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Should blood type influence my diet selection?
Question
PPNF has taught me that I should look to my heritage many (dozens) of generations back to identify which foods my body is most likely best adapted to assimilate. I am trying to marry that information with several other diet and nutrition concepts in identifying the best diet for me. I have read some materials on blood type diets. Is there some merit in your opinion on including blood type in diet selection? If so, can you provide some guidance?
Answer
Dr. Peter D’Adamo learned about the idea of eating differently for different blood types from his father, a doctor. He then sold millions of copies of a book he wrote on the subject, based on these ideas, which had no scientific research to back them up. Although the book, as many books have the tendency to do, has caused many people to believe what is written on its pages, the research to validate any of it still does not exist. Since D’Adamo is an intelligent man, all of the diets he promotes are better than the Standard American Diet (SAD) and therefore many who have changed their diet to follow one of his, have seen health improvements.
I spoke to one physician a few years after the book was first published. This physician did a short non-published observational trial with a group of people to investigate what I just mentioned. He recruited a group of people for a blood-type diet trial as a personal experiment. He purposefully put each person on one of D’Adamo’s diets that was for a different blood type than their own, but told them it was the correct one. In other words he typed a number of people, told them their blood type was different than it actually was, and had them follow this wrong blood type diet. All had previously been on a standard American diet. He told me that all participants saw distinct improvements in their health, and at the end of his experiment he let them all know what he had done and gave them their correct results.
My take on these results is that either the study participants’ WRONG blood type diets, as I mentioned earlier, were superior to their previous poor diets, and/or that the mind body belief connection, which is incorrectly referred to as the “placebo effect” were the probable basis for their improvements.
I have been helping people get well for over two decades and have never utilized any of D’Adamo’s ideas. The first thing that I would do if I were trying to investigate blood-type diet science, would be to try to locate (more difficult today than in Dr. Price’s days) a few tribes who are still consuming their traditional diets. I would then blood-type a large percentage of each tribe. If these tribes were in close to perfect health; and if each individual tribe member only had access to and therefore consumed the same foods, and lastly, if the tribe has been consistently consuming the same foods for thousands of years, they should all be of the same blood type. If the blood-type diet has merit for further research, these tribes would be the ones to study. Maybe this will be done at some point or maybe it has and I have not seen the research?
Many years ago while I was presenting an all-day lecture on Dr’s Price and Pottenger at the Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine, one of their class of graduating naturopaths asked me about the blood-type diet. I answered him in a similar fashion to what I have written here. This prompted one of their professors in the back of the room to inform me that they were going to begin a research study on the blood type diet ideas later that year. I contacted them a year later to find out how the research was progressing and was told that the funding did not come through and so the research study was not going to be done.
See the link below to read one of many decent articles on the blood-type diet premise.
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/05/31/no-science-behind-blood-type-diets-researchers-say
David Getoff, CCN, CTN, FAAIM, Price-Pottenger Vice President