Zone Diet - Best Protein Snacks For Weight Loss

The Zone diet is a diet popularized in books by biochemist Barry Sears. It advocates consuming calories from carbohydrates and protein in a balanced ratio. There is no evidence that it makes people more healthy.

Diet

The Zone Diet is a fad diet in the low-carbohydrate diet school that was created by Barry Sears, a biochemist.

The diet teaches followers to eat five times a day, 3 meals and 2 snacks, with proteins, favorable carbohydrates, and fats in a ratio of 30-40-30. The hand is used as mnemonic tool; five fingers for five times a day, and no more than five hours between meals; the size and thickness of the palm to measure protein; and two big fists worth of favorable carbohydrates or one fist of unfavorable carbohydrates. There is a more complex scheme of "Zone blocks" and "miniblocks" that followers of the diet can use to determine ratios of macronutrients to eat. Favorable carbohydrates have a lower glycemic index. Monounsaturated fats are encouraged. Followers are encouraged to exercise daily.

The diet falls about midway in the continuum between the USDA-recommended high-carbohydrate food pyramid and high-fat Atkins Diet.

Theory

Like other low-carb diets, one of the ideas on which the diet is based, is constructing meals carefully to cause a sense of satiety so that followers of the diet do not overeat. Also like other low-carb diets, the idea of a glycemic index is used to classify carbohydrates. Both ideas are meant to promote weight loss via reduction in calories consumed, and avoid spikes in insulin release, thus supporting the retention of insulin sensitivity.

The Zone diet proposes that the precise ratio betweens proteins and carbohydrates is essential to "reduce the insulin to glucagon ratio, which purportedly affects eicosanoid metabolism and ultimately produces a cascade of biological events leading to a reduction in chronic disease risk, enhanced immunity, maximal physical and mental performance, increased longevity and permanent weight loss.

Efficacy

Like other low-carb diets, the theories underlying the Zone diet are unproven.

As of 2013, there were "no cross sectional or longitudinal studies examining the potential health merit of adopting a Zone Diet per se, closely related peer-reviewed findings from scientific research cast strong doubt over the purported benefits of this diet. When properly evaluated, the theories and arguments of popular low carbohydrate diet books like the Zone rely on poorly controlled, non-peer-reviewed studies, anecdotes and non-science rhetoric."

See also

• Diet (nutrition)
• List of diets
• Medical research related to low-carbohydrate diets

References

External links

• Official Website of the Zone Diet

Interesting Informations

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