Michael Rossoff, L.Ac.
A Macrobiotic and Oriental Medicine Pioneer
Reflects on Three Decades of Healing

© By Peter Barry Chowka

Michael Rossoff, L.Ac. courtesy © michaelrossoff.com

(March 1, 2004) Michael Rossoff, L.Ac., is a macrobiotic counselor, a licensed acupuncturist, and an Oriental Medicine and macrobiotic teacher based in Asheville, North Carolina.

On February 23, Rossoff was the subject of a feature article by the Associated Press, "Macrobiotics Dieters Stick With Carbs," in which he contrasted his philosophy and practice with the popular Atkins approach.

Quite out of the blue, the story re-introduced me to Rossoff, who I had known for several years in the mid-1970s when we both lived in the Washington, D.C. area. At the time, I had several years of experience investigating and writing about orthodox medicine and innovative health care options. In 1977, when we first met, Rossoff had been studying, practicing, and teaching macrobiotic philosophy, lifestyle, and healing for almost a decade, and he was the best known practitioner of macrobiotics in the D.C. area.

On February 26 and 27, 2004, Rossoff and I had two lengthy phone conversations, basically renewing our acquaintance and picking up the discussion where we had left off so many years ago.

I began by asking Rossoff how his work with alternative medicine began - back in the days when such approaches were decidedly alternative (as opposed to complementary, the word that is often used today). He replied, "That's really asking about how did I get started with macrobiotics."

Macrobiotics

Michio Kushi, Washington, D.C. 1975 Photo © by Peter Barry Chowka

Macrobiotics is an alternative lifestyle and dietary treatment approach that was introduced to the West in the 1960s by two men from Japan, Sakurazawa Nyoiti (a.k.a. Georges Ohsawa, 1892-1966) and, more prominently, Michio Kushi (1926-). Macrobiotics is an eclectic combination of Eastern philosophy and practical dietary and lifestyle advice and was extremely influential as a primary alternative at the dawn of the modern day American alternative medicine movement which began to gather strength and adherents in the 1970s. Among other things, macrobiotics spawned one of the most popular national alternative medicine and culture periodicals of the time, East West Journal (which in the 1990s became Natural Health). For a number of years, macrobiotics represented a kind of hip or fashionable alternative to the mainstream American diet, attracting celebrities like singer John Denver and actor Dirk Benedict.

At his Web site, Rossoff explains, "Macrobiotics is a simple, natural approach for creating a healthy life. By addressing the central importance of daily eating, we can begin to regain control of our lives. Food is basic to life and life depends on our relationship to nature that has brought forth these foods. So our eating needs to be adjusted by season of the year, where we live, the type of work we do and more. For best health, the majority of our foods needs to be vegetable quality. Animal foods like fish and poultry and eggs may be incorporated by those who desire or need these animal foods. Other forms of animal meats are avoided for best health."

Rossoff was exposed to macrobiotics when he spent a week at a Vermont commune in 1969. (He was ready for a change, he said, increasingly dissatisfied with his downbeat life in Washington.) Soon after, he moved to Boston, which at the time was the world capital of macrobiotics, where he lived, worked, and studied with macrobiotic proponent Kushi, immersing himself in macrobiotics and living in one of the macro study houses in the Boston area. Rossoff was also exposed to Oriental Medicine and acupuncture, and in 1979 he earned an L.Ac. degree.

Rossoff returned to his home town of Washington, D.C. in the mid-1970s. Rossoff recalls that he gave "public classes - I gave lectures on Yin Yang philosophy and food, and my then wife gave cooking classes - that was one of the core models." The model also included, in many cities ("like Toronto, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and plenty of other cities"), one or more study houses where people interested in macrobiotics lived, worked, and studied together.

After his further formal education, Rossoff added acupuncture and Chinese medicine to his clinical practice, and established a treatment center in Bethesda, Maryland that expanded to include other holistic practitioners. For seven years, he published a national magazine, MacroMuse. He also taught and traveled widely.

In 1995, Rossoff relocated to Asheville, North Carolina, a "small, vibrant, growing town in the mountains" which he described as the "Boulder [Colorado] of the East Coast."

In Rossoff's view, although macrobiotics continues to be taught to this day, it might be said that the wind started to go out of its sails after its high point was reached in the 1980s.

"By the end of the '80s," according to Rossoff, "macrobiotics started to wilt."

His explanation of why this happened could fill a book. Among other things, he said, "Macrobiotics needed to do a number of things which it didn't do, including reinvent itself." He added, "For all of its talk, it doesn't walk its talk well. It doesn't accept change easily. It got stuck - for example, in believing in the ideals of macrobiotics versus the reality. There wasn't the willingness to explore the dichotomy between the ideals and the reality, in large measure because Michio Kushi had been put on a pedestal - not by me but by enough people - and frankly, that's what Michio wanted. The [macrobiotic] organizations were overly controlled and really stifled growth. Seemingly inclusive but ultimately exclusive. Macrobiotics never found a way to reinvent itself that didn't have Michio Kushi as both the centerpiece and the controlling force. And Kushi's strength is not in having others having authority. Over time, more and more people became disenchanted. They wanted to help - they wanted to be involved, they took over leadership roles, but then weren't allowed to lead. It was all very subtle when it was going down, not overt but covert.

"On a certain level, over time the public developed a perception - much more understanding thanks to your writing and others' about health foods - that macrobiotics was not the only voice about natural foods, eating more vegetarian, and things like that. And so it didn't any longer distinguish itself and it became best known as 'the diet for death's door.' You know, to try and avert going through death's door. A last resort diet. And that's far from the reason that I joined it for and what I've tried to teach it, to be beyond.

"It really did look more like business than healing. You know, I was involved in Chinese medicine. I was recommending, not even Chinese herbs, I'm recommending culinary herbs - sage and thyme. Kushi was against it. But there was no discussion about it. 'Rossoff's wrong.' That's not the spirit of macrobiotics! So I just distanced myself and did my own thing, but I've never rejected the term macrobiotics.

"Meanwhile, Aveline Kushi [1923-2001, Michio's wife and a noted macrobiotic practitioner, author, and teacher in her own right] died of cancer and before her, their daughter Lilly Kushi. It was upsetting when they got cancer and died. That shook up macrobiotics. It was another factor in macrobiotics losing its power."

Chinese Medicine

Rossoff then turned the discussion to Chinese medicine. "I was academic dean of an acupuncture school [Atlantic University of Chinese Medicine outside of Asheville, NC] for three years. I resigned last May. Chinese medicine has gained so much respect in America - over 40 states have legalized it. There are 40-some schools in America. Accreditation standards keep rising, with more and more hours that need to be taught - not necessarily to teach Chinese medicine, but more in Western sciences.

"There is now approved to be a true doctorate program in Chinese medicine, which I am against. The reason that people have wanted it is that they want to be on a par with M.D. s. And I don't want to be on a par with M.D. s. I think Chinese medicine has much more to lose than to gain from this. I'm in the minority in this debate or discussion. [Proponents of Chinese medicine] want hospital privileges, they want to prove themselves equal to or better than Western medicine. But Chinese medicine is just too much a different paradigm.

"Personally, I do think that in the broadest sweep of providing health care to the large population, Western medicine is doomed - therapeutically. I don't think there's a will to make a significant change. Who is it benefiting but the drug companies?

"Western medicine is already proving its failure in the chronic and degenerative diseases realms. The best example is their own statistic that the sixth leading cause of death is drug interactions that were prescribed. The bottom line is that people may want the free [conventional] care, or the cheap care, or the endless care and think that it's cheap but it's really proving to be an unsuccessful paradigm that it's coming from.

"Ironically, the public is seeking out more and more alternatives that represents a quest for something more than allopathic medicine. One of the issues that I see, in trying to offer a bigger vision and a clear health alternative that can really serve humanity, is that there is a problem in that all medical systems - Western medicine, Chinese medicine, homeopathy, Ayurvedic medicine - all of them have a certain built in arrogance of, 'We have a vision to understand the nature of disease and the true nature of healing.' All forms of medicine have their own system of diagnosis, and whatever that system of diagnosis is leads to a system of treatment. Western medicine has become a very mechanical level of diagnosis - X-rays and CAT scans and so on - and mechanical treatments. Chinese medicine comes from another paradigm, a much more subtle diagnosis, and has much more subtle forms of treatment. But they all ultimately fail to be perfect despite their vision of perfection.

"What I see happening is to offer some clear cut alternative, let's say Chinese medicine, and integrate it with macrobiotics. I think they can be merged. But the response is, 'It has to be proven under the model of Western thinking,' which means those double blind studies. I think that viewpoint should be challenged."

Further Thoughts

On February 28, I e-mailed Rossoff some additional questions and he provided the following replies.

Peter Chowka: What are are the major differences in the alt med field now vs. the 1970s?

Michael Rossoff: In the 1970s there was a passion and curiosity for valid and valuable alternatives to popular western medicine. There was a keen awareness of the failure of the medical model that saw the body as an object with replaceable parts and assumed that the body was incapable of self-healing. There was a quest for a more embracing system that had endured the test of time.

Nowadays, public awareness has grown significantly. There is a consciousness of a huge array of alternative paths for self care and of alternative practitioners to facilitate health and healing. Even mainstream medicine acknowledges the importance of a good diet and exercise to a degree that did not exist in the 1970s.

In the 1970s macrobiotics was viewed as a cultist, radical, fringe diet. Most all of its dietary concepts are now accepted easily, even if people don’t want to change their personal eating. And more and more nutritional studies support the idea of vegetables and grains and more vegetable-based proteins as central to a healthy diet. Macrobiotics was never purely vegetarian. But in the 1970s it was overly limited in selection and preparation. During the following decades, macrobiotics has gradually changed. My teaching and use of macrobiotic principles in healing are more dynamic than many who have continued teaching. This is partly due to my experiences of working with thousands of clients and reflecting on what works or not. And it is partly due to my continuous practice of acupuncture. Here I have immersed myself in the history and practices and Chinese medicine. It has been rewarding and revitalizing on a personal basis. And it has influenced my approaches to healing through food.

In the 1970s Chinese medicine meant acupuncture (and moxibustion). Now it includes herbal medicine and more. Even the acupuncture of the 1970s was limited by the textbooks and teachers. There was no consensus on terminology or even some point locations. Further, there was constant exclusivity, where one school claimed superiority of knowledge over all other schools.

Nowadays, more people are choosing to learn alternative medicine as a career. Only later do some students discover whether or not they really have the desire and compassion for healing. Interestingly, a significant number of students in Oriental medicine schools are between 30 – 60 years of age and wanting to change careers. They consistently demonstrate a strong passion for their studies.

Meanwhile the schools are more accepting of each other. This is largely due to the accreditation of schools, which requires that they teach certain core material, so that different traditions of Chinese medicine are represented in their curriculum.

Chowka: What do you see as the primary challenges and obstacles to establishing a better health care system in the U.S.?

Rossoff: The greatest challenge is to create a new, realistic definition of health. The current (“old”) definition—the absence of symptoms—is poor at best and false at worst. It encourages people to live in denial and accept less vitality and well being as the norm. This definition puts doctors in the role of prescribing quick remedies, which may undermine long term wellness. Further, when the body can no longer repress disturbances, the myriad symptoms that arise can terrify and depress people. For now they have few options, they believe, since the quick remedy route has faltered. This “old” definition of health implies that the chronic and degenerative diseases are inevitable and a “natural” part of aging and death. With this comes an addiction to high-tech and high cost diagnostics and treatments. These promised solutions have rarely materialized, though they satisfy our fantasy of objective healing. Isn’t it childish to rely on medical technology as all-knowing, just as a child can believe in the wizardry of a magician?

And so it becomes a true prediction since there are statistics to support this “old” view of health. The rulership of statistics and machines used to diagnosis and treat these chronic and degenerative diseases can create false understanding. A recent example is the use of hormones for post-menopausal women. Twenty years ago I was seeing an increasing number of women with breast or uterine cancer who had taken hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for many years. Their doctors refused to acknowledge any connection between the two. Only recently has it been “proven” that HRT is a major risk factor, even taken for a short span of time. Further, as the medical field comes to admit to this danger which has affected thousands of women’s lives, they now change the terminology, by saying “hormonal supplements” instead of HRT.

Regardless, all of these miss the main issue, namely a new definition of health, which would put these issues into a different perspective.

Health must embrace change and see that there is a natural range of wellness, where sometimes there is more physical and mental vitality and at other times less. Symptoms are messages of imbalance and the body’s natural effort to rebalance itself. Health needs an appreciation of the body’s self-healing capabilities and its limits, both day-to-day and year-to-year. For this approach to work, people must want to learn simple self-care and want to become more interactive.

In Chinese medicine there are three causes of disease: external, internal and other. The external are environmental factors like wind, cold, damp, heat and dry. The internal are emotions such as anger, fear, worry and grief. And the others include excesses of lifestyle (food, sex, drink), accident and infections. Regardless of which cause, the core of the problem will always involve digestion. So stomach aches, nausea, constipation, diarrhea are significant factors towards disease. Nowadays, thousands of people take laxatives, antacids, and even stronger drugs like prilosec. This does not bode well for the future health of our society.

Chowka: As a follow-up question, are you optimistic about the future in terms of health care?

Rossoff: No and yes. No because I foresee a greater and greater increase in chronic and degenerative diseases. These take years to manifest and by their nature will take much effort to change. Our current disease care system will reduce the physical and mental pain that comes with these conditions, which for most people will be an acceptable substitute for real healing.

And yes because there is an increasingly diverse segment of our population that is seeking alternatives. Whether this is through books, magazines, diet plans, and pop culture vitamin or herb of the month. And most importantly, the medical establishment will reach a threshold of awareness, acceptance, and ultimately respect for key “alternative” healing methods. This will occur as these approaches, like Chinese medicine, are successfully used by people and as health insurance recognizes their cost effectiveness. I can envision that Chinese medicine can work side-by-side with Western medicine.

Chowka: As someone who has spent more than three decades involved with macrobiotics, what do you feel are its primary accomplishments and legacy?

Rossoff: Macrobiotics has achieved many notable accomplishments. First, it deserves credit for beginning the organic food growing in America. In the late 1960s, Erewhon Trading Company (a macrobiotic wholesale food company) guaranteed farmers a certain value for growing organically, even if the crop did poorly. This was a pivotal move for the budding organic movement. Second, macrobiotics integrated a philosophy about foods (yin-yang dynamics) rather than opinions of good vs bad. This helped establish a “natural” foods movement in contrast to the existing “health” food concept (of vitamins, a la Adele Davis). Third, macrobiotics challenged directly the medical model of disease and healing. This was a type of power shift, where individuals could learn enough to take basic good care of themselves and their family. Fourth, macrobiotics said health begins in the kitchen. This was and continues to be an era of fast foods, where highly processed and prepared foods dominate. Asserting that home cooking is a potent form of independence was radical, even if overstated. Fifth, macrobiotics inspired many young people to start related businesses, such as natural food stores, bakeries, importing and producing companies. Some larger successful examples are Eden Foods, Imagine Foods, Amy’s Kitchen and Great Eastern Sun. Further the core macrobiotic movement in Boston inspired publications like East West Journal (which changed to Natural Health) and New Age Journal.

Michio Kushi (R) and Edward Esko (Center) meet with Peter Bourne, M.D., President Carter's science advisor, the White House, December 1977. Photo © by Peter Barry Chowka

Chowka: What problems or conditions do most of your clients today present with, and are they different from the 1970s?

Rossoff: The problems of today are more similar to those of the 1970s in that they reflect real health concerns that are troubling but not life threatening. Some examples are chronic or severe headaches, menstrual problems, difficulty sleeping, stress related symptoms, and backaches. During the 1980s and early 90s, macrobiotics became known as the cancer diet, so there were large numbers of people seeking out macrobiotics as a last resort. This was due mostly to the book Recalled By Life by Anthony Sattilaro, M.D. (with Tom Monte), who documented his healing of prostate cancer that had spread to the bones by the time he began macrobiotics. Even to this day, macrobiotics is remembered as a cancer diet. But to me it is less about heroic measures and more about regaining internal self-healing powers and awakening people to the mental, emotional, and spiritual sides of their life.

Chowka: Finally, who are some of the people you credit with positively influencing your career in healing?

Rossoff: Michio Kushi was my first true teacher. His effect was to encourage one of the mottos from his own teacher, Georges Ohsawa: non-credo, do not (just) believe. The philosophy of yin-yang dialectic was inspiring and freeing. I naturally found myself curious about Oriental diagnosis and acupuncture. Other people influenced me either by my studies with them or through lectures or readings. These include: in shiatsu massage Shizuko Yamamoto; in acupuncture JR Worsley, Nguyen Van Nghi, Jeffery Yuen; in foods for medicine, too many to name! And in a real sense, the many thousands of clients and hundreds of students I have had over these 30+ years. They have inspired me to search deeper and continually pursue new avenues in my quest to serve as a conduit for healing.

For more information,

About Macrobiotics

"The New Macrobiotics" by Bill Tara
Macrobiotics Today, January/February 1995, Vol. 35, No. 1

Macrobiotics Internet Resources