The Metabolic Typing® Diet
(Doubleday, 2000)
by William L. Wolcott and Trish Fahey
The best-selling, definitive work on Metabolic Typing®
A Book Unlike Any Other
Are you among the millions of health seekers always on the lookout for a nutritional breakthrough? Continually searching for a new and better way to eat? A way to feel better, look better, lose weight, boost your energy? Perhaps you’re striving to overcome some of the chronic ailments now so prevalent among us. If so, the Metabolic Typing Diet Book is for you.
If only you could zero in on the right diet. Sounds like a simple enough task, doesn’t it? And yet, identifying a truly effective diet has long been, for most of us, an elusive goal, an objective that somehow remains just beyond our reach.
Today’s savvy health consumers know that doctors have no “magic bullet” solutions for the majority of human ailments and that good health and longevity are somehow inextricably linked to diet and lifestyle management. So it’s axiomatic these days that, to remain free of pain, illness and excess weight, or to enjoy high levels of energy and well-being, one needs to pursue the right dietary and nutritional regime.
But here’s the catch: For many years nutritional science has been based on a generic approach to health and nutrition. Virtually all of the world’s leading dietary experts have established single dietary solutions which they believe can be universally applied to everyone.
Yet this approach fails to recognize that, for genetic reasons, people are all very different from one another on a metabolic level, i.e., in the way that our bodies process foods and utilize nutrients.
As an example, certain car engines are designed to run on gasoline. Others can’t function efficiently without diesel fuel. Our bodies operate on the same principle. For instance, some people thrive on large amounts of meat and fat; others are built for high-carbohydrate, low-fat diets based primarily on grains and vegetables.
Your body has its own internal “engines of metabolism” whose job it is to convert food and nutrients (“body fuel”) into the energy that is necessary for all life-sustaining activities. And your “body fuel” requirements are very unique. In fact, human beings have infinitely variable nutritional requirements.
As a result, to be truly healthy and fit, you need a diet that is customized or tailored to your body chemistry. The Metabolic Typing® Diet is a breakthrough how-to book which enables you to do just that. It provides a proven, scientific, time-tested method you can use to identify your own highly individualized needs.
You’ll be truly amazed at the many health and fitness benefits you’ll experience when you consistently eat according to your Metabolic Type®. Here are a few highlights:
- achieve your ideal weight and stay there
- lose weight without deprivation and struggle
- free yourself from food cravings and hunger
- enjoy sustained high energy and endurance
- bolster your immunity and resist infections
- conquer indigestion, fatigue, allergies
- overcome depression, anxiety, mood swings
- prevent and reverse chronic illness
Author William L. Wolcott
Bill Wolcott is the world’s leading authority on Metabolic Typing®, a revolutionary dietary technology that enables people to optimize their health and fitness by identifying their own highly individualized nutritional needs, and tailoring their diets accordingly.
As a nutritional expert, Bill has a unique background. For nearly 40 years he has provided technical consulting services to health professionals throughout the world – including MDs, nutritionists, naturopaths, dentists and chiropractors. In this capacity, Bill has personally developed computer-based, customized “metabolic profiles” on hundreds of thousands of patients.
Practitioners throughout the world use Bill’s nutritional profiles as the basis of tailor-made therapeutic regimes for people with many different types of chronic health problems. Over the years these customized metabolic protocols have proven to be remarkably effective in helping to prevent and reverse all kinds of chronic ailments.
Although the traditional health care system excels in the treatment of medical emergencies, traumatic injuries and acute health problems of short duration, it’s never been oriented toward effective management of chronic, long-term health disorders nor has it been an information resource for how to obtain and maintain optimal health.
As many people are aware, chronic health problems do not typically respond to conventional medical treatments such as drug and surgical intervention. Instead, they most often require lifestyle modification, especially in the area of diet and nutrition.
For many years, scientists and health practitioners worldwide have recognized the critical importance of nutritional therapy. Clinicians have been intensely interested in offering effective nutritional guidance to patients, yet they’ve been frustrated by the inability to find nutritional solutions that work well for everyone.
However, as far back as the 1930s, scientists and researchers began to identify specific ways in which human beings differ from one another on a biochemical or metabolic level, due largely to genetic inheritance. Based on this information, researchers also began to discover that many kinds of chronic ailments could be resolved when people adopted dietary and nutritional regimes compatible with their own unique body chemistry. They began to differentiate people from one another on the basis of their “metabolic type.”
Over the course of the 20th century, many leading scientists and clinicians contributed to the field that has come to be known as “Metabolic Typing®.” It is actually the culmination of 90 years of pioneering research on the part of many of the 20th century’s most significant nutritional researchers – including Francis Pottenger, M.D., Weston Price, D.D.S., Royal Lee, D.D.S., Emmanuel Revici, M.D., William Donald Kelley, D.D.S., George Watson, Ph.D., and Roger Williams, Ph.D.
Beginning in the late 1970s, Bill Wolcott joined this cadre of researchers and over the last two decades has played a pivotal role in advancing the field of Metabolic Typing® into a very sophisticated nutritional discipline. For example, in 1983 he discovered critical new dimensions of the way in which human metabolism is controlled by the Oxidative System and the Autonomic Nervous System. Bill published a paper on this topic and over the course of the following 3 decades made many additional discoveries that continued to transform Metabolic Typing® into a multi-dimensional clinical and academic discipline.
Unlike other current dietary approaches which distinguish people from one another on the basis of single variables – such as body typing and blood typing – Metabolic Typing® utilizes many different aspects of a person’s physiological makeup in order to specify a diet appropriate for that person. Metabolic Typing® uses multiple biochemical or metabolic indicators and seeks to identify patterns among these variables – patterns that reveal how a person’s system is genetically designed to digest and utilize or “process” specific foods and nutrients into energy.
In 1986, Bill and his wife Suzi Wolcott founded Healthexcel, a unique technical consulting organization based in Winthrop, Washington. Bill’s highly specialized expertise in the area of nutritional biochemistry – combined with his prodigious abilities in the realm of computer science – have made Healthexcel a leading edge provider of customized nutrition products and services.
Foreword by Etienne Callebout, M.D.
I first began to investigate Metabolic Typing® almost 15 years ago, after hearing reports of exceptional clinical results that people were achieving with it. I was intrigued when I learned of this novel nutritional technology, one that somehow enabled clinicians to identify the highly specific dietary needs of individuals. At the same time, of course, I was skeptical. It sounded a little too good to be true and was based on concepts that seemed highly unconventional, even within the context of alternative medicine. Nonetheless, I decided to follow up on the subject, in case there might be something of value I might discover.
Back in the 1980s, I was, like many other clinicians, a true believer in the value of diet and nutrition. But like everyone else, I was also continually frustrated by the contradictions and complexity inherent in nutritional science. Nutritional therapy clearly held a great deal of potential as a primary therapeutic approach, yet there were so many practical challenges involved in applying it in clinical settings. Health professionals simply had no reliable means of evaluating peoples’ dietary deficiencies and recommending predictably effective nutritional protocols. Time and again I had encountered the same frustrating dilemma: a dietary program that worked very well for one person would produce little or no beneficial results for someone else. There seemed to be no readily available solutions on the horizon.
Then in the mid-1980s I heard about a group of scientists and clinicians in the United States who had, over a period of years, evolved a unique way of addressing this problem, with a system they called metabolic typing. Researchers such as William Kelley, George Watson and Roger Williams had built upon the work of scientists and clinicians of an earlier era; men like Weston Price, Frances Pottenger, and Royal Lee. What they all shared in common was a profound interest in a concept that Williams described as “biochemical individuality,” or the idea that no two individuals are alike on a biochemical or physiological level.
As far back as the 1930s, Weston Price embarked on extraordinary anthropological expeditions to remote corners of the globe and uncovered the link between modern eating habits and the incidence of chronic degenerative illness. He also discovered that there is no such thing as a standard “healthy diet.” Due to tremendous variations in climate, indigenous food supplies, environmental conditions, and the principles of evolution, adaptation and heredity, different cultural and ethnic groups, over a period of many centuries, developed distinctly different kinds of dietary requirements.
In later years, Watson, Kelley. and others did remarkable work in examining what these variations in genetically-based nutritional needs were all about from a metabolic or biochemical perspective. They knew that a given diet upon which some people might thrive could easily cause other people to be sick. But why? What was the underlying scientific explanation for this phenomenon?
One of the factors they discovered early on was the pivotal role that the involuntary or autonomic nervous system (ANS) plays in determining metabolic individuality and in influencing health and disease. There are two separate branches of the autonomic nervous system. One of these branches, the sympathetic system, controls bodily processes that have to do with energy utilization and is sometimes referred to as the “fight or flight” branch. The other branch, the parasympathetic system, controls bodily activities that pertain to energy conservation, and is often thought of as the “rest and digest” branch.
In most people, one branch tends to be stronger or more dominant than the other, which creates a certain amount of biochemical or metabolic imbalance. If this imbalance becomes too pronounced, disease processes can develop. Interestingly, specific foods and nutrients have the natural capacity to strengthen whichever side of the autonomic system is weaker. As a result, metabolic typing enables people to establish balance within the ANS. This is important since the ANS is the master regulator of metabolism.
Another primary determinant of what kind of food a person needs in order to be healthy pertains to the rate at which their cells convert food into energy or the rate of cellular oxidation. The oxidative rate, which is also largely determined by heredity, needs to be kept in balance if the body is to function properly. Some people are fast oxidizers, which means that their cells rapidly convert food into energy. To sustain metabolic balance, these people need foods that burn slowly, such as heavier proteins and fats. On the other hand, slow oxidizers are able to maintain metabolic balance with lighter food (carbohydrates) that burns faster than protein and fat.
In the late 1970s and early 80s, the nascent science of metabolic typing got a tremendous push forward when Bill Wolcott entered the picture and made a breakthrough discovery pertaining to the interrelationship between the Autonomic Nervous System and the Oxidative System. This discovery, which he termed “The Dominance Factor,” enabled him to predict, with far greater levels of accuracy and precision than ever before, exactly what kinds of foods and nutrients a person would need to establish metabolic balance. In the years since then, he has single-handedly expanded and refined the foundational principles of metabolic typing to an extraordinary degree. The practical results have proven to be nothing short of spectacular.
By providing dietary solutions that are effectively tailored to peoples’ highly individualized biochemical needs, Bill has shown us the true potential of diet and nutrition and demonstrated the body’s superior capacity to regulate and heal itself, once it’s given the right raw materials to work with. His methodology resolves so many of the bewildering contradictions and limitations of modern nutritional science. He really has taken the guesswork out of dietary therapy.
One of the many unique aspects of metabolic typing is that it’s not something that clinicians use to “treat” specific diseases or symptoms. Rather, it’s a “non-specific” approach that allows us to look beyond symptoms, and to analyze the physiological imbalances and biochemical disturbances that underlie chronic health disorders. That’s why people who use metabolic typing have the ability to build health and wellness from the ground up, rather than simply trying to address disparate symptoms in a piecemeal fashion. This foundational approach to diet and nutrition produces a health inducing “domino effect” on all the body’s systems and leads to the elimination of multiple symptoms at the same time.
I have used metabolic typing in my clinical practice for a long time, and I’m convinced that it is an unrivaled method for conducting dietary evaluations and developing dietary recommendations. I have found it to be very successful in resolving and/or alleviating the severity of, all manner of health problems: allergies, digestive disturbances, chronic fatigue, anemia, obesity, hormonal imbalances, mood swings, poor concentration, depression, high blood pressure, diabetes, low blood sugar, arthritis and so on. Yet it’s important to realize that metabolic typing does a lot more than eliminate symptoms. Because when you balance body chemistry, you then have the capacity to be vibrantly, glowingly healthy, not merely free of nagging aches and pains and ailments.
Unlike other methods of determining dietary individuality, such as blood typing and body typing, metabolic typing is a dynamic, comprehensive system that encompasses all of the body’s known adaptation or homeostatic mechanisms. In other words, it doesn’t just measure a single fixed variable such as your blood type or body type. Instead, it takes into account many different types of biochemical or metabolic variables, which are subject to continual change and flux over the course of your lifetime.
That’s why metabolic typing is a very accurate dietary discipline, not subject to the laws of chance. This is also why it is a very advanced academic discipline, even though it’s also a practical, easy-to-use nutritional technology.
There are so many levels to metabolic typing that I am sure it will go on being a wonderfully advanced clinical technology for health professionals. But what is exciting is that this book now provides health consumers with what they have desperately needed for so long: a simple, rapid and dependable way to identify their metabolic type and eat accordingly, and to adjust their dietary regimes as the need arises.
The term “revolutionary” is so frequently overused in our modern era. But in the case of metabolic typing, it’s a very apt description. I think you will agree with me when you read Bill Wolcott’s marvelous book.
Etienne Callebout, M.D.
Harley Street, London
1999
Frequently Asked Questions
What’s the number one dietary myth?
The biggest dietary fallacy is the notion of a “healthy, balanced diet.” There is no such thing. The only “healthy” diet for you is one that is compatible with your Metabolic Type®.
Why do diets fail? In other words, why do so many people find it impossible to lose weight and keep it off?
Most weight loss approaches only address the symptoms of obesity, not the underlying cause of obesity. The underlying cause of obesity is metabolic imbalance caused by peoples’ failure to meet their individualized, genetically-based nutritional requirements.
Why is obesity a runaway epidemic in the United States? Why are people in Europe and other regions of the world far more fit and trim?
The robust health and fitness often seen in people in other cultures has a great deal to do with the fact that they adhere to “native” or “ancestral” diets, i.e., they eat specific foods and food combinations that their systems are genetically designed to handle. A common mistake made by most scientists is thinking that one such diet could possibly be right for everyone. As long as wrong questions are being asked, right answers will never be found.
What’s wrong with high protein diets? Or high carbohydrate diets? I know people who have succeeded with both these approaches.
There’s nothing wrong with these dietary approaches. They can and do work for some people. The problem is, standardized or “one-size-fits-all” diets only work by chance — for those people who happen to have metabolisms well suited to these approaches.
Why do I feel tired all the time, even though I eat a very healthy, balanced diet, exercise regularly, and get plenty of sleep?
You can be eating all the highest quality foods and taking good care of yourself, but if you’re not eating according to your Metabolic Type®, you won’t be able to efficiently convert food into energy; you will store it as fat instead.
Why have Americans gotten so much fatter in recent years, even though we’re consuming much less fat?
Contrary to popular wisdom, fat is not what makes people fat. What makes people fat is their inability to eat the right proteins, carbohydrates and fat in a ratio that is appropriate to their Metabolic Type®. Said differently, the wrong fuel is being fed to the body’s engines of metabolism and as a result, cannot be fully converted to energy.
The high protein, high fat diets are all the rage now, but they seem dangerous to me.
In some places in the world, there are people who have thrived for centuries on diets very high in proteins and fat. Their metabolisms have evolved in accordance with their habitats. For instance, in traditional Eskimo cultures, there is virtually no heart disease or cancer, even though these people consume extraordinarily large amounts of meat and fat.
Don’t I have to be very careful about how much cholesterol I consume?
No. Unlike what you’ve been taught to believe, the build-up of unhealthy cholesterol is not a function of how much cholesterol-rich food you consume. Rather, it’s the result of disordered cholesterol metabolism, which is caused by eating a diet inappropriate for your Metabolic Type®.
Is it true that “one man’s meat is another’s poison?”
Yes, it’s literally true. The very same diet that can cause chronic illness in some people can actually prevent and reverse the identical health disorders in other people. For example, people who come from cold, harsh, northern climates tend to need high-protein, high-fat diets in order to sustain themselves. On the other hand, people from tropical or equatorial regions tend to thrive on much lighter foods, i.e., diets much lower in protein and fat, and higher in carbohydrates.
Why is there so much variation in peoples’ dietary needs?
People have different metabolic and dietary needs as a result of evolution and adaptation. Over a period of many years, our ancestors developed specific dietary needs in response to specific aspects of their environment — climate, geography, vegetation, food supply, etc.
Why do we need Metabolic Typing to identify what our needs are?
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Reader Comments
I’ve been involved in nutrition for over 20 years and I have never read a book anything like this one. It’s a MUST READ for anyone interested in how to truly be healthy.
( Radio Show Host )
I was worried when I bought the book that it would be too hard to understand. But I was so excited to discover that everything was explained so simply. It was so lively and so interesting. I’m already reading it again and using it on my whole family.
CM ( housewife )
I am a 34 year old competitive natural bodybuilder who has spent much of my time since the age of 15 reading, learning, and experimenting with the human body through training to achieve optimum health and development. I have read a great many books and articles on every type of diet imaginable. I have personally experimented with just about every ratio combination known and all have had success but to limited degrees. Of course with bodybuilding, the supplement companies push everyone to eat 300-600 grams of protein per day and if you want to get “cut” (very low body fat), you must cut your carbs down or even out (ie. Protein Diet so popular now). These things I have tried several times over. True, I lost body fat BUT I also lost a good deal of muscle in the process. I also could never quite hit that elusive “rock hard” look of ultra lowfat on the body. On the other hand, I’ve tried low fat-high carb diets that have just left me big but totally devoid of any muscular definition (ie. FAT!!). I came across your book in a store. WOW!!! I read the first 250 pages that afternoon, I was so pumped about what you were talking about!!! I took your simple self-test and discovered that I am a Mixed Type. This information has confirmed many of the things I have experienced over the years and also explains why my current ratios of food (30% protein, 55% carbs, 15% fat) seem to be making me feel very healthy but have also helped me to unprecedented gains in muscle/strength while keeping body fat lower.
DMacD ( bodybuilder )
I have recently obtained and read your book from cover to cover, non-stop before I could put it down. It hits both spots — the head and the heart — with impact. An excellent treatise. How could anyone not be convinced? . . . Well done. A seminal book of excellence. Congratulations.
JL ( administrator )
I’m clearing my bookshelves. From now on, The Metabolic Typing Diet is the only book I am recommending to my patients.
JR ( medical doctor )
I have been reading The Metabolic Typing Diet with great interest and a sense of ah-hah!!! I feel as if a light bulb has turned on. I have a degree in nutrition and my disillusion with the “one diet fits all” began when I was studying Human Nutrition and Dietetics in college. Some of the diets we were being trained to design were ridiculous. I knew if I ate some of these diets I wouldn’t feel well. I could not bring myself to become a dietitian and instead began a quest to find out all that I could beyond the “Food Guide Pyramid” approach. I am familiar with most popular diet plans and the nagging question for me has always been, how can this be right for everyone? The blood type diet began to answer the question, but your book really shows the big picture.
CW ( nutritionist )
I’m almost finished with your book, The Metabolic Typing Diet. What a great service you have done for so many people! In my heart I knew how to eat to control my food intolerances, but it just didn’t make sense based on what we’re hit with in today’s media. This book pulled it all together. Thanks again!
DS ( housewife )
I have already sent 3 patients and 1 doctor to buy your book. I would also be interested in the near future to become certified as an instructor. The more I ponder this metabolic typing the more excited I get. It answers so many questions and resolves so many problems I was having in practice.
KT ( physician )
The authors have clearly expressed a unified theory of biological individuality and have synthesized a practical and, to my knowledge, uniquely comprehensive approach to applying this most fundamental principle to wellness. I know that their program is effective, it’s logical, it’s simple and it is too important to overlook. Anyone interested in fine-tuning their personal health program, or who is a professional in the field, will find this book informative, straight forward, and immensely valuable.
RD ( medical lab owner )
This book has been invaluable in helping me to understand my individual dietary needs. By taking the test provided, I discovered, for example, that I NEED to eat meat at breakfast– not just any protein, but meat, specifically– and that I should avoid citrus. As a result, I feel MUCH better, and have been able to lose weight without a struggle.
RD ( medical lab owner )
The Metabolic Typing Diet is truly the most important nutritional book one can read to begin finding true and lasting health. The metabolic typing diet, as put forth in the book, not only, I believe, saved my life, but has led to ever increasing health and energy. At 57 years of age, I am stronger and healthier than I was at 20, and feel better and better as I watch my friends and family succumb to the ravages and aches and pains of aging. No diet works for everyone, but the RIGHT diet for a particular individual does exist through metabolic typing. The Metabolic Typing Diet is truly the missing link on the nutritional information scene. Read it. It will change your life.
BH ( music teacher )
This book will be helpful for people who want to understand nutrition and metabolism in a way they can use. Instead of just saying “do this,” Wolcott lays out a coherent system for understanding how people burn their food quite differently, and why “one man’s meat” is literally “another man’s poison.” In the big picture, it shifts our perspective from “one size fits all” nutrition to individual nutrition that really does fit.
MS ( educator )
Reading “The Metabolic Typing Diet” feels like parasailing over the morass of confusion that plagues one at every step while wading through health magazines, diet books, supplement ads. The concept is totally refreshing. It’s been totally obvious to anyone who has ever tried a diet that what works for others, alas, does not necessarily work for them. Wolcott seems to be the first to look around, believe what he and everyone else sees, and to dig deep right there. Brilliant breakthrough! I have to hand it to Wolcott and Fahey. They’ve done an excellent job presenting the material-not because the information is so complex, but because it’s so comprehensive. Simple and clear sums it up.
LF ( nutritionist )
The End of One-Size-Fits-All Diets
For many years, health consumers have been overwhelmed with complex and often sharply contradictory information about what to eat in order to feel well and stay healthy and fit. And, recently, all the confusion about what represents a healthy diet has erupted into a major diet controversy in the national media.
The current diet debate is focused on the all-important issue of macronutrient consumption — in other words, health experts everywhere disagree strongly about how much protein, carbohydrate, and fat people should be eating.
For instance, some nutrition experts are big proponents of low-fat, low-protein, high carbohydrate diets. They contend that diets high in fatty foods like meat, cheese and vegetable oil will expand our waistlines, clog our arteries and put us all on the fast track to senility and premature death. Many of these experts advise us to cut fat intake to a bare minimum and stick to light vegetarian fare based on grains and fruits and vegetables.
Other leading nutritional gurus advocate just the opposite — diets high in protein and fat and low in carbohydrates. They believe that the only way people can combat serious health disorders like obesity and heart disease is to heavily restrict their consumption of carbohydrates (like fruits, grains, bread, and pasta) while making proteins (meat and fish and poultry) the mainstay of every meal.
Still, other experts are firm believers in “40-30-30” diets — in other words, they believe that all meals and snacks should be comprised of protein, carbohydrate, and fat in a precise 40-30-30 ratio. In some people, this approach prevents certain kinds of unwanted hormonal shifts which, if left unchecked over time, contribute to serious chronic health problems — including obesity, atherosclerosis, cancer, diabetes and chronic fatigue.
Countless other diets also compete for our attention, all promising similar kinds of long-lasting health benefits — energy and fitness and disease-free lives — despite the fact that they too offer sharply contradictory advice.
A quick stroll down the health and fitness aisle of your local bookstore reveals a dizzying array of choices — macrobiotic diets, raw food diets, celebrity diets, organic food diets, rotation diets, dairy-free diets, sugar-free diets, cardiovascular diets, cancer prevention diets, diets for athletes, diets for women, diets to slow the aging process, diets to strengthen immunity, diets to combat depression or fatigue, cholesterol-free diets, hypoglycemic diets, and on and on.
A recent Google search for “healthy diet” produced over 15 million hits! And a search at Amazon.com for “diet books” produced 176,000 – each promoting itself as right for you.
The primary problem for health consumers is this: since the market is flooded with so many dietary options, and so much conflicting advice and opinion, people are left feeling confused, not knowing how to make sense of it all. Since people have no way to make rational dietary choices, they’re forced into a process of endless experimentation, forced to play a never-ending game of “dietary roulette.”
In other words, the most profound limitation of virtually all diet and nutrition books is that they’re based on a system of chance. Since these books offer generic rather than customized dietary advice — the programs they describe work fairly well for some people some of the time. That’s why most nutritional books offer up a decent range of positive case histories.
But case histories can be very misleading. The real barometer of the value of any nutritional system is whether it can be relied upon to produce consistent and reliable clinical results for anyone who chooses to use it. This is simply impossible with diet and nutrition books now on the market.
In contrast, The Metabolic Typing® Diet is based on a completely different and truly revolutionary scientific technology (metabolic typing) which is the very essence of inclusion, precision, predictability.
Metabolic Typing® takes the guesswork out of nutritional science, and it doesn’t leave anyone behind. It’s an advanced but very easy and accessible methodology that anyone can use to rapidly cut through the information glut of confusing fact and opinion and accurately assess their own unique nutritional requirements.
The Metabolic Typing® Diet is a truly revolutionary book that provides what has long been desperately needed: a systematic, testable, repeatable, verifiable means for each of us to find an answer to the question, “What’s right for me?”
The First Book Ever To Provide Customized Dietary Solutions
Are you overweight? Do you suffer from low energy, digestive problems, allergies, low blood sugar, poor concentration, mood swings, hormonal imbalances, high blood pressure, or other chronic ailments? Have you tried lots of diets with limited success? Are you confused by all the contradictory advice of nutrition experts? If your answer is “yes” to any of these questions, here’s what you need to know: the real secret of health and fitness is customized nutrition.
Today’s diet books are virtually all based on a standardized or mass market approach to health and nutrition. In other words, they offer single, one-size-fits-all dietary solutions. But this approach has proven to be very limited — it’s the reason diets don’t work for most people.
Nutrition’s best kept secret is simply this: what works for one person may have no effect on another person, and may make a third person worse. Here’s another way of describing this same principle: any food or nutrient can have virtually opposite biochemical influences in different people.
In other words, the very same foods that will keep you energized, healthy and slim can cause someone else to be overweight, fatigued and unhealthy! Why? Simply because your metabolism is very unique!
In the same way that your outward appearance is different than everyone else’s, and no two people have the same fingerprints, we are all very different internally as well — on a biochemical or metabolic level. This means your dietary needs are highly individualized.
The Metabolic Typing® Diet is the first book ever to provide simple, practical methods for identifying a diet that is tailored to your body chemistry — and yours alone.
This is the definitive book on “metabolic typing,” widely regarded as the “next wave” in nutritional science. Unlike other one-dimensional dietary approaches that attempt to differentiate people on the basis of single, fixed variables such as blood type or body type, Metabolic Typing® is a comprehensive, dynamic system that encompasses a whole range of biochemical or metabolic variables.
The Metabolic Typing® Diet not only gives you the ability to pinpoint your dietary needs with great precision, it also allows you to modify your diet as your needs change over time. For many different reasons — including stress, illness, physical exertion, aging, dietary habits and environmental influences — your metabolism is subject to shifts and changes.
Fortunately, Metabolic Typing® is a technology that anyone can use to modify their diet as their metabolic needs change over time. That’s why The Metabolic Typing® Diet is a “must read.”
The Ultimate Guide to Optimum Health and Permanent Weight Loss
There are few things in life as liberating as discovering your Metabolic Type®, few things as enlightening as finally coming to understand exactly what foods and food combinations will enable you to thoroughly enjoy your life and live it to the fullest.
Most of us have been slaves to food in one way or another all our lives. Quite literally, what we eat controls every aspect of our existence — how we look and feel, our range of productivity and performance, the quality of our emotional experiences, whether we stay well or fall prey to disease, even the quality of our sleep and the nature of our dreams.
When we don’t understand how specific foods affect us, eating becomes a daily struggle. We struggle to feel satisfied, to fight the battle of the bulge, or just to feel decently from one hour to the next.
Once you recognize your metabolic individuality, however, everything changes. The balance shifts, the tables are turned — suddenly you’re the one in control of food, it’s not in control of you. Eating right is no longer a complex challenge and food is no longer your adversary. When you know how to choose foods that effectively sustain your body’s unique style of functioning, eating is what it should be — easy and enjoyable.
Imagine the sense of excitement and empowerment you’ll have the first time you go to the supermarket and select groceries in a truly well informed and targeted way — rather than being forced to make purchases in a random, haphazard fashion, based largely on guesswork about what might or might not be good for you or your family.
Think of the freedom you’ll experience once you’re able to identify, with certainty, what kind of meals or snacks can make you feel great and give you high levels of energy and endurance for hours at a time.
Won’t it will be exhilarating to know exactly what you can eat anytime you need to be at your best for a business presentation or a tennis match, to take an exam or embark on a long road trip? What’s more important than knowing how to choose just the right sustenance to enable you to put in a long day at the office, enjoy your kids, pursue your hobbies, write a novel, or burn the midnight oil in any one of a thousand different ways?
It’s not an exaggeration to say that, once you identify your Metabolic Type® and begin to eat accordingly, your life will never be the same. It’s literally like having a blindfold removed, and experiencing a whole new dimension in life. You’ll wonder how you’ve managed to function all these years without this kind of fundamental self-awareness.
Health & Fitness Benefits for Every Type
When you start to eat correctly, you’ll experience lots of positive changes that will sharply improve the quality of your life. Some of these benefits will occur right away, others will take a while longer.
Here are the kinds of improvements you can expect in the short-term:
- your food will be efficiently converted to energy rather than stored as fat
- you’ll enjoy plenty of physical and mental energy following meals and snacks
- you’ll feel full and hunger-free, 4 to 5 hours after meals
- you’ll lose your cravings for sweets and starchy foods
- digestive problems — indigestion, gas, bloating — will subside
- you’ll have sustained energy and endurance throughout the day
- you’ll be capable of improved athletic performance
- your ability to concentrate will be significantly enhanced
- you’ll enjoy a renewed sense of well-being and positive mental outlook
- irritability, anxiety, depression, and hyperactivity will fade away
There are plenty of long-term benefits you can expect as well, although they’re different for everyone, since people have different kinds of metabolic imbalances and an almost infinite assortment of related health problems.
In general, however, here are the kinds of long-term health benefits you can expect if you stick to a diet that’s tailored to your Metabolic Type®:
- natural weight loss, without dieting or restricting calories
- permanent weight loss, without struggle, deprivation or hunger
- achievement of your ideal weight, whether you’re overweight or underweight
- prevention of chronic disease
- enhanced immunity
- improved resistance to colds, flu, recurrent infections
- reversal of chronic or degenerative health disorders
- slowing of the aging process
A customized diet will provide you with much more than symptom suppression, a quick fix for common ailments, a temporary energy boost, or a way to help you shed a few pounds in the short term — only to have your health problems and your weight reappear again soon. It’s a process that enables you to optimize your health in a permanent way, by balancing the homeostatic mechanisms that control all aspects of your metabolism.
When you consistently consume the right fuel mixture, you’re providing your body with the raw materials it needs to regulate and repair and regenerate itself on an ongoing basis. That’s the essence of real health and real healing, and the reason why people are very successful when they use Metabolic Typing® correctly to prevent and reverse chronic illness. You’ll be amazed at the kinds of results you can achieve with customized nutrition, especially if you apply a little time and perseverance.
Your Dietary Needs are Largely Determined by Heredity
Over thousands of years of evolutionary history, people in different parts of the world developed very distinct nutritional needs in response to a whole range of variables — including climate and geography and whatever plant and animal life their environments had to offer.
As a result, people today have widely varying nutrient requirements, especially with regard to macronutrients — the proteins, carbohydrates and fats which are the fundamental dietary “building blocks,” or the compounds most essential to sustaining life.
For example, many people who currently inhabit tropical or equatorial regions have a strong hereditary need for diets high in carbohydrates such as vegetables and fruits and grains and legumes. These foods tend to provide the kind of body fuel that is most compatible with the unique body chemistry of people who are genetically programmed to lead active lifestyles in warm and humid regions of the world. Their systems are simply not designed to process or utilize large quantities of animal protein and fat.
Conversely, people from cold harsh northern climates are not genetically equipped to survive on light vegetarian food. They tend to burn body fuel quickly, so they need heavier foods to sustain themselves. Eskimos, for example, can easily digest and assimilate large quantities of protein and fat — the very types of foods which would overwhelm the digestive tracts of people from, say, the Mediterranean basin.
The bottom line is that a diet considered “healthy” in one part of the world is frequently disastrous for people elsewhere in the world. For instance, well known dietary expert Nathan Pritikin pointed out that Bantu tribes in Africa eat very low-fat diets, an approach that has long been widely regarded as very healthy in the U.S. and other industrialized societies. Not surprisingly, coronary artery disease and other modern degenerative diseases are almost non-existent among the Bantu.
Pritikin’s successors and other leading health professionals have long advocated low-fat diets for everyone. Yet this one-size-fits-all approach has clearly failed to reduce obesity and cardiovascular disease for large segments of our population. Like all other universal dietary recommendations, it overlooks the enormous amount of biochemical and physiological diversity among individuals.
As an example, Scottish, Welsh, Celtic, and Irish people have certain nutritional requirements which are just the opposite of the African Bantu. The ancestral diets of the Scots and Irish and related cultures have always been very high in fatty fish.
For this and other reasons they have a hereditary need for more fat than other populations. So the low-fat diets that prevent heart disease in the Bantu can actually cause heart disease in some people of Anglo-Saxon descent. And vice versa.
This principle of diet being linked to genetic requirements is seen throughout nature. Every animal species is genetically programmed to feed on specific sources of food. Unlike man who applies free will to his dietary choices, animals eat according to their natural instincts and genetic dictates. Consequently, insects, reptiles, fish, birds and mammals ( except man ) are not plagued with degenerative health disorders like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, allergies, and multiple sclerosis — to name but a few.
In his book Happiness is a Healthy Life, Lendon Smith, M.D. writes, “The trick of eating is to figure out your racial / ethnic background and try to imitate it.” It’s a great idea, but there’s just one problem — in today’s day and age, few of us a have a clear cut ethnic or genetic heritage. In places like the United States in particular, we’ve become a true genetic “melting pot.”
People from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds have moved from continent to continent and country to country and mixed and mingled like crazy. So most of us have lots of different blood lines running through our veins.
Maybe you’re part Irish and part German with traces of Mexican blood. Your best friend might be half Italian and half Japanese. Perhaps your neighbor has a Swedish mother and a Lebanese father and a maternal grandmother that was part Jamaican. The permutations are endless. There have been so many cultural shifts and so much intermarriage in the modern world that it’s just not possible for most of us to identify — with any degree of precision — exactly what our ancestral diet might be.
But here’s a major caveat — while your ancestral diet is of critical importance in figuring out what foods might be ideal for you, it’s not the only factor. Our nutrient requirements are also heavily influenced by our environments and the kinds of lifestyles we lead. But both have shifted dramatically over the course of the last century.
It took all of us thousands of years to adapt to our earthly surroundings, yet in the last 100 years — the evolutionary blink of an eye — many of the essential qualities of our air and water and soil have been altered, suddenly and profoundly. The delicate symbiosis that our ancestors developed with their natural habitats has been seriously disrupted. In many ways the environment can’t sustain human health as it once could.
The same applies to our lifestyles. We’ve all been genetically bred over the millennia for a great deal of physical activity — to run and walk and plant and hunt and fish and ride and herd. But in a very short span of time that all changed. Now we spend huge blocks of time indoors under artificial light, exposed to all kinds of foreign chemicals, leading sedentary lives in front of TVs or computers or riding around in planes, trains and automobiles.
So, identifying the diet that will best support your health is considerably more complicated than simply trying to determine your ethnic and cultural heritage. There are just too many different factors besides heredity which influence your nutritional needs.
Not to mention the fact that your nutritional needs are not static. Your body is a dynamic homeostatic system — meaning it’s always in flux, always attempting to regulate itself, achieve a healthy balance, adjust to shifting environmental conditions.
Your dietary needs can change from year to year, season to season, day to day — even hour by hour, due to cyclical (circadian) rhythms which cause predictable shifts in your body chemistry every 24 hours.
Fortunately there is a breakthrough technology you can use to quickly and easily identify which foods are right for you . . . it’s called Metabolic Typing®.
The Ultimate Guide to Optimum Health and Permanent Weight Loss
There are few things in life as liberating as discovering your Metabolic Type®, few things as enlightening as finally coming to understand exactly what foods and food combinations will enable you to thoroughly enjoy your life and live it to the fullest.
Most of us have been slaves to food in one way or another all our lives. Quite literally, what we eat controls every aspect of our existence — how we look and feel, our range of productivity and performance, the quality of our emotional experiences, whether we stay well or fall prey to disease, even the quality of our sleep and the nature of our dreams.
When we don’t understand how specific foods affect us, eating becomes a daily struggle. We struggle to feel satisfied, to fight the battle of the bulge, or just to feel decently from one hour to the next.
Once you recognize your metabolic individuality, however, everything changes. The balance shifts, the tables are turned — suddenly you’re the one in control of food, it’s not in control of you. Eating right is no longer a complex challenge and food is no longer your adversary. When you know how to choose foods that effectively sustain your body’s unique style of functioning, eating is what it should be — easy and enjoyable.
Imagine the sense of excitement and empowerment you’ll have the first time you go to the supermarket and select groceries in a truly well informed and targeted way — rather than being forced to make purchases in a random, haphazard fashion, based largely on guesswork about what might or might not be good for you or your family.
Think of the freedom you’ll experience once you’re able to identify, with certainty, what kind of meals or snacks can make you feel great and give you high levels of energy and endurance for hours at a time.
Won’t it will be exhilarating to know exactly what you can eat anytime you need to be at your best for a business presentation or a tennis match, to take an exam or embark on a long road trip? What’s more important than knowing how to choose just the right sustenance to enable you to put in a long day at the office, enjoy your kids, pursue your hobbies, write a novel, or burn the midnight oil in any one of a thousand different ways?
It’s not an exaggeration to say that, once you identify your Metabolic Type® and begin to eat accordingly, your life will never be the same. It’s literally like having a blindfold removed, and experiencing a whole new dimension in life. You’ll wonder how you’ve managed to function all these years without this kind of fundamental self-awareness.
Health & Fitness Benefits for Every Type
When you start to eat correctly, you’ll experience lots of positive changes that will sharply improve the quality of your life. Some of these benefits will occur right away, others will take a while longer.
Here are the kinds of improvements you can expect in the short-term:
- your food will be efficiently converted to energy rather than stored as fat
- you’ll enjoy plenty of physical and mental energy following meals and snacks
- you’ll feel full and hunger-free, 4 to 5 hours after meals
- you’ll lose your cravings for sweets and starchy foods
- digestive problems — indigestion, gas, bloating — will subside
- you’ll have sustained energy and endurance throughout the day
- you’ll be capable of improved athletic performance
- your ability to concentrate will be significantly enhanced
- you’ll enjoy a renewed sense of well-being and positive mental outlook
- irritability, anxiety, depression, and hyperactivity will fade away
There are plenty of long-term benefits you can expect as well, although they’re different for everyone, since people have different kinds of metabolic imbalances and an almost infinite assortment of related health problems.
In general, however, here are the kinds of long-term health benefits you can expect if you stick to a diet that’s tailored to your Metabolic Type®:
- natural weight loss, without dieting or restricting calories
- permanent weight loss, without struggle, deprivation or hunger
- achievement of your ideal weight, whether you’re overweight or underweight
- prevention of chronic disease
- enhanced immunity
- improved resistance to colds, flu, recurrent infections
- reversal of chronic or degenerative health disorders
- slowing of the aging process
A customized diet will provide you with much more than symptom suppression, a quick fix for common ailments, a temporary energy boost, or a way to help you shed a few pounds in the short term — only to have your health problems and your weight reappear again soon. It’s a process that enables you to optimize your health in a permanent way, by balancing the homeostatic mechanisms that control all aspects of your metabolism.
When you consistently consume the right fuel mixture, you’re providing your body with the raw materials it needs to regulate and repair and regenerate itself on an ongoing basis. That’s the essence of real health and real healing, and the reason why people are very successful when they use Metabolic Typing® correctly to prevent and reverse chronic illness. You’ll be amazed at the kinds of results you can achieve with customized nutrition, especially if you apply a little time and perseverance.
The First Book Ever To Provide Customized Dietary Solutions
Are you overweight? Do you suffer from low energy, digestive problems, allergies, low blood sugar, poor concentration, mood swings, hormonal imbalances, high blood pressure, or other chronic ailments? Have you tried lots of diets with limited success? Are you confused by all the contradictory advice of nutrition experts? If your answer is “yes” to any of these questions, here’s what you need to know: the real secret of health and fitness is customized nutrition.
Today’s diet books are virtually all based on a standardized or mass market approach to health and nutrition. In other words, they offer single, one-size-fits-all dietary solutions. But this approach has proven to be very limited — it’s the reason diets don’t work for most people.
Nutrition’s best kept secret is simply this: what works for one person may have no effect on another person, and may make a third person worse. Here’s another way of describing this same principle: any food or nutrient can have virtually opposite biochemical influences in different people.
In other words, the very same foods that will keep you energized, healthy and slim can cause someone else to be overweight, fatigued and unhealthy! Why? Simply because your metabolism is very unique!
In the same way that your outward appearance is different than everyone else’s, and no two people have the same fingerprints, we are all very different internally as well — on a biochemical or metabolic level. This means your dietary needs are highly individualized.
The Metabolic Typing® Diet is the first book ever to provide simple, practical methods for identifying a diet that is tailored to your body chemistry — and yours alone.
This is the definitive book on “metabolic typing,” widely regarded as the “next wave” in nutritional science. Unlike other one-dimensional dietary approaches that attempt to differentiate people on the basis of single, fixed variables such as blood type or body type, Metabolic Typing® is a comprehensive, dynamic system that encompasses a whole range of biochemical or metabolic variables.
The Metabolic Typing® Diet not only gives you the ability to pinpoint your dietary needs with great precision, it also allows you to modify your diet as your needs change over time. For many different reasons — including stress, illness, physical exertion, aging, dietary habits and environmental influences — your metabolism is subject to shifts and changes.
Fortunately, Metabolic Typing® is a technology that anyone can use to modify their diet as their metabolic needs change over time. That’s why The Metabolic Typing® Diet is a “must read.”
The Ultimate Guide to Optimum Health and Permanent Weight Loss
There are few things in life as liberating as discovering your Metabolic Type®, few things as enlightening as finally coming to understand exactly what foods and food combinations will enable you to thoroughly enjoy your life and live it to the fullest.
Most of us have been slaves to food in one way or another all our lives. Quite literally, what we eat controls every aspect of our existence — how we look and feel, our range of productivity and performance, the quality of our emotional experiences, whether we stay well or fall prey to disease, even the quality of our sleep and the nature of our dreams.
When we don’t understand how specific foods affect us, eating becomes a daily struggle. We struggle to feel satisfied, to fight the battle of the bulge, or just to feel decently from one hour to the next.
Once you recognize your metabolic individuality, however, everything changes. The balance shifts, the tables are turned — suddenly you’re the one in control of food, it’s not in control of you. Eating right is no longer a complex challenge and food is no longer your adversary. When you know how to choose foods that effectively sustain your body’s unique style of functioning, eating is what it should be — easy and enjoyable.
Imagine the sense of excitement and empowerment you’ll have the first time you go to the supermarket and select groceries in a truly well informed and targeted way — rather than being forced to make purchases in a random, haphazard fashion, based largely on guesswork about what might or might not be good for you or your family.
Think of the freedom you’ll experience once you’re able to identify, with certainty, what kind of meals or snacks can make you feel great and give you high levels of energy and endurance for hours at a time.
Won’t it will be exhilarating to know exactly what you can eat anytime you need to be at your best for a business presentation or a tennis match, to take an exam or embark on a long road trip? What’s more important than knowing how to choose just the right sustenance to enable you to put in a long day at the office, enjoy your kids, pursue your hobbies, write a novel, or burn the midnight oil in any one of a thousand different ways?
It’s not an exaggeration to say that, once you identify your Metabolic Type® and begin to eat accordingly, your life will never be the same. It’s literally like having a blindfold removed, and experiencing a whole new dimension in life. You’ll wonder how you’ve managed to function all these years without this kind of fundamental self-awareness.
Health & Fitness Benefits for Every Type
When you start to eat correctly, you’ll experience lots of positive changes that will sharply improve the quality of your life. Some of these benefits will occur right away, others will take a while longer.
Here are the kinds of improvements you can expect in the short-term:
- your food will be efficiently converted to energy rather than stored as fat
- you’ll enjoy plenty of physical and mental energy following meals and snacks
- you’ll feel full and hunger-free, 4 to 5 hours after meals
- you’ll lose your cravings for sweets and starchy foods
- digestive problems — indigestion, gas, bloating — will subside
- you’ll have sustained energy and endurance throughout the day
- you’ll be capable of improved athletic performance
- your ability to concentrate will be significantly enhanced
- you’ll enjoy a renewed sense of well-being and positive mental outlook
- irritability, anxiety, depression, and hyperactivity will fade away
There are plenty of long-term benefits you can expect as well, although they’re different for everyone, since people have different kinds of metabolic imbalances and an almost infinite assortment of related health problems.
In general, however, here are the kinds of long-term health benefits you can expect if you stick to a diet that’s tailored to your Metabolic Type®:
- natural weight loss, without dieting or restricting calories
- permanent weight loss, without struggle, deprivation or hunger
- achievement of your ideal weight, whether you’re overweight or underweight
- prevention of chronic disease
- enhanced immunity
- improved resistance to colds, flu, recurrent infections
- reversal of chronic or degenerative health disorders
- slowing of the aging process
A customized diet will provide you with much more than symptom suppression, a quick fix for common ailments, a temporary energy boost, or a way to help you shed a few pounds in the short term — only to have your health problems and your weight reappear again soon. It’s a process that enables you to optimize your health in a permanent way, by balancing the homeostatic mechanisms that control all aspects of your metabolism.
When you consistently consume the right fuel mixture, you’re providing your body with the raw materials it needs to regulate and repair and regenerate itself on an ongoing basis. That’s the essence of real health and real healing, and the reason why people are very successful when they use Metabolic Typing® correctly to prevent and reverse chronic illness. You’ll be amazed at the kinds of results you can achieve with customized nutrition, especially if you apply a little time and perseverance.
Your Dietary Needs are Largely Determined by Heredity
Over thousands of years of evolutionary history, people in different parts of the world developed very distinct nutritional needs in response to a whole range of variables — including climate and geography and whatever plant and animal life their environments had to offer.
As a result, people today have widely varying nutrient requirements, especially with regard to macronutrients — the proteins, carbohydrates and fats which are the fundamental dietary “building blocks,” or the compounds most essential to sustaining life.
For example, many people who currently inhabit tropical or equatorial regions have a strong hereditary need for diets high in carbohydrates such as vegetables and fruits and grains and legumes. These foods tend to provide the kind of body fuel that is most compatible with the unique body chemistry of people who are genetically programmed to lead active lifestyles in warm and humid regions of the world. Their systems are simply not designed to process or utilize large quantities of animal protein and fat.
Conversely, people from cold harsh northern climates are not genetically equipped to survive on light vegetarian food. They tend to burn body fuel quickly, so they need heavier foods to sustain themselves. Eskimos, for example, can easily digest and assimilate large quantities of protein and fat — the very types of foods which would overwhelm the digestive tracts of people from, say, the Mediterranean basin.
The bottom line is that a diet considered “healthy” in one part of the world is frequently disastrous for people elsewhere in the world. For instance, well known dietary expert Nathan Pritikin pointed out that Bantu tribes in Africa eat very low-fat diets, an approach that has long been widely regarded as very healthy in the U.S. and other industrialized societies. Not surprisingly, coronary artery disease and other modern degenerative diseases are almost non-existent among the Bantu.
Pritikin’s successors and other leading health professionals have long advocated low-fat diets for everyone. Yet this one-size-fits-all approach has clearly failed to reduce obesity and cardiovascular disease for large segments of our population. Like all other universal dietary recommendations, it overlooks the enormous amount of biochemical and physiological diversity among individuals.
As an example, Scottish, Welsh, Celtic, and Irish people have certain nutritional requirements which are just the opposite of the African Bantu. The ancestral diets of the Scots and Irish and related cultures have always been very high in fatty fish.
For this and other reasons they have a hereditary need for more fat than other populations. So the low-fat diets that prevent heart disease in the Bantu can actually cause heart disease in some people of Anglo-Saxon descent. And vice versa.
This principle of diet being linked to genetic requirements is seen throughout nature. Every animal species is genetically programmed to feed on specific sources of food. Unlike man who applies free will to his dietary choices, animals eat according to their natural instincts and genetic dictates. Consequently, insects, reptiles, fish, birds and mammals ( except man ) are not plagued with degenerative health disorders like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, allergies, and multiple sclerosis — to name but a few.
In his book Happiness is a Healthy Life, Lendon Smith, M.D. writes, “The trick of eating is to figure out your racial / ethnic background and try to imitate it.” It’s a great idea, but there’s just one problem — in today’s day and age, few of us a have a clear cut ethnic or genetic heritage. In places like the United States in particular, we’ve become a true genetic “melting pot.”
People from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds have moved from continent to continent and country to country and mixed and mingled like crazy. So most of us have lots of different blood lines running through our veins.
Maybe you’re part Irish and part German with traces of Mexican blood. Your best friend might be half Italian and half Japanese. Perhaps your neighbor has a Swedish mother and a Lebanese father and a maternal grandmother that was part Jamaican. The permutations are endless. There have been so many cultural shifts and so much intermarriage in the modern world that it’s just not possible for most of us to identify — with any degree of precision — exactly what our ancestral diet might be.
But here’s a major caveat — while your ancestral diet is of critical importance in figuring out what foods might be ideal for you, it’s not the only factor. Our nutrient requirements are also heavily influenced by our environments and the kinds of lifestyles we lead. But both have shifted dramatically over the course of the last century.
It took all of us thousands of years to adapt to our earthly surroundings, yet in the last 100 years — the evolutionary blink of an eye — many of the essential qualities of our air and water and soil have been altered, suddenly and profoundly. The delicate symbiosis that our ancestors developed with their natural habitats has been seriously disrupted. In many ways the environment can’t sustain human health as it once could.
The same applies to our lifestyles. We’ve all been genetically bred over the millennia for a great deal of physical activity — to run and walk and plant and hunt and fish and ride and herd. But in a very short span of time that all changed. Now we spend huge blocks of time indoors under artificial light, exposed to all kinds of foreign chemicals, leading sedentary lives in front of TVs or computers or riding around in planes, trains and automobiles.
So, identifying the diet that will best support your health is considerably more complicated than simply trying to determine your ethnic and cultural heritage. There are just too many different factors besides heredity which influence your nutritional needs.
Not to mention the fact that your nutritional needs are not static. Your body is a dynamic homeostatic system — meaning it’s always in flux, always attempting to regulate itself, achieve a healthy balance, adjust to shifting environmental conditions.
Your dietary needs can change from year to year, season to season, day to day — even hour by hour, due to cyclical (circadian) rhythms which cause predictable shifts in your body chemistry every 24 hours.
Fortunately there is a breakthrough technology you can use to quickly and easily identify which foods are right for you . . . it’s called Metabolic Typing®.
The Ultimate Guide to Optimum Health and Permanent Weight Loss
There are few things in life as liberating as discovering your Metabolic Type®, few things as enlightening as finally coming to understand exactly what foods and food combinations will enable you to thoroughly enjoy your life and live it to the fullest.
Most of us have been slaves to food in one way or another all our lives. Quite literally, what we eat controls every aspect of our existence — how we look and feel, our range of productivity and performance, the quality of our emotional experiences, whether we stay well or fall prey to disease, even the quality of our sleep and the nature of our dreams.
When we don’t understand how specific foods affect us, eating becomes a daily struggle. We struggle to feel satisfied, to fight the battle of the bulge, or just to feel decently from one hour to the next.
Once you recognize your metabolic individuality, however, everything changes. The balance shifts, the tables are turned — suddenly you’re the one in control of food, it’s not in control of you. Eating right is no longer a complex challenge and food is no longer your adversary. When you know how to choose foods that effectively sustain your body’s unique style of functioning, eating is what it should be — easy and enjoyable.
Imagine the sense of excitement and empowerment you’ll have the first time you go to the supermarket and select groceries in a truly well informed and targeted way — rather than being forced to make purchases in a random, haphazard fashion, based largely on guesswork about what might or might not be good for you or your family.
Think of the freedom you’ll experience once you’re able to identify, with certainty, what kind of meals or snacks can make you feel great and give you high levels of energy and endurance for hours at a time.
Won’t it will be exhilarating to know exactly what you can eat anytime you need to be at your best for a business presentation or a tennis match, to take an exam or embark on a long road trip? What’s more important than knowing how to choose just the right sustenance to enable you to put in a long day at the office, enjoy your kids, pursue your hobbies, write a novel, or burn the midnight oil in any one of a thousand different ways?
It’s not an exaggeration to say that, once you identify your Metabolic Type® and begin to eat accordingly, your life will never be the same. It’s literally like having a blindfold removed, and experiencing a whole new dimension in life. You’ll wonder how you’ve managed to function all these years without this kind of fundamental self-awareness.
Health & Fitness Benefits for Every Type
When you start to eat correctly, you’ll experience lots of positive changes that will sharply improve the quality of your life. Some of these benefits will occur right away, others will take a while longer.
Here are the kinds of improvements you can expect in the short-term:
- your food will be efficiently converted to energy rather than stored as fat
- you’ll enjoy plenty of physical and mental energy following meals and snacks
- you’ll feel full and hunger-free, 4 to 5 hours after meals
- you’ll lose your cravings for sweets and starchy foods
- digestive problems — indigestion, gas, bloating — will subside
- you’ll have sustained energy and endurance throughout the day
- you’ll be capable of improved athletic performance
- your ability to concentrate will be significantly enhanced
- you’ll enjoy a renewed sense of well-being and positive mental outlook
- irritability, anxiety, depression, and hyperactivity will fade away
There are plenty of long-term benefits you can expect as well, although they’re different for everyone, since people have different kinds of metabolic imbalances and an almost infinite assortment of related health problems.
In general, however, here are the kinds of long-term health benefits you can expect if you stick to a diet that’s tailored to your Metabolic Type®:
- natural weight loss, without dieting or restricting calories
- permanent weight loss, without struggle, deprivation or hunger
- achievement of your ideal weight, whether you’re overweight or underweight
- prevention of chronic disease
- enhanced immunity
- improved resistance to colds, flu, recurrent infections
- reversal of chronic or degenerative health disorders
- slowing of the aging process
A customized diet will provide you with much more than symptom suppression, a quick fix for common ailments, a temporary energy boost, or a way to help you shed a few pounds in the short term — only to have your health problems and your weight reappear again soon. It’s a process that enables you to optimize your health in a permanent way, by balancing the homeostatic mechanisms that control all aspects of your metabolism.
When you consistently consume the right fuel mixture, you’re providing your body with the raw materials it needs to regulate and repair and regenerate itself on an ongoing basis. That’s the essence of real health and real healing, and the reason why people are very successful when they use Metabolic Typing® correctly to prevent and reverse chronic illness. You’ll be amazed at the kinds of results you can achieve with customized nutrition, especially if you apply a little time and perseverance.
Your Dietary Needs are Largely Determined by Heredity
Over thousands of years of evolutionary history, people in different parts of the world developed very distinct nutritional needs in response to a whole range of variables — including climate and geography and whatever plant and animal life their environments had to offer.
As a result, people today have widely varying nutrient requirements, especially with regard to macronutrients — the proteins, carbohydrates and fats which are the fundamental dietary “building blocks,” or the compounds most essential to sustaining life.
For example, many people who currently inhabit tropical or equatorial regions have a strong hereditary need for diets high in carbohydrates such as vegetables and fruits and grains and legumes. These foods tend to provide the kind of body fuel that is most compatible with the unique body chemistry of people who are genetically programmed to lead active lifestyles in warm and humid regions of the world. Their systems are simply not designed to process or utilize large quantities of animal protein and fat.
Conversely, people from cold harsh northern climates are not genetically equipped to survive on light vegetarian food. They tend to burn body fuel quickly, so they need heavier foods to sustain themselves. Eskimos, for example, can easily digest and assimilate large quantities of protein and fat — the very types of foods which would overwhelm the digestive tracts of people from, say, the Mediterranean basin.
The bottom line is that a diet considered “healthy” in one part of the world is frequently disastrous for people elsewhere in the world. For instance, well known dietary expert Nathan Pritikin pointed out that Bantu tribes in Africa eat very low-fat diets, an approach that has long been widely regarded as very healthy in the U.S. and other industrialized societies. Not surprisingly, coronary artery disease and other modern degenerative diseases are almost non-existent among the Bantu.
Pritikin’s successors and other leading health professionals have long advocated low-fat diets for everyone. Yet this one-size-fits-all approach has clearly failed to reduce obesity and cardiovascular disease for large segments of our population. Like all other universal dietary recommendations, it overlooks the enormous amount of biochemical and physiological diversity among individuals.
As an example, Scottish, Welsh, Celtic, and Irish people have certain nutritional requirements which are just the opposite of the African Bantu. The ancestral diets of the Scots and Irish and related cultures have always been very high in fatty fish.
For this and other reasons they have a hereditary need for more fat than other populations. So the low-fat diets that prevent heart disease in the Bantu can actually cause heart disease in some people of Anglo-Saxon descent. And vice versa.
This principle of diet being linked to genetic requirements is seen throughout nature. Every animal species is genetically programmed to feed on specific sources of food. Unlike man who applies free will to his dietary choices, animals eat according to their natural instincts and genetic dictates. Consequently, insects, reptiles, fish, birds and mammals ( except man ) are not plagued with degenerative health disorders like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, allergies, and multiple sclerosis — to name but a few.
In his book Happiness is a Healthy Life, Lendon Smith, M.D. writes, “The trick of eating is to figure out your racial / ethnic background and try to imitate it.” It’s a great idea, but there’s just one problem — in today’s day and age, few of us a have a clear cut ethnic or genetic heritage. In places like the United States in particular, we’ve become a true genetic “melting pot.”
People from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds have moved from continent to continent and country to country and mixed and mingled like crazy. So most of us have lots of different blood lines running through our veins.
Maybe you’re part Irish and part German with traces of Mexican blood. Your best friend might be half Italian and half Japanese. Perhaps your neighbor has a Swedish mother and a Lebanese father and a maternal grandmother that was part Jamaican. The permutations are endless. There have been so many cultural shifts and so much intermarriage in the modern world that it’s just not possible for most of us to identify — with any degree of precision — exactly what our ancestral diet might be.
But here’s a major caveat — while your ancestral diet is of critical importance in figuring out what foods might be ideal for you, it’s not the only factor. Our nutrient requirements are also heavily influenced by our environments and the kinds of lifestyles we lead. But both have shifted dramatically over the course of the last century.
It took all of us thousands of years to adapt to our earthly surroundings, yet in the last 100 years — the evolutionary blink of an eye — many of the essential qualities of our air and water and soil have been altered, suddenly and profoundly. The delicate symbiosis that our ancestors developed with their natural habitats has been seriously disrupted. In many ways the environment can’t sustain human health as it once could.
The same applies to our lifestyles. We’ve all been genetically bred over the millennia for a great deal of physical activity — to run and walk and plant and hunt and fish and ride and herd. But in a very short span of time that all changed. Now we spend huge blocks of time indoors under artificial light, exposed to all kinds of foreign chemicals, leading sedentary lives in front of TVs or computers or riding around in planes, trains and automobiles.
So, identifying the diet that will best support your health is considerably more complicated than simply trying to determine your ethnic and cultural heritage. There are just too many different factors besides heredity which influence your nutritional needs.
Not to mention the fact that your nutritional needs are not static. Your body is a dynamic homeostatic system — meaning it’s always in flux, always attempting to regulate itself, achieve a healthy balance, adjust to shifting environmental conditions.
Your dietary needs can change from year to year, season to season, day to day — even hour by hour, due to cyclical (circadian) rhythms which cause predictable shifts in your body chemistry every 24 hours.
Fortunately there is a breakthrough technology you can use to quickly and easily identify which foods are right for you . . . it’s called Metabolic Typing®.
One Man’s Food is Another’s Poison
As you may already know, metabolism is simply the sum total of all the chemical and biological activities that are necessary to sustain life. Although these life functions — or metabolic activities — are many and diverse, they can be summarized as follows: nutrition, transport, respiration, synthesis, regulation, growth and reproduction.
In order to sustain life, all these metabolic activities require energy. The air, water, sunlight, and food (nutrients) which we acquire from our environment are used by our body to produce this vital, life-sustaining energy.
The raw materials in the foods we eat (vitamins, minerals, enzymes, etc.) are particularly important, since they’re used by our bodies to repair, rebuild and heal tissue. But foods and nutrients are also essential because they provide the fuel that is oxidized (burned or combusted) in our cells to provide energy for all metabolic activities.
In fact every biochemical process in your body is entirely dependent on the rate, quality and amount of energy available to you. When optimum energy is available to your body on all levels — to all your cells, organs, glands and systems — then optimum (balanced and efficient) functioning of your body, or good health, is possible.
It is on the cellular level that all metabolic activity takes place and efficiency or inefficiency is determined. Each cell in your body is like a biochemical factory built to fulfill a specific metabolic function. As food passes through the digestive tract, it is absorbed into the bloodstream where it is transported to the cells. Once nutrients arrive at the cells, they are assimilated into the cells, and then utilized by the cells for the production of energy and for the fulfillment of the cells’ “programmed” function
We all need a full spectrum of nutrients. But, different people have genetically programmed requirements for different amounts of the various nutrients. It is these differing genetic requirements that explain why a given nutrient can cause one person to feel good, have no effect on another, and cause a third person to feel poorly.
Poor Health Begins at the Cellular Level
Each cell in your body “knows” how to be a perfect cell — it’s designed to be healthy, and to efficiently perform the functions for which it was created.
But, unless the specific raw materials for which you have a genetically-based need are made available to your body at the right place, at the right time, and in a form that can be utilized, inefficiency at a cellular level will result. In turn, your cells’ ability to perform their designated functions will be impaired.
As your cells lose the ability to adequately produce energy (from a lack of sufficient nutrients), they also lose their ability to repair and rebuild tissue. Strong, healthy cells become replaced with weak, defective ones. This in turn exerts a “domino effect” on your whole system.
If the cells of an organ become weakened and less able to fulfill their roles, the function of the organ itself becomes weak and inefficient. When this happens, stress is put on your entire system — with disease as the inevitable result.
On the other hand, when cells do get all the nutrients for which there is a genetically required need, they’re capable of producing optimum amounts of energy. With adequate available energy, they can readily fulfill their genetic roles. And with the proper raw materials (nutrients), the cells can also repair and rebuild and reproduce efficiently and effectively.
When the cells are strong, healthy and efficient, so too are the organs, glands and systems they comprise — with good health as the natural result. But in order to acquire the nutrients for which your body has a genetic need, you must first identify what your needs are. That’s the purpose of identifying your Metabolic Type®.
An Example of Varying Dietary Requirements
One important factor that is used to determine your Metabolic Type® is your rate of cellular oxidation. Thus, one of the things that the book’s metabolic survey (questionnaire) is designed to do is find out which of the following three characteristics may apply to you:
- slow oxidizer
- fast oxidizer
- mixed oxidizer
Your rate of cellular oxidation is not the only factor that determines your Metabolic Type®, but it is a very important factor – and one that is largely determined by your genetic heritage.
Slow oxidizers require low-fat, low protein, high carbohydrate diets, whereas fast oxidizers need high-protein, high-fat, low carbohydrate diets. Mixed oxidizers require relatively equal amounts of protein, fats and carbohydrates.
As an example, let’s say that you are a fast oxidizer but you are not eating a diet that includes adequate amounts of protein and fat. Here’s what’s likely to happen:
your resistance to infections will drop and other chronic ailments can develop
your food won’t be adequately converted to energy; some of it will be stored as fat
you’re likely to experience hunger and fatigue following meals
you’re likely to have problems such as irritability, indigestion, and a lack of stamina
What Type Are You?
The modern science of Metabolic Typing® utilizes various methods for identifying peoples’ biochemical individuality and determining their dietary needs. A primary method is the interpretation of “body language,” or the evaluation of any number of the hundreds of different traits and characteristics that make one person distinct from another in terms of:
- physical appearance
- anatomical or structural traits
- psychological characteristics
- personality and behavioral traits
- food reactions and dietary preferences
Believe it or not, all your highly individualized characteristics have biochemical correlates. In other words, they are a direct result of the unique way in which your regulatory (or homeostatic) control systems are designed.
We all have genetically inherited strengths or weaknesses (or imbalances) in our:
- autonomic nervous system
- carbo-oxidative system
- lipo-oxidative system
- endocrine system
These are the key homeostatic systems that determine your Metabolic Type®. For example, your autonomic nervous system manages all the involuntary activity in your body — your heartbeat, your breathing, your digestion, reproductive functions, immune activity, etc.
The carbo-oxidative and lipo-oxidative systems control the way in which your cells convert nutrients into energy, and your endocrine system exerts all kinds of influences on your metabolism through the secretion of hormones, the chemical messengers that manage the activity of tissues and cells.
There are countless readily observable clues that help reveal how these systems function for you. For example, if you’re tall and have good concentration but weak digestion, these are traits that suggest something about the way your autonomic nervous system (ANS) is designed, i.e., that your body may be more influenced by the sympathetic branch of the ANS, relative to the parasympathetic branch.
Or if you have a poor appetite and have low energy but function well on sugar or starches, you might be a slow oxidizer rather than a fast oxidizer.
The endless possible variations in your traits indicate the nature of the “imbalances” within your regulatory systems and, in turn, define your metabolic individuality. These traits or clues tell us a great deal about the efficiency with which all your organs and glands function, the kinds of health disorders you’re subject to, and the effect that different foods and nutrients have on your health.
Remember though, “body language” is never absolutely clear cut. In other words, there are no “pure types” — people who have traits that reflect only specific imbalances, such as sympathetic dominance versus parasympathetic dominance or fast oxidation versus slow oxidation, and so on. You’re more complex than that — like an extraordinarily complex mosaic comprised of countless facets arranged in a highly unique configuration.
So what we need to do is look for patterns among your traits and characteristics that can tell us something about your dominant tendencies.
Think of it this way: If you’re lost in the wilderness at night and want to find your way home, you have a good chance of doing so if it’s a cloudless night and you have some understanding of astronomy. If you can locate the Big Dipper, you can find the North Star and identify the four directions. Using that as your reference point, you can determine the proper direction to find your way home.
Metabolic Types® are like constellations. They’re patterns that organize the infinite minutiae of your physiological and biochemical makeup, enabling you to know what nutritional path to follow in order to balance your body chemistry — and in turn optimize your health and fitness.
Choose Foods to Look Great, Feel Great
Have you ever noticed that Americans are among the fattest people in the world? And yet weight problems and obesity are rare occurrences in many places — especially among people who live in “isolated” or “primitive” (non-industrialized) cultures?
One primary reason for this is that people who live in remote cultures, far apart from the industrial mainstream, generally don’t indulge in modern eating habits. Instead they typically adhere to their “native” diets, which means they eat the very same kinds of whole, natural foods that their ancestors depended upon for sustenance and survival. In other words, they stick to the foods that they are genetically designed to handle.
If you’re seeking to lose weight or maintain your ideal weight, the essential first step is to eat a metabolically appropriate diet. No other single factor will exert more influence on your ability to manage your weight effectively.
Of course there are certain kinds of generic things that anyone can do to minimize their weight — including exercise to burn calories, exercise designed to build lean muscle mass and thereby increase the metabolic rate, keeping insulin levels in check ( insulin is a hormone that increases fat storage ) by balancing the blood sugar, etc.
But unless you’re eating according to your Metabolic Type®, you’ll struggle with excess weight. Why? Because following a diet that’s wrong for you will disrupt your cellular oxidation. In other words, your cells will not have the ability to efficiently convert nutrients into the energy they need to conduct life-sustaining metabolic activities.
Your cells are the workhorses of your body; they’re like miniature chemical factories.
They take raw material in and process that raw material into a vitally important end product — energy. But your cells cannot accept just any raw materials; they’re genetically programmed to require a specific type of nutritional input.
So, whenever you consume calories in a form your cells can’t use, or in a form that’s not ideal for them, your cells simply can’t do a good job of burning the calories, or converting the food and nutrients you eat into energy. And whenever calories cannot get burned or oxidized as “body fuel,” they get stored as fat instead.
This is the reason why some people stay slim and energized on various kinds of high-protein, high-fat diets while other people feel sluggish and gain weight by eating this way. Conversely, some people are able to stay trim and fit on low-protein, low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets, while these same diets cause others to pack on the pounds and be chronically fatigued.s.
Everyone is different, and everyone needs to identify the specific foods and food combinations that are best for their own unique body chemistry.
To give you a clearer understanding of just how important it is to eat according to your Metabolic Type®, and what kinds of things can go wrong if don’t feed your body what it needs, consider the following examples:
1) Jack is a “Protein Type,” which means he needs to eat a diet based on significant quantities of protein and fat. He definitely needs to eat protein at every meal and snack, and to limit his overall consumption of carbohydrates (such as grains, fruits and vegetables) to roughly 30% of each meal.
However, if Jack ignores his requirement for a high proportion of protein and fat at each meal, and instead eats liberally of carbohydrates whenever he feels like it, here’s what is likely to happen:
- his body will compensate by breaking down muscle tissue for protein
- his adrenal and thyroid glands won’t function properly
- the parasympathetic branch of his autonomic nervous system will be strengthened
- the above occurrences will cause his metabolic rate to drop
- his body will produce excess insulin, a hormone which directs the body to store fat, as opposed to burning fat for energy
- fat storage will be increased because his cells will be unable to carry on normal and efficient oxidative processes
2) Susan is a “Carbo Type,” which means that carbohydrates should comprise roughly 60% of each of her meals and snacks, with proteins and fats comprising the remaining 40% of each meal and snack. Unlike Jack, who as a Protein Type really needs to eat protein at ever meal, Susan can sometimes eat carbohydrates alone without suffering any ill effects. However, most Carbo Types do well by including protein at every meal. But they need lighter, leaner, lower-fat proteins than Protein Types. However, if Susan disregards this approach and eats excessive amounts of protein and fat, and inadequate amounts of carbohydrates, here’s what will happen:
fat storage will be increased because her cells will be unable to carry on normal and efficient oxidative processes
due to a shortage of glucose, her body will tear down ( “catabolize” ) its own muscle tissue in order to obtain this desperately needed fuel
her adrenal and thyroid glands will not be able to function properly
the above occurrences will cause her to gain weight by decreasing her metabolic rate