Dr. D’Adamo is the pioneer of the Blood Type Diet. Here Andrea Donsky interviews him to understand how eating for your blood type will be beneficial for health in the long-term.
Naturally Savvy Question (Andrea): For those that aren’t familiar with the blood type diet, can you give us a brief overview of your background and what you do?
Dr. D’Adamo: When I first graduated from Naturopathic College, we were taught that everyone should be a vegetarian in order to heal and maintain perfect health. When I opened up my practice, that is what I did – made everyone a vegetarian. Some people got better but not everyone and this was perplexing to me.
When I really thought about nature I began to realize that in a snowstorm, no two flakes are alike. If nature took all that time to make each flake of snow different, couldn’t it be that food, which energizes our bodies, could produce sickness in some and not in others?
Having a strong background in blood pathology, I turned to ‘blood‘ to do my research and began to realize certain things that eventually led to the Blood Type Diet.
Anthropologists tell us the first human beings on this earth were Type O. Many millennia later Type A appeared, then Type B, and finally the last to appear was Type AB. Through experience, when I gave O’s flesh foods they did well and the A’s did the best with the vegetarian kingdom. As I did this, I noticed much of my patients getting better, stronger, healthier, and my office was full. I did this research from 1957-1978 and then figured I knew all there was to know and so I wrote my first book “One Man’s Food…Is Someone Else’s Poison.”
As time went on, questions arose that I couldn’t answer. I knew my work was right, but realized there was more to it than I really knew. So I started looking at blood under magnification. What I discovered is that your blood group might be O because our predominant parent is O, but if your other parent was A or B you might have a sub trait from their blood type as well. This gave me the ability to see deeper into the body, how it reacts in the world, and vice versa. This discovery was Rh factors and I saw they played a role as well, and of course this is what the last book “Just An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Cure” is based on.
Naturally Savvy Question (Andrea): When patients come to see you, do you only treat them with the blood type diet, or do you employ other methods as well?
Dr. D’Adamo: We use much more than just the blood type diet. We take a series of pulses (an unorthodox method) that I developed. There are 6 pulses. One tells us energy, another acidity, how the bowels are functioning, the kidneys, the small intestine, and the liver. Next, we examine the iris of the eye (a map of our body), which helps me to identify all the weaknesses from the moment of birth up until today. I then set out to treat those weaknesses.
Naturally Savvy Question (Andrea): Being an alternative medicine doctor, how would you say your work differs from a conventional doctor?
Dr. D’Adamo: What I do is locate the cause. When you examine the body in the proper way you find out which organs have the problems and then treat the patient from there.
When one wants to do something in a natural way they need to learn the word ‘patience’ because nature works very slowly. Most sicknesses start in infancy although we don’t feel them. It takes time to develop, so it will take time to go away.
Conditions such as Arthritis, Alzheimer’s, Diabetes, and Cancer aren’t the result of germs or viruses. These diseases are produced by stress and poor eating habits. We DO have control: we can treat these conditions, but you really need to go to the weakened organs and strengthen them directly. I treat the cause, not the symptom. You need to use vitamins and herbs. I see vitamins as drugs – each blood group’s nutrient requirement being different than the other.
Naturally Savvy Question (Andrea): From your clinical experience, what types of people has the blood type diet helped the most?
Dr. D’Adamo: We treat everything from Heart conditions, to Cancers, to Diabetes, etc. I believe people heal for three reasons:
1) Severity of Illness
2) Age of patient
3) How much they are willing to do and not do.
My job is to tell my patients everything they need to do and then I simply walk away. The therapies are up to the patient. People will get better if they stay with the program.
We need to work at recapturing health. Most of us have been given health from the moment of birth and when it breaks down we blame God.
Naturally Savvy Question (Andrea): In your new book, "Just an Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Cure," you take the blood type diet further by sub-classifying blood types into sub types. How are you able to determine what sub-type you are? Is this something that can be determined with a blood test? How far back in your family history can you look to determine your sub-type?
Dr. D’Adamo: No matter how hard you try to see an individual, it’s impossible to get the whole picture from a book. When someone comes to me, we look at the blood and then we are 1000% sure what his or her blood type is.
Someone can have a sub trait of O followed by a sub trait of A – you can be both at the same time.
You can get tested, but it takes a great deal of skill to look under magnification to see if there is clumping. It is the clumping to one side or the other that tells you your sub-group.
But just looking at the blood group is a mistake – there is so much more to who we are.
Naturally Savvy Question (Andrea): In your son’s book, ‘Eat Right for Your Blood Type’, Dr. Peter D'Adamo discusses the breakdown of a person’s blood type by either being a secretor or a non-secretor. Do you subscribe to the same philosophy? How do these factors fit into the new sub-categories?
Dr. D’Adamo: I don’t follow anyone else’s research, but when Peter finds someone else’s research he incorporates it. I must always do my own research and do it myself. Anything I speak about is from my own research.
I follow a very narrow path and it must be prudent to me. When I started to do this research nobody else was doing it. It was by trial and error and as thousands of patients started telling me things it validated my research for me.
Naturally Savvy Question (Andrea): Does a person have to follow the blood type diet 100% to feel the difference? Is it still beneficial to implement some of the changes (for example eliminating only the worst foods for your type)?
Dr. D’Adamo: I think anything you do that’s positive, even small things, begin to accumulate. Every little thing helps. The problems we suffer with today are the wrongs we did in our past. As we begin to change and make corrections today, we are ensuring our health for the future. That’s the nice thing about the program. There are little children that I treated when I started my practice 50 years ago that are now grandparents: intelligent, calm, peaceful, exciting to be around, and with acute minds. What’s nice about it is that it’s not me – I didn’t cure anyone. My job is to always tell the truth, and yours is to take responsibility.
