Eating for my Blood Type - The Beginning
Hi, I’m Danielle, Blood Type A+. Fitting because my personality is pretty “type a” naturally.
I came across something called “Blood Type” diet a handful of years ago - it wasn’t shiny or sexy, or anything anyone I knew was doing. It was just another idea that passed into my peripheral on the never ending “find the right diet” excursion.
It occurred to me at this point that I wasn’t even sure of my blood type; how had I made it into my 30’s not knowing this? I ended up finding it in my labor/delivery records from 2016. It wasn’t hard to find, and since I now knew my type, it was hard not to entertain some of the ideas purported in the blood type diet.
I ventured through the lists of foods - it was an interesting approach. Based on your type, there are certain foods that can be a) beneficial, b) neutral, and c) harmful. And interestingly enough, I got excited to read some of the items on the beneficial list that I had currently been restricting in my own diet. Things like buckwheat - grains that are not only delicious, but filling, and now apparently beneficial. Based on this exciting little feature, I decided it was worth a shot.
For a few years I’ve loosely thought about these foods. I haven’t really avoided the harmful foods, mainly because I’ve always thought that it’s wise to eat meat. And I still think it’s wise, but the way I was approaching it was not tailored to maximize my biochemical function based on my blood type. According to the diet, there are no beneficial meats for Type A’s. There are a handful of neutral meats (think: poultry), and then a long list of harmful - actually harmful to you - meats (yep, red meat is one of them).
I was guilty of picking and choosing what I wanted to from the diet because I was what I considered to be a very healthy eater. Nothing I was eating was processed or GMO. I wasn’t eating sugar or soy or gluten. I was sure to have animal protein with every meal - usually either ground turkey or ground beef/steak. Healthy, right?
Fast forward to May 2025: I dove in. I got some encouragement from social media and my interest piqued: is there something to this no-meat thing? Is it possible to feel good, and not just good, but better, eating soybeans? Living on things I typically avoided like whole grains and carb-heavy meals? Avoiding beef?
Understanding that our blood has a genetic component is what really convinced me. It’s hard to argue with your genes. Your body can either do what it can do, or not do what it can’t. There’s just no arguing. So if blood type is compatible with my genetics, the food I eat is probably going to be able to be digested better and more efficiently. I’m willing to try that.
I just quit; no more meat for me. I bought tofu and felt really weird about it. I never thought I would EVER eat anything with soy in it - what we learn is how bad soy is for you and how it promotes estrogen dominance. I have avoided soy the way I have avoided pesticides and added sugars the past 5 years. Here I was buying tofu and saying goodbye to steak. Truth be told, I have always felt very, very full after eating red meat. Not in the sense that I felt sick, just full for a long time, overnight even.
So began the immersion - and I digress from all the exciting factors of diving in fully. As someone who’s been afraid of grains and carbohydrates for years, I had a newfound permission to enjoy these things. Items like buckwheat (which is available in several forms like pasta, breads, and cereals), were about to become a staple in every meal, delivering that satisfying, “carb-full” feeling after eating. I was here for that! I was excited to feel full and be able to eat yummy, filling grains and not feel guilty about it.
As far as vegetables, things didn’t change much, but seeing the beneficial list inspired me to broaden my tastes within the veggie kingdom. You know how you get stuck in a rhythm because it works? I have been guilty of using the same vegetables on repeat because they’re easy in my routine. Now I’m looking at more options and it’s an exciting new layer of my meals that I haven’t tried before.
There are a handful of vegetables that are on the harmful list that I had been consuming because you think you’re being healthy by just eating vegetables in general. But no indeed: no cabbage, no sweet potatoes or potatoes of any kind, no tomatoes, no peppers, no pickles…
It’s in these very detailed differences that the blood type diet makes sense. Here’s the science:
It all comes down to a little process known as agglutination, according to D’Adamo. This involves blood antibodies being able to grab onto toxic materials as they pass by in the bloodstream so that they don’t continue to roam the system. The antibodies in your blood are different than other antibodies in the body - blood antibodies are known as IgM (maybe you’ve seen IgG in your studies). They’re larger and shaped differently, almost like snowflakes, so that they can stick more viruses, parasites, & bacteria together. They actually accumulate these foreign types of cells, kind of like a holding pen, whereas other antibodies simply tag the foreign materials. This process makes it easier for your body to get rid of things. Imagine you went outside to your garbage bin every time you had a single piece of trash. That would require a lot of effort and would be really inconvenient for you. Instead, you toss things into a trash bag in your home and take that trash out when the bag gets full. It’s a safe place to keep the garbage until you can get rid of it, and that’s kind of like what your IgM antibodies are doing for you.
This is where type comes into play. Antigens - which are chemical markers on every cell - determine your type. For example, Blood Type A cells have A antigens, Blood Type B cells have B antigens, AB has A and B antigens, and O has no antigens. The antigens are different because they are made with different chemical sugar bases, which differentiates the structures of each type. And because of their differences, blood types will actually agglutinate, or collect, cells of other blood types thinking that they are foreign invaders, which is why getting a transfusion with the wrong type of blood can kill you. This is also why Type O is the universal donor - no other blood types will agglutinate type O cells because there are no A or B antigens in type O. For the same reason, AB can receive blood of every type. Antigens are important because they create the antibodies we were talking about in the previous paragraph.
And why does any of it matter? You may have deduced that it has *something* to do with your immune system, and you’d be right. Blood type antigens are your body’s greatest security system - they let your body know if the intruders are friends or enemies. (If you have the book, there is a great, in-depth explanation of this on pages 29-34). It stands to reason that supporting your blood type through diet and exercise will optimize your immune function and thus your overall health and wellbeing.
The idea that our blood comes from our ancestors is non-debatable. It makes sense that the way they moved, we should move. Type O’s were the most nomadic of the blood types; their hunter-gatherer lifestyles included roaming over great distances, hunting an area to depletion, and moving on to find more food sources. Conclusively, Type O’s today benefit from the type of movement that mimics this lifestyle: short bursts of high intensity exercise, heavy weights, running, and the like. Fast forward anthropologically and you get your Type A’s who finally figured out how to make the food come to them - enter agricultural society. The Type A’s were the first group who could “set up shop” in one permanent (or semi-permanent) location, sit under a roof, and wait for seeds to sprout and grow into edible plants. Due to agrarian food security, Type A’s didn’t have to roam and travel great distances to find food. The type A bodies adapted to be locally based and thus today’s Type A’s benefit from slow and intentional types of movement (think Pilates, yoga, walking, stretching). In fact, exercise that is too intense (like Type O exercise) can actually be very harmful to Type A’s.
Our bodies need what they need. And it’s all coded in our blood.
Now that I’m three full weeks in, I have abundant energy, and have lost fat. I notice I’m hungry in the mornings (an indication of vitality). My bowels have been firm (as opposed to soft), and I don’t have that tenderness in the center of my tummy when I push on it. It has been so obviously POSITIVE. And as a female, I have noticed no additional cycle symptoms. In fact, I feel SIGNIFICANTLY less bloated and have far more energy than usual (although I still feel a little more fatigued around my cycle - that’s one of my usual symptoms). My breasts are in fact tender, but no more than usual. It’s amazing how tight my clothes are NOT - I usually feel pretty swollen around my cycle, and this time I gratefully do not.
You can find the book here. If you read it, please comment on this blog and let me know your own personal thoughts about it. I’d love to explore this with more people to personally get a general consensus on its effectiveness. Or, if you’ve already tried it, I’d love to hear about your experience, good or bad. It’s so important to remember that diets are never a one-size-fits-all thing. Just because your blood type matches the diet doesn’t mean your personal history is compatible. For example, someone without a gallbladder and Type A blood is going to have different supplemental requirements on the Type A diet than someone with a gallbladder and Type A blood. Someone with candida overgrowth and Type O blood is going to need to eliminate the sugars in the Type O diet. And so on.
I know I haven’t spoken much on the AB and B types - you can find information about them in the book. Type O is the most common blood type, followed by Type A. Together, they cover almost 80% of the human population. AB and B are the most recently evolved types and have slightly different parameters. Type B is in fact the only one that benefits from dairy, while AB is limited by many of the limitations shared by both A & B.
Personally, I’ve been approaching it from a strict “beneficial” standpoint, meaning I’m eating foods only from the beneficial lists, not the harmful or even the neutral lists. There are several foods that are neutral, but I’m focusing on it from a beneficial only approach to maximize the value of this diet.
Things I am loving on the Blood Type Diet that I hadn’t been allowing myself before:
Bread alternatives (using buckwheat flour, flaxseed, sprouted grains)
Oatmeal
Tofu, surprisingly (I love the texture, almost like I’m being naughty and having cheese)
Lentils
Apricots (wasn’t eating fruit before, aside from berries)
Fig (fresh, not dried - I try to avoid dried fruit - anti-fungal)
Plum
Cherries
Pineapple
Things I am missing on the Blood Type Diet:
Coconut (milk, cream, kefir, wraps)
Pot roast
Steak
Cabbage
Chickpeas
Cayenne
Black pepper
Tomato
Sweet potato
Things I don’t miss:
All the ground turkey and chicken
Ground beef
Vinegar
Olives
Eggplant
Milk
Frog (LOL)
Shrimp
Halibut
All I know is that I’m having fun with the textures allowed in this diet that I’ve made myself avoid for other reasons up to this point: I enjoy grains and squishy, satisfying tofu (almost like a cheese or scrambled egg texture) at every meal along with an abundant variety of greens. I never feel painfully full, and I never feel the need to snack. I’m waking up with the sun, but having a hard time falling asleep (I just have so much energy). I feel strong and lean. And I don’t have any pressure on myself to exercise - I just go for a walk or hop on the Pilates reformer or maybe do some really light weights. Life has honestly taken a turn for the easy and the enjoyable. I hope that a few more months of this commitment will prove that this is sustainable for me and that I continue to feel this great. Of course, I’ll keep you posted. And I hope you’ll do the same!
More resources:
Blood Type Test Kit (Instant results, at-home)