Business & Tech

Eating — and Cooking — for Your Blood Type

A local food whiz teamed up with a local Naturopath and just released four e-cookbooks which are based in the practice of blood-type dieting.

When traditional western medicine doesn’t work, some people turn to other sources for help.

That’s what happened with Kristin O’Connor’s mother, who after years of debilitating ulcerative colitis and not finding a solution from doctors and meds, turned to the theory of blood-type dieting. O’Connor said her mother visited Dr. Peter D’Adamo, a naturopathic doctor who developed the theory of blood-type dieting, which is what it sounds like—eating some foods and avoiding others based on your blood type—and shortly thereafter experienced rapid improvement in her health.

“Seeing her transformation, it was incredibly powerful,” said O’Connor. She said her mother was “barely eating anything” because her mother didn’t know how her digestive system would react.

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That was enough to win over both mother and daughter to believe in eating in respect to blood type. It was even enough to ‘convert’ O’Connor’s brother, a gastroenterologist by profession, she said.

O’Connor, who grew up in Ridgefield, went through a gauntlet of health problems herself. Between the ages of 18 and 21, she experienced similar gastrointestinal pains which were further troubled by her diet. She said that after seeing her mother’s health improve, she went as a patient to see D’Adamo and experienced a similar recovery. Now O’Connor works at D’Adamo’s office and she has written a series of e-cookbooks, one for each blood type—A, B, AB, and O. Each book is stocked with 150 blood-type-specific recipes and has just been released electronically via Drum Hill Publishing, debuting today.

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A ‘type O’ chili would be regular chili, as tomatoes and red meat are staples according to D’Adamo’s diet. However, an ‘A’ blood type should avoid red meat, tomatoes and peppers, so O’Connor had to use her culinary magic—she’s the owner and operator of nuristhis.com—to make a chili friendly to blood type O. She said she came up with a chili verde, which used different spices but had the same “feel of chili.”

How it's done

D’Adamo, who lives in New Canaan, has been involved in the practice of blood-type dieting for thirty years, but it wasn’t his idea—it was his father who asked the question, “’Why do some people do better on one diet and not on another?’” said D’Adamo.  

At first, he said, he was skeptical. But after writing his thesis on the subject, D’Adamo graduated from Bastyr College with Naturopathic Doctorate and further explored what he found to be an effective , natural method of combating problems involving “weight problems, inflammation” and other disorders.

“It doesn’t supersede emergency care but these are things that people can control on their own, by keeping better care of themselves,” said D’Adamo.

resides in Wilton at 213 Danbury Road. D’Adamo said that patients come mostly from all over the world, with only “10-20 percent” of patients coming from the immediate area. The clinic has been part of the town for six years, after relocating from Stamford and Greenwich. The Wilton building has a small, demonstration storefront with supplements, testing materials and cook books that is open to the public. Main retail storefronts are located in New York City, Singapore and London.

After setting up an appointment, patients meet with either D’Adamo or one of his practitioners. After undergoing a number of procedures, the data is run through a software program invented by D’Adamo, SWAMI, which then identifies a “personalized Genotype.” These calculations are based on “12,600,000 individual calculations” which were “performed on 225 individual nutrient values found in each of 800 foods, matched to the results of 130 measurements and tests” that have been conducted on the patients, according to an example of a SWAMI print-out on D’Adamo’s website. Out of 900 recipes, the program narrows it down to a “top 150 recipes” for that person, and the patient can then go to a personalized website to make their own meal plan, according to D’Adamo.

The entire process is relatively cheap, and depending on whom one sees—either Dr. D'Adamo or one of his trained practitioners—could be as low a couple hundred dollars.

D’Adamo said that “roughly, eight out of ten people seem pretty happy” after following their new diet. “That’s the evidence,” he said. 

Drum Hill Publishing is also located in D'Adamo's Wilton office.


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