This past Saturday (March 11th) I gave my presentation at the Institute for Integrated Nutrition. They base their weekend seminars out of the Time Warner Building in New York City, at the Jazz Theatre. What a wonderful facility! Although there were about 1,100 students in attendance, the theatre made it appear very intimate, as the audience sections went ‘up' more then ‘out' so I could almost touch, see and feel this warm, welcoming community.

I was quite worried about the timing of the lecture; I had about 2 hours, and the slides and handouts were clocked to the minute. Yet, despite my neurosis, things went off without a hitch and indeed, it ended exactly on the dime. As part of my arrangement with IIN, I've had to moderate a private online community for their students, who have been uniformly bright and respectful; a testimony to the developers of this program. So the last few days have had a definite lightness to my being; these high stakes lectures (such as the IfHI conferences) always tend to produce a quaking heaviness in the week or so before their delivery date. After everything, this heaviness lifts as in the words of Winston Churchill, I sleep ‘the sleep of the saved.'

Thanks to Joshua for the kind introduction, and Rose and Kimberly for taking such good care of me. I greatly enjoyed my visit.

Earlier this week we had performance anxieties of a different nature, as my youngest daughter Emily prepared for her performance as Joseph in the lead role in the Montessori presentation of "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat.�

As any parent can attest, come performance time nerves begin to sizzle; you just so want your kid to be happy, and to do a good job of things. And if as a parent I do say so, she sang like a lark. Who knew the kid had such a beautiful voice? Joseph was a bit of an emotional stretch for her, since her four closest friends were all narrators, and got to dress up in princess-like gowns and wear makeup, whereas she had to dress rather plainly.

However, her eventual sartorial splendor brought perhaps the biggest grin I have ever seen on a human face.

More performances appear to beckon. One of the platelet disorder societies wants to set up some sort of lecture opportunity. Apparently they've had numerous individuals with bleeding disorders report back to them that the Blood Type Diets appear to influence their condition for the better. I'd like to do the lecture, but there seem to be a plethora of these obligations in the next two month, which may make doing anything else difficult if not impossible.

Interesting casual mention of the BTD on ‘Good Morning America', apparently in the context of another story on genetic testing and diet.

Oh well, practice beckons. Gotta hit the shower.

My friend gave me an interesting gift this holiday season: A 'Buddha Machine,' a transistor radio-sized device with a loudspeaker which plays ambient-ish music. The Buddha Machine is a hardware loop player, built kind of like a little AM radio, playing 9 different built-in loops on an endless cycle, with one simple button allowing you to fade between them. It was inspired by a popular Buddhist accessory, a small portable device they sometimes carry that when activated plays a musical chant to pray along with, such as the 'Refuge Prayer', hence the name. It sells for about $25 USD, with batteries, which at least partially explains why it is so cheaply manufactured. It is available on the internet from a variety of outlets.

The nine loops are available to download for free from this site. They are tiny .mp3 files, so you can right-click on each of them, select 'Save Target As' and save them to your desktop. If you have iTunes, which you can also download for free, you can make a playlist and have your own virtual Buddha Machine.

The sounds themselves have nothing to do with Buddhism; they're just quite and restful.

Received a few '2006 Lectin Calendars' from one of the lectin chemical manufacturers. They are rather nice, a 2006 calender of big, beautiful pinup shots of all the BTD avoids.

Yesterday I cleaned an old brass plaque that says:

Peter J. D'Adamo, ND
Naturopathic Physician

It was severely tarnished, and it took a long time to shine it up, but after a while it really came to life.

The plaque once hung on the door of my first office in Connecticut, at 54 Lafayette Place in Greenwich. After I moved from that location there never seemed to be an appropriate place to hang it, so, as sort of a joke, I hung it on the door to my home office.

Then the other day I thought, "I'd like to hang that plaque on the outside of the new clinic."

So I pulled it down, shined it up, and went over to the worksite to tell the carpenter where I wanted it hung.

Interestingly, the last time it hung on a office:

1. I was just starting in private practice.

2. The practice was in a house.

3. I was spiritually invested.

Perhaps that old plaque will bring some of the old energy with it.

On another note, I reformatted and cleaned up the Clinic Website. There are some neat things over there, such as downloadable pamphlets, etc. Give it a look.

I was up way to late last night watching the 24 hour 'Twilight Zone' marathon on the Sci-Fi channel, which featured the classic episode 'To Serve Man.'

The Kanamits, a race of nine foot tall space aliens, with big light bulb heads and curious little goatees, arrive on Earth, and immediately start helping man. They appear totally trustworthy and full of goodwill. This idea is backed up when they leave a book titled "To Serve Man" at the U.N. Michael Chambers, a decoding expert, along with thousands of other people book passage to the Kanamit's home panet. Meanwhile, Michael's assistant Pat is trying to decode the book left by the Kanamits. As Michael is boarding the Kanamit spacecraft, Pat runs up and tells Michael she has finished translating the book - it's a cookbook!

Besides the fact that it was shot in glorious black and white and gorgeously lit, the show had oddly moralistic endings, which were themselves often quite twisted. Not too scarey to a saucer-eyed kid in 1964 who could still run to his grandparents sitting in the kitchen if things got too intense.

This all-consuming soliloquy reminds me of a classic line from the Simpsons, during the opening credits of the Clown's holiday special:

"It's a Krusty Kinda Kristmas. Brought to you by ILG: selling your body's chemicals after you die. And by Li'l Sweetheart Cupcakes - a subsidiary of ILG."

Which of course reminds me of the famous scream by Charleton Heston that 'Soylet Green is made from humans!' or, even better, the repeated attempts of an Apache-necktied Heston parody on a long-ago Saturday Night Live trying to get the phrase just right.

Back soon with a 'heartier' blog!

Dinner out last night with an old friend of ours who has struggled back from a series of health problems. Fish with assorted vegetables. Yummy, if a bit overpriced, but that is Greenwich Connecticut these days. Incredibly high noise levels, to which you can only add your own attempts to scream above the cacophony.

This is an example of what some people call 'the escalation phenomena.'

You can only be heard by screaming above the high noise level, produced by other people screaming loud enough to be heard above your screams.

Like Dean Ornish and Robert Atkins on the Larry King show in 'the old days.'

A good example of the escalation phenomena is sometimes seen in clinical medicine. It usually takes form in a clinician misinterpreting the side effects of his treatment as signs of the further progression of the disease, thereby requiring more treatment. An example of this in the last century was the use in allopathic medicine of huge doses of mercury to treat syphillis. Its use was so accepted that eventually the symptoms of mercury poisoning were included in the descriptions of end-stage syphillis.

Olga, our dinner guest, lost her husband Eric about a year ago. Once, about ten years ago, we got talking about medicine, and Eric volunteered his philosophy that 'the body has a bias towards healing.' I remember having to take a step back from this, since over the course of my life, I have never associated the word 'bias' with anything other than negative meaning.

However, I then remembered that radios were 'biased', i.e. the difference between an AM and FM radio, was simply that the AM radio was biased to receive AM frequencies, while FM radios were biased to receive FM. So to understand his meaning of the word, I had to understand that his use of the word bias was in the context of an orientation or leaning-towards.

It was so like Eric to have the ability to rescue a villified word like bias and put it back to work.

Tom Greenfield's column on blood type and osteoporosis is a must-read. Research published this year showed significant difference between the ABO blood types and the rate of osteoporosis. In a study that looked at 227 postmenopausal women. The results showed that the prevalence of osteoporosis in the proximal femur and lumbar spine averaged 2.3- and 1.7-fold higher in women with blood type AB than in those with blood type O.

This again validates the sophistication of choosing one's diet based upon the genetics of blood type. How many type O's have been lectured by dieticians and other vegetarian nutritionists that 'all that protein will give you osteoporosis.' Guess what? Doesn't happen. Type AB women on the other hand, may have a good friend in cultured dairy products, and the AB diet gives permission to use these high calcium foods.

A new study looked at the distribution of ABO blood groups in acute leukaemias and lymphomas. As I predicted in in my first book over ten years ago, in acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, there were more patients with O blood group. In Hodgkin's lymphoma and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma patients, there less patients with A blood group, respectively. This leads me to believe that the cellular mechanisms (T, Tn) that are found in 'A-like' cancers (breast, colon, stomach) are not a factor in lymphoproliferative diseases, which as my oncology professor many years ago quickly and frequently reminded us, 'are not true cancers.'

A study published in Acta Otolaryngol found a correlation between ABO group and noise induced hearing loss; with a significantly higher number of workers tested being blood group O.