Who You Gonna Call, Part VII: The Guys Telling You to Eat for Your “Type”
Joe Mercola’s been hyping his metabolic typing program to his 1.5 million readers. You, too, can pay big bucks for it, as soon as he’s done creating it. He continues to tell people to eat lots of whey protein powder (which he sells) and avoid eating grains, despite a massive body of evidence telling us otherwise. (Mercola’s a great watchdog and right on so many other things, though.) Peter D’Adamo has already sold millions of copies of his book Eat Right for Your Blood Type. He prescribes a certain diet to follow for A, B, AB, and O blood types.
People following the plan quit eating wheat and dairy and think that it’s the blood type diet that helped them feel better. In fact, it’s eliminating foods that many people are sensitive to that makes a difference, because no scientific evidence underpins D’Adamo’s recommendations. Those recommendations have just made us all more anxious and confused. And they’ve led more people down a path of eating a death-promoting diet rich in animal products like the Diet Docs recommend. (Unless you’re Blood Type A–D’Adamo says you folks are supposed to be vegetarian!)
Joel Fuhrman, M.D., methodically took D’Adamo’s entire theory apart, using the body of scientific literature easily accessed in medical databases. D’Adamo says Type A people should eat vegetables since they’re more prone to heart disease and cancer. Problem is, they’re not, when all types of heart disease are examined. Any slight differences in a few studies don’t warrant radically different nutritional recommendations. Type O, B, and AB folks get PLENTY of heart disease and cancer, and sending them down the track toward more disease is a travesty.
All the other blood types are supposed to follow D’Adamo’s specific recommendations for lots of cheese, or lots of meat, or both. It’s all underpinned by terribly flawed logic and gross misunderstandings of human physiology and nutrition.
We do have some variations in our genetic makeup and needs (especially as more and more people develop sensitivities and allergies to good foods). But many genetic factors affect your risk for various diseases, blood type playing only a small role at best. Please don’t trouble yourself to buy/read/follow this misguided program, yet another of the false gods of nutrition at whose altar we worship.
Tomorrow I end this “false gods” series and sum it all up, just before leaving town for the rest of the week to collect some Vitamin D watching my son play baseball in a sunny place. Yesssssss!
Posted in: Healthy Weight, Lifestyle, Whole Food
I have not thoroughly read the “Eat Right 4 Your Type” book but based on a quick review at BAM and common sense it seems ridiculous. I jumped over to Amazon and see that reader reviews are very polarized.
I subscribe to Dr. Mercola’s ezine and like much of what he says but much is impractical for me or extreme enough that my wife just rolls her eyes. I have also read Mercola’s “Total Health Program” which was good but not great. I say not great because it was light on content with a significant portion of the book being recipes. I read his Metabolic Typing literature and found it simultaneously vague and complex… if that makes sense. If I remember correctly, determining your type is a trial and error process where you determine your type based on how your respond to certain type of food (protein, carbs, fat??). It just seemed clumsy to me and not many others advocate this approach to diet.
Robyn, what is your advice on grains? Mercola say no grains but I love whole grain bread. Most of the bread in the grocery story has HFCS or other sweetners.
Based your comment and the fact you recommend the China Study (which I’ve read), I assume you do not like whey protein. Right? The China Study data was based on Casein protein so I don’t understand the position. But… that is probably better addressed in a separate post.
It’s been mostly bright sunny in Central Florida the past several weeks!
Mercola has already released his so-called Nutritional Typing program and it is a dismall failure. It contains only 21 questions that most people can’t even answer and does NOT tell you your Metabolic Type – or anything else for that matter – except that you need to pay for more silly crap from him.
Only Bill Wolcott’s system can determine ones metabolic type, and Mercola foolishly abandoned his access to Wolcott’s questionnaire over 8 months ago thinking he could rip it off and make big money. He has now competely failed and clearly knows it as evidenced by the fact that he has not mentioned his own system since it was released 6 weeks ago.
Mercola.com is now nothing but the KMart of crummy online health products. Very sad. His greed is ruling his ego driven little universe now without any concern for other’s health and wellbeing.
By the way, the EAt Right for Your Blood Type diet is bogus for a number of major reasons, and the China Study is completely misunderstood by nearly everyone. It ony applies to the Chinese. Would you follow the advice of a study that only looked at Eskimos for example? I don’t think so…
Real metabolic typing is the only way to go at this point, at least until someone finds a way to decode genes to determine metabolic type, and then it would only give your constitutional type, not your real time type which is what you must work with.
John and David, I don’t like whey protein based on The China Study. It’s still milk proteins in whey powders.
I trust and believe The China Study to be of tremendous consequence whether you’re Asian or North American, or of “Other” descent. The study has hundreds of statistically significant findings–if you believe (and I don’t) that 90 percent of those findings have no relevance for white people (for example), the remaining 10 percent still powerfully recommend that we stay away from an animal-protein-heavy diet. I think it’s courageous, unbiased research that is refreshingly free of big-industry backing (with resulting motive and manipulation). That’s so unusual in a huge study like that.
Grains have sustained people for tens of thousands of years. They’re really a miraculous food, when you consider that you can store them for 30 years, and they still sprout to become living food! They’re inexpensive, low on the food chain, and densely nutritious. It’s insanity to tell people not to eat them, like Mercola does.
That said, gluten intolerance is becoming an epidemic. Sadly, these sensitivities may be due to a century of hybridization and genetic modifications. Thank goodness for the recent re-discoveries of unhybridized spelt, Kamut, and quinoa (quinoa not technically being a grain, but I use it like one).
Robyn
Robyn,
I’ll bet you are a slow oxidizer or sympathetic dominant metabolic type from your insistance that grains are “densley nutritious” etc. I have no doubt you do well with them – and probably better than most. And though I agree with you about Mercola’s insanity you are no different in your blanket statement about grains. But there is simply no denying that many if not most people in the western hemisphere do better without grains in their diet.
The fact that grains can be stored for so long does not make them a miraculous food. It makes them a cheap and easy way to feed a hugely overpopulated nation like China or India a basic, and distinctly non-nutritious pablum. To say they are densly nutritious displays a lack of knowledge about their micronutrient content and basic metabolic processes. They do not and cannot sustain life. Period. They mostly fill bellies and shut complaining mouths. Read Guns, Germs and Steel and Against the Grain, then decide.
The heirloom grains are mostly an exception to the rule, but it is their protein content and lack of protein molecule complexity which makes them valuable. Protein requirements are very well understood and precisely documented, and you can’t get them met with grains. More and more people have derailed Krebs cycles which prevent them from efficiently producing protein from consuming grains and legumes.
Dairy and grains are huge problems for most of the caucasian population. The China Study does NOT AT ALL apply to our western culture. It appears you may not have read it carefully enough, or have missed the learned critques of it.
Hi David, I have read “learned” critiques of Campbell. When something is as huge and implication-rich as China Study is, eroding the foundations of common beliefs, it will always have detractors. I find Sally Fallon’s double-barrel gunning down of his research is knee-jerk and borne of the massive pro-meat agenda of the Weston Price Foundation. I love that Campbell is the son of a cattle rancher and had biases towards, not against, an animal-protein-rich diet, before evidence convinced him otherwise.
You have decided that research findings in one culture have NO implications for another culture. I would imagine, then, you also believe animal research to have no implications for humans either. And in fact, you’d have to throw out all human research, since subjects in all studies will have differences with any individual reader.
Grains are very high in micronutrients, which is well documented, so I don’t know what you mean there. I know of a gentleman named Lester Germanio who eats a diet that is almost exclusively sprouted grains cooked at low temps, the perfect example of the “miracle” (my word) that John and other Biblical folks wrote of in apocryphal texts. He feels great, is highly productive, and last I heard, he’d lost 50 lbs. Thus, “They do not, and cannot, sustain life. Period.” seems far-fetched. My own family’s digestion is clean and untroubled by whole grains; on the other hand, most of us experience digestive revolt when eating meat. (And while you lumped dairy and grains together, I want to say that I AGREE about dairy, and yes, about 90 percent of Caucasians have dairy intolerances.)
That said, I’m aware of increasing sensitivities to grains, especially in Caucasion populations, especially in those with weakened/diseased gastrointestinal tracts. For folks who don’t digest grains well, they can eat the seedfruits like quinoa and buckwheat (gluten-free or low in gluten). You’d want an extensive period of cleansing, before re-trying grains if that’s your objective. For that, I’d do 3-4 weeks of the Arise and Shine cleanse including colonics, and then several months of a clean, vegetable-rich diet (that includes GS).
Robyn