Interview with Dr. Peter D'Adamo & Catherine Whitney

Peter:

[transcript starts two minutes in…we're talking about the influence of Peter's father.] This kind of scientific element to it, because it just really wasn't in many instances possible. He just asked that question, which was ... It didn't make intuitive sense to him that people would normally thrive on an identical diet. He had noticed early on that that wasn't the case at all. Some people who went through the standard spa cuisine of the 1960s and '70s, some people, what they now would call a plant and raw foods diet, or a detoxification diet, or something like that, some did well, but others actually proceeded to actually get worse.

Nowadays we talk about genetics and [nutragenomics 00:00:43] and all these other kind of genetic type technologies, but back then there was no genetics, in the sense of any practical sense. They only way you could distinguish people would be the external appearances that they had, or blood type.

Catherine:

Plus there was absolutely, virtually no sensitivity to the idea that different diets might work for different people.

Peter:

There was no sensitivity to diets. Generally the mentality of the time was largely that you ate to not get scurvy, you ate to not get [beriberi 00:01:22]. The notion of how deficient you have to be in something to get those kind of illnesses is so far away from the way we look at it now, where we see that there can be choices that we make that don't simply prevent deficiencies, but actually cause us to have greater performance and greater health and greater vitality.

There was two leaps of faith, I think. There was one that there would be some link between genetics that were possible at the time, and blood typing is a very easy thing to accomplish in a clinical environment. You just need a drop of blood and away you go. But also, two, that even food itself could be something above and beyond what at the time was considered. You would remember that the most practical advice you would get from a physician back then was eat a balanced diet. That was the standard mantra. Eat a balanced diet. Balanced diet? What? A balanced diet of the kind of foods that basically we ate lots of back then, which were meats and processed foods and packaged foods and sugar and saturated fats and things. You wanted a good balance of that, apparently. At the time, that was sufficient.

Really, I think one of the things that he was able to get on top of was the fact that, as you said before, there was no single, simple way to look at things, that people were different. That was important because what followed were a series of tidal waves of particular ways of eating that came in these booms. We had, back in the '60s, the high protein diets, the Scarsdale diet, the Atkins diet. Then that was followed in the late '70s and '80s with the extreme low fat diet, with emphasis on complex carbohydrates and oat bran muffins and things like that. As usually is one of these extremes is paramount, the other one undergoes a period of being vilified. Right now we're done vilifying high protein diets.

Catherine:

We've got the Paleo.

Peter:

Now we're vilifying high carbohydrates and all sorts of other things. The reality is that each person is really ... Should be looked at as a sort of laboratory of one, and that ultimately ... The more likely you are to have a crude or a base instinct, everybody should be Paleo, or everybody should be vegan, everybody should be fill-in-the-blank, you're still falling into that realm of okay, what are we looking at the role of nutrition as being? I think that that's really where the mindset is finally changing. When I wrote Eat Right, it was a hard book for a lot of people to fathom, because it didn't easily fall into one camp or the other. It didn't fall into low fat, complex carbohydrates. It didn't fall into high protein. It's just that they're all kind of valid. You just have to do a little extra work trying to figure out which one works for you.

Catherine:

It really revealed the insecurity people have around food, too, because it's like they didn't know what to do, not being told that there's just one way. Then it just makes people nervous. You do have to have a base of knowledge to make the diet work for you.

Peter:

There was a great cartoon that I had seen recently, and it was just a line of people that came to a ... Two signs. One sign on the left pointed to the left, and it said, "Simple, but false." To the right was, "Complex, but true." The reality is that the simplicity that we strive for, and sometimes simplicity is great, because typically if you can explain things in simple terms, it probably means we're getting closer to the essence of it, and the essence of simplicity in nutrition goes back to the ideas of don't die from beriberi. That simplified nutrition, and it's really valid. Someplace in this world right now, somebody needs nutritional guidance to not get beriberi, but the other side of the coin is that ultimately looking at it from any other perspective, other than just the avoidance of some deficiency disease, you have to look at the individual.

There is something inside of all of us that takes any piece of advice, be it from your accountant, or from your lawyer, or from your physician, and ask themselves deep down inside, "Does this really pertain to me? Does this make sense? Do I feel that that's me they're talking about?" I think that a lot of what we base our supposition on is that even though perhaps maybe the Blood Type Diet is a little bit more complex than just simply do this or do that, that that little nagging question about is this going to be the way that I can find out something that's right for me? Is this going to be something that's going to be a slightly bit more specific to who I am? Slightly a bit more tailored. I think that's a driving force.

I don't think people up until Eat Right for Your Type even thought that there was a way that you can wind up choosing between different diets other than just simply trying one and seeing if it worked, and then trying the other.

Catherine:

Right. You decided to write a book, obviously to reach more people.

Peter:

It's funny. I didn't decide to write a book though. It was a phone call that came to my office one day from an editor, who said-

Catherine:

Will you work with me?

Peter:

No. I was in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Catherine:

You were in Greenwich. Okay.

Peter:

I got a call from an editor at another company, not the company that I wrote Eat Right for Your Type at, and she said, "I had seen you in a magazine, and you seemed like you had a nice poise. Would you like to write a book?" I said, "Yeah, I've got this idea that there are some ways you can predict differences in how people should eat by understanding what their blood type is." She actually said it wasn't something they were interested in, and I didn't want to write the other book that she wanted me to write, so that was the end of the conversation.

Then a couple months later she called back and said there was a meeting that she had had with all the other people, an editorial team, and they had brought it up, and they were now all of a sudden intrigued by it, and they went and looked, and they didn't find any books in print on the subject, so she said, "Okay, let's write that book." To this day, I have a couple of friends who are want to be writers, and I tell them about this story and they just cringe because they spend their whole lives basically shoving manuscripts in manila envelopes and having them returned unopened. Here's a guy who basically just answered the phone and somebody asked me, "Do you want to write a book?"

Catherine:

When it's right it's right.

Peter:

Then you came on the scene when we actually had an interesting process. The company that I was writing the early version for got out of the, what they called the trade books, the self-help books. They went back to school textbooks was going to be their primary focus, so at that point I was adrift, but the editor who I was working with was a wonderful woman, said, "You know, you really should have an agent." I never felt comfortable with you, but I never thought that I needed an agent, because I had not come into this process with any prior awareness. She said, "I spoke to another person who is an agent. She's interested and you should call her up on the phone." Then I did, so I had an agent. Then the agent said, "You know, you really should find a good co-writer, because A, you've never written anything, and you have a great story, but if we have you work with a co-writer, the co-writer's reputation will give a lot of confidence to people to feel that this is a project that they can get behind, and come up with the funding and the support for." That's when we started working together.

Catherine:

That process was over probably a couple ... Meanwhile, you were writing the book. Meanwhile, you had a manuscript by the time ...

Peter:

A bunch of writing.

Catherine:

You had done a lot of work on-

Peter:

Right. I think we're really ... You brought to the process an awareness of what the average person would like in a book like this. I'm going to clear my throat Bob. Okay?

Catherine:

I remember when-

Speaker 3:

Hold on.

Catherine:

oh.

Speaker 3:

Because I want to give him a nice-

Catherine:

Oh, are we off.

Speaker 3:

No. He'll cut into this now.

Catherine:

Okay. I remember when Eat Right for Your Type was published. There was a lot of confidence with the publisher, and in fact there was a bidding war to get the book in the first one. A lot of publishers were saying this is potential, but the truth is we had no idea what to expect.

Peter:

Right. There were 16 publishers who actually bid on the book. The interesting thing about it was that they were ... When eventually it wound up with GP Platinum, who then got bought by Penguin, so now we work for Penguin, Penguin, or Platinum at the time, thought that this was going to be an easy sell on the East Coast and and easy sell on the West Coast. When the book came out, it sold in neither place, which got everybody quite alarmed, because they thought, what's going on here?

Then several weeks into the process they started seeing all these blips in middle America. Springfield, Illinois, and Louisville, Kentucky. All of the sudden these places were buying the book. I kind of take a little bit of inverse pride in that, in that ultimately I don't think the people that would have been the quick adopters were really ready for this, but there were a lot of people who had probably never embarked on any dietary book of any sort who seemed to be quite willing to embrace this very fast. What was happening was that there were these clusters, and when they went back and they started finding out why all these particular middle America places were having such blips, it's turning out that people in churches, pastors in churches were getting up and saying, "Everybody go out and buy this book." It was kind of a ground swell.

Then eventually the more "[arodite 00:12:42]" readership started to catch on to it, and then that's when the book sort of really took off.

Catherine:

Yeah. Then internationally. The fact that it exists in 65 languages and all over the world. I've had the experience more than one time of people coming back from international travels where they're in Africa or Asia or Europe, saying, "Oh yeah. My hotel lobby has that book in it." Or some such.

Peter:

I had a patient many years ago, wealthy woman, who had relatives in Norway, and so she went to go see them, and it wasn't in one of the large cities, it was a smaller town in Norway. She noticed that all the people were reading the Norwegian version of the book. She said, "Oh, he's my physician." They grabbed her and marched her around the town to introduce everybody to this person who had actually been a patient of mine. Yeah. Very interesting. A lot of the markets where the book has done extraordinarily well, again, are not typical international markets. It did very well in Germany, it did very well in the UK, but we sell an inordinate amount of books in the Middle East. I found that that was kind of a way of maybe seeing just how ... How cosmopolitan the concept is. People can look at a lot of things about themselves in judgments or criticisms, but your blood is your blood. Pretty much the universal language.

Catherine:

That's what we say in the book. You can be a blood type A in the United States or you can be a blood type A in Iraq and exchange blood.

Peter:

And maybe the person that your bias has led you to feel animosity towards might be more useful to you in a car crash than your best friend.

Catherine:

Exactly. One of the things that I have always valued about the Blood Type Diet is that the phenomenal response from people seems to be directly related to the fact that it works. There's such a sense of tangibility to the results people get, which is what keeps them recommending the diet and keeps them doing it themselves.

Peter:

We were also an early experiment in social media. When we first put up the main website that I have on the internet, which is www.dadamo.com, I had ... I have a love of computer programming in addition to medicine. I had written an early version of what would be a message board nowadays. We had these forms and these bulletin boards, and so many of the people that were in at the very beginning are still moderators on those boards 20 years later.

Catherine:

I know. It's crazy. I remember those early boards.

Peter:

Since I think the boards are still there because every time I try to take them down everybody raises a healing cry, but there's also groups on Facebook and all sorts of Instagram things. I don't really follow a lot of that, but it's a self-organizing principle, and I think people who come to this way of thinking, they appreciate the fact that there may be other people out there who think the same way, and maybe make them feel a little less isolated or a little less ostracized because of it. It's a funny concept. Just as many people embrace it. It's caused a lot of controversy too. I think that in the medical profession, or even in my own profession, you would tend to think that ... I practice a type of "alternative medicine" which is not a phrase I particularly enjoy using, but for the common understanding, it is what I practice, which is the nature of having medicine, is a type of basic medicine, very ancient type, and I guess you would call it complementary or alternative, but I like neither of those phrases. You could expect that something that's a little way out would be embraced in those circles, and then disputed in the traditional medical circles, and it's showed no such characteristic. There were people in alternative medicine who just despised this theory. Other people in conventional medicine who embraced it almost intuitively.

Catherine:

Don't you think the key is how rigid the way of thinking is? Because the reason that people in your field might despise it probably has to do with the meeting and other aspects of the diet that-

Peter:

Oh yeah. Definitely. If you've got somebody who based an entire career on the assumption that a low fat, plant-based, vegetarian, vegan diet is universally useful, and somebody comes along and says, "Wait a minute. There's a section of the population that might do better on a higher protein diet." Well, you have two things you can do. You can stick to what it is that you have held as a long-term belief, or you can change your beliefs. A small number of people alter their beliefs in the face of results or evidence, and other people just decide to completely dispute it.

I think that that's the interesting thing about it, because on the other side of the coin you might have somebody who's put people on high protein diets their whole career and somebody comes along and says, "Well, not everybody is so great with these high protein diets," and then all of the sudden you've got animosity from that direction too.

Catherine:

One of the things that's notable about this diet, which this book is now at its 20th year anniversary, and yet the publicity from the media, or the media around the Blood Type Diet, has been very critical over the years, always. Whether it's been-

Peter:

Not always, but I would say a great portion of it.

Catherine:

More recently there's been more positive, but there has been the dietitian community and the various purveyors of healthy living seem to just be overwhelming with criticism.

Peter:

I think that you're supposed to in certain circles get your scientific information from scientific journals, and to get your scientific information from a mass market book, to some people, that's enough to brand it as [apostacy 00:19:35] or heresy, but the reality of the whole thing is that there are elements to the theory which are just really observational and empirical, and then there's a huge underlayment of circumstantial evidence behind it, so one is left to believe that the only thing missing is the 10,000 participant double-blind placebo control study.

Catherine:

There you go. Yep.

Peter:

The reality is that's likely to be missing for a very long time, because of a few issues having to do with the fact that our current experimental design doesn't really lend itself well to dietary and food studies. When I redid the version that's going to be released of Eat Right in January, it was interesting to look at what is necessary to prove something with regard to such a thing as a change in your diet. Now, to use a simple example, there is a thing in statistics called statistical power. It's the number of people you need to have in your study to be able to rule out all the conflict things. Turns out that if we were just going to prove or disprove that increasing salt is bad for you, and your increasing salt in your diet is bad for you, that's just one thing, salt in your diet, you'd need 165,000 people.

Catherine:

Really?

Peter:

Yes. Now, let's just talk about a system that isn't just testing one diet. Testing four diets. And, it's testing in each one of those diets 600 foods. Yes, it would be an absolutely splendid opportunity  be able to have a double-blind placebo controlled study, but they're much more engineered for things like pharmaceuticals. Pharmaceutical is real simple. I've got a drug and I've got a placebo. You don't know which one it is. I give them to you and I see what happens. Easy in, easy out. How long do you have to follow a diet before you decide that it doesn't work? A year? Four years? They've been following those nurses up in Maryland, in Massachusetts, for two decades.

Catherine:

Seems to me that it would be sufficient to have a cumulative result situation. Once you compile the thousands and thousands of results that you have done, the work that's been in progress all these years, at some point a conclusion becomes self-evident.

Peter:

It does, and I think that the notion of the fact that something is unprovable makes it unscientific is actually kind of silly. We draw conclusions about things all the time that don't have a precise and beautiful scientific justification. Probably about 25% of any and all pharmaceuticals are not given based on any real placebo control studies. They're just basically observational type things. You look at it like that and you think to yourself, okay, now that could be a problem if something, let's say I was telling people to do something that was risky, but let's go back and think about what we first talked about, that really the Blood Type Diet is just a collection of all the other healthy diets. What's the downside of trying one of four fundamentally healthy diets and seeing if that diet is particularly more healthy in you than someone else? You really can't lose anything. As a matter of fact, any given diet in the Blood Type Diet, A, O, AB, or B, somebody's written an entire book telling everybody to do that.

This takes us into the realm of what I like to call [hearistics 00:23:44]. There are certain types of things that they are solutions that are just good enough to get the job done. For instance, chicken soup, if you have a head cold, is probably a great example. Is it great? Well, people seem to think so. Has there really been a double-blind study on it? I doubt it. In essence, the only thing I can say about it is probably not a good thing if you're type B to have chicken soup, but nonetheless you can have turkey broth.

The reality is that our current scientific system, the way we currently analyze whether something is "scientific" or unscientific doesn't really apply to something like this. In and of itself, that's a kind of a statement that kind of takes your breath away, because it says, okay, here's a concept that's actually so big and broad that the current gold standard of being able to weigh scientific evidence isn't designed to actually measure it.

I think that, like what you were saying, though, it that actually you just track people and let them do what they will with it, and see what happens. We've done that over the years. We have thousands of people who have reported, self-reported their outcomes and things, and there are a couple of very interesting observations. I won't go into the details, because we could spend the entire time talking on those, but when you collect people's outcomes, "I followed the diet for three months," and then we ask them very simply, "What happened?" An inordinate number of people would have improvements in things that are not normally known to be associated with being responsive to a change in how you eat. Certain types of things like thyroid conditions, skin conditions, migraine headaches. Nutrition and a dietary change are not usually the first line of attack for those things. It begs the bigger question, which is that this is a diet that is not really per se looking at your food the same way all the other diet systems are.

First and foremost, it's looking at whether or not you can construct a diet that's immunologically in line with you. If you eat foods that are immunologically in alignment with your genetics, maybe your immune system responds to that by doing something better that it was struggling with, or maybe it can fight off an infection you've been dealing with for a long time, or maybe it stops attacking your tissues. There is a lot of insight into the ways the diet works that we still remain to try to understand, but your blood type is a big immunological marker, and there's a lot of your blood type in your digestive tract, and there's a lot of foods that react with that blood type marker in ways that go on to actually activate or deactivate parts of your immune system.

There's a huge variation in the makeup of your [microbiome 00:27:02] that's controlled by your blood type, and then this other thing called your [secretor 00:27:06] status, which we [won't live right 00:27:08] for your type of [inaudible 00:27:09]. If you take both of those two genes, the gene that controls your ABO blood type and the gene that makes you either a secretor or a non-secretor, you can do a lot of very useful calculations with this kind of stuff. One of the ways that we've seen the scientific community catch up with a book that was written in 1995 is that there's been very little need to have to amend anything that we wrote 20 years ago. We just had to add all the new information that had been discovered in the meantime, which is kind of profound in a way and it just says that there was something that was so foundational, there was something in the information that was such a bedrock of evidence, and there are thousands of articles that the elements of the blood type theory are built on.

The interesting thing about the word, it's not scientific, is that that's often substituted for the meaning it's not scientifically proven to my degree of satisfaction. On the other hand, it's not scientific really means that it has no basis in science. If I said, "the Blood Type Diet is based upon some ehteral gas that permeates inside of your body, that's in alignment with the planets, and it has a lot to do with sun spots," well that's unscientific. But if I say, "Your blood type has to do with genes that control digestive functions, they have to do with how you immunologically react with foods," not only can I say that, but I can point chapter and verse to the specific physiological effects and the actions that foods take upon you that are unique to your blood type. That's scientific.

You can have a lot of very well-proven evidence-based scientific observations that will really leave many people sufficient to be able to just say to themselves, "Is this going to be something I think I should try?"

Catherine:

One thing that hasn't happened in the last 20 years is nobody has disproved the Blood Type Diet.

Peter:

They've tried.

Catherine:

But nobody has.

Peter:

There was a study that was published in an article a while back that purported to disproved it, but when we looked at the data, it really was a mess. They didn't actually put the people on the Blood Type Diet. They had them on a regular diet and kind of guessed at how close the Blood Type Diet to the Blood Type Diet they were. However, and you can read about this on my website, it was a study in search of a conclusion, and the conclusion they were in search of was that you shouldn't bother with the Blood Type Diet. There were some deeper, darker reasons for why that was done, which make you wonder about the way we do science in general, but the reality of the whole thing was that it turned out that by the time we had done the numbers and done all the crunching, that they were making claims about people following the Blood Type Diet when in fact the people were doing less than 10% of the Blood Type Diet, and their version of blood type diet included things like frankfurters and french fries and mac and cheese. You can read a lot of my books. You never find any mac and cheese and frankfurters in there.

Catherine:

True enough.

Peter:

In terms of ultimately, I'll leave it to the listener to decide whether or not that represented a really reason, cohesive, intelligent disproval of the diet. Now, you will read a lot of negative things about people, but it's a lot of arm-waving. It's just ... I think the reason that there's just a lot of this controversy is if you look at the place we position ourselves, if you are a high protein advocate, you probably have some animosity towards the people who are the vegans, and they probably have some animosity towards you. Maybe some of the listeners know this, but there's a religion in the Middle East called [Bahaism 00:31:42]. Bahaism is a funny religion, because it actually is a conglomeration of Judeo-Christian value and Islamic values. They kind of take all the best of all the religions and they weave it together. The interesting result is all the other religions can't stand them. Matter of fact, I guess you could sum it up as saying I know I have problems with you and you have problems with me, but these other guys, they've got to go. We're sort of in that position. If you want to know why there's so much controversy, it's because we actually make both sides of the dietary spectrum apoplectic.

Then you look at this in terms of, well, food is big business. I don't care what you say. Anything that changes public perception of the value of food is always going to be viewed somewhat either beneficial or as a threat. You look at the American Dietetic Association and they make the vast majority of their money basically fronting for agribusiness. You can go to their website and find a defense of junk food. You can see that on one hand if you don't rock the boat, or if you reinforce the status quo, you might do a lot better in the long run in terms of your public persona. But on the other hand, if you do actually have a theory that actually does perhaps maybe look at foods differently ... There's a lot of things we did I think that were very good. Back when we first wrote Eat Right for Your Type, there was almost no such thing as grass-fed beef.

Catherine:

No.

Peter:

Matter of fact, when we told people to look for grass-fed beef, they would email me and go, "I don't know. Where do you get this stuff?"

Catherine:

Like you have to go out to the grass yourself.

Peter:

Right. Then the only thing we could find was one company who would drop ship frozen grass-fed beef.

Catherine:

And you couldn't find chemical-free meat in the supermarkets at all. You had, everything was specialized.

Peter:

By the time two years later we wrote Live Right, we were talking about GMO's. Nobody talked about GMO's in 1996. Nobody talked about grass-fed. The reality was that it wasn't just a book that was about food selections, it was about food choices as well. No one is saying that ... It was ... Sometimes you see it, the trainers, Tae Bo, you can eat a greasy cheeseburger, and the reality of the whole thing is that that's not going to help anybody.

Catherine:

Right.

Peter:

It's very little in common with the way that our bodies would like to receive that particular type of protein.

Catherine:

It's interesting that we're doing the 20th anniversary edition right at a time when it seems a lot of people are talking about the Millennials being such a big social focus, and as a group it seems Millennials are more inclined to be sensitive about diet and health and the environment and all of these issues. Maybe the Millennials I know would say, "Blood Type Diet? Sure. Let's try it."

Peter:

I also think that they're a little more skeptical of revealed wisdom from authority sources. Listen, I think that anarchism is a good thing. It keeps us on our toes. Information is fed to us almost always with some kind of purpose behind it with regard to something or another. I think the explosion of social media has kind of deteriorated the information pipeline to the point now where alternative views are as easy to find as conventional orthodox views. I think that is probably the greatest ... You look at my own children, who fall into that kind of demographic, and they're not, I would say, untrustful, but they have an incisiveness into the rationales behind how the information is being presented that I think when we were younger we didn't have that. You just had newspapers and three channels of television. Frankly, I think they did a better job back then. A little more accountable.

Catherine:

You had experts. The Millennials who are going to be embracing this 20th anniversary edition hopefully, it's like a whole new population of blood type diet opportunity.

Peter:

Yeah. I'd like to think that the vast majority of people who come to this book are people in need of it. I think when you find that the average person who reads the book is dealing with something, they're dealing with a condition, and I suppose that's the thing that's always kept me away from trying to look at it as just exclusively some way to be able to get into a tuxedo or a bathing suit. It didn't seem to strike me as doing it justice. I think people have obviously, there's countless examples of people that reshaped themselves with this diet over time, but I think that you're right. I think the ... I think it just makes intuitive sense to somebody who takes the time to just ponder it that no one's ever going to win the one size fits all diet discussion, because there is no winner. There is no way that they're going to synthesize human chow like they have for dogs or cats or horses or goats. There is no such thing as human chow. There is a human chow if you're obviously in a starvation situation, there's obviously calories that can be put in and macro-nutrients that can be put in and the body will do the best it can with it, but most of the time in our society we've got people who overeat all the wrong things, and that's a whole different horse of another color.

We do wind up in the situation here where you look at in 1995 there was no word called nutrogenomics. There was no nutritional genomics. I just finished teaching a course at University of Maryland in nutrogenomics. When you just simplify it down to the brass tacks, Eat Right was the first nutrogenomic book, because even though we look at a blood type as a thing in your blood, a physical thing in your blood, it turns out that it's actually describing differences in our genes. In addition to the fact that your blood type has physical manifestations, it's in your tears, it's in your saliva, it's in your perspiration, it's in your digestive tract, blood type is also at a very high level a genetic thing, so that when the switch gets thrown to make somebody type B, all sorts of other genes get turned on in different patterns. If someone else gets the switch turned on such that they're type A, those same genes get switched on in other ways. There's whole cascades of genes that get turned on and off in different configurations depending upon which particular blood type you wound up with. It is a genomic thing, and it's a nutrogenomic book.

Catherine:

Right. That's interesting. You, meanwhile, in addition to all of this work, I'd like to say a few words about the Center of Excellence report, because it seems to me that people are always curious about whether or not you're in practice.

Peter:

Yeah. They think after I wrote the book I just sit on a lounge chair and sip cocktails from a cabana boy. The reality is, unfortunately, not anything like that.

Catherine:

You started this program in conjunction with the University of Bridgeport.

Peter:

Yes. It's part of their naturopathic medical curriculum there, and after I had taught a couple of years in the standard faculty, we decided, then they decided that they wanted to actually have a particularly dedicated facility that was looking at advanced ways of analyzing what now is called personalized medicine. The Center of Excellence was created, and we do have a very vibrant clinical environment. It's a teaching clinic as well, so people are surprised to know that I still practice. I run the teaching shifts. We have turned out several now years of young doctors who have learned a lot of the techniques that we've developed along the way, and I think that... I don't have a problem with this, but I'll always be known as the Blood Type Diet guy, and I'm not struggling with that at all, however I have moved far beyond that in my own work. As I said before, I've loved software, so for me, genetics and computers and software have all been woven together in many different ways. What we have done at this particular facility, Center of Excellence in generative medicine, is we have developed very advanced software tools that allow us to use things like a person's 23 and me, their genetic information. We are working on software now that allows us to get results from a person's microbiome, the genetic signature of their microbiome.

This is actually allowing us to tailor therapies much more precisely, and even work on the diet a little bit more. Teaching really has become, I think, my fundamental, prime focus at this point in my life.

Catherine:

That's cool. Now, you live in a... You currently are in a mixed blood type marriage. Your wife Martha has blood type O. The classic OA combination. Your daughters are what blood type?

Peter:

They're both A.

Catherine:

Your daughters, like you, grew up in a blood type centric home.

Peter:

Well, we never really made it doctrinaire. We never really made it about the thing. We just made it about the choices. I am fortunate in that my two daughters are very diligent about how well they take care of themselves. Maybe your Millennial theory is correct. It's hard to say. They have at times exceeded even my capabilities in terms of how much effort and diligence that they put into things. I think I credit my wife Martha with a lot of that. She never really made it about the process. She made it about the choices. If there was a meal that we had which perhaps maybe had a grain or something, or a bread that wouldn't have been acceptable for the kids and I, she very quietly would just roll up whatever it was inside of lettuce and that was your sandwich. Again, in many instances, we have lived it from personal experience as well. So many times in the past relatives or family members have used it and helped various conditions they had at the same time. We're fortunate. We've been pretty healthy. I think Martha is really the secret weapon behind this whole thing. In essence, I think that the two of us together have kind of made, I think, this thing the journey that it has and I'm very grateful for that. I think that she's made me a better writer, made me a better physician, made me a better teacher.

Catherine:

I think a lot of people would agree with that. Thank you Doctor. Until next time, when we talk again.

Peter:

Yeah, Catherine, we should do this more often.

Catherine:

We should.

Peter:

All right. Thank you very much.

Catherine:

All right. Thank you.