If you want to lose weight, gain muscle, increase energy levels or just generally look and feel healthier you’ve come to the right place. The proposed diets all tend to be pretty decent, whole foods-based ways of eating, and they’re all better than the standard of industrial processed junk, but differences do exist. Here’s the basic breakdown of all four blood type diets:
Type O: The “original” blood type and the oldest one, proponents claim it evolved among hunter-gatherers in response to their (Primal) diet of animals and plants. People with this blood type do best on meat, fish, and certain fruits and vegetables while limiting starches and omitting grains (especially wheat), beans, legumes, and dairy. It’s pretty much a strict paleo approach.
Type A: The agricultural blood type, proponents claim it arose after the advent of agriculture. People with this blood type do best on vegetables, fruits, grains, beans, legumes, and limited fish. They should avoid meat, wheat, and dairy. It’s basically a vegetarian diet.
Type B: The “nomad” type, proponents claim it arose amongst pastoralists raising animals for meat and milk. People with this blood type do best with lamb, mutton, rabbit, and most other meats (except for chicken), dairy, beans, and vegetables. They should avoid wheat, olives, tomatoes, and corn.
Type AB: The “generalist” blood type. People with this blood type can eat many meats, some seafood, dairy, beans, grains, and fruit, but they should limit kidney beans, lima beans, seeds, corn, beef, chicken, and buckwheat.
First, they’ve got the anthropology all mixed up. These connections are worth looking into and deserve further study, certainly, but they have nothing to say about what diets work best with each blood type. Obviously, we agree that certain kinds of dietary lectins are problematic, especially if they make it past the gut and into the blood stream. They’re a big reason why we avoid most grains, beans, and legumes, not only do they contain large numbers of lectins, but the lectins they have tend to be particularly proficient at disrupting and navigating the gut barrier. And yes, some people seem more sensitive to dietary lectins than others, but we see no evidence that a person’s lectin sensitivity and thus ideal dietary composition is determined by their blood type. It’s an attractive idea, the notion that we can determine someone’s optimal diet and offer them perfect health and protection from disease simply by checking their blood type. It’s just not a realistic one, according to the available evidence. In the end, this might be the most important part of this whole thing, the blood type diet “works” because it eliminates processed food regardless of blood type, removes wheat from the diets of people with blood types A, B, and O (which takes care of the vast majority of the population of the world), and recommends that most people (type O is the most common blood type) eat a diet based on meat and plants with little to no grains, beans, sugar, and legumes. Honestly not all surprised that so many people get great results. What about you? Have you tried the blood type diet?
