By Portland Helmich

“She’s healthier than anybody I’ve seen in my office in the last 12 months,” says Dennis Grossman, an internist in Cleveland, Ohio. Out of context, this isn’t a remarkable statement. Meeting his patient, though, one realizes Grossman’s assertion is nothing less than astonishing.

Sitting in the afternoon sunlight on an early spring day, Janet Vitt looks like a normal 54-year-old woman. Thin, but not sickly. And yet nine years ago, this divorced mother of two then-teenage sons was worse than sickly—she was terminal.

Stage IV lung cancer was the diagnosis. A dull pain in the center of her chest had led to a CAT scan, revealing three tumors in her left lung and seven in her right—and the disease had spread. Her liver housed three tumors, she had another in her pancreas, and yet another was causing her abdomen to swell. A registered nurse since 1971, the soft-spoken Midwesterner understood the gravity of her diagnosis. “When cancer is above and below the dia-phragm,” she explains, “we say people aren’t going to make it.”

Though her mother had died of lung cancer at 42, Vitt had thought her fate would be different. She worked out three times a week and had what she assumed was a fairly healthy lifestyle. Okay, so she held two part-time teaching jobs in addition to working full-time as a nurse manager at a local hospital. (“I foolishly thought being stressed-out was exciting,” she admits.) But so what? Unlike her mother, she never smoked.

She didn’t have time, though, to rethink her lifestyle in the beginning. When her abdominal tumor was removed eight days after her diagnosis, it had ballooned from the size of a nickel to an 8- by 11-centimeter mass. One oncologist gave her three to six weeks to live; another suggested three to six months. She grabbed onto the more promising prognosis and agreed to participate in an experimental chemotherapy trial, hoping to extend her life by a month.

But just three weeks after receiving the first dose, she dropped 46 pounds from her already slender 118-pound frame. “During those three weeks,” she recalls, “if I had even a sip of tea, I’d puke for a half hour.”

Realizing that a second dose would kill her, Grossman suggested something that sounded outlandish: alternative healing. “I thought that was for hippies,” Vitt says. “But I asked him what he thought I should try and he said, ‘macrobiotics.’”

Through a chance meeting with a macrobiotic counselor, Grossman had begun reading about and taking classes in this highly specialized diet. “I knew there was no harm in it,” he says. “The oncologists had nothing for her, and I thought it might help to change her immune system and enhance her quality of life.”

Macrobiotics (meaning “great” or “large life” in Greek) is much more than just a diet; it’s a way of living in balance. Exercise and rest, socializing and solitude, sensible sleep habits, even keeping a tidy home, are all part of a macrobiotic life. But most people associate macrobiotics with the nutritional regimen developed by Japanese writer-philosopher George Ohsawa in the early 20th century. Popularized in America by Michio Kushi in the sixties and seventies, the macrobiotic diet is a far cry from its trendy, contemporary counterparts, like the low-carb, antiaging, or raw-food diets.

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