Whole Living Guide >
Bio-Individual Diets - Nutritional Narcissism or New Nutritional Paradigm?
BY DYLANA ACCOLLA, L.AC; Illustration by Jacob Goble

Steve sat in my office describing his frustration with the
Atkins diet. "I don't know why it is, but I've hit a plateau and I just don't seem to be able to lose any more weight," despite his strict adherence to the Atkins regime-all the protein and fat he wanted but no refined carbohydrates.

Aaron's wife was diagnosed with off-the-charts cholesterol, was on heavy-duty medication that wasn't significantly lowering it, and her weight was creeping up uncontrollably. So Aaron put them both on Dean Ornish's low-fat, low-protein, and high complex carbohydrate diet. He was a suave 30 pounds lighter the next time I saw him, while his wife's cholesterol had dropped to safer, controllable levels. She had lost only a few pounds, however, he reported, even though they were on the exact same diet.

Deborah thinks she has candida overgrowth. Despite following a long-term anti-candida diet and taking anti-candida and parasite-dispelling herbal tinctures, the symptoms persist. "It's getting to the point where I don't know what to eat!" she said in her last visit to my office.

So many of my patients are in the same predicament, and doctors hear this kind of complaint everyday. How can we answer these questions? Truth be told, we are all on diet-information overload - there is just too much diet and nutrition-related minutiae out there to piece together into a coherent puzzle. Meanwhile the pursuit for the magic bullet diet that will keep Americans fit and trim for life remains elusively out of reach. As a practitioner I have to ask myself why some diets work well for some, but not for others. Why can people eat the best organic food, take the best nutritional supplements, exercise regularly, get enough rest, and still feel fat and unwell?

It's not just that we are eating more junk food than ever before. Part of the problem can be traced back to the government sanction and popularity of low-fat diets, which began in January 1977, when a Senate committee co-chaired by George McGovern and Bob Dole published its "Dietary Goals for the United States," advising Americans to curb their dietary intake of fat to counter the epidemic of chronic and fatal diseases sweeping the country. Scientific evidence to support claims that fat was dangerous was ambiguous. Nonetheless, in 1984, the National Institute of Health officially recommended that all Americans over the age of two eat less fat. In less than 10 years fat went from being satiating to being toxic, and the non-fat movement was born.

It didn't matter that the several hundred millions of dollars that the NIH sunk into trying to prove that fat kills failed to show just that. Five major studies revealed no such link between high dietary fat and heart disease. A sixth concluded that reducing cholesterol levels with drug therapy could help prevent heart disease. This was the study used to support low-fat logic, and once the NIH supported the low-fat doctrine, societal and market forces took over. American agriculture was set to benefit by the whopping six to 11 servings of bread, pasta, cereal, and rice recommended by the re-configured Food Guide Pyramid, put out by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The food industry began churning out thousands of low-fat products, replacing fats with sweeteners, high-fructose corn syrup, and a whole generation of fat substitutes, such as Proctor and Gamble's Olestra, emerged. The Pritikin Diet and Dean Ornish's findings supported the low-fat gospel.

Meanwhile, other high-level scientists were unwilling to give low-fat the nod for all Americans. Pete Ahrens, who had done seminal research on cholesterol metabolism at Rockefeller University, testified to McGovern's committee that everyone responds differently to low-fat diets. Other experts pointed out that if nothing else, the low-fat diet idea is radically oversimplified. It ignores that fact that unsaturated fats like olive oil are good for you because they raise your good cholesterol (high-density lipids) and lower the bad ones (low-density lipids) in comparison to carbohydrates. Not only that, but some nutritional research, by the late 1960s, showed that a low-fat, high carbohydrate diet could raise triglyceride levels and lower the HDL levels to create a satellite of imbalances known as Syndrome X, or insulin resistance.

Insulin regulates blood sugar levels. It also regulates fat metabolism. Insulin helped primitive people retain fat in times of plenty, which they would burn off in lean times. Today, people eat so much sugar and refined carbohydrates that they become insensitive to insulin. In this vicious cycle, the pancreas pumps out more and more insulin to keep blood sugar in check, and the insulin tells the body to hold onto more and more weight. And as long as they remain on a high-carb diet, they get fatter and fatter, unable to shake the weight.

Hence the popularity of the Atkins diet. Robert Atkins, author of Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution (1989) and Doctor Atkins' New Diet Revolution (2001), allows his readers to eat protein and fat without limit but he puts the lid on sugar, starches, and refined carbohydrates. No fruit juice, and a moderate amount of vegetables. Eating protein, fat, and vegetables effectively shuts off the insulin faucet in many people, and the body starts burning fat rather than storing it.

As my patient Steve, noticed, however, Atkins doesn't work for everyone. In fact, no single diet really works for everyone. The idea that different people have different nutritional needs originated long before our dietary quagmire of the past 30 years. Its roots can be attributed to Dr. Weston Price, a Cleveland dentist of the early 20th century, who has been called the "Charles Darwin of Nutrition." Price, concerned with the prevalence of dental decay and physical degeneration in the mouths of Americans, traveled the world to study the mouths of indigenous people and isolated genetic groups. He found that beautiful, straight teeth, disease resistance, and emotional stability were typical of indigenous people on their traditional diets. It is important to mention that everybody's traditional diet was vastly different, with Eskimos eating up to 10 pounds of meat and fat a day, while tribes in tropical climates consumed near-vegetarian diets, and the Swiss ate a diet laden with cheese, milk, and rye. In sharp contrast were those tribes who had adopted "civilized" diets consisting of sugar, white flour, pasteurized milk, alcohol, chemicals, and preservatives. The further people moved from their traditional diets, the worse their teeth, gums, and structural alignment in the mouth became. Degenerative illness proliferated, and emotional stability declined.

Dr. Price's book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration (1939), demonstrated several ground-breaking nutritional concepts, the first being that there is no universally healthy diet. Second, the only healthy diet is one that meets one's own genetically based requirements, not what a diet book or a diet expert says is right. Third, Price also showed that by returning to one's traditional diet, physical degeneration could be reversed. Finally, he showed that there are no "good" foods or "bad" foods. Rather, people thrive on diets meant for their genetic type and decline on other foods.

Dr. Roger Williams, a biochemist, took Price's research a step further with his classic book Biochemical Individuality (1956), in which he asserted that individuality pervades every part of
the human body, from the gross anatomical level to microscopic, cellular level. He also found that imbalance or inadequate nutrition at the cellular level is a major cause of human disease. Our nutritional needs are genetically determined and we have highly individualized nutritional requirements.

How do you determine what your genetically determined
nutritional needs are? Naturopathic doctor Peter J. D'Adamo, author of Eat Right 4 Your Type (1996), has sold millions on the idea that blood type can determine nutritional needs. D'Adamo's intriguing theory is based on the assumption that early nomadic humans, the hunter-gathers, had type O blood, and their diet contained as much meat as they could get. Then, about 15,000 years ago, agrarian culture developed and diets shifted to more grain-based, vegetarian diets. The farmers evolved into type A. Further evolution and co-mingling produced types B, and AB. According to the theory, people with type O blood will do well on a lot of meat, while the later types are genetically predisposed towards grains and dairy products.

It sounds good, but in fact, clinicians report as many successes as failures with the system. Anthropologists can point to evidence that all four blood types existed in the hunter-gatherer Paleolithic era. Other researchers suggest that the theory doesn't work for all people today because the blood types of the past were quite likely homogenous, whereas contemporary blood types are likely very different from those of the Paleolithic era. Nutritional needs have likely changed accordingly. Nevertheless, many people do well on Dr. D'Adamo's blood type theory, suggesting that there is at least a drop of substance to it.

One man's food is another man's poison
Dr. Williams called for the development of a reliable method to establish metabolic profiles that could be used to evaluate and treat patients with nutrition on a highly individual basis. One researcher who took up his call was an orthodontist from Texas named William Donald Kelley. Dr. Kelley knew of Price's work with primitive cultures and began working on the poor teeth problem. His research was interrupted, however, when he developed pancreatic cancer in the mid-1960s. Rather than resign himself to die, Kelley set to work ridding his diet of sugar, refined carbohydrates, and junk food. Encouraged by the progress he made on eating fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, Kelley began researching and adding other therapies including vitamins, minerals, enzymes, and detoxification techniques, and he survived the cancer. Over the next few years Kelley began to treat other cancer patients with his protocols and he became a highly regarded figure in the alternative medicine movement.

Kelley's eureka moment came in 1973, when his wife came down with a life-threatening illness after inhaling toxic paint fumes. Kelley's own protocol failed to help his wife. At last Kelley tried the one thing he had avoided giving her-meat. Once she ingested beef broth and meat she made a swift and impressive recovery. Within 24 hours she went from being nearly comatose to sitting up in bed. Literally, one man's food was another's poison.

It became clear to Kelley that what constituted a healthy diet for one person could be a formula for disaster for another. If any nutrient or food can have totally opposite biochemical effects in different people, how can there be a treatment-for any condition-that can work for all people? The logical answer is that there can't.

Kelley realized that two people with the same degenerative disease could have virtually opposite biochemical imbalances. But when two opposite biochemical protocols are administered, both patients get well. To illustrate, a diet high in fatty red meat may cause one person to suffer with obesity and extremely elevated cholesterol, while actually lowering the cholesterol and producing weight reduction in someone else. The same applies to all kinds of other common ailments. For example, a diet that resolves headaches, digestive disturbances, chronic fatigue, arthritis or allergies in one person can actually produce these identical problems in another individual with a different type of metabolism.

To Kelley, the logical conclusion was that it is not the disease, but the underlying imbalances that have caused the disease, that should be treated. From this viewpoint, diseases are expressions of underlying imbalances. Successful, predictable, reliable diet therapy can be chosen once you know the metabolic type of the patient because only then will you know how nutrients behave in his or her metabolism.
* While it is true that there are tens of thousands of biochemical reactions taking place in the body on a daily basis, Kelley and William Wolcott, his main assistant, theorized that all of those processes fall under the control and regulation of just a few fundamental homeostatic systems, the most significant of which are dualistic in nature. These homeostatic mechanisms function through complementary yet opposing influences. In terms of nutrition, metabolic type research has shown that every food and nutrient has a specific inhibitory or stimulating effect on one or the other side of the homeostatic control mechanisms. Thus, no food or nutrient is "good" or "bad" for everyone-it totally depends on the particular biochemical balance of the individual in question. Research also indicates that no adverse condition can exist without an imbalance in one of the fundamental homeostatic control mechanisms.

Currently nine fundamental control mechanisms have been discovered and are used to define one's metabolic type. The most important ones are the autonomic nervous system (the sympathetic and the parasympathetic divisions) and the oxidation rate (the rate nutrients are converted into energy). Certain nutrients stimulate and strengthen sympathetic output, while others increase parasympathetic output. Certain nutrients increase the rate of oxidation while others slow it down.

Other homeostatic control mechanisms include acid/alkaline balance (pH balance), prostaglandin balance (regulates immune and inflammatory responses), electrolyte balance (regulates circulation and osmotic pressure), catabolic/anabolic balance (intracellular oxygen metabolism), constitutional type (pitta, kapha, vata), and blood type (basis for blood type-specific food reactions). Interestingly, blood type plays only a minor role in this system.

In any given individual, one or another of the homeostatic control systems will dominate. Either the autonomic system has the stronger impact and determines the influences of nutrients in a given person, or the oxidative system exerts its impact. Whichever system dominates determines whether nutrients will acidize or alkalize in that person. This principle, "the Dominance Factor," was formulated by Wolcott in 1983 and Metabolic Type testers claim that it explains why for any predictable, reliably successful therapy, you must first determine the dominant system and the metabolic type before you can know how nutrients behave in a patient's metabolism.

Fortunately for you, you do not have to understand the biochemistry involved to take the 65-question test in Wolcott's The Metabolic Typing Diet (2000) that helps you determine what kinds of foods are best utilized by your system. To be sure, the test has its share of oddball questions, such as, "How do bee stings affect you?" and "How would you describe your gag reflex?" But somehow by the end of the test Wolcott has figured out your dominant homeostatic control and your oxidative speed. With this information, he can, with about 80 percent accuracy he says, help you determine your nutritional needs without getting you too involved in the biochemical lingo.

Scores determine whether you are a Carbo Type, a Protein Type, or a Mixed Type, and you can then turn to the appropriate sections on diet and eat according to your metabolic type. Once you have the hang of your general diet, further refinement is possible with the suggestions later in the book. For people with chronic illness, it is possible to have an hour-long session with a Certified Metabolic Type Advisor after having a computer analyze a questionnaire and customize a diet and supplement plan for you. It costs about $100. There are more comprehensive programs should you be so inclined, which include a 2500-point computer analyzed questionnaire, glucose, protein, and other mini challenge tests, a circadian rhythm test, hair mineral analysis, endocrine type testing, and a detoxification program.

Wolcott, Kristal, and Healthexcel add a disclaimer to their program, saying that while their concepts, diet and lifestyle suggestions "are based on our own theories drawn from the ideas of past researchers in the field. These theories have not been scientifically proven." When it comes to diet and nutrition, however, what's been proven? Wolcott and his team seem to be genuinely pioneering the development of a new paradigm of diet and nutrition that combines the wisdom of holistic medicine with the accuracy of modern science. The Metabolic Typing Diet gets my Diet Book of the Year Award.