Zone Diet - The Idea and Why It Works

Return to...Page 1

Sears also believed that it was important to consume fat in order to allow your body to actually burn the fat that is has stored. He argued that although some fats were bad for you like transfats, hydrogenated fats and saturated animal fats, certain fats like monounsaturated fats were beneficial. Firstly, by consuming monounsaturated fats from plant oils the eater will reach a feeling of fullness much faster so that access calories are not eaten and the consumer will limit their caloric intake. The extra fat in the diet will also slow the absorption of carbohydrates, meaning a lower amount of insulin in your system at any one time. This lower level of insulin will promote body fat burning and also not allow you to store extra calories that you have taken in as body fat.

Sears saw that in a condition where there was high amount of insulin in the system would also promote sluggishness and the feeling of being unwell. This is because the high levels of insulin in your body from the consumption of excess carbohydrates would cause the body to store the majority of its calories to your body fat and allow your blood sugar levels to decrease substantially. This means that the body must compensate by lowering your metabolism and your brain will also starve because of it. In the long run this will cause bouts of hypoglycemia where you will get chills and severe sugar cravings which will once again start the cycle all over again.

Criticisms

One of the biggest opponents to the Zone Diet is the American Heart Association. Their first gripe is about how the diet is very careful in saying that the fat that dieters should take in should be in the form of mono or poly unsaturated fats and that they should avoid saturated fats and trans fats as much as possible, but the diet still allows very high amounts of proteins which in itself will contain unhealthy amounts of saturated animal fats. Sears responded to this criticism by saying that the proteins that he suggested are relatively low in saturated fats and that the formula for how much protein is safe to take is based on a calculation of the person’s lean body mass, activity and other factors before a set amount is suggested.

Some dieticians have called the Zone Diet as simply a dressed up low carbohydrate diet and is more of a gimmick to get sales for Sears’s books. They argue that the principles that Zone Diet teaches is almost exactly the same as a low carbohydrate diet. The 40% carbohydrate ratio that the Zone Diet suggests should come mostly from complex carbohydrates such as beans, vegetables and legumes, simple carbohydrates like white rice and white bread should be avoided. Although 40% might seem a lot, if you take into consideration the amount of vegetables that you consume, the 40% will very quickly The Zone Diet also recommends 30% protein which although sounds low for a low carbohydrate diet, is actually within the range of what the diet would recommend. Low carbohydrate diets like the Atkins Diet also recommend a higher than average amount of fat intake which coincidently is also what the Zone Diet recommends. All these factors combine to show that the Zone Diet actually mimics the recommendations of a normal low carbohydrate diets.

Our Recommendation

Although we see the benefit that the Zone Diet proposes, we feel that there are other diets that are more straight forward and easier to follow. The science is sound although the implementation of it is a bit lacking. In practice it is actually very hard to keep a constant 40:30:30 ratios on all the foods that you eat. This involves weighing up all the foods that you consume and constant vigilance on what you eat. This, we feel is the downside of this diet. Very few people will have the patience to follow through and keep on this diet in the long term.

We certainly would not tell people not to try this diet, there are certainly very many benefits to be gained however we feel that keeping to it is going to be quite difficult as dieters start getting weary of the precise calculations that this diet calls for.