Book review: The Metabolic Typing Diet, by William Wolcott

While I was slaving away, learning for my personal training exams, I had to learn a lot of nutrition information for the purposes of weight loss and health.  Most of it, I completely disagreed with.  I had formed opinions based on personal experience and observation of other people, as well as a lot of random reading.  For example:

• Nutrition for weight loss – I knew from personal experience that it’s pretty much impossible to eat 55% of your calories in carbohydrates and lose weight healthily (yes, I know about the Twinkie guy).  Using this recommendation, if you are female or a smaller male, you are never going to get enough protein or fat in your diet and you’re going to get sore after your workouts.  You’re probably also going to lose muscle and your mood is likely to go down the pan.
• Nutrition for health – I also didn’t agree with the lipid hypothesis, which was the basic theory on which pretty much all of the discussion of nutrition.  This is broadly interpreted to mean that fat is bad and carbohydrates are good, as far as heart disease is concerned.  I had formed this opinion based on various articles and papers that I had read but I had never really sat down and worked all the way through it.  Fortunately, I came across Dr Malcolm Kendrick, who explains why fat consumption is irrelevant for heart disease, and Robb Wolf, who explains why carbohydrates are bad for heart disease.

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So it’s all sorted then?

Well, no.  I didn’t want to stop there.  I wanted to understand more about how food and the body interact.  Dr Kendrick made me realise that food is not as significant for heart disease as we might expect and that stress is a far, far bigger factor.  

He also helped me understand why much of our discussion of superfoods is flawed because of ad-hoc hypotheses.  Also, Robb Wolf helped me understand that it is the metabolic syndrome (i.e. body composition) that is the driver for ill-health and not the foods themselves.  But that wasn’t the end of the road.  I had lots of other questions.

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What sort of questions?

Well, my biggest question was – how many other assumptions have I been making?  What else may not be valid?

One of the big assumptions we all make, of course, is the idea that germs are the sole cause of certain diseases, also known as the germ theory of disease, and that the condition of the body has no role in whether we catch an ailment or not.  My first reading on this subject was the fascinating work Food is Your Best Medicine, by Dr Henry Bieler.  

Dr Bieler introduced the idea that germs might not be the sole cause of disease and might even be merely a coincident factor rather than a causative factor.  Obviously, a radical idea and certainly not a popular one!

For a more detailed discussion of the germ theory of disease and why Dr Bieler challenges it, check out my review of Food is Your Best Medicine.

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So where are you going with this?

Well, another book that rejects the idea that germs are the sole cause of certain diseases is The Metabolic Typing Diet, by William Wolcott (affiliate links (UK, US).

Find out what type of metabolism you have inside

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OK, I read the review of your crazy Bieler guy – why should I read this one?

I’ll keep this brief, after my long introduction…

• Background – The Metabolic Typing Diet is a more academically useful book than Food is Your Best Medicine.  It is a more complete work in that it gives a big background chapter at the beginning, explaining what other work people have done in this field.  It explains how the important work of Weston A Price was instrumental in the realisation that the health of natural populations on their ancestral diets was very good.  Switching to new, modern diets lead to a swift decrease in health and longevity.
• Development – the development of the metabolic typing theory is shown clearly, as follows:
  • Wolcott shows how he began with the work of William Donald Kelley, which suggested that people can be divided into two main categories, depending on whether their sympathetic or parasympathetic nervous system is dominant.  Which system is dominant dictates which type of diet is better for them.
  • Wolcott notes that this theory did not always lead to the best results and that George Watson’s division by the rate of oxidation was often superior – people are either slow or fast oxidisers.  They either digest food really quickly or they don’t.  Fast oxidisers do badly on carbohydrates because they burn through the food like mad, get blood sugar spikes and end up hungry an hour later.  They need fatty meats and protein.  Slow oxidisers do badly on fatty meats because they can’t burn them quickly enough to get the fuel they need so they become sluggish and tired.  They need a supply of carbohydrates to keep them ticking over.
• The metabolic typing theory – Wolcott explains how he combined Kelley’s theory with Watson’s theory and came up with a dominance theory that explained how they interacted.  He then used this theory to create a set of questionnaires to establish where people lay on the spectrum.  The theory sets out that if you eat according to your type, you will enjoy good health.  If you don’t, you won’t.
• The first level of typing – the first level of the testing is given in the book is based on Watson’s theory and establishes whether you are a protein type, a carbohydrate type or a mixed type.  The book then gives chapters on each type to explain how to eat in order to fit in with your type.

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So do you buy into this mumbo-jumbo?

Well, it doesn’t make a lot of difference to me.  I come out pretty definitively as a protein type, which means I need to eat plenty of protein and fat along with green vegetables.  I need to avoid sugar an starches like the plague.  So apart from a few small tweaks around the selection of which vegetables I might find optimal, I wouldn’t need to change my diet at all.

If I were really struggling with the Paleo Diet and the test told me I was a mixed or carbohydrate type then I might be tempted to buy into the theory and to give it a couple of months doing the prescribed diet.  If that describes you, I’d be really interested to see how it works out for you.