Blood Type Diet Information
Are you looking for a way to lose a few pounds and also make your body healthy? You can benefit from eating right for your blood type.
What is “Eating right for your blood type”? Eating for your blood type means following the guidelines outlined in Dr. Peter D’Adamo’s book, Eat Right 4/For Your Blood Type, written in 1996. This was a very popular book when it was first released. I hope to give you some information that you may not have been aware of previously.
First, you need to know your blood type. Many people do not know their blood type, which is amazing if you think about it. You can learn what your blood type is by giving blood at your local Red Cross or by asking your doctor (if they have done a test that will tell them), or you can purchase a blood kit (sold at some health food stores, or online) that will tell you your blood type in about 5 minutes. That information may also be on a military ID card if you have one.
Once you know your blood type you will need to learn what items are considered “good” and “bad” for you.
Basic blood type guidelines
Blood Type O: This is considered the oldest blood type – a person with this blood type is considered to have the best results with exercising extensively and eating meat. This is the most common blood type. This is probably why low carb/keto diets work for many people, as this is basically the same diet, but without the dairy or pork. Good food choices are most animal protein, vegetables and fruit, and Ezekial bread. Bad are wheat, dairy, corn, cauliflower, pork, kidney and navy beans, red and white potatoes, peanuts, oranges, tangerines.
The two common imbalanced areas on O types are the pituitary and liver. The O types tend to have congested liver and Vitamin E has to be processed there. Taking Vitamin E in supplementation form for O types can put excess stress on the liver. This may be why there are so many confusing studies on the effects of Vitamin E.
Blood Type A: A blood types do best with mild exercises such as yoga or walking and also switching to a vegetarian diet. Good is eating a mostly vegetarian diet and fresh seafood, fruit, nuts, and Ezekial bread. Bad is eating red meat, pork, dairy, wheat, bananas, oranges, mangoes, tomatoes, and papayas. The A types tend to operate poorly under stress, which can affect their nervous and digestive systems.
Blood Type B: The B blood type is similar to a Mediterranean diet, and these people do well on moderate exercises, such as hiking or swimming.
Good food choices include fish, lamb, turkey, dairy products, vegetables, pineapple, and papaya. Bad is pork, chicken, tomatoes, peanuts, shellfish, corn, olives, and wheat. The B types are prone to kidney issues. This is the weak link for B types. Sometimes
B-complex can aggravate them. For a B type, the imbalanced areas are the brain and circulatory systems.
Blood Type AB: People with AB blood have the rarest blood and the funkiest diet outline, and do best with exercises such as Tai Chi, hiking, tennis, or cycling. Good choices are fish, seafood, turkey, lamb, eggs, cultured dairy, beans, oats, and spelt. Bad is chicken, pork, corn, shellfish, lima and kidney beans, wheat, and bananas.
For AB types the areas of imbalance are colon and blood.
My Experience
When I started my health journey, I changed to a vegan macrobiotic diet. It helped to save my life. However, after eating that way for almost 13 years, I started gaining weight and no matter what I tried, I couldn’t seem to get myself turned around. I am an O blood type, so starting to eat meat products again was a huge decision. After reading this book, however, I choose to eat meat. Starting small, and eating only organic grass-fed meats, I saw a huge difference in my energy and weight. My family and customers also have noticed positive changes.
The books and other materials that are sold by the companies affiliated with Dr. D’Adamo actually list the foods in three categories as Beneficial, Neutral, and Avoid. Dr. D’Adamo states in his cookbook “Cook Right 4 Your Blood Type,” that Beneficial foods are food that act as medicine in your body. The “Avoid” foods are foods that act as poison or toxins in your body, and the Neutral foods are foods that have no real affect but act as basic food for your body.
So the idea is if you are sick, and want to get healthy, it would be beneficial for you to eat mostly or only Beneficial foods for your blood type. If you are fairly healthy now, eating a few avoid foods are fine, now and then, but it might be a good idea to eat Beneficial foods when you are eating Avoid foods to help balance out the effects.
There is an exception to this that they don’t discuss in the books, but is used by some health professionals and herbalists I know, and that is when cancer or other certain diseases are present; these may be times when you would do all the avoids, to smother cancer. This can be explained in detail with chemistry, but to give you a simple example – if there was a virus in the circulatory system, taking herbs or foods that would make your blood sticky might help to pull the virus out or create an environment where it couldn’t live. If you would like to learn more about this, look up “polymorphism” along with “chemistry” on the web.
So what are the effects? How does this really affect your blood and therefore your body and health?
It is very challenging to explain how the Blood Type approach works without going into the biochemistry of the process. It works on a long chain polysaccharide system and the agglutination of that. The testing isn’t actually done with blood at all. It is done with an antigen serum on a substance. Provoking abnormal blood reaction equals agglutination. In layman’s terms, this is the stickiness in the blood due to the long-chain polysaccharides not matching and causing lectin activity. Lectins are like the Velcro that keeps these bound together. Lectins are in everything. There is no way to avoid them. You just want to initiate and minimize the right kinds. So, what they are looking at is how sticky an item, or how free-flowing it makes your blood. Good items make your blood free-flowing, bad items make your blood sticky, which can cause health problems in the long run.
How did this all come about?
Dr. Peter D’Adamo is a naturopathic physician, a Bastyr graduate, like his father Dr. James D’Adamo (published One Man’s Food in 1980). His father believed that no person was identical to the next and that there had to be some reason why some people did well on certain foods, while others did not. He also pioneered the field by doing blood tests on his patients to try and find out what these unique properties were.
Dr. Peter D’Adamo followed in his father’s footsteps and, during his senior year, he searched for existing literature in the medical community on this phenomenon. He found that two major stomach illnesses were associated with blood type, and then another that had to do with stomach cancer.
Of course, when his book first came out, the medical community ignored his finding and balked at the studies – which is usually what happens when the truth comes out. But now there are several hospitals across the country that are promoting this way of eating for optimum health.
We recommend the blood type diet as a general guideline, a starting point to help you find where you should be with your diet. Many of our customers tell us they notice major health differences by making the changes outlined in the book. Speaking of the book, it does a good job of explaining the history behind blood types, all the unique differences between the different blood types, including the strengths, weaknesses, medical risks, and emotions of each blood type, and also how food actually affects our blood.
However, we found out by accident that the lists of foods labeled Beneficial, Neutral, and Avoid that are in the book, do have some differences than what is currently recommended. We found this out because of my son. He is a blood type B and we looked in the book and it said that he could have soy milk. It said it was a neutral item. We got some wallet cards in our store to sell, and they said that soy milk was now Avoid for B types. I called – what’s up with this? They told me that the tests that they are running on the blood and foods now are much more accurate than they used to be, which changes some of the items from the original book. The current food lists recommend in wallet cards, and small books specifically for each blood type produced by the D’Adamo company are typically up-to-date. Try to find the date it was published to confirm this or, you can also go to his website for all the changes at http://www.dadamo.com/errata/smartfaq.cgi
Another thing we have learned is that all the food tested was non-organic with antigen serum testing. So there may be some slight differences in the food you are eating if you are only eating organic non-GMO foods.
For those of you who decide you would like to give this diet a try, there are recipes in most of D’Adamo’s books as well as cookbooks that he sells with some wonderful recipes where he lists which recipe is recommended for which blood type.
Secretor tests
There is a new test that D’Adamo is doing now for people: it is the Secretor/Non-Secretor test. Independent of blood type, people are either a Secretor or Non-Secretor. Secretor has to do with how your body’s ability to secrete your blood type antigens into your body’s fluids and secretions. This is similar to how you secrete saliva in your mouth, or the mucus in your digestive tract, etc. A secretor puts their blood type into these fluids, whereas a non-secretor puts little to none of their blood type into their fluids. The majority of people in the U.S. — 80% — are secretors.
Healthwise, secretors tend to be at a better advantage overall, as being able to secrete blood type into your bodily fluids, allows for an added degree of protection against organisms and lectins. It is also thought to promote a more friendly pro-biotics environment for your body as well.
There are a record number of diets and diet books out on the market today. Knowing which one to choose is often a shot in the dark. Each book has its good parts and bad parts. Some play very loose attention to science and others seem to adhere unbendingly to science and are short on taste. The “Eat Right 4 Your Type” diet has worked well for me, my loved ones, and my customers. I heartily recommend Dr. Adamo’s books and programs for you to try to see if this diet is compatible with your needs and wants. We recommend people try to follow the guidelines for a few months, and then make modifications as their bodies give them feedback. You too can be pleasantly surprised with the results as many others have found.
