Hi Joyce,

> BT diet is really a misnomer - it isn't really about eating to lose
> weight, though that is usually what happens when you only eat foods
> suitable for your personal genetics.

Fair enough. Weight loss seems to be one of the diet's selling points,
though. If I click "Blood Type Diet" on the front page of dadamo.com, I get
to a page which tells me about losing weight.

Weight loss is something specific, which could easily be tested using the
technique I described in my last post. I would hope that Dr D'Adamo would
test his diet before marketing it, so I would hope to find such a study
referenced under "The Science". Unfortunately what I actually found were
things like the typhoid vaccine paper, which have no relevance.

Since no one seems to have tested the Blood Type Diet, I can't see why we
should expect it to work. There don't seem to be any systematic tests on the
website, for weight loss or any other claimed benefit.

> My B+ friend found she easily lost weight eating a paleo style diet,
> avoiding grains and dairy products [she had been a vegetarian from age
> 50 to 70 when she then developed persistent atrial fibrillation - now
> all but cured under her new regime] ....

It's always nice when someone gets better. On the other hand, this is just
one person, and we know that 10% of people improve their health when given
conventional diet advice. If we found that 25% of people improved when
advised to follow the Blood Type Diet, we would have a highly significant
result. Unfortunately, even if a thousand people say they have lost weight
with the Blood Type Diet, it doesn't tell us what this ratio is.

The other thing is that we want to see people losing weight and not putting it
back on. This means following up a few years after the initial diet advice
was given. This has been done for the low fat "GP diet" and in fact this is
where the 90% failure rate comes from. Any diet that is being proposed as an
alternative really needs to be tested the same way: we want to see people
maintaining a steady and healthy weight. Yo-yo dieting is unhelpful.

Pete