Every so often the distant past catches up with us in astonishing ways. This is one of the most astonishing for me and the ramifications from my viewpoint are too slow in spreading throughout the health conscious population. To speed things up a bit for my readers at least, here is a summary of a very important and not widely publicized discovery that could change your life considerably; and for the better. Since 2012 is just around the corner and you will need to be in your top condition to deal with it, according to all the prophets, maybe the Buchanan saying is doubly important today, “If you don’t take care of your body where are you going to live?”

I was waiting in the clinic of our network chiropractor a time ago and met an extraordinarily beautiful young woman who worked as a flight attendant for a major airline. Not only was she beautiful but she was emanating what my Hindu friends call Shakti, a lovely radiant energy.

As a health writer at the time I was very interested in her diet, and how she kept up her amazing looks and energy when traveling all over the world at an hour’s notice, and dealing with the time changes and ethnicities of Calcutta, Tokyo, Paris, L.A., Beirut or Chicago with equal ease.

We had her down to dinner shortly after, and made sure that the topic of her energy came up. She was, like us, a devotee of Super Blue Green Algae but did not attribute her energy and well being to that alone.

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

At the time that was news to me so we had her tell us about it and I then researched the work of the person who brought this ‘so obvious once said’ concept into the world. Here are the main historical details for those readers who have wondered why the diets and exercises that work wonders for others don’t work for them at all.

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.

Let’s deal with the semantic issue right up front. From the scientific point of view evolution is a fact. There are several scientific theories about the mechanism by which evolution occurs, and those people who erroneously think that theory means the same as opinion in science tend to question the fact of evolution because some theory is not to their liking.

All the evidence currently available indicates that the cradle of mankind as the primate with the power of abstraction is Africa. The blood of our earliest human ancestors was Type O. They were hunters, not settlers or agrarians.

It was research connecting the Type A blood group people with stomach cancer and pernicious anemia that gave the D’Amanos the clue they needed.

The Doctors D’Amano had discovered that their Type O patients did very well on animal products and protein rich diets. These diets require more stomach acid for digestion than 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 B-12 which requires a definite amount of stomach acid for proper absorption.

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 development of immune systems that could deal with the occasional bit of bad meat, and the scratches, scrapes and infected wounds associated with killing large clawed, fanged or horned animals that didn’t want to be killed.

The change of large numbers of people from mainly hunter-gatherer 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 25,000 and 15,000 years ago.

The Type A people 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 viewpoint, because until agriculture developed there was little possibility of great groups settling permanently in one place, and producing by sheer survival those whose immune systems could best resist these diseases of groups.

As a related historical foot note, the hunter groups among the American Indians were mainly Type O and were decimated by the deliberate germ warfare method of the Anglo Americans who gave the Indians the blankets of smallpox victims. Whole tribes were wiped out by this method.

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 folks are most highly 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 Europe contains Type A, and the next mutation; Type B. It seems that the mutation from Type O to Type A was associated with the change from hunter to farmer. The change from Type A to Type B seems to have been associated with climate change.

Type B began between 15,000 and 10,000 B.C. in what is now India and Pakistan. It was first prevalent in India among the Caucasian and Mongolian tribes who were steppe dwellers. They spread their B gene throughout Asia and were famous in history as the Mongol hordes. They depended for their food on herding and domesticated animals. Their food therefore was mainly meat and cultured dairy products. China and Southeast Asia were also included in the Type B migrations.

At the time this was happening the land bridge between N. America and Asia was under water, so the influx of Type B into N. America was halted, and Type O remained the prevalent blood type here until the European invasion.

The Mongol barbarians are the source of the small numbers of Type B’s in Europe. Most of them are in Germany and Austria. The greatest concentration is still around the river Elbe, which was the historical dividing line between the Mongols and the others.

Those historical dividing lines are fascinating. In my article on coffee I pointed out that there is still a dividing line in Europe between those who have cream in their filtered coffee and those who drink it black, unfiltered and saturated with sugar. In an historical atlas the line is the boundary of the Ottoman Empire.

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

The Jews, whether Sephardic or Ashkenazin are mainly Type B and differ from the mainly Type O Arab population of Iraq and ancient Babylon. Apparently Sarah and Hagar had different blood types. Hagar being Egyptian was the mother of the Arab race and Sarah of the Israelites. Abraham was the father of both. It's a theory anyway, meaning opinion.

The most modern, and therefore the rarest of all blood types 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 with European populations produced the new mix. It comprises about 5% of humans.

Type AB has the tolerance of A and B. So people with this blood type have an enhanced ability to make specific antibodies to bacterial infection. They have a reduced risk of having allergies or autoimmune diseases. Every front has a back however, and the flip side of AB is that it responds to anything like A or B or itself. It makes no antibodies therefore for specific kinds of cancer.

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

Your optimum health could well be obtained by the simple expedient of eating and exercising according to your blood ancestry. Whatever it may be it does not have to be a boring diet.

The original book on the subject was Eat Right for your Type by Peter D’Adamo. Now there are many books available, including a recipe book for every blood type. Just check that title on Amazon.com and you will see all the others.

At the time I encountered this theory and its amazing ability to explain what was happening in a world of confusing diets that didn’t work for everyone, I had been a vegetarian for twenty years. I sent for a blood testing kit and found that I was Type O. As a healer I found that eating a little meat now and again certainly made me more grounded.

And for those people interested in the Shroud of Turin mystery…was it Jesus or Jacques de Molay who was wrapped in the shroud, or was it a trick of Leonardo da Vinci? Well, it wasn’t Jesus. If Jesus existed at all he was born about twenty centuries ago. The blood on the shroud is AB, which arrived only eleven centuries ago.