How Diet Affects Health
A person's diet can have a profound effect on their state of physical health and even in some cases on their mental health too.
But for the purposes of this article, I'll be looking directly at the correlation between diet and physical health.
There have been many specialized diet plans formulated over the years to help people to lose weight in the main, although some have actually been created as a means of promoting better physical health.
One such diet that is gaining a lot of credibility lately is the one based upon blog group. This is an interesting variation on the reasons why certain foods affect certain people in certain ways.
The Blood Diet
The basis of this diet lies in the fact that people with certain blood groups metabolize certain foods differently to those in different blood groups.
It has a lot to do with the way in which the body is programmed to deal with the foods it receives depending upon the ancestral needs of our evolutionary forbears.
The oldest blood group is defined as the "O" group and evolved when our oldest ancestors were hunter-gatherers. Their digestive systems were designed to cope with eating the meat of freshly killed animals and even some that was not so fresh, along with whatever nuts, berries and fruits that could be foraged for at the time but with very little in the way of vegetables as these were not cultivated of eaten.
As humans evolved to become settlers, and farmers, cultivating crops and food they could grow in the soil, the "A" blood group evolved. These ancestors of ours had a changed diet that relied less on meat and foraged nuts and berries and more on vegetables and cultivated crops.
The even later blood group of "B" evolved latest of all as our farmer ancestors became adept at refining grains to produce breads and sugars to produce sweet foods. The diet is similar to the "A" group ancestors but with a higher tolerance for refined foods.
You can see from this evolutionary progression of our human ancestors and their digestive needs that it logically follows that foods that are more readily digested and metabolized by one blood group may not be so effectively metabolized by another.
The blood diet is based on these findings as well as other medical and nutritional aspects and it shows that there is a scientific and well researched reason why different people react to different diets with different results. A lot of the differences can be attributed to a person's blood group as to how well they will metabolize certain foods.
Commercial Diets
Following on from the revelations of how people with different blood groups react to metabolizing different foods, we can see how the many commercial diets that are available these days with the emphasis on weight loss will be either very successful or not so successful for different people without them realizing why that is, in the main.
The problem with commercial diet plans such as Jenny Craig, Nutrisystem, Medifast and Weight Watchers etc is that their diets are more general in makeup.
While they do cater for different groups of the population by dividing their plans into those for men and those for women, then subdividing into those for different age groups, vegetarians, diabetics, the gluten intolerant, lactose intolerant etc, they still don't go far enough by taking into account the differences in people's physical makeup.
Of course, to do that on a commercial scale would involve a lot of extra work and doubtless cause the cost of said diet plans to rise because of the additional research and work that would have to go into them to make them work. For more information on Nutrisystem, please visit: https://health-image.com/nutrisystem/
Conventional Diets
What may be considered as the more conventional diets where the dieter works from a diet sheet that is either derived from a diet book or other publication, or created for the individual person by a professional nutritionist or dietitian, can be customized to incorporate blood group diet aspects and thereby result in a highly effective diet for both weight loss and physical health benefits.
This type of diet can be considered by some as more time consuming and labor intensive. This is because meals have to be prepared and cooked by the dieter and portion sizes have to be carefully measured and ingredients weighed to ensure the correct calorie count is achieved for each meal.
However, the extra effort that is put into such a diet will result in a much more pleasing and effective outcome for the dieter. That's because not only will they be ensuring they are eating all the right foods for their physical makeup, but they will also be able to enjoy the superior taste and quality of correctly prepared home cooked meals.
More information on the "Blood Type Diet" can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_type_diet