Cabbage is consistently neutral for Type O/Hunters. However for Type A/Teachers it changed from Avoid to Beneficial. This has made my Honorable Husband very happy, and my Darling Daughter somewhat unhappy. Ah well, you can't please everyone.

HH hates cooked cabbage, but he loves coleslaw. He likes it with creamy dressing; he likes it with vinaigrette. He just likes coleslaw. I've never been particularly good at making coleslaw, however. The bottled dressings had lots of chemicals and didn't taste nearly as good as the coleslaw at our favorite restaurants. So when I started the BTD in 2003, I stopped buying cabbage. But for some reason, while I would urge HH not to order beef in a restaurant, I was quite comfortable with him ordering coleslaw. I can't explain it, but I can't remember a time when I suggested substituting something else for coleslaw.

DD on the other hand never really liked coleslaw at all. When we talked about it this morning, she thinks it is because she never liked the dressing. She is more sensitive to the tang of vinegar than HH. Even before the BTD she would request her salad with dressing on the side, so she could add the minimum amount. Coleslaw is usually soaked in dressing. She is willing to admit that she probably never gave cabbage a chance because there was so much dressing.

We were thinking this morning about how we might make a truly beneficial coleslaw. A yogurt dressing is a possibility, but that would be avoid for me. We're going to try plain olive oil with some spices. That sounds good to all of us.

My favorite way to eat cabbage - pre BTD - was sautéed in a little milk and butter. The milk took away the undesirable flavor of cooked cabbage. It was delicious. Milk, is no longer an option, but now that all of us can eat cabbage, I may have to experiment with cabbage cooked in almond milk and ghee.

In these days of transition between BTD and GTD, I find myself going back to the overriding principle of nutrition that has guided me for more than 25 years. It is best to eat food the way God made it because he is the one who designed our bodies. When there is a lectin or a metabolic issue with a fruit or vegetable (like there is with cucumbers and oranges) I'm going to avoid it. But if one diet says it's good and the other says it's bad, I'm going to trust that God knew what he was doing when he made it good to eat.

There is another area where God was way ahead of modern nutrition science. He told His people long ago, "This is a lasting ordinance for the generations to come, wherever you live: You must not eat any fat or any blood." Leviticus 3:17. What a lot of grief and how many heart attacks could have been avoided, by following that simple rule. Remember, that Leviticus was written before science defined proteins, carbohydrates and fats. The fat referred to here (read the context for yourself) is animal fat. Oils are spoken of very favorably in both the Old and New Testament.

I've come back from paradise... or at least Saint Martin.

It was good to get some time out in the sun and swim in the beautiful blue Caribbean. I also rediscovered the pleasure of reading from books, versus all the reading that I do from computer monitors. With proper lighting it is just so much easier on the eyes. Everyone at the hotel was reading different books... except that they were all written by someone named Gresham.

I've never cultivated much of a taste for fiction, since you have to work so hard at populating a mental space to hold all the necessary components; the setting, theme, characters. I find that many people who do like fiction seem to have a type of RAM memory in a certain part of their brains that they can fill with all the plot details, then erase for use with the next novel. I feel sometimes that if I did too much of that it might push some of the other stuff out, so in the midst of all those murder mysteries, there I was with Paul Kennedy's ‘Freedom From Fear' (a 900 page thriller on US history during the 1930's depression) and Larry Wall's ‘Programming Perl' (made especially interesting by the fact that none of us took our computers with us).

I'm in the process of completing the SWAMI GenoType software (which is mostly written in Perl) and in a blitz of activity since my return it is now at the point where we can beta test it in the clinic. Pretty cool, if I do say so myself. It takes between 90 and 230 individual client parameters (blood groups, asymmetries, etc) and analyzes 700 individual foods according to 200 nutrient parameters (antioxidants, propensity to foster microbial overgrowth, acetylcholine content, etc.) For all those 12,600,000 individual calculations, the program is quite fast, though I do admit to a perverse pleasure sitting there for about 30 seconds watching it groan under the strain.

One of the mottos of Perl is that ‘There is more than one way to do it' (TIMTOWTDI, usually pronounced "Tim Toady"). The more that I think about it, there is a lot of Tim Toady in my nutrition research as well.

Probably because at heart I am fundamentally a post-modernist.

Post modernists believe in AND more than OR, whereas modernists tend to give OR precedence in their lives and thoughts. The folks who get all bent out of shape about ‘the GTD versus the BTD' are probably modernists and think that there is only one path to the truth. There is certainly one truth (or fact, or whatever) but that is not the same as saying that there is only one way to find it.