Eat Right for Your School - Letters to the Editor

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients,  Jan, 2003  

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Editor:

Bravo for Dr. Gaby's reminder that the emperor is wearing no clothes (Nov issue, p134). In the back-and-forth that may result from this discussion of what my former students have chidingly called Eat Right for Your School or Be True to Your Type, I'd like to make two points. First, anecdotes from zealots simply have no place in this discussion. Second, to my knowledge there is not one clinical trial in which people who all have the same condition were given the "right" diet for their type while others were randomized to the "wrong" diet for their type to see if these interesting ideas make a clinical difference. So quick are we in natural medicine to believe that what makes physiological or biochemical sense will really help anyone, even in the absence of clinical data. None of us can confidently say that the blood type theory will not be proven at least partly true some day. However, shame to those practitioners who with full belief have, with no shred of hard clinical data from a randomized trial, jumped on this fad like a flea to a dog's back.

Steve Austin, ND

Portland, Oregon

COPYRIGHT 2003 The Townsend Letter Group
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