Ho-kay. I haven’t written about fad dieting for a while; to be honest, I thought I’d pretty well covered the bases with the keto, Whole30, vegan, food-sensitivity and paleo diets, with a brief foray into what Tom Brady eats, and figured that every other weird eating plan out there was just a variant on these. But I realize that I’ve never actually discussed the whole gluten-free craze, which I plan to do, plus some other somewhat more fringe-y ideas (since, sigh, going gluten free has become pretty mainstream). But I’m going to start this new round of anti-faddism with something I heard about only recently, and that is the “blood-type Diet.” While it became popular with the publication of Eat Right 4 Your Type (no link provided, as I don’t want anyone wasting money on it) in 1996, it’s still alive and kicking. A revised and updated version of the book was published in 2016, and I found out about (or was reminded of) the diet because I heard about someone I know who is following it.
Here’s the idea behind this diet: Your blood type (that is, A, B. AB, or O) is a marker that determines how you should eat, because it refers to where your ancestry fits into the overall genetic history of humankind. In this theory, type O is the earliest type, and so someone with that blood type has a strong hunger-gatherer heritage and should eat lots of meat, vegetables and fruit and avoid dairy and grains, particularly gluten. Because type O’s have a strong “fight or flight” instinct (chasing down all those woolly mammoths will do that for you), they need to avoid items that will increase stress such as caffeine. And they need vigorous exercise. But type As need to be vegetarian (eating healthy and organic foods, as opposed, I guess, to unhealthy and inorganic), because their type comes from the time in human development when we were becoming more agrarian. Type B has a laundry list of foods to be avoided. I’m not sure what AB’s are supposed to do, but you get my drift. It all boils down to this one statement:
There is no scientific validity for this diet at all.
And yet the book sold seven million copies! While books dealing with diet and nutrition in a solid, sane way sell hardly any. It’s so frustrating!
Well, I’ll quit tearing my hair out for today. As with this fad diet, so with them all: do your due diligence. Or, as I often ask,
Don’t people know how to use Google?
This Type of Diet Is a Total Fad
