A Complementary and Alternative Medicine with Curative Intents

This study uses qualitative medical anthropological methods to evaluate the effects of macrobiotics on health, healing and cancer prevention.

  1. The basic macrobiotic diet is primarily vegetarian: whole grains, vegetables, legumes and soy products, sea vegetables, some fish and some fruit, and is low in fat, sugars and processed foods.
  2. We are collecting healing narratives, self-reports of lifestyle and health, and food diaries, and conducting extensive interviews with about 100 macrobiotic practitioners and 25 macrobiotic counselors.
  3. A principal aim is to answer why people adopt macrobiotics and why they stay on, stop or modify the diet. We will also consider short- and long-term effects of macrobiotics, its use as a complementary or alternative cancer therapy and, for those who claim that macrobiotics helped them, how they used macrobiotics and conventional therapy, and the course of their disease.
  4. This research aims to provide associative evidence to provide the groundwork for future prospective studies on macrobiotics. We have focused on gaining a broad understanding of the actual practice of macrobiotics in the Columbia, South Carolina, area.
  5. Columbia has had one of the most active macrobiotic communities in the United States for the past 15-20 years.

The study of macrobiotic practice is complicated by the fact that macrobiotics is not just a set of dietary guidelines. Rather, food is seen as medicine and medicine as food within the oriental concept of balance. Macrobiotic counselors are reluctant to give hard and fast rules because in their understanding no foods are necessarily bad for a healthy person, except when eaten in excess. Thus macrobiotic practice is highly individualized.

The adoption of macrobiotics is also usually associated with a wide diversity of alternative healing practices and other lifestyle changes. The qualitative approach is thus essential for the study of the holistic context of health, healing and diet in people’s actual lives.


Principal Investigator: Jane Teas, PhD

Co-Principal Investigator: Joan Cunningham, PhD

Project Coordinator: Puja Verma, MSPH

Consultant: Ginat Rice, Macrobiotic Chef and Counselor

Graduate Assistant: C. P. Kanwat, MBBS

Interviewers: Jane Teas, Ginat Rice, Puja Verma, C.P. Kanwat, Angelica Kushi.


The Macrobiotics Research Project, a 2-year grant sponsored by Centers of Disease Control from October 2000 to September 2002 by the University of South Carolina, Prevention Research Center-Special Interest Project, School of Public Health 15 Medical Park, Suite # 301, Columbia, SC 29203.