Recently I was in my favorite coffee house Richton Perk in Richton Park, IL
( See the posting ‘Douglas Discovers Coffee, updated 2/13/2009 for its story). All the regulars have their own custom hand lettered mug with their name on the side and the date of their becoming a regular on the bottom, with their number since the first mug was made. To everyone’s surprise and delight a long lost customer, number 12 of the regulars came in with his beautiful cousin, on the exact anniversary, March 12th on the bottom of her mug.

Nobody there at the time had met the cousin before. Conversation at the Perk is often a fascinating trip into highways and byways of science, history, politics local and global, musical taste and so on, terrible jokes, slices of life not dependent on Fox News or the latest headlines. In the chit chat while we got to know the beautiful cousin we touched on the effect of evolutionary blood line on optimum diet.

So, since what the Perk mixture of eccentrics and hoi polloi talk about is often the inspiration for my articles, and will certainly interest at least some people out there in my cyberspace family, here is some history about how I got interested in the effect of blood groups on human dietary practices.

In the 20th century I used to attend the Evanston clinic of an astonishingly competent chiropractor/healer named Elizabeth, and while there one day met an exceedingly beautiful young woman who worked as a flight attendant for a major airline.

She was just emanating what our Hindu friends call Shakti, a radiant and lovely energy.

Naturally I was interested in her diet, and how she kept her amazing looks and energy when traveling all over the world at a moment’s notice, dealing with the climates and foods of Calcutta, Tokyo, Paris, Los Angeles, Beirut or Chicago with equal ease.

We were so impressed by her energy that Shirley and I invited her to dinner in our home in the far South Suburbs of Chicago, an area so ignored by the media that some people think it doesn’t exist. We made sure that the topic of her energy came up in the conversation. She was an eater of Super Blue Green Algae like Shirley and myself, but did not attribute her energy to that alone.

“I’m a Type O,” she said. “And when I eat according to my blood type I have unlimited energy.”

This was news to me so I had her tell me about it and then as soon as possible read the work of the person who put this ‘so obvious, once said’ concept into the world.

Here then is a summary of the main historical ideas of the blood type diets for those readers who have wondered why the diets and exercise routines that work wonders for others don’t work for them at all. The next sentence contains the principle of the whole study.

There is a fundamental relationship between your blood type and the diet and life style that will be optimum for your health.

Your blood type is a genetic marker whose significance may be seen in the evolutionary tree of your ancestors.

From the scientific point of view evolution is a fact. There are several theories about its mechanism and those people who think that theory means the same as opinion in science, as in common parlance, tend to question the fact because some theory doesn’t agree with them.

At the moment, the cradle of human kind as the primate with the power of abstract thought seems to be Africa. The last act in the series Battlestar Galactica rather heavy handedly pointed out the way that all humanity began with a primeval Eve in Africa. The series was thus reflecting current scientific theories about human origins known to informed people.

The blood of our earliest ancestors was Type O. These people were hunters, not settlers or agrarians.

It was research connecting Type A blood with stomach cancer and pernicious anemia that gave the D’Adamos the clue they needed. It is interesting trivia to this wordsmith that the physicians concerned had the name of the first man in Genesis, whose name Adam means red clay or red earth. Maybe too it was also a coincidence that the chief officer of Battlestar Galactica was named Adama.

The Drs. D’Adamo had discovered that Type O patients did very well on animal products and protein rich diets. These diets require more stomach acid for digestion than those diets that emphasized vegetarian food.

They found that stomach cancer was linked to too little stomach acid, as was pernicious anemia due to a lack of vitamin Bs12 which requires sufficient stomach acid for proper digestion.

From the evolutionary point of view it began to make sense. The original O’s and their descendants were eaters of meat. Their evolutionary path included the immune systems that could deal with the occasional piece of bad meat and the scratches, scrapes and infected wounds associated with the killing of large animals that resisted being killed.

The change of large numbers of people from mainly hunter gatherers to agrarian coincided with the mutation that produced Type A.

These folks did well on a mainly vegetable and grain diet. The Cro-Magnon Type O was followed by Type A New Stone Agers between 15,000 and 25,000 years ago,

People with Type A, even today, predominate as survivors of diseases related to dense populations; diseases such as plague, cholera and smallpox. This is a cogent fact from the evolutionary point of view, because until agriculture developed there was little possibility of great groups settling in one place, and producing by sheer survival those whose immune systems could resist the diseases of groups.

Eventually the gene for Type A spread beyond the Middle East and Asia, where it seems to have started, and penetrated Europe and south-central Russia.

From there the invaders carried their genes, new foods and lifestyles into areas previously dominated by Type O’s, and the majority of people became less able to digest the ultra carnivorous diet that the earlier people had been able to thrive on.

Today the Type A’s are mainly concentrated in Western Europe.

The frequency of Type A diminishes eastward along the early migration trails, but the Mediterranean and Adriatic areas, particularly Spain, Turkey and the Balkans have very high concentrations of Type A.

Eastern Asia contains Type A and the next mutation; Type B.

It seems that the mutation from Type O to A was to do with the change from hunter to agrarian. The change from A to B seems to be associated initially with climate change.

Type B began in what is now India and Pakistan between 15,000 and 10,000 B.C. It was first prevalent in India among the Caucasians and Mongolian tribes who were steppe dwellers.

They spread their B gene through Asia and were famous in history as the Mongol Hordes. They depended for their food on herding and domesticating animals. Their food therefore was mainly meat and cultured dairy products. Their children were brought up on mare’s milk for example.

China and Southeast Asia were also included in the Type B migrations.

By the time this was going on the land bridge between N. America and Asia was under water, so the influx of Type B into North America ceased. Type O populations were predominant until the European invasions.

The Mongol Barbarians are the source of the small numbers of Type B in Europe. Most of them are in Germany and Austria. The greatest concentration of them is among the Germans round the river Elbe, which was the historical dividing line between barbarians and others.

The Indians of India are Caucasian by ancestry and have some of the highest concentrations of Type B populations in the world. Chinese and Korean have high percentages of B and low of A.

The Jews, whether Sephardic or Ashkenazim are mainly Type B and differ from the mainly Type O Arab population of Iraq and ancient Babylon. That is interesting since they both claim descent from Abraham.

The most modern, and therefore the rarest of all blood is the Type AB, from the mingling of Type A Caucasians with Type B Mongolians.

Until about eleven centuries ago there was no Type AB blood. The intermingling of populations from Eastern invaders and European populations produced the new mix. It comprises about 5% of current humanity.

Type AB has the tolerance of A and B. So people with this blood have an enhanced ability to make specific antibodies to bacterial infections. They have a reduced chance of having allergies or autoimmune diseases. The flip side is that Type AB responds to anything like A or B as self. It makes no antibodies therefore for certain kinds of cancers.

This little jaunt into the history of your dietary ancestors will show you that your tolerance of, or need for meat or dairy, or a more or less total vegetarian diet is set out for you in your own blood group.

Your optimum health could well be obtained by the simple expedient of eating and exercising according to your blood ancestry. It is not a boring diet.

Complete details on how to do this are to be found in Eat Right for your Blood Type by Dr. Peter D’Adamo. Since he brought out this book there have been others and now, years later, my local health food store has little plastic cards on sale with recommendations for your food according to blood type.

On a personal note,,, I had been a vegetarian for twenty years before this book was brought to my notice by the beautiful flight attendant. I phoned my doctor and found that in spite of all the various blood tests taken over the years, including before operations, nobody seemed to have noted my blood type. So I did what the book said and sent for a self testing kit. I was Type O. As an energy healer I found that eating a little non mammalian meat now and again has definitely grounded me a lot. And I needed that at the time.

Before I leave this Perk inspired article…One of the regulars, a senior citizen, had a triple bypass operation on February 15th the day after his birthday. Today, less than a month later he was welcomed back at the Perk, a bit weak, but undefeated. Another shared the applauded news of her second granddaughter, with the beautiful name of Amber Nicole. A good coffee house is a second family for everyone who cares to participate.

And back to blood for a moment, for collectors of historical trivia. The blood on The Shroud of Turin is Type AB. Jesus, if he existed as an historical figure, was born about 20 centuries ago. Type AB arrived about eleven centuries ago. The shroud blood is not that of Jesus. The other theory that the shroud once covered the tortured body of Jacques de Molay, the Grand Master of the Templars, has therefore received a boost.