrobiotics for dummies by Verne Varona which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. Macrobiotics was originally linked to zen meditation but is now seen as a form of alternative therapy in its own right. The main principles are you try to have your food raw, you don't have animal protein, you avoid dairy products & you don't have processed food. A friend told me if you smoke & have dairy products it gets mucus in your arteries & when you smoke the poisons from that stick to the mucus making you more prone to things like cancer. Fruit is quite acidic so you avoid that, you try to have food which is as close as possible to a neutral ph. This is good because if your blood becomes too acidic or alkali it can make you ill. Your diet should be predominantly sea vegetables, vegetables & fermented food. Fermented food is things like sauerkraut & prebiotic yoghurt which supply your gut with friendly bacteria. These produce some of the vitamin B's among other things. It also helps with your immune defences. You do eat an unhealthy meal once a week to shock your body into taking healthy food once again. Sea vegetables are things like kelp & are often forms of seaweed. If your diet contains too much acid your urine will contain a lot of the distinctive smell of ammonia. Where macrobiotics was linked to zen meditation is that they both teach mindfulness when eating. You should chew slowly & focus on the taste of the food. Practitioners of zen meditation follow the same guidelines as taught in macrobiotics. Finally pickled food is often consumed by people following macrobiotics but brine is used instead of vinegar because it has a more neutral ph.