A few thoughts about ‘acceptance’ in medical ‘science.’ It’s a common game to make it difficult for an idea that you despise to see the light of day.
At first, when my book, Eat Right 4 Your Type was released, the most common negative response was, out of abject ignorance, ‘this is impossible, because we’ve never heard of any of this before.’ Here, they unfortunately ignore the simple fact that every assertion I’ve ever made has been backed up by direct citation in the literature or is a self-evident conclusion drawn from the obvious consequences of differing physiology.
The next stage of resistance came from competing diet theories and systems, most of which, understandably, faced the strategic problem of being relegated to a subsystem of another diet theory. These ‘reviews’ would attempt to devalue the intellectual basis, usually from a position of extreme fact-bending in pursuit of their own righteousness. Most of these critics had little knowledge of the technical underpinnings of my work, but for what they had in mind, none was required.
Then came the folks who simply could not hold two divergent thoughts in their heads at the same time: that red meat or soy could be useful for one person but a problem for another. As the medical/dietician response became more nuanced, the argument morphed into ‘well, the diet has a lot of health foods, and that’s why people say it works,’ ignoring the fact that in large samples, 85% of the respondents had a positive result from eating for their blood type, regardless of who they were and what they ate. In other words, a Type A was just as happy on the Type A diet as a Type O person on the Type O diet, even though the diets share very little in common, and indeed one ‘single diet proponent’ often points to other diets as being dangerous.
Finally, we have the drizzle of ‘negative’ studies, including the famous PLOS One that claimed to have debunked the system, when in fact they just went back into their records for another study, extracted what the people ate, and compared it to some cardiac and metabolic tests that were done at the time. Not a terrible design, but the authors force-fitted the food values in my books to the foods in their prior food questionnaire, so soy, fava, lima, broad became ‘beans, all types.’ Simple statistical analysis showed that this yielded less than 14% concordance, leading me to conclude that if you follow 14% of the diet for your blood type, your results will not be so great.
When I wrote Live Right for Your Type and added the secretor factor, I was excoriated again, this time by many in my own field, who leaned back on the ‘not invented here’ response. Now, you cannot order a microbiome or nutrigenomics panel without first discussing secretion status. The lectin aspect in Eat Right for Your Type was dismissed as irrelevant by most dietitians because ‘most lectins are destroyed by heating.’ This is true in the sense that ‘most’ is not ‘all’ and you don’t need a whole lot of these things to cause problems. Besides that, some lectins, such as those in banana or wheat germ, have their potency increase when heated.
However, there seems to be a glimmer of hope for the future. A few of the early, most vehement critics appear to have changed their attitudes, a testament to their intellectual integrity. It’s nice to see many of the guiding lights in functional medicine now talking about secretor status and even lectins in the diet. For whatever reason, many fail to extend their evangelism to the ABO system, which, of course, is directly linked to it all — and to me. I’m a big boy and don't spend a lot of time dwelling on it, but as the old saw goes, ‘Pioneers take the arrows, settlers take the land.’
