Unlike Dr. Robert Atkins and his low-carb diet plan, Dr. Peter D'Adamo's clinical findings have not yet been validated and popularized on a national level, and this is why so few people are even aware of the connection between your blood type, your diet and your health.



Dr. Atkins' research and diet plan were denounced nationally by the mainstream medical research community and physicians alike for years.

Only today do the same critics, some 30 years later, reluctantly admit that Dr. Atkins was right about his diet of eating more protein and fats and less carbohydrates.

Dr. D'Adamo's findings are critical to understanding why Americans have become some of the most unhealthy and overweight people in the world. An inordinate amount of our children are walking about today as examples of obesity before they are even teenagers.

When you know that there are more O blood types than any other type, you can then better appreciate the extent of our problem.

This article cannot address all of the issues involved, but I will focus specifically on runners who are an O positive blood type and why is it so difficult for them to lose weight.

Despite the numerous diet fads available to us today, D'Adamo says we can no more choose the right diet for ourselves than we can choose our hair color or gender. It was already chosen for us many thousands of years ago.

We have been so busy looking at the characteristics of food that we have failed to examine the characteristics of people, says D'Adamo.

D'Adamo separates foods into 16 distinct groups and then divides them into three categories: highly beneficial (acts like a medicine for the specific blood type), neutral (acts like a food), and avoids (acts like a poison for the specific blood type).

In essence, highly beneficial foods increase your metabolism and avoid foods slow it down.

Because D'Adamo's Blood Type Diet is tailored to the cellular composition of your body, specific foods will cause weight gain or weight loss for you, even though they may have a different effect on a person of another blood type.

Here are the two important weight-loss factors involved:

1) As your body makes the dramatic shift of eliminating foods that are poorly digested or toxic, the first thing it does is try to flush out the toxins that are already there. Those toxins are deposited mainly in the fat tissue, so the process of eliminating toxins also means eliminating fat, therefore losing weight in the process.

2) The effect that specific foods have on the bodily systems that control weight.

The effect of lectins on O positive blood types is very negative, for example:

Lectins, which are abundant and diverse proteins found in foods, have agglutinating properties that can affect your blood.

Simply put, when you eat a food containing protein lectins that are incompatible with your blood type antigen, the lectins target an organ or bodily system (kidneys, liver, brain, stomach, intestines, etc.) and begin to agglutinate blood cells in that area.

This is especially true for O positive blood types.

The lectin activity of certain foods on O positive blood types may do the following:

Inflame the digestive tract lining, disrupt the digestive process, slow down the rate of food metabolism, compromise the production of insulin, and upset the hormonal balance.

(Editor's Note: This is Part 2 of a 5-Part Article.)