NINE UNDENIABLE TRUTHS ABOUT THE BLOOD TYPE DIET

by John Ashby, M.D. -Philadelphia PA

1. The Blood Type Diet is a simple piece of organic truth that will someday revolutionize medical thought and practice.

2. Criticism of the Blood Type Diet is inversely proportional to knowledge of it.

3. Wisdom of the cells of the gut is greater than that of all the neurons in the frontal cortex.

4. It is the hidden desire of those who cheat, while on the Blood Type Diet, to have belly pain.

5. Food cravings are the path to an abyss of evil and destruction best avoided by urgent sweat busting exercise.

6. Vegetables are like sex. If you can't remember how long it has been since you have had any, you're not having enough.

7. Adhering to the weekly frequencies for consumption of recommended food groups is the hidden method of enhancing performance on the Blood Type Diet.

8. If producing large bowel movements were an Olympic event, most Blood Type Dieters would be gold medalists at every Olympiad.

9. Informing family and friends that one is one on the Blood Type Diet is similar to informing them that one has a serious sickness for which they hope there is a quick and easy cure.

A recent question posed to an internet dietician Mary Hartley sparked some outrage over on the www.dadamo.com message boards and got me thinking:

Is there any truth to the diet based on blood type?

For example, O blood type should eat more protein and AB blood type should eat more veggies.

Answer

The Blood Type Diet is outlined by Peter D’Adamo in Eat Right 4 Your Type, a diet book that has been a bestseller for over 10 years. Mr. D'Adamo asserts that your blood type is the key to your immune system, and by eating particular foods according to your blood-type, you can lose weight and prevent diseases, such as cancer, asthma, arthritis, diabetes, and others. But truthfully, there is no scientific evidence to back the authors claims, and the diets recommended for some blood types could produce nutritional deficiencies. The Blood Type Diet is just another fad diet.

Many dieticians embrace and use the research behind the Blood Type Diet, so it is not a complete and absolute truth to claim that registered dieticians (RD) know almost nothing about nutrigenomics and genetic based nutrition. However, based upon a series of interviews conducted in Holland among Dutch dieticians, it's not far from the truth:

Based on the analysis of 51 face-to-face interviews with Dutch dietitians in April 2006, it can be concluded that awareness and knowledge on nutrigenomics is low. Almost half of the interviewees had heard of nutrigenomics and nutritional genetics, but most could not explain what either were about.

Clients of more than half of the interviewees bring up the topic of heredity or family history during consultations in regard of nutrition-related diseases such as weight and diabetes. Clients almost never ask questions related to genetic testing but, if they do, it is in the context of hyper-lipidemia, hyper-cholesterolemia and other metabolic disorders.

More than half of the dietitians thought genetic testing would be relevant for dietetic practice. Most, however, experienced difficulties with identifying the practical implications of nutrigenomics. They expected nutrigenomics to offer opportunities for dietetic practice through tools for creating more personalized or individual dietary advice and prevention of diet-related ill health. Some dietitians expressed concerns about cost, the current lack of evidence, and the affect on clients’ attitudes whilst other felt they knew too little to identify their concerns.

In line with these concerns, there is feeling that nutrigenomics is not relevant to dietetic practice because of a lack of evidence, anticipated costs of testing, and the existing potential for treatment without genetic testing.

When I read these critiques from people who are supposedly experts I simply marvel at the degree of self-assurance they display despite what appears to be a complete ignorance of the subject. There is enough science behind the use of blood type as a dietary determinant to choke a horse; maybe two or three horses. However, if you don't like the conclusions (or more likely don't like who or where they came from) go ahead and criticize the science. That never fails to buy a bit of time.

I also get a bit skittish when someone who is trying to convince me of something starts their sentence off with 'Truthfully...'

The line about the diets producing nutritional deficiencies is complete twaddle. There is no proof of that whatsoever. I challenge Ms. Hartley to back up her assertions with some sort of evidence, or lacking that have the courage to retract this ridiculous statement.

Reminds me of the quote by Upton Sinclair:

If is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

Speaking of fad diets, many dieticians still cling to the low-fat (or should I say 'fat-phobic') fads of the 1980's. There is perhaps perverse justice in a vignette I recently read in David Stafford's terrific new book Endgame, 1945. Stafford writes that after the outcry against the Nazi euthanasia program, the experts merely moved their lethal expertise away from gas to starvation:

The asylums and hospitals reverted instead to the murdering of the handicapped through lethal injection and deliberate starvation. The director at Kaufbeuren, Dr. Valentin Falthammer, was an especially keen and energetic supporter of the program, and proudly introduced a carefully crafted fat-free diet that guaranteed death to his patients and economized on pharmaceuticals. The death rate rose so high that local authorities forbade the ringing of church bells at funerals, so as to not alert the local population.

Like Peter Gabriel said three decades ago:

It's only knock and know-it-all,
but I like it.

Spent the weekend in Phoenix/Scottsdale where I lectured to the Arizona Naturopathic Medical Association. Nice crowd; surprising to me was the fact that MDs outnumbered NDs at the morning professional session. Had way too much material. The professional lecture was supposed to last four hours, and by midpoint I realized that I actually had about nine hours worth of material, forcing a truncation which certainly had nothing to do with any lack of science.

Happily, this probably means that my presentations for IfHI 2009 are already complete.

Here is a short film about the epigenetic landscape that I made for the lectures. Enjoy.

In addition to my feverish efforts to bring www.dadamo.com back into the Information Age ---the shoemaker's kids do in fact often lack shoes--- the so-called holiday week finds your humble blogger finally mastering the intricacies of Apple's wonderful Keynote presentation software. If like me you've always used PowerPoint, Keynote is indeed a revelation.

The purpose of using presentation software is to give presentations and my upcoming lectures in Arizona are providing the necessary threat-impetus.

At the request of the Arizona Naturopathic Medical Association (AzNMA) on Saturday, January 10, 2009 I'll be doing a total of four hours of lecturing to docs and a one hour public lecture (with a half hour reserved for questions and answers) at the Doubletree Paradise Valley in Scottsdale, AZ. If you are in the Phoenix area why not plan to stop by. I can promise you that the slide/multimedia/rumination presentation may well give old Al Gore a run for the money.

Any trip to Phoenix also affords the extra benefit of seeing our good friends Paul and Laura Mittman. I'm so proud of what Paul has accomplished at Southwest College.

Found this little unused snippet from the volumes of material that was prepared for The GenoType Diet but never used. Thought it might make for interesting reading.

The high water mark of hunter-gathering is often called the Mesolithic period ('Middle Stone Age') which began around 10,000 years ago and ended with the introduction of farming. The onset of farming differed from place to place, starting early in the Near East and much later in Europe. Hunter-gatherer technology reached its apex during the Mesolithic era; fishing tackle, stone adzes, canoes and bows have all been found preserved at various sites.

Popular culture tends to depict our Stone Age ancestors as crude, simplistic animals perpetually at the point of starvation. "Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" as Thomas Hobbes had put it in 1651. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Though small in number, Paleolithic hunter-gatherers worked far fewer hours and enjoyed more leisure than typical members of industrial society, and they still ate well, satisfied with very little in the material sense. The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture was not necessarily a one way process, and evidence seems to disprove any notion that hunter-gatherers were saved from extinction by the advent of farming technology. They seem to have been familiar with farming practices when it arose, but for the longest time simply rejected it, or used it as a marginal supplement to the diet.

As these late hunter-gatherer societies evolved, they began to develop specializations such as fishing and seafood collection, harvesting nuts and fruits, or trapping small animals. They often had simple forms of representative government, based around family or clan.

Perhaps it is not coincidental that the story of the Garden of Eden in the Bible shares some of the same elements in its storyline. Some anthropologists have hypothesized that the Garden of Eden does not represent a geographical place, but rather represents cultural memory of the simpler times of hunter-gathering, when man lived off God's bounty, as opposed to being civilized and toiling at agriculture.

A large percentage of the world's cultures have stories of a Great Flood that devastated earlier civilization. This flood is sent by God or the gods as an act of divine retribution to destroy civilization. Noah and the Ark in Genesis, Matsya in the Hindu Puranas and the Epic of Gilgamesh are among the most familiar versions of these myths, all of which divide prehistory into a pre-flood or Antediluvian and a post-flood world.

Certainly there were major changes to the planetary water table at the end of the last ice age, as melting waters for the rapidly diminishing glaciers would have caused the levels of the seas and oceans to rise about 125-150 feet, deluging and destroying many prior land bridges, such as that between Alaska and Siberia, and isolating many populations. The end of the last ice age was also accompanied by the mother of all volcanic eruptions as the movement of the African plate opened a fault-line under the Mediterranean Sea, creating a string of volcanoes that still exist, such as Vesuvius and Etna. There is some geological evidence suggesting that a massive prehistoric flood occurred around 8000 years ago as the Mediterranean Sea spilled into the present day Black Sea.

William Ryan and Walter Pitman, geologists from Columbia University proposed what came be called the 'Black Sea Deluge Theory' which hypothesizes that melting of the last great glaciers caused the rising Mediterranean to finally spill over a rocky sill at the Bosporus eventually flooding 155,000 square kilometers of land. Despite some supportive findings, the theory remains an active subject of debate among archaeologists.

Although by this time agriculture had already reached the plains of central Europe, the Ryan and Pitman linked its spread with farming people displaced by the flood. It has been suggested that the memories of these displaced survivors was the source of the Great Flood Legends.