Origin of the Macrobiotic term

The origin of the macrobiotic term comes from Greek, specifically, from the word ‘macro’ – large – and ‘bios ‘ – life -, so it means ‘great life’. However, macrobiotics also define the ability to live life in a great and splendid way .

The first known record of the term Macrobiotics is found in the essay of the Greek Hipócrates , extolled as ‘The Great’ , originally from Kos, entitled « Air, water and places » dated about 2,400 years ago, where it is used to refer to long-lived and healthy people. This immeasurable healer, whose therapy grants a primary role to dietetics , is held by the father of Western medicine, whose members still graduate university as allopathic doctors by reciting the oath Hippocratic.

Studies consider the Japanese Ekken Kaibara (1630-1716), the first theoretical Oriental Naturist, who spread the naturopathy and laid the philosophical foundations of what two centuries later would hatch as Nippon Macrobiotics.

The word “Macrobiotics” was used in Europe by a German medical professor, personal doctor of Goethe, called Christophe Wilhelm Von Hufeland (1762-1836) who wrote the book: “Macrobiotics: the art of prolonging life”.

The first mention of the term Macrobiotics is used by George Ohsawa After Hippocrates and several classics of Greek Antiquity, and after the German Hufeland, it is Ohsawa who gives full meaning to the word Macrobiotics. He uses it for the first time in the text of his popular work “ Zen Macrobiotics “, published in Japan in 1960.

Among his disciples were Michio Kushi, Aveline Kushi, Herman and Cornelia Aihara, Tomio and Bernadette Kikuchi, Shizuko Yamamoto, Clim Yoshimi, René Lévy, Madame Rivière and Vicente Ser , who was the introducer of macrobiotics in Spain .