The World Peace Diet: Eating For Spiritual Health And Social Harmony

Living the Revolution / 283
which is more human addiction. Finally, there is also the macrobiotic
perspective that animal foods are extremely yang in their energetic
impact on the body, contracting the energy field, and that the body will
then naturally and inevitably crave foods and substances that are
extremely yin and expansive. These extreme yin foods are alcohol,
white sugar, drugs of most every kind, tobacco, and caffeine. Grains,
legumes, and vegetables tend to be neither excessively yin nor yang, but
are more balanced, and so create few cravings. Eating extreme foods
forces the body to gyrate continuously between the two poles, alternatively
craving contracting foods like meat, cheese, eggs, and salt, and
then expansive substances like sweets, coffee, alcohol, drugs, and
tobacco, ad nauseam.
How can these connections be brought to attention in public
forums? Perhaps, for example, the popular Twelve-Step programs could
be made more effective by recognizing the insidious power of eating animal
foods in driving the mental, emotional, and physical urge to consume
alcohol and other harmful substances. The twelve steps of
Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Overeaters
Anonymous, and similar programs are all grounded in the timeless principles
of relying on support from others with similar aspirations by creating
ongoing support groups and relying on “a Power greater than ourselves
to restore us to sanity.” Twelve-Step programs are effective
because they take a basically spiritual approach, urging people to rise
mentally and spiritually to a higher level of consciousness than the level
at which they created the problem. They encourage introspection,
humbly recognizing the harmful effects of past actions on other people
and making amends to them, and improving conscious contact with the
higher Power, and relying not on self-will but on the desire to fulfill the
will of the higher Power.
Unfortunately, animals are not included in the moral inventory of
those harmed by former actions, and eating and using animals isn’t
questioned. This helps explain perhaps why people in AA groups are
taught they will always be alcoholics and can never take just a small
drink, because in continuing to eat animals, the underlying pressures
remain. The body and mind naturally still crave alcohol, drugs, sweets,