North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[road's end farm <organic101@linkny.com>]

On Jun 28, 2006, at 11:29 PM, kieran or donna wrote:

> <x-tad-smaller>    By the time you get to his 2nd or 3rd book, you will notice that he tells all 4 blood types to avoid wheat.  </x-tad-smaller><x-tad-smaller>[. . .]</x-tad-smaller><x-tad-smaller>    Now I'd like ya'lls opinion sometime on his list of fruits.  
> </x-tad-smaller>

Donna, I'm sorry, I'm not at all likely to spend the time reading these.

I do have a family member with some actual knowledge of how new information about human genetics indicates differences in optimum individual diets. I asked him once if there was any blood type connection; he said that although people do vary considerably in this, there is no correlation with blood type.

Your own description indicates that in areas where you have some knowledge, Adamo's information appears to be lacking, but that doesn't stop him from writing as if he did have the information. This is generally a danger sign. So is a tendency to make statements that, if true, would mean most of the population of the world would never have been born, as their ancestors would have been too sick from eating the wrong thing to produce them.

I'm not surprised that there are some apparent success stories. People tend to note positive samples more strongly than negative ones: that is, a hundred people can say the diet doesn't work, but what tends to be remembered is one person saying that it did. Also, people who drastically change their diets to try the latest thing they've read often eliminate something that was bad for them, purely by accident, and may think that this validates the whole diet when they've just stopped eating, for instance, huge amounts of sugar donuts; they probably didn't need to cut out wheat, just to reduce the number of donuts.

I go basically by my mother's principles on this: eat a wide variety of things, including plenty of fruits and vegetables; don't eat a lot of processed foods or additives; and get up and move around. (Not while eating!).

--Rivka
Finger Lakes NY; zone 5 mostly