We were talking about diets the other day and one of the people at the table mentioned that they had brought up the subject of the Blood Type Diet to several friends who ran a health food store. Their friends had certainly heard of it, but responded that that concept was "old" and "past its prime." Thinking perhaps they were correct, I decided to compare my first book, Eat Right For Your Type with current as well as past diet best sellers to see how it held up.

Interestingly, many of these books have long gone on to paperback, whilst ten years after its release Eat Right For Your Type keeps chugging along in hardcover. Another factoid I just learned from my editor is that Eat Right at $24.95 is priced substantially higher than the usual hardcover diet book which typically has a manufacturer's suggested retail price of $19.95. Since amazon.com gives up to the date sales ranks, I thought I'd use their ranking system as a good idea of current consumer interest.

Here are the results:

Book	Amazon Number
The Maker's Diet (Rubin HC)	3,854
Eat Right For Your Type (D'Adamo HC)	226
Healthy Aging (Weil HC)	1,667
Enter The Zone (Sears HC)	3,688
Atkins for Life (Atkins P	489,632
Eat Less, Weigh More (Ornish P	6,388
The No Grain Diet (Mercola P	270,636

PD=Paperback HC=Hard Cover

Doesn't look past its prime to me. In fact one of my daughters, who relentlessly checks its standing on Amazon, tells me that Eat Right more typically hovers around #150 and will peak at 30-35 when I do a radio or television show. Like most books on Amazon, you can also buy a second-hand copy of the book you are perusing from an Amazon-approved independent vendor, with the listings set up as a sort of reverse auction, lowest prices first. The lowest price being asked for a second hand copy of Eat Right For Your Type was $7.95, whereas the lowest asking price for most of these other books hovered between one cent and fifty cents.

Health food stores are often difficult arenas for the BTD. The concept requires both education and discussion, which a lot of retailers don't have much time for. Also, like other sales-driven entities, the health food industry tends to get seduced by new and exciting things. It just makes me even more appreciative of the doctors and retailers who use the concept day in and day out in their work .