Do people with O+ blood type like meat more and people with B+ like veggies more?
There’s a theory, popularized in the “Eat Right 4 Your Type” Diet (text-messenger speke is always your mark of top-notch scientific research), that traces the evolutionary history of blood types to the expansion of civilization. Later-arising blood types would be better adapted to the types of food eaten then. There ARE elements of food called “lectins” that can, potentially, interact with blood antigens and cause clotting that will make you sick. The idea of the diet is that very trace amounts of lectins make it through the digestive process, causing very small amounts of clotting making us feel unhealthy. Pick foods with lectins that don’t affect your type and you’ll feel better. However, the evolutionary reasoning doesn’t hold up: blood types are older than civilization. And the biochemistry of getting lectins into your bloodstream is a lot more complicated than the author makes it out to be. Humans are natural omnivores and there doesn’t seem to be any bias towards particular foods
I never even heard about this before, so I did a little digging, and the only source I can find is one apparently crackpot diet peddler (Peter D’Adamo, a “naturopathic physician”). His grouping of foods appears to be arbitrary; his clinical studies will produce results always some time in the future (and when that future comes, they get conveniently forgotten). And his grasp of evolution, among other scientific concepts, appears to be extremely weak. I find it amusing that the best defense offered by the author is this piece, which suggests that the best evidence for the claims is bloggers, columnists, self-supplied testimonials, and similar sources. Not any kind of scientific study, or even some kind of cogent explanation for how blood type is connected to alleged differences in metabolism. Oh, he cites hundreds of studies, but none are relevant to his theories. As one
There’s a theory, popularized in the “Eat Right 4 Your Type” Diet (text-messenger speke is always your mark of top-notch scientific research), that traces the evolutionary history of blood types to the expansion of civilization. Later-arising blood types would be better adapted to the types of food eaten then. There ARE elements of food called “lectins” that can, potentially, interact with blood antigens and cause clotting that will make you sick. The idea of the diet is that very trace amounts of lectins make it through the digestive process, causing very small amounts of clotting making us feel unhealthy. Pick foods with lectins that don’t affect your type and you’ll feel better. However, the evolutionary reasoning doesn’t hold up: blood types are older than civilization. And the biochemistry of getting lectins into your bloodstream is a lot more complicated than the author makes it out to be. Humans are natural omnivores and there doesn’t seem to be any bias towards particular foods
I never even heard about this before, so I did a little digging, and the only source I can find is one apparently crackpot diet peddler (Peter D’Adamo, a “naturopathic physician”). His grouping of foods appears to be arbitrary; his clinical studies will produce results always some time in the future (and when that future comes, they get conveniently forgotten). And his grasp of evolution, among other scientific concepts, appears to be extremely weak. I find it amusing that the best defense offered by the author is this piece, which suggests that the best evidence for the claims is bloggers, columnists, self-supplied testimonials, and similar sources. Not any kind of scientific study, or even some kind of cogent explanation for how blood type is connected to alleged differences in metabolism. Oh, he cites hundreds of studies, but none are relevant to his theories. As one
