Why not read the websites and do your own comparison,
then report back to this list.

www.macrobiotics.org
www.anhs.org

Macrobiotics uses salt, little or no fruit, but only if cooked
(although personal experience within their communities,
along with their networking has allowed them to
rationally discuss and compare their experiences,
and this is one of the many policies which is changing).

Macrobiotics believe in an Asian (Taoist) principle of yin-yang,
the belief that every reality is party of a pulsating unity,
and that each reality is and is known as its energies,
its energies of expansion or contraction, or both.

Raw fooders are just that -- folks who, for whatever reasons,
eat raw foods (and preferably produce).

Now, we can all talk about the IMPORTANCE of the
EMPHASIS with respect to, or in comparison with,
other approaches, but the waywardness of arbitrary eating
leaves MUCH room for many different (and logically conflicting)
approaches that are more systematic and organized and disciplined.

When we see reports of responsible medical studies that
urge us to go one way or the other, we need to look at
the control groups, and discern what they are studying,
and to see their conclusions are "relative to their objects of study".

There ARE numerous raw foods vegan approaches:
natural hygiene
fruitarianism
Hallelujah Diet
    etc.

These CAN be made compatible, or one could look for
the finer distinctions between any two of them, or
perhaps the range of different emphases in all of them.

There are also "macrobiotic-style" diets and
"hygienic-style" diets which are not quite so tight
in their understanding of how to act around food.

Remember, the OFFICIAL organizations behind
any of these diets
(1) have grown up around diets which preceded them,
      they did not mandate these diets de novo; and
(2) have accepted and welcomed diversity in the
      practice of these diets, since these diets are
      themselves a TYPE of populist movement,
      movements which can be found within any
      worldview -- from Taoist to Catholic or Evangelical,
      Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, naturalist, heathen, etc.

So dietary practice is amendable to study as EITHER
a part of the worldview of the persons who adhere to
that dietary practice, or as independent from those
understandings and worldview, since the practices
can be abstracted from the ideological matrix in which
those dietary practices are made a part.

When we talk about legal issues regarding speech
or moral or religious advocacy, the law courts
abstract in a secular way the practices as public
practices, and try to discuss them from the perspective
of the general law, not as they are intended from the
worldviews.

But within any community of natural foods persons,
even those drawn together by, and constituted by,
another set of understandings and principles,
there can be BOTH macrobiotics and natural hygienists,
fruitarians and junk food vegans, old and young,
mature and whimsical, well-grounded and informed --
or superficial and ignorant.

The communities in which these practices are found
may find a respect for natural foods to be an integral
part of their value system, or they may find these
people to be so rare that some opportunistic individuals
will merely wish to take advantage of them in a commercial
way, by marketing to them.

Anyway, we all have much that we do share and could share
with one another, and the search for common ground and
common grounds for sharing respectfully with our friends
and fellow human beings, even if we are only tangentially
"diet mates", can only deepen our understanding of our
own practices.

And, remember, it's all in the practice.

And it IS possible to apply "the scientific method"
to one's individual practice, but that requires a profound
reconstruction of "the scientific method" so that we
can think inductively about our own practices,
and can consider in some ways the practices of others.

Experience
Compare
Reflect
Integrate with the testimonies of others
               What are other folks telling us?
               Can we verify or validate ANY of that?
               With what behaviors are those claims associated?
               What are the visible or observable results?
               What about independent investigations of those claims?

Then, having incorporated into our own understanding of the world
   and our lives within that world what we have received from others
   and observed of their lives in community with us or others,
   we proceed to observe our own Experiences with our practice,
   to Compare that with the experiences of others, and their claims,
   think about or Reflect upon all this new information,
      and perhaps a new "Integration of life and learning" for
continuing
practice,
      and then continue further the ECRI process

But without some disciplined and explicit SYSTEM,
the practices will seldom be uniform across practitioners,
and the quest for objective information here will be at best clinical,
   and seldom that.

So we can approach these other natural foods diets with
some interest, objectivity, curiosity, mutual respect, and
   a continuing quest for objectivity in all matters.

However, the dialogue and the testimony of the
social sciences and the natural sciences should
be accepted at the testimony level, or in Comparison,
where the studies are considered to be more data
with which we should wrestle, about which we should think.

Remember, our own experience is MERELY one experience,
but it is our own experience, whatever.

And the quest for OBJECTIVE TRUTH requires some norm or
standard of objectivity which transcends the individual self.

Maynard