Variations in the levels of two proteins critical for fat breakdown may explain why some blood types do poorly high fat diets, while others seem to thrive.

Readers of this blog know my feelings concerning the recent PLOS study on the blood type diet. You can read them here and here. As these previous articles demonstrate, the problem was not so much the study’s methodology, but rather with its criteria, i.e. the assignment of blood type diet values to foods that had […]

A look at the core data used in the PLOS Study [1] debunking the Blood Type Diet (BTD) finds support for the researcher’s conclusions that if your experimental  subjects eat potato chips, sandwiches, pizza, ‘beans,’ mac-and-cheese, French Fries and processed meat products while doing 13.7% of the Blood Type Diet, their final cardiometabolic markers will […]

A study purporting to ‘debunk’ the blood type diet theory has recently been published. [1,2] However, a closer look at the study’s experimental design raises serious questions about its conclusions, including whether in fact the participants were actually following the blood type diet at all, and given its other parameters, would it have even been […]

It is not enough to be in the right place at the right time. You should also have an open mind at the right time. –Paul Erdos One thing I’ve noticed about my work with blood groups, which has done much to convince me that it is truly valuable, is the fact that it seems […]

Imagine that you are the owner of a small factory that makes replacement windows. Normally, your ordering department does a pretty good job of things and the supply of the constituent parts necessary to make a decent replacement window (one assumes these to be things like glass, vinyl, aluminum, hardware, etc.) arrive punctually and in […]

There have been no shortage of supercilious, poorly researched articles about the blood type diets in the major media. They are usually provoked by a statement of support by some celebrity or media icon who has experienced success with the plan. Typically within a week my phone rings off the hook with one major media […]

My mailbox got choked up the other morning with emails from friends and strangers wondering about my thoughts on the recent study published in Nature on the mapping of gut bacterial (microbiome) patterns to basically three general groups. The findings were extensively reported in the media, including Wired Magazine which managed to start the article […]

A recent Lancet article has resuscitated some interest about the influence of ABO blood groups and one’s chances of developing coronary atherosclerosis. Like a lot of earlier studies that documented the influence of blood group phenotypic influences on disease incidence, the researchers went in looking for one correlation and wound up finding another; and possibly produced an oversimplification in the rationale of their results.

Known to the Dutch as the “Hongerwinter,” the winter of 1944-45 saw the birth of almost 40,000 babies, each of whose vital statistics, such as name, birth date, and weight, were duly recorded by the Dutch authorities. In the 1960’s researchers began to study these now fully-grown famine survivors, and the results were shocking.