Macrobiotics is all about balancing the yins and yangs in life. I think the easiest way to do that is to rely on nature, which has the art of balancing already mastered!
Whole, natural food is already balanced within itself. As soon as you start to deconstruct it and eat the food in parts, you are moving away from that balanced center, and probably introducing an imbalance to your body. Also, when you add preservatives, or grow the food using pesticides and other chemicals, you've added something unnatural and unwhole to the food.
I was so excited the first time I saw "MacroBars" on the grocery store shelf. Finally, a healthy organic snack food I could buy that would be balanced and contain whole ingredients! Alas, this was not to be entirely the case.
The list of ingredients gave me the first clue, telling me not only which were whole foods or not, but also how much of each ingredient there was compared to the others (listing the ones with the largest amounts first). What the list does not say, however, is what the actual amount is of each ingredient. And that's where the trouble begins.
Out of a total of ten different flavors of MacroBars, five of them begin with the ingredient brown rice syrup — obviously not a whole food, and not so obviously, way too much of it in proportion to the other ingredients. Most of the other five flavors contain either brown rice syrup or agave nectar as the second ingredient, with the first ingredient being either a nut butter, or in two cases, rolled oats.
MacroBars do have some good things going for them: The ingredients are organic (yay!). There are no artificial ingredients. Many of the ingredients are whole nuts, nut butters, seeds, and fruit. I chose the "Granola With Coconut" flavor because the first three ingredients were rolled oats, puffed brown rice, and walnuts, followed by brown rice syrup, coconut, raisins, dates, and almond butter. A pretty simple recipe — just unfortunately, much too sweet, too much yin. Sigh.
MacroBars are made by a company called GoMacro. They have lots of interesting information on their website about how they started the company and based it on macrobiotics. Somewhere along the way, however, they got detoured by someone's sweet tooth!
Related blog articles:
What Is Macrobiotics?
No More Sugar
Trying Out New Cookie Recipes
