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Blood Type Diet - meet SCD!
by Milk for the Morning Cake - 07.05.2009

Dr Peter J D'Adamo's, Blood Type Diet has been a bit of an inspiration to me over the years. The principle of the diet is that our digestion is affected by our blood type, because our blood types evolved over thousands of years in response to climate and lifestyle. Our digestion, immune systems and physical types followed suit.

D'Adamo identifies the types according to their traits. 'O' is the Hunter, 'A' the Cultivator, 'B' the Nomad and 'AB' the Enigma. Each type has food that acts as medicine and food that is harmful, alongside differing stress triggers and beneficial exercises to help recreate conditions that shaped each blood type.

I've used it with myself and my patients, rather loosely, as most people find it quite hard to follow, but always with great success.

However, with my SCD journey so freshly minted, I had rather forgotten about blood type principles for myself. Yet I had found recently that Fin seemed to be having diarrhoea more often and I had the occasional day when I couldn't explain why I was bloated or had woken up feeling sluggish and cross.

Like anything bubbling into consciousness, it took a while for me to connect the dots and realise that as we had progressed with SCD we had introduced more foods that were contra-indicated for our blood type.

As 'O' blood types we are not suited to dairy and yet we were eating cheddar cheese daily and I had switched to making our yogurt with cows milk. We are unsuited to coconut, peanuts, brazils and cashews and I had gradually bought all of these back into our diets (bar peanuts and cashews for me, which I can't digest at all!). We gaily ate unsuitable ham and chorizo - even though I often found it left me feeling a little bilious. Finally, we kept trying to introduce pulses and beans but found that we would be doubled up in pain with the windows thrown open for relief - 'O' types don't do well on pulses.

I decided to cross reference the two diets and start following an 'O' type SCD diet to see if mine and Fin's mood, stools and energy would follow a more consistent path.

So this is the start of a little mini series - SCD meets the Blood Type Diet. I'll let you know how I get on and provide information about how the other blood types affect SCD.

If you don't know your blood type you can get a little kit from the chemists that just involves a little prick on the end of your finger.

Meanwhile, I'm off to have a prune and some peppermint tea - both highly beneficial. Tune in next time for a more in depth look at 'O' type SCD.

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