Zone Diet - The Idea and Why It Works

The Zone Diet is a term that was made famous Barry Sears back in 1995 when he published a book about a different dieting system where ratios of certain foods should be adhered too in order to promote good health. The main ratio that this diet suggests is 40:30:30. 40% of your calories should consist of carbohydrates, 30% of your calories should be from proteins while the other 30% should be from fats. Although this is the ratio that was set up by Sears as the ideal ratio to keep a healthy life there has been many people that have doubted this to be of any value. Later on we will see the benefits that this Diet may provide set against any false claims.

Although it would first seem that the 40:30:30 ratio is a guideline to the types of food that you eat, the optimal ratios are actually there to provide the proper hormonal balance, ideal for a healthy body. The whole premise of this diet is to keep two main hormone levels at their optimal level throughout the day. These two hormones are insulin and eicosanoids. Sears believed that it was this magical 40:30 ratio of carbohydrates and fats that would offer the best ratio for the optimum level of insulin, it is neither too high where you consume too much carbohydrates or too low where you do not consume enough. Sears believed that at this balance point natural anti-inflamatory substances and hormones like eicosanoids are formed. These eicosanoids offer protection to the cardiovascular system and offer blood thinning properties similar to Aspirin but without the negative affects.

The affect of having these two important hormones in balance is that the human body is in caloric balance more of the time and can also efficiently burn off calories without having it being stored as fat. One very large reason for the level of obesity in the society today is the over reliance on carbohydrates. The access consumption of carbohydrates will mean that the insulin levels in your body are very high. When insulin levels are high access calories are stored as fat. This is why the Zone Diet recommends that carbohydrate intake be reduced so that insulin levels can be reduced and thus not having your body store the fat, instead burning whatever fat you have stored up.

The Fat Contradiction

We have always been made to believe that a diet that was high in fat is something that should be avoided as it is unhealthy. We were made to believe that if you consumed dietary fat that you will gain body fat in equal proportion. Barry Sears suggested that this belief was actually flawed when he published his book. He believed that the amount of fat that we eat in our diet has almost no correlation with the amount of body fat that we develop.

Sears also went on further to say that many “low-fat” diets were actually counter productive in the effort to lose weight. The replacement for fats in most of these “low-fat” diets is actually carbohydrates which will cause your body to produce larger than normal amounts of insulin to lower your blood sugar levels. What insulin does is that it takes the extra glucose in your blood and convert it to body fat so that your blood sugar levels stay relatively stable. The best example that he sighted to prove this idea is that ranchers are in the habit of fattening their live-stock before selling them to fetch higher prices, their feed often changes to low-fat grain compared to higher fat and protein grain for this. This same principle holds true for humans, a low-fat diet will ironically cause you to get fat over time. This is one of the main reasons that modern western societies are so much fatter then they were previously.

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