Author: Matt Davis / Source: Big Think
- Diet plans are immensely popular and commercially successful, including the blood type diet.
- The diet asserts that people with different blood types need to modify their diets to eat the foods that work best for their blood type.
- While the diet pays lip service to science to justify its claims, it seems to rely on pseudoscience and cannot be considered evidence-based medicine.
It just takes a quick glance at some of the most popular blogs or The New York Times’s bestseller list to realize that people have an enduring obsession with diets. There’s the keto diet, of course, and the paleolithic diet. There’s also the cabbage soup diet, which involves pretty much exactly what you’d expect. There’s the Drinking Man’s Diet, which incorporates a lot of meat and alcohol and seems more designed for fun rather than health. There’s fruitarianism, the Slim-Fast diet, the alkaline diet, the baby food diet, the morning banana diet, the lamb chop and pineapple diet — people are desperate to know what they should be putting in their bodies to maximize health and lose weight.
As just one example of how the diet craze can go awry, consider the blood type diet.
How does the blood type diet work?
The blood type diet asserts that different lectins, a broad class of proteins commonly found in foods, affect people with the various blood types differently. The main feature of lectins is that they are not digestible and they bind to other molecules, particularly carbohydrates. Your body uses this feature for a variety of purposes, such as identifying different kinds of pathogens. At the same time, pathogens use lectins to bind to their intended targets.
The blood type diet argues that the lectins found in foods interact with people differently depending on their blood type. If a person with the wrong blood type consumes the wrong kind of lectins, then the individual can allegedly suffer from skin problems, digestive issues, chronic fatigue, and many other ailments. The truth is, lectins play a huge variety of roles in the body. Some lectins can, for example, promote bone growth, while others, such as ricin, can be impressively lethal. And while different lectins can be used to identify different blood types, there’s no evidence that the different blood types experience symptoms like chronic fatigue from ingesting the “wrong” lectins from a food source. Nevertheless, here’s how the proposed system breaks down:
- People with type A blood are supposed to avoid meat and go mainly vegetarian. They should eat fresh, organic fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and legumes.
- B-type individuals can eat meat, but not chicken. They can eat rabbit, goat, lamb,…
The post Is the blood type diet real? appeared first on FeedBox.