My blood hates meat?!

General Questions
#1

My SO’s mother has always been the type to whole-heartedly accept the latest contradictory diet/supplement/herbal remedy, and it invariably ends up filtering down to my SO. Their latest craze is dieting based on blood type. For the last 3 months they’ve been strictly following a series of books by the same author (Eating right for YOUR blood type! Cooking right for YOUR blood type! Buying fanatical diet books for YOUR blood type! etc.)

My SO has B blood type, and the following are a few of the evil foods for her, according to this author:
-Tomatoes
-Avacados
-Chicken (but not turkey?!)
-Penuts
-Soy (!)
-Whole wheat bread

She’s encouraged to eat a lot of beef. I, on the other hand, have blood type A and the books say I should be a vegetarian. The lists are very extensive for each blood type. Note that it’s more of an ‘eat right’ diet than a ‘lose weight’ diet. This brings me to a few questions:

>Are this guy’s findings supported by anyone in the scientific community?
>Does this diet have any truth behind it, or is the author just trying to stretch his wallet seams?
>Do the foods on this list even have anything in common? I (highly) doubt he tested each food on controlled groups for any significant amount of time.

He also makes some more wild claims about blood type. For instance, he states that if a person with B blood type has a baby with a person of A blood type, the child will eventually get cancer. I imagine that would be a huge scientific issue if there were any truth behind it, but my intuition says it’s not.

Can you guys shed some light?

As always, your infinite wisdom is appreciated.
-M

#2

I’m not a terrible expressive person, but I think I can say without fear of contradiction that the author of the Blood Type Diet is a complete raging lunatic with the scientific acumen of a brick.

I ran into an identical scenario to your own. My chick’s mom is a bit on the gullible side, which, combined with a short attention span, leads to the adoption of all kinds of diets that would be funny if I was the one getting rich off them. An like you, her beliefs filtered down into the fragile brain of my SO. Fortunately, I was able to fight off the demons if ignorance!

Fortunately, given the fact that any realtion to the guy’s theory and reality is purely coincidental, it was pretty easy. Here’s a link tat gives the background of the diet:

http://www.owendot.com/Health_Science/Diet_FAQ.html

Here are a few links that pretty well bury it:

http://www.health101.org/art_blood_type_diet.htm
http://www.acu-cell.com/btd.html
http://www.vegsource.com/articles/blood_hype.htm

Just goes to show that people will believe anything. It is complete and utter B.S., and hopefully the weight of evidence will help convince your SO.

#3

That’s EXACTLY the type of info I was looking for. Thanks for the links!

#4

Yeah, these alternative therapies are so silly, but my mother eats up every last one and never trusts scientifically sound treatments … much of her paycheck is spent on vitamins that I think make her ill, she gets colonics regularly, is obsessed with yeast and parasites, and now pays for some bougus machine that supposedly uses electricity to find out what’s wrong with you. (If you have a bad gall bladder, or parasites, certain frequencies in your body will resonate or something.) :rolleyes: Yet she eschews sound medical advice, and is terrified of drugs.

I guess this is better than the “kinesiology” testing she made me do when I was younger…I had to breathe in and out in separate nostrils (which I could never do because of severe allergic congestion), and then the quack nutritionist would hold a bottle of vitamins or food over my shoulder while I held out my arm. If she pressed down, and my arm went down quickly, then it would be declared that that food was “bad” for me. I would then be given a bunch of pills to take. Because I had very large, swollen tonsils and couldn’t swallow the pills whole, I was forced to chew them. …UUUGHHGHHGH!!!

So, what will they come up with next? “Eat Right for your Hair Color”? “Eat Right for your Height”? They make about as much scientific sense.

#5

If you search around a bit, you’ll find a few other threads where we’ve covered this.

It’s complete and total crap.

#6

It’s all quackery, nonsense, pseudoscience… whatever you want to call it. If she wants to lose weight she needs to eat less, eat better, and exercise. But that requires self-control and dedication, something every dieter dreads…

#7

G.M. Chrysler! And I thought the Blood Type Diet was weird!

The real tragedy is that I haven’t figured out a way to cash in on all of this lunacy. :frowning: