A blood type diet backs up the idea that the foods we eat react chemically with our blood type. If you follow a diet designed for your blood type, your body should digest food more efficiently as well as allowing yourself to lose weight, have more energy, and help prevent diseases. But how much of this is true? The answer to that is likely none of it. 

The idea of a blood type diet was first brought to light in 1996 by a man named Peter D’Adamo, a naturopathic physician. He had published a book explaining how people could be healthier, live longer, and achieve their ideal weight by eating according to their blood type. However, in 2013 and 2014 studies, researchers found evidence explaining no benefits from a blood type diet. They even found that while people following any of the blood type diets had some improvements in certain cardiometabolic risk factors (cholesterol and blood pressure), those improvements were unrelated to blood type (Shmerling, 2019). 

D’Adamos “Recommended” Blood Type Diets (If they were true)

Type O Blood: This blood type should have High protein foods and eat lots of meat, vegetables, fish, fruit, but limit grains, beans, and legumes.

Type A Blood: Should choose fruit, vegetables, tofu, seafood, turkey, and whole grains but avoid meat. 

Type B Blood: Should pick a diverse diet including meat, fruit, dairy, seafood, and grains.

Type AB Blood: Should eat dairy, tofu, lamb, fish, grains, fruit, and vegetables. 

Myth Busted 

 One study that debunked the blood type diet was a study done in 2014 by the University of Toronto. The researchers conducting this study gathered data from 1,455 study participants. “We found no evidence to support the blood type diet theory,” said the senior author of the study, Dr. Ahmed El-Sohemy, Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Nutrigenomics at the University of Toronto.

D’Adamo thinks that type O and type B must eat meat daily to be healthy. This is anything but true, especially when it has been proven that vegetarian diets consistently have shown to produce lower rates of cancer, heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, gallstones, kidney disease, obesity, and colon disease, and to enable people to live longer and more healthy lives.

It’s mathematically impossible that the health advantages for vegetarians could be accounted for only by type As benefiting from the absence of meat, this would have to be a factor for all blood types. 

In Conclusion

A blood type diet has been proven to be a hoax that should not be trusted. A majority of people who follow a blood type diet may only be seeing improvements if they’ve increased the plant foods and started a more simplistic way of eating. Long term research clearly shows that the blood types eating animal-based foods are at higher risk of chronic disease. It comes down to paying attention to your body and maintaining a varied diet with high nutritional content fruits and vegetables.