The second part of the Blood Type Diet has to do with antibodies. An antibody is just a piece of protein made by your body for a particular use- to get rid of bad stuff. The bad stuff includes bacteria, viruses, and anything that your body hasn’t made on its own. Let’s pretend, for our purposes, that your white blood cells are dumb and only do what they’re told- which is to destroy anything with antibodies. If it doesn’t have an antibody attached to it, your white blood cells don’t know how to tell if it’s good or bad for you.
You make antibodies that attach to the bad guy, then the white blood cells know to get rid of it. Some antibodies are special though, and don’t need white blood cells to help them; like the antibodies that protect you from other blood types. If you’re type A and you get a transfusion with type B blood, your body recognizes the wrong blood type and dumps antibodies into your blood stream to stick to the B cells. By sticking all the blood cells together, it’s like dumping superglue into your blood stream; the blood clots, and you could die. If you’re AB, the universal receiver of blood, you don’t make antibodies against blood type because you would end up killing yourself—the carrier of all the blood types. So you’re not only rare but you’re special too!
Now to the food part:
Something you probably didn’t consider before is that food can have blood type! Which means you should treat food like a blood transfusion: You want to get the right one. Food has blood type, because “blood type” is just a piece of sugar. Food has lots of sugar—fructose (fruit), sucrose (beets, sugar cane), mannose (cranberries), fucose, galactose, and lots more. The last two sugars, including some variation, are the blood type sugars. Where do you find fucose and galactose? Fucose is in mushrooms, brewer’s yeast, flax seeds, and many types of seaweeds. Galactose is in milk, cheeses, red algae, shark cartilage, and chondroitin sulfate.
If you extract those sugars from food that you have antibodies against, it’s the same thing as a bad blood transfusion. Luckily most of us don’t eat with an IV for our nutrients, so we don’t have to worry about food killing us. But when you put those foods that look like the wrong blood type into your gut, you cause a non-lethal reaction that can still hurt you.
For example, when a person who is blood type A drinks milk, the digestive system detects the D-galactose in milk and causes the body to “reject” it. Milk is full of lactose and D-galactose. The rejection that happens here is different than lactose intolerance, which is just a deficiency in lactase enzyme production. D-galactose is what blood type B is made of. In a transfusion, the type A or O person sees D-galactose as a foe, and makes antibodies that stick the type B red blood cells together. This causes clotting and sometimes death if not corrected soon enough. So when the A or O digestive system sees milk, which looks like blood type B to their body (lots of D-galactose in milk), their body tries to combat the foreign sugar by producing mucus and other allergy-like responses. Mucus is a great food for certain kinds of bad bacteria, so having too much puts you at a higher risk for infections and other unpleasant side-effects. And many people experience hay fever and other kinds of sinus problems when they eat dairy. Is it any wonder that most mammals stop drinking milk after infancy? Blood type B is the only group of humans whose bodies actually gain benefit from milk and other dairy products with high amounts of galactose- because those foods look like them!
Milk is not the only food that this happens with. Another example is pork. People always wonder why pork is an avoid, since it’s considered a low-fat protein source. Well pork is a source of N-acetyl galactosamine (blood type A). So just like type A and milk, type B and O should avoid pork because of this immune-stimulating sugar.
Pork is an interesting food, because it’s not only the antibody reaction that makes it an “avoid”- it also contains lectins and other toxins, as hogs are naturally toxic animals.
Even some nutritional supplements are not blood type proof. Chondroitin sulfate, as mentioned earlier, is another source of N-acetyl galactosamine, which causes the same problem for O and B. People who pump their bodies full of health products are sometimes doing more damage over time than they are good. Now you can see why this kind of research is so important. Just imagine how much trouble people could save themselves by sticking to the right foods for their blood type!
