BodyBiotyping

christian@theperrymount.com — 2010-03-03T21:26:19+00:00

Body biotyping and Metabolic typing are ways to find your individualised nutritional needs. They recognise patterns in physical, emotional, physiological and psychological characteristics to produce foods plans that are specifically tailored to the individual. These are based on what I call Evolution Nutrition, by this I mean we should observe nutritional habits that our bodies have literally been designed to over millions of years. A great question to ask yourselves with anything to do with health is, what have our bodies been doing for the longest time? Because it is that which we will be most adapted to. Let’s look at a few examples.
What fats are better for you, vegetable seed oils or saturated fats found in animal meats? Well, go back a few thousands years, and think about how you would make an oil out of vegetables seeds? Basically you couldn’t really, you just wouldn’t have the tools to squeeze an oil out of them in the quantities we use today. Now what about animal / meat products? Of course we would have been eating meat, and in fact have been eating meat for millions of years, a Paleolithic diet, so we are far more adapted to eating and processing the saturated fats in meat then any other oil.
My next example is similar, are we more adapted to eating meats or grains such as wheat? The answer is virtually the same, grains have only been produced in agricultural quantities in the last 10,000 years, a drop in the ocean compared to how long we have been eating meats. This is a possible answer to why so many people are wheat intolerant, our digestive systems just aren’t as well adapted to them.
These are examples of general patterns in our nutrition over our evolution. We can get more detailed than this and look at our genetics and family background. This is easiest explained by looking at extremes, let’s take for example the Eskimos’s. Their diet consists of nearly 100% animal meat and extremely high animal saturated fat. Most people know that the Eskimo’s have incredibly low rates of heart disease, yet it has been ingrained into us that these are the exact foods that should be clogging our arteries if we merely look at it!
An extreme in the other direction are certain African tribes where they are very nearly vegetarian and have the same fantastic health as many other indigenous cultures around the world (this is based upon research by a dentist called Weston Price). So would you make an Eskimo vegetarian or an African tribesman consume large amounts of meat? No of course not, it is all about the individual and how their own body responds to the food they eat. Everyone is an individual, we all look different on the outside and our metabolism is as different on the inside to. We each will respond better to different foods, different mixes of protein, carbohydrates and fats and will even do better with different sized meals at breakfast, lunch and dinner. Some of us will thrive on 3 meals per day, other better with 6 smaller meals.
How do you think your diet is performing for you? The simple way to find this out is how do you feel? If you are not as healthy as you want to be then you are probably doing something wrong. A very simple piece of advice I give to my patients is to try something different. So if you are tired, have re-current colds, infections and other illnesses and you eat vegetarian then I would say try not being vegetarian! If you are overweight and lethargic and eat meat at every meal then try cutting your meat intake down and go closer to being a vegetarian, simply experiment with your foods, trying something new. The other piece of simple advice is to stop eating anything that is man-made and refined (sugar, hydrogenated fats etc), if it wasn’t around 10,000 years ago then don’t eat it!
Body Biotyping observes that there are five basic body types that are determined by a dominant hormone gland in our body, they are the pituitary, thyroid, adrenal, gonad or gonad/pituitary types. Let’s look at an example of a Body Biotype. The adrenals glands, which produce the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol, produce a stocky, medium height, muscular, rugby-player type shape in the male. These people will crave meat and salt as they stimulate the adrenal gland hormones and act like a “food drug” to make the person feel better. So an adrenal type person should be careful to not over indulge in these foods but instead balance themselves with other beneficial foods. Within Biotying terms an adrenal type will perform better observing a food-combining diet, where protein and vegetables are eaten together and carbohydrates and vegetables are eaten together but not protein and carbohydrates on the same plate. Other give aways that an adrenal Biotype will gain weight around the abdomen as the fat cells in this area are sensitive to the cortisol and adrenalin hormones.
Pituitary types are tall and gain weight all over, thyroid types gain weight centrally on the thighs and buttocks and the gonad types gain weight on the rear and breasts in the women. Pituitary types crave milk and dairy, thyroid sweets, carbs and coffee and the gonad type rich spicy foods.
These individual differences reveal so much about us and answer questions that so many people are asking themselves, like why did my friend lose weight on the Atkins diet but I felt awful? Body Biotyping reveals that only two of the five types would do well on the Atkins, just as it explains why only three out of the five types could be a healthy vegetarian. What about that person you know that just eats whatever they want and never gains weight! They are a gonad/pituitary type, the newest Biotype to have evolved and therefore are most used to modern day foods.
If you are interested in finding out more about Body Biotyping and your individual nutritional needs then visit www.theperrymount.com/events to see a full presentation by Christian Bates on Body Biotyping.

Podcast with Pete Cohen visit www.weightlossguru.com

christian@theperrymount.com — 2010-03-03T21:22:57+00:00

Pete Cohen, weight loss guru, interviews me about the basics of naturopathy and hormones

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BodyBiotyping

Podcast with Pete Cohen visit www.weightlossguru.com