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