DIETS are never easy to follow, regardless of how delicious their advocates make them out to be. While the spirit may be willing, one's patience for measuring, shopping and menu planning may well be weak.

Even if you're not trying to lose weight, changing your dietary habits for the sake of health isn't easy either. Take those who have dabbled with Peter D'Adamo's Blood Type Diet - which follows the premise that your blood type determines which foods are good or bad for you - and found it just too much hassle to remember which blood type can't tolerate chicken, buckwheat, tomatoes, corn and the like, especially when cooking for people with different blood types.

No wonder, then, that requests for a restaurant that serves blood type diet-friendly cuisine led Caline Chew and her husband Michael Goh to open such an eatery right beside their retail outlet selling D'Adamo's health supplements.

The restaurant, which is scheduled to open after Chinese New Year, promises natural, unprocessed and non-GMO foods, with no trans-fat or refined sugars.

'Everything from water to salt is blood-type compliant,' says Ms Chew, who has attended annual conferences at D'Adamo's research institute in the US and obtained a 'master of institute of human individuality'.

The camera-shy Ms Chew says she has always been very health-conscious, even before she chanced upon D'Adamo's book. A type 'O', she had been experiencing stiffness and pain in her finger joints, and read that she had been eating a lot of foods that should be avoided with her blood type, like corn and bread. 'I decided to experiment and cut out these two items from my diet - I felt the pain go away within two weeks,' she says.

Spurred by this, the former real estate agent started learning as much as she could about the diet, which was how she ended up flying to the US for the conferences, and also meeting D'Adamo himself. She also started taking supplements, before setting up My Blood Type Diet Store four years ago, which she and her husband run full time.

It's not an easy diet to follow, she concedes, 'but even if you can manage 60 per cent compliance and take supplements, you can still get results'.

The new restaurant, she says, is designed for customers 'who find the diet hard to follow when they eat out', adding that 'when they go out they are faced with mostly 'avoid' food like chicken stock, starch, etc'.

The 40-seater semi-fine dining restaurant is a proper F&B establishment as opposed to a casual health food cafe. 'We have hired a chef who's had experience in hotel kitchens, and we worked with him over three months to develop the entire menu from soups to pastas to desserts.'

And it's an original menu, too, with some local influence, rather than taking recipes wholesale from D'Adamo's cookbooks. There'll be meat and seafood like cod en papillote, that is, baked in paper, and 'a lot of very nice wheat-free pastries', she says. 'We just tried some pandan chiffon cake made from spelt flour and it was very good.'

After all, 'we want people to eat and feel the difference in their health - but the point is also to enjoy the process and not be stressed over their diet'.

My Blood Type Restaurant
(opening Feb  2008)
#01-29 Golden Shoe Carpark.
Tel: 6533-5570
www.healthyharvest.com.sg

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