Talk:Macrobiotic diet

Fad diet

A fad diet is one that has a relatively brief moment of popularity. If the Wikipedia article is going to say that something is a fad diet, we need decent sources for it. Here are a few:

• doi:10.3390/ijerph20156461 PMID 37569002: "Despite its well-intended claim to be the diet for planetary health, this was considered faddish. With its roots in traditional Asian medicine (a diet said to balance yin/yang), western scientists referred to the diet as 'quasi-religious'."
• ISBN 9780199734962, |chapter=Diet, fad : "A “fad diet” is a scheme of eating that enjoys temporary and sometimes enthusiastic popularity. Usually created by one person or the product of a religious movement...George Ohsawa, a Japanese philosopher, developed Zen macrobiotics. It is a belief based on the laws of yin and yang described in the ancient Buddhist philosophy. An extremely restrictive diet regimen, this diet consists of whole cereal grains; locally and organically grown vegetables; small amounts of soups; beans; sea vegetables; and meat, fish, and fruit in limited amounts. Popular from the 1960s into the 1980s, this dietary concept has been criticized as having been developed without the benefit of scientific evidence, but its principles have made their way into mainstream healthy-diet literature and practice."
• ISBN 9780199734962, |chapter=Health Food : "The history of health foods in the United States is often intertwined with food faddism, defined as a prescription of foods with exaggerated and scientifically unproven health claims....From the 1960s onward macrobiotic diets became especially popular"
  • Note that Food faddism (which is about science) is not the same thing as a Fad diet (which is about popularity). Macrobiotic dieting is probably both of these things.
• ISBN 9780199734962. |chapter=Juice Bars : "The macrobiotic vegetarianism fad in the mid-1960s stirred up the juice-bar business with the creation of smoothies, originally a mixture of fruit, fruit juice, and ice sold in the back of health-food restaurants and stores."
• ISBN 9780199734962, |chapter=Vegetarianism : "From the late 1960s to the present, the influence of Asian religions has played a key role in orienting many Americans toward a vegetarian lifestyle. One of the earliest manifestations of this trend was macrobiotics, a quasi-religious food-reform movement with dietary principles based on a yin-yang dichotomy derived from Taoism."
• doi:10.36019/9780813591513-012: "food cultists, from old-line vegetarians to youthful Orient-oriented ‘macrobiotic’ dieters..."
• doi:10.1515/9781438436272-006 takes a more nuanced view: It "Macrobiotics initially came into vogue in the United States in the mid 1960s" but has "enduring appeal". (I think this could be a valuable book chapter for many parts of this article; this is the one source I most recommend.)
• This book: "Not so harmless was the “macrobiotic” diet that became a cult in 1960s North America. Adherents followed a regime of ten steps that increasingly restricted their diet until the final stage, when only brown rice, salt, and herbal teas were allowed. Few reached this ultimate stage, but some of those who did died of malnutrition. As with many food fads..."

Looking in a few dictionaries, I didn't see any that defined it as a fad diet. The closest I saw was in Green's Dictionary of Slang, which said that "rice and beaner" was derived from the macrobiotic diet and meant a person who was concerned with the issues of the 1960s.

doi:10.9783/9781512820010-003 also looks useful for developing the article, but doesn't address the fad/non-fad question directly. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:33, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

Albeit it late to this discussion, on a topic where certain editors are obviously grinding their own POV biases and using dishonest arguments to support them, before one decides whether macrobiotics is a "fad diet", one would have to define what compromises a fad diet in the first place.

Fad by definition is a short lived popularity. Depending on which definition of fad one uses, macrobiotics would also fail on never have been being an "intense and widely shared enthusiasm". Macrobiotics was always very much a minority interest, and only practised by few.

The mere matter of fact that it's endured for 100 years or more, and reflects roots in eating patterns 100s of year old, would exclude it from being a "fad", or outliving such a pattern. Labelling it as such is simply cultural prejudice.

One may or may not accept the given rational but it's just one of many dietary patterns by now.

I have concerns about the lede because, historically, macrobiotics was not actually influence by Zen Buddhism at all. At one point, one of the promoters labelled it "Zen Macrobiotics" merely for the sake marketing, but not even all of promoters. Yin-Yang, 5 element theory etc owes far more to Taoism than it does to Buddhism, and no school of Buddhism has ever followed or promoted such a diet. Least of all Zen Buddhism.

There is a lot of misinformation in the topic and poorer quality references given. Not a similar account name (talk) 07:00, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

before one decides whether macrobiotics is a "fad diet", one would have to define Wrong. That is not how Wikipedia works. If a reliable source says "fad diet", Wikipedia can repeat that. See WP:RS and WP:OR. --Hob Gadling (talk) 07:47, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

Well, the newcomer isn't entirely wrong. We're supposed to WP:Use our own words, and doing that effectively means that we have to know what the words mean, and whether a source is using them precisely and accurately. For example, some Crash diets are called fads even when they've never been popular, and it would be better in such instances to prefer the sources that accurately and precisely describe them as crash diets over the sources that sloppily call them fads.

One subtlety that I think is being missed here is that a dietary pattern (or an individual food) can be both a fad at one point and also a non-fad at another point. The sources I've found indicate that a macrobiotic diet was a fad diet for about 20 years in the previous century. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:33, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

A good new source that has a chapter on the macrobiotic diet is Travis A. Weisse Health Freaks: America's Diet Champions and the Specter of Chronic Illness. pp. 52-92. There is also Barrett's The Health Robbers pp. 225-233 and this paper on questionable cancer treatments [1]. It's probably worth updating the article. I have ordered the Weisse book so I will see what it says. Psychologist Guy (talk) 19:47, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

There is extensive coverage of macrobiotics in Unconventional Cancer Treatments (from page 58). I am surprised this source wasn't already on our article. Psychologist Guy (talk) 19:54, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

It should be. I think there are a couple of different "camps" for this diet (spiritual vs cancer vs it's just what everyone was doing in 1975), and perhaps if you are interested because of one of them, and especially if you're surrounded by people like you, it might be hard to see see that the other ones exist. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:17, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you WhatamIdoing.

I see there is a Wikipedia tag , so I am asking that question, e.g. one reference is a book about "unconventional diets".

Unconventional by whom? If you spoke to Oriental Asians they'd just see it as a normal, traditional (pre-Western influence) approach to health & diet, e.g. if you get sick in China, you eat congee rice (rice porridge). They don't actually call it a "Macrobiotic Diet 1", because that's a modern, Japanese re-interpretation, but it is a "Macrobiotic Diet 1" (well cooked grains only).

An equivalent uninformed contributors might understand (I am not addressing that at you) would be to write an entire article framing 'chicken soup' for Yiddish communities, as a "fad diet". It's not a fad diet either, it's just cultural. It's probably not scientific either (although it has its roots in folk remedies), but it's what your grandmother cooks for you when you get sick.

It's only a fad or unconventional to people for whom "convention" is to eat steak, meat and potatoes, e.g. the Middle American authors being quoted.

Note the lack of Japanese or Asian references.

There was a prejudicial bias in the article towards a typical "Middle American values", especially the ridiculous ones dating back to the early 1970s when White America was in the middle of some kind of culture war (that the references given here even refer to, i.e. a reaction to the hippie counterculture which first supported or explored the lifestyle), based largely on a gross or wilful misunderstanding of what macrobiotics means (e.g. read one of them dated 1974 rail on against people arguing in favour of unrefined foods, and the threat it is to the government etc).

Was macrobiotics adopted "faddishly" or "cultishly" in the West during the hippie era, i.e, late 60s/early 70s?

Yes, I would probably agree with that & agree that could be incorporated into the article, but macrobiotics is,

a) just a traditional Oriental diet/lifestyle/approach to healthcare, &

b) gone mainstream by now (60 years later).

As an aside, if this article is to become truly encyclopedic, I'd just like to point out that there is more than one school of macrobiotics and part of the problem here is that most of the more conservative, reactionary citations, are responding to the Kushi school of macrobiotics, NOT macrobiotics as a whole. Kushi, it has to be said, was both envangelistic (hence, cultic impression), but also slightly unhinged.

His was not the original of the Shokuyo-Kai/Shokuyo Shinseikai which, amazingly, do not even feature in the article. Not a similar account name (talk) 07:09, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Being "a fad" and being "unconventional" are separate categories, although they may overlap.

Can you read Japanese? If so, there are sources listed at w:ja:マクロビオティック that would likely be considered reliable here. The English Wikipedia permits non-English sources. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:59, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

I am not seeing any evidence from reliable sources this diet is a "traditional Oriental diet/lifestyle/approach to healthcare". The traditional oriental diet had no metaphysical baggage about what is energetically balanced. The macrobiotic diet cannot be traced before George Ohsawa in the 1930s. Ohsawa did cite Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland as an influence but Hufeland did not promote a macrobiotic diet. Traditional oriental diet includes plenty of animal-based foods going back 1000s of years. The macrobiotic a 1930s invention bans eggs, dairy, seafood (apart from limited fish), red meat, poultry and certain fruits and/or nightshade vegetables. How is that traditional oriental cuisine? Traditional oriental cuisine has banned all these foods historically? Obviously not, no historian would claim that. Like I said Asia has always been a massive consumer of animal-based foods. The macrobiotic diet is a restricted pescetarian diet, I see no historical sources for this kind of eating in Asia. I wrote the entire "early history" section on the pescetarianism article so I am familiar with similar diets. I see nothing traditional about the Macrobiotic diet, it was Ohsawa's invention. It doesn't have a long history. TLTR please show us one source that claims macrobiotics is traditional Oriental cuisine. Psychologist Guy (talk) 19:20, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

I see that Not a similar account name has been blocked for a few months from editing this article and talk-page so I do not expect to see any reply anytime soon. Psychologist Guy (talk) 19:23, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

According to the Japanese Wikipedia's article, in the 1930s, a small amount of chicken was also accepted by the original promoter.

I suspect that the idea (some foods are "yin" and others are "yang") is traditional. It's not very different from Americans saying that milk produces phlegm, or 18th-century physicians prescribing a Low diet for a sick person. The particular classification of individual foods, however, is his own idiosyncratic invention. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:58, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Link for 'Unconventional Eating Practices and Their Health Implications'

Does anyone have a link for the complete paper, 'Unconventional Eating Practices and Their Health Implications' by Rhona M. Hanning B.A.Sc. & Stanley H. Zlotkin M.D., Ph.D.? What's obviously available on the internet doesn't support what was written on the topic, so I NPOV-ed it until we can see and assess the whole.

Not a similar account name (talk) 06:24, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

Please don't damage articles because of your inability to access a source. Try a library. Bon courage (talk) 06:29, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

Actually I repaired the article, removing biased POV placed in it by other contributors who never read the given source in a library but rather just extrapolated from a given summary.

Thanks. Not a similar account name (talk) 06:33, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

There's a list of sources above that all call this diet a fad diet. Please stop edit-warring, the current wording reflects a long-standing consensus and your changes have been challenged. Red Rock Canyon (talk) 07:41, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

The references DON'T actually say what is being claimed.

If you disagree, post the quotations from them that does.

Thanks. Not a similar account name (talk) 06:16, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Uh, this diet is included in an encyclopedia of fad diets, and looking at the abstract of Hanning et el, it says

The authors discuss a number of unconventional or faddist foods and eating practices and their health implications. Among the topics included are vegetarianism, Zen macrobiotic diets

which is enough in itself (unless the body of the article contradicts that, which is exceedingly unlikely). Incidentally note this article is also in Wikipedia's "Fad diets" category. (Update: Having finally got the source, it seems it is indeed more complicated than the abstract says, arguing that because the diet's popularity has persisted it is no longer a 'fad'. Happy to update the article accordingly). Bon courage (talk) 07:44, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

This does not appear to be available in Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library. You can ask for help at Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange/Resource Request. Otherwise, I'd suggest checking http://worldcat.org/ to find the library closest to you that has that journal. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:36, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

Disruptive short description edits

• Xaltrebor01 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)

Xaltrebor01 is repeatedly changing the short description to "Enlightened Healing diet based on ancient Orientall Medicine" [2]. This isn't supported by any WP:RS in the article. No academics, dietitians or food historians have described this diet as an "enlightened healing diet" so this claim is WP:OR and violates WP:Fringe. Psychologist Guy (talk) 23:30, 27 October 2024 (UTC)

User is now trolling and vandalizing the article with "Harvard Medical School empirically, substantiated Alternative Holistic diet [3] , an admin needs to block this user. Psychologist Guy (talk) 00:17, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

I have put the article under extended confirmed protection for a month due to a complaint at WP:AN3. This should put a stop to what you see as the inappropriate changes to the short description. EdJohnston (talk) 03:42, 29 October 2024 (UTC)