Should You be “Eating Right for Your (Blood) Type?”

According to advocates of the Eat Right for Your (Blood) Type diet, by Peter J. Dâ??Adamo, your food choices should be determined based on your genetic make-up, as expressed in your blood type. Although this diet has been widely accepted by the public, is this something you should actually be doing to optimize your nutritional status? Will eating for your blood type maximize your athletic performance? These are the questions many martial artists ask when evaluating any popular diet, including this one.

Although the Eat Right for Your Type diet (ER4YT) offers explanations for the premises on which the diet is based, these explanations â??hold up to neither scienti?c  scrutiny nor, at the very least, competent theoretical speculation of open-minded critics,â? according to the Nutrition in Complementary Care News- letter. This is not a diet based on sound dietetic or medical principles.

The ?rst implication made by ER4YT is that blood types have evolved or mutated over the course of human existence, when in fact, we share the same blood groups (A, B, AB and O) with chimpanzees and gorillas. This proves that we didnâ??t evolve from some other blood groups, but have always been these blood types since our evolutionary predecessors already have this blood type. Why would this author make such an implication that is so obviously not grounded in fact. This alone is enough to make you question both his philosophies and his motivations.

Another blatant misrepresentation of known medical fact used as foundation for the diet prescriptions in this book is that stomach acid is responsible for the digestion of protein. Any introductory nutrition or even health class will tell you that Pepsin (an enzyme) is secreted into the stomach and that it, not the acid, digests the protein. High levels of stomach acid actually impair protein digestion. The book uses this premise to prescribe a diet high in protein for those with blood type O, whom they say have a higher secretion of stomach acid. This is another invalid claim. The book also quotes forty year old research, which has since been disproven, to back up their suggestion that certain blood types should consume a diet high in cholesterol. In fact, although not everyone is sensitive to high cholesterol foods in terms of increasing risk of heart disease, no one should consume a diet HIGH in cholesterol as those foods high in cholesterol wouldnâ??t create a balanced diet. They are also generally high in fat, which leads to unwanted empty calorie intake.

Another area where ER4YT errs in is recommending daily animal protein consumption for people having blood group O or B. Vegetarian diets have been widely proven to bene?t extremely large percentages of the population, and since blood groups O and B comprise up to 69% of the population, people with these blood types may bene?t in many ways from a vegetarian diet. While eating beef isnâ??t bad for you in and of itself, saying that you will be healthier for consuming it daily is totally ungrounded in scienti?c knowledge or research, regardless of your blood group.

Finally, and probably where it makes it biggest mistake, the ER4YT diet discourages exercise for blood type A. Everyone knows that regular exercise bene?ts just about everyone. And I, as a type A person, certainly donâ??t understand how anyone could say that it isnâ??t healthy for me to exercise!

According to John J. McMahon, Jr., a naturopathic physician (MD) and author of The Blood Type Diet: Latest Diet Scan, â??The blood type solution encourages sundry capricious restrictions on diet, exercise and herbal medicine for which it is only able to reference itself as ?nal authority. Good science and common sense make this theory impossible for me to take seriously.â? Instead of looking to ?nd a quick and easy ?x to make you healthy overnight without any effort including exercising, focus on what you already know is the only way: eating right (high ?ber, low fat, variety) and exercising regularly.