Macrobiotic Diet

Aajonus practiced the macrobiotic diet for a year and a half. He described it as something he undertook seriously and said that because of his stomach surgery history, he had to eat it in a very simple form, without the heavy spices that other people in the same community were using. He noted that the macrobiotic community he was part of in his city would often get "pretty spicy" in their preparations, and this was where he learned the diet. The experience gave him direct familiarity with the approach but ultimately preceded and informed his rejection of grain-based and cooked dietary systems in general.

He observed that one person in a seminar testimonial described their own path as having gone "through macrobiotics and everything else and fermenting with every diet you can imagine" before arriving at the Primal Diet. This pattern of prior macrobiotic practice followed by eventual adoption of raw animal foods was one Aajonus encountered repeatedly among the people he worked with.

One of Aajonus's most direct and repeated criticisms of the macrobiotic diet and all grain-centered dietary systems was their relationship to fungal overgrowth in the body. He stated plainly that any carbohydrate foods, and especially grain-based foods, invite fungus into the body as a matter of course. His exact framing was: "If you're eating grain-based foods, you're asking for fungus. Period."

This problem was compounded in any person who had previously received penicillin or other antibiotics. In those individuals, he explained, the antibiotic molds already living in the body, which do not cycle off because they have been sterilized before being introduced, feed on grain foods. These funguses are the same organisms responsible for nail fungus, skin cracking around the nails, and related conditions, and they are in Aajonus's framework the direct result of antibiotic-introduced molds being fed by grain consumption. Since the macrobiotic diet is centered on grains, it would, in his view, continuously nourish these mold organisms in anyone who had prior antibiotic exposure, which in modern populations is essentially universal.

Aajonus noted specifically that people who had followed a macrobiotic diet for a significant period of time would face particular challenges when attempting to change their diet. He said directly: "If you've been a macrobiotic for a while, you're going to have problems with any diet change." This observation was offered in the context of discussing raw butter and raw cheese as transitional foods, suggesting that the body's digestive terrain after extended macrobiotic practice was compromised in ways that made adaptation to any new dietary pattern more difficult.

The implication within his framework is that macrobiotic practice, like other cooked and grain-heavy diets, degrades intestinal bacterial populations, disrupts the balance of digestive microbes, and leaves the body poorly equipped to shift to foods that require different enzymatic and bacterial environments. Raw dairy in particular was mentioned as a transition food for former macrobiotics, with the caveat that getting raw butter was important and that pressed oils, which macrobiotics sometimes rely on for fat, function primarily as solvents rather than as lubricating and protective fats.

In addressing the situation of someone who had been a macrobiotic and might not yet have access to raw butter, Aajonus explained the distinction between pressed oils and raw animal fats in precise terms. Pressed oils, he said, regardless of what kind they are, "are mainly solvents." They will break down toxicity in the body, degrade scar tissue and degenerative tissue, but they do not lubricate, protect, or strengthen the body the way raw animal fats do. He contrasted this with raw dairy fat, referencing the account of a Russian general in World War II who noted that as long as his men had access to dairy, which was raw at that time, their hair and skin remained supple and resilient, and that this changed when they were forced to stop eating dairy.

For former macrobiotics accustomed to using vegetable oils, coconut oil, or sesame oil as their primary fat sources, this distinction was significant: they would be unprotected and unable to build cellular integrity on pressed oils alone, regardless of how high-quality those oils might be.

In his book "We Want to Live," Aajonus recounted an observation directly relevant to the macrobiotic diet's relationship to cancer. He noted that he observed "a rapid decline in the health of a cancer patient who had been improving somewhat on a modified macrobiotic diet" when that patient switched to an all-raw vegetarian diet. The significance of this observation within his narrative is that even the modified macrobiotic approach had been producing some degree of improvement in a cancer patient, enough that an abrupt switch to raw vegetarianism caused a rapid and observable worsening. This did not constitute an endorsement of macrobiotic practice for cancer, but it did illustrate that the raw vegetarian approach could be inferior even to a modified macrobiotic protocol in certain circumstances, and it raised the question for Aajonus of whether there was a more fundamental dietary principle that both approaches were missing.

This observation was part of his larger account of why he moved away from raw vegetarianism and eventually toward raw animal foods as the central element of a health-supporting diet. The macrobiotic diet, in this account, served as one data point along a path of observation and experimentation rather than as a system he credited with significant therapeutic power.

Aajonus addressed the use of lacto-fermented vegetables, including sauerkraut, which have an association with macrobiotic and traditional cooked-food diets through figures like Sally Fallon. His position was that sauerkraut and fermented vegetables of this kind are "fine for the people eating cooked food." He explained that sauerkraut is a vegetable acid and that it tends to wipe out the putrefactive bacteria that the body uses to digest meats and animal-cell foods, including eggs, meat, and dairy. Because of this, he said, the probiotics in sauerkraut "is not for carnivores" and is not suitable for the Primal Diet. It can help replace some enzymes and provide digestive acids that assist with cooked vegetables and cooked grains, making it useful in a macrobiotic or similar context, but it works against the bacterial environment needed to properly digest raw animal foods.

He also commented on people in the tradition of Sally Fallon and Mary Enig, who praised fermented vegetables and cooked foods, noting that in his observation neither of them were in good health in their older years and that they lacked vitality and energy. This was his way of illustrating the limits of the macrobiotic and traditional-foods approach when it is not built around raw animal products.

Aajonus addressed kombucha in contexts adjacent to the macrobiotic tradition. He noted that kombucha is made from cooked substances and that it involves a mycelium fungus that digests dead roots in the ground. He acknowledged that kombucha can act as a mineral supplement for people who eat cooked foods, similar to how intestinal funguses help with dairy digestion, but he observed that the people he had studied who drank kombucha heavily from 1988 through 1993 were "mainly vegetarians" eating "very little meat," and that most of the men lost their hair, suffered from bad digestion, experienced gas with everything, and were in poor condition overall from drinking as much as a quarter of it per day. The association between kombucha use and macrobiotic or vegetarian dietary backgrounds was implicit in his account, and the message was that without raw fats and raw meat to provide cellular protection and regeneration, fermented substances like kombucha could cause harm rather than help.

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