Metabolic Typing - The Right Thing at the Right Time?

'One man's meat is another's poison:' Previous acquaintance

I have just been reading Wolcott and Fahey's 'The Metabolic Typing Diet,' and have been so excited by what it offers me. I love reading diet books in general, and especially those that give some explanations for why their suggestions might work, and offer differentiation between different people's needs. I used to love reading about Ayurveda, Chinese medicine too (although I tended to get lost in the finer distinctions between 'excess yin' and 'depleted yang'). I love anything that synthesizes the observations of ancient healing traditions and modern scientific understanding.

I'm aware that I'm also ripe for an 'aha' moment, given the long quest for balance of parameters in figuring out what on earth to eat. I'm also better able than at any previous point in my life to answer questions about my body truthfully. I recall reading Gabriel Cousens' 'Conscious Eating' when I was still pretty enthralled to anorexia and definitely utterly fruitarian-biased. Cousens goes over much of the same territory as 'The Metabolic Typing Diet' but gears it to vegan and living foods. Back then, I simply could not answer the questionnaires for identifying your body type! I was so overwhelmed with 'shoulds' about how to be, and answered the questions according to those, and I cheated and picked answers that would say 'eat more fruit, less fat' too. I do now remember that I entertained the idea 'what if I am a fast oxidizer/parasympathetic?' and even admitted to myself that I probably could give up sweet fruit as a staple and eat that way: that it might even feel better. I dismissed it because it would be more expensive (those foods are harder to dumpster-dive), harder to do so entirely locally and would require more food-prep. So those parameters all trumped 'might feel better.' Glad to be out of that phase now!

This time around...

This time, I did the questionnaire as sincerely and without bias or prejudice as I could: I didn't read any of the preceding explanatory chapters, I didn't try to guess where the questions were going. And truthfully, there were so very many questions on so many tangents that the little part of me that did try to calculate along the way was flummoxed: I was under the impression that I had similar numbers for all three possible categories. Well, as it turned out, when I added them up I came out very clearly as a 'Protein Type' (or, in Cousens' parlance, the fast oxidizer/parasympathetic). And, when I went to the chapter about 'Protein Types' and it said 'here are some oft-observed characteristics of Protein Types' it was 'check, check, check - that's me!' I've never had such a clear confirmation on a dietary questionnaire before (unless I prejudiced myself and 'rigged' the numbers, and then it was never quite so convincing).

Then I went back and read the explanatory chapters. I would have preferred it if he hadn't tied the explanation of variety of metabolic types to the Weston Price/traditional diets/geographic locations theories. I wish he hadn't partly because my husband doesn't believe in this and I didn't want him to dismiss it - nor other people be put off by the intrusion of that dogma. But mostly I wish he hadn't brought it up because it's immediately falsified as an explanation by the observation that traditional cultures themselves have long observed differences in people's dietary requirements and have codified them based on differences in body types amongst other things (as he himself shows)!

After that, though, I loved the explanation of how the same minerals can balance or imbalance a body depending on which system is dominant in the metabolism and on how quickly or slowly certain processes take place in different bodies. I love the recognition that the same remedy can have different effects in different places, and that our bodies change, too: that in fact, a person's type can change over time. It would be great to learn within my own body, for example, that I don't need to take so much Magnesium: that if I balance things, it'll be able to express itself. That I can still eat the veggies I love, but that there are some that can help my system come more into balance. And as for protein, I am currently highly ambivalent about my meat eating: although I never want to lose the sense of compassion, empathy and connection with humans and other animals that becoming a meat eater has brought me, I am not sure that I still want to eat meat! But it was fascinating to me to look at the chart for the recommended meats for Protein Types and to see that the ones that I had liked the most (things like organ meats and herring, not things you'd expect a life-long vegetarian to be drawn to!) were the most highly recommended ones!

I do love the full-circle way that this brings me back to Gabriel Cousens' work, and am so grateful for his work showing how to apply the insights of the metabolic typing without necessarily having to eat loads of meat. I have had one validating experience so far. The issue for Protein Types, besides actual proteins, has to do with purines, and the meats that I have been drawn to generally turn out to be purine rich, which is either a coincidence or an indication of some validity there for me. Cousens tells that spirulina, chlorella, brewer's yeast and bee pollen are high purine vegetarian foods (I love all these too, although the algae were an acquired taste). I've also found this table of purine contents: I love knowing the underlying point (eat purines) and being able to look for them rather than just being given a flat list of foods, because then I can make my own list! 'Ulterior harmony'… So - the validating experience. I've really been enjoying my raw-vegan breakfast of chia seeds soaked in water and nut milk, with some protein powder, spices and sometimes berries. A couple days ago I had this breakfast with blueberries and noticed I was still very hungry afterwards. I had a few more blueberries and a little apple and instantly felt much worse, even a little nauseated. (That's why so often I've stayed with just being still hungry, for fear of making matters worse.) So the next morning, I had the same breakfast but without the blueberries and with some chlorella and some pollen/royal jelly powder instead. And I felt so much better! I still needed a little snack before lunch, but I felt much clearer, less achingly hungry, not at all nauseated. Exciting for me, anyway.

Avoiding Dogma and further thoughts and limitations

But I am not taking on Metabolic Typing as another dogma: I will experiment but suspend judgment. I recognize from the outset that I'm ready for 'something' that will help me. I'm intending to try eating just the recommended veggies and leaving out the rest, emphasizing protein and once again quelling my fear of fat (it always makes me feel better - why do I keep cutting it out?), cutting out the dried fruits in raw treats, even avoiding chocolate for a bit, just to see what it feels like. I am very determined not to get obsessive about it again.

I recognize that while I was 'ready' for this, the questionnaires might be off-putting for some people. If you've never eaten red meat, for example, some of the questions are unanswerable. But you can do Cousens' version in Conscious Eating or Rainbow Green Live Food Cuisine instead. Some of the questions are a revelation in their own way. For example, there are questions to do with how you feel when you eat a snack before bed. I don't eat before bed because I have long had a belief that it's 'bad' to do so, so I didn't know the answers to those questions. But after doing the questionnaire, I realized that very often I am hungry at bedtime! On the other hand, I imagine that it would be fairly easy to ridicule the questions as 'unscientific,' 'anecdotal,' 'vague,' etc. Personally, I think it would be a shame to take this attitude. Both Wolcott and Cousens emphasize that the most reliable way to figure out your type is to take their tests and have them measure it. Since they'd love for you to spend lots of money on their personal attention, but recognize that not everyone is going to be able to, it is pretty smart to give people epiphenomenal indicators that are often accurate and give the opportunity of self-diagnosis. 'Teach me to fish,' don't just hand me a fish (or a handful of nuts, or whatever) - which is why I'd have preferred more discussion of the specific micronutrients that are most important for balancing the different types, how to tell in more detail which macronutrients each needs to emphasize and avoid - although I recognize that this gets into the kind of area where it's probably harder to make generalizations (and this is where they want you to come to their clinic and get the full work-up).

I also recognize that this book is more likely to be helpful if your system is imbalanced - but then that's when you're most likely to be looking for help from a book like that anyway. In this connection too, you're more likely to get something out of the questionnaires and less likely to feel skeptical and dismissive if you are currently working through a health challenge and have been wont to notice and track your physical tendencies. I would also say that if you turned out to be a 'Mixed' type, the book would be much less helpful, because the recommendations for this are a mix of those of the other two types and therefore less clear up front and more dependent on your own fine-tuning. The most standard 'healthy diet' put out in the mainstream is closer to the 'Carb' type diet than the 'Protein' type, so there may be fewer surprises if you're a 'Carb' type also.

Applicability for CR?

From the point of view of Calorie Restriction and getting the most 'bang for your buck' out of what you eat, wouldn't this be a potentially very useful tool? My biggest concern with the whole CR program is the question of absorption. A lot of calculations that I've seen around the place, presenting restricted calorie diets that provide all the RDAs of all the crucial nutrients, beg the question to me 'but can the person eating this absorb all those nutrients?' For example, if I, as a protein type, am eating significant amounts of kale to meet all kinds of nutritional requirements, but am not only unable to absorb them from the kale but actually am impeded from absorbing other things I need because kale contains too much potassium for my metabolic type, then wouldn't it be useful to my CR practice and to my health to replace the kale with spinach, which is more biased toward sodium? Even more concerning than that, the suggestion is that the RDAs themselves are misleading (something I'd long suspected anyway): might it not be useful to employ the fine-tuning contained here to make sure that one obtained the right balance of micronutrients for oneself as opposed to aiming for some arbitrary figure from a bell curve? April? Anyone? I recognize that when I got that bloodwork back in the fall saying that I was barely absorbing any protein, and had currently been eating a very high-protein diet (including a lengthy experiment with dairy, which I'm allergic to), I kind of gave up on protein, thought 'what's the point of eating it if I can't absorb it?' According to this book, when a deficiency situation leads to a malabsorption situation and the vicious cycle of being deficient but not being able to take in the nutrients, that's when eating according to your metabolism's needs is the most important, to enable healing to take place. That makes sense to me. I think I threw the baby out with the bathwater. Initially I felt better because I'd quit dairy and increased carbs to a bearable level, but since then I have been having troubles and infections again, and the days I eat the most protein are generally the days I feel far the best. Just need to keep taking those enzymes!

So, finally, I have enjoyed and benefited greatly from this book, but I know that a lot of that is in the current eye of the beholder.