The Zone Diet: Food Becomes a Potent Drug

Did you ever have a day when everything went right? You woke before the alarm, got to work on time, your work pleased the boss, you visited the gym and exercised in perfect form. It's likely you were in The Zone.

Some athletes refer to The Zone when they make a good play. Dr. Barry Sears, Massachusetts-based Ph D. in biochemistry, dedicated his life and career to constructing dietary technology to combat disease and increase performance, to keep you in his dietary version of The Zone.

The claims

Sears has developed a Zone Diet which he says allows you to accomplish the following goals:

¨ Lose weight permanently

¨ Reset your genetic code

¨ Prevent disease

¨ Achieve maximum physical performance

¨ Enhance mental productivity

¨ Reduce craving for sweets

¨ Balance hormone and insulin levels

¨ Positively impact depression, arthritis, cancer and alcoholism

¨ Boost immune system

How the plan evolved

Dr. Sears lost many men in his family to heart disease and he did not want to suffer the same fate. Earning a doctorate from Indiana University, he continued with post doctoral work at the University of Virginia.

Spurned by pharmaceutical companies because his work could not be patented, he was undaunted and created his own company in 1976, Lipids Specialties. He worked on such ground-breaking scientific phenomenon as AZT, the AIDS drug.

Sears viewed food as a potent drug, one consumed often and he reveres its anti-disease qualities. A Zone-favorable diet is 40 percent calories from carbohydrates, 30 percent from fat and 30 percent from protein.

In his 1995 book, Sears divided foods into Zone-favorable and unfavorable. The Zone-favorable diet uses blocks to determine portions. If the food is Zone-favorable, twice as much can be eaten. If Zone-unfavorable, only half as much is recommended.