(I mistakenly submitted the incomplete post above...I apologize)

I offer this by way of elaborating on point made by Manymoons:

I knew no one personally who died at the early stages of macrobiotics, but from Michio's discussions about those cases at the time, and my experience with macrobiotics over the years since then I have come to see that, as Manymoons states, the events usually resulted from careening from one extreme behaviour to it's opposite. The archtypical case might be of the young woman who came to macrobiotics from several years of drug use, got the message that drugs are extreme "yin" and "bad", and immediately felt she should become more "yang", which is "good". Hearing that salt is yang, she apparently drank an entire bottle of tamari (seeking an American quick fix) which brought about her death.

It should be noted, though, that the tendency to swing to extremes that many of us who come to macrobiotics are subject to does not start with personal behaviour. From a big picture point of view, it is the extreme "yang" nature ("guns, germs, and steel") of the civilization of which we are a part that brings about the appetite for extreme yin (drugs, alcohol, caffeine, nicotine) that brings up the need for extreme yang (too much salt), that, in some cases results in the final yin state (death and desolution).

The ancient orient, evidently, distinguished between different levels of "doctor": The lowest sees, and deals with the symptoms only; the next sees and deals with the cause in personal behaviour; the next finds the source of the problem in "point of view"; the next sees the condition of the individuals having its cause in the condition of society of which he/she is a member; the highest sees the condition of individual as a perfect manefestation of the natural order of the infinite and eternal universe. My feeling is that each of these has their appropriate place. We are neither pawns of larger forses, or do we have quite the free will that we imagine.

Macrobiotics is nothing, if not an appreciation for, and tool to live with, the paradox (two equal and opposite things being similtaneously true) of existence.

Bill