June 8, 1996

An Introduction to The Zone

A review of the theory and practice of The Zone,
with reports of our experience with it after six weeks.

Quite by chance, we heard one Dr. Barry Sears on "The Today Show," describing his research and experiments with a dietary regime that is meant to deal, at once and without disbalances or side effects, with degenerative diseases in general (cardiovascular, diabetes, cancers, arthritis) and with a host of other illnesses that plague more and more of the population (obesity, high blood pressure, insomnia, depression, allergies, etc.). "The zone" is the term which athletes have come to use for that state of psychophysical efficiency when energy, mental acuity, and total condition of good health coincide and combine, in a recognizable state of peak performance. For those of us not at the right age anymore or in the condition of the top-notch athlete--and we are the prime objects of Sears's concern and work--the zone is that state of biochemical/hormonal balance in which our bodies can make corrections, can heal, freeing us for greater and greater mental and physical performance through renewed health and vitality. One seeks to enter the zone with each of his three regular meals--and two prescribed snacks--each day. In his book, The Zone, Sears lays out the basis for his thesis, describes tests of its performance, and gives in detail the procedures by which each person can seek reliable, regular entry into the zone.

Sears, who owns most of the major patents in the world for intravenous cancer drug delivery, has been involved in research on a number of critical health issues, especially the cardiovascular diseases. His own and research by others had led him to an effort to produce a drug that could get at what he had come to see as the central, controlling force in most of our illnesses--distortion of insulin function. He came to realize that no drug could be both powerful enough and steady enough in its behavior to deal with the problem. Only diet, which he now describes as the most powerful drug anyone can safely take, can accomplish the task.

I listened to Sears from the perspective of dietary interest, concern and experiment spanning a period of some sixty years, a long accumulation of what had been experienced and learned from switches and trials that began with my Mother's removal of all refined foods from the family larder (with no sugar at all!) in the early 1930's, and her interest in and use of soy substitutes for some of the animal protein. This was followed over the years by on-again off-again varieties of vegetarianism and macrobiotics with all its rice, other grains and dried beans. Then--to correct an accumulation of ill effects which showed up most alarmingly in sugar in the urine--I undertook a concentrated program of Adelle Davis's corrective measures, including high-protein Tiger's Milk, lots of lightly cooked liver, five eatings a day with supplements each time, all of which did correct the sugar problem and steer me away from incipient diabetes but did not wholly correct what I have come to feel as a "fouling of my carburetor." The contemporary shift in accepted dietary thinking toward greater and greater emphasis on whole, complex carbohydrates suited my experience, but the de-emphasis on animal protein has troubled me a good bit. While we, remembering our own negative experience with it, have resisted the contemporary vegetarian thrust in our household, we have nevertheless been affected by the current thinking and drumbeat of information, toward lesser amounts, and those closely measured, of animal protein.

In the back of my mind, because it has remained in my experience, has been some doubt that we had, despite expressed approval by a number of trained people, really solved the dietary riddle. We "knew" we were doing a lot of things right. But I also sensed we were still doing some significant things wrong. Sears put his finger right on them, and because his explanation made so much sense we were not thrown by his recommendations, which would cut out of our diet so much that had become central. We got his book the quickest way possible, read it within hours, and launched.

Before we relate some of our own experience, we should take a brief look at the Sears thesis, its basis, and what it entails. This way of eating is designed for individual requirement, choice and management. On a meal-to-meal basis, one steers himself into or out of the zone. What is so surprising and exciting, is that one knows so soon that something is happening, and can know so much sooner than with any other way of eating we know anything about, and so much more clearly, whether he's doing the right things for himself. There is feedback, and it comes sooner rather than later!

Sears reminds us of Adelle Davis, in that he seems conversant with the important research of his time, and is guided by its evidences and anomalies. His work is very broadly based. If there are a few things that seem to have weighed most heavily in determining his direction, one would be work that won a Nobel prize in 1982. This research proved the existence of powerful hormone-like elements, heretofore almost undetectable and very difficult to observe because they occur only within the individual cells, and have a lifetime measured in seconds. There are hundreds of these elements, all of them with 20 carbon atoms in their structure, which gave them their name "eicosanoids," from the Greek "eikosa" for twenty. Prostaglandin is one of the first discovered and best known of the eicosanoids.

It turns out that eicosanoids are more powerful, by far, in their effects than are the hormones. They divide into two general groups: the very favorable, and the less favorable--ones that readily slip, when overly-abundant, from what good uses they have to very detrimental effects. For good health, what we require is a body chemistry that maintains an optimum balance between the two classes, and that at the same time discourages the worst behavior of the second group. Sears is convinced beyond any doubt in his mind that the key to both of these is control of insulin function.

Before going farther, it may help the initial grasp of eicosanoid function to know that precisely what makes aspirin work, whether to relieve pain or to diminish risk of heart attack, is that aspirin is an eicosanoid suppressant. It shuts down eicosanoids that cause such things as inflammation and platelet aggregation. The patient experiences almost miraculous relief in many instances. But the rub is that the aspirin has shut down ALL eicosanoids, good and bad, so there is almost certainly other trouble ahead.

The other work we want to refer to here comes from the growing field of paleopathology. Sears refers to this work, but the best description of it and of its significance to the Zone diet comes from a second, in effect a companion book, by two Little Rock doctors, Eades and Eades: Protein Power. We recommend a reading of Eades and Eades, not only for this account, but for their explanation of eicosanoids which is clearer than Sears's. It turns out the Egyptians mummified many more than their pharaohs, and over many hundreds of years. There reportedly are more Egyptian mummies than there are living Egyptians, and they are so perfectly preserved that almost every aspect of physical health can be studied in them. The key point that Sears, the Eades, and others, have focused on is that the Egyptians were in the front ranks of those human ancestors who first devised and ate a grain-based diet. Grains were developed only about 8,000 years ago, a critical fact in the judgment of Sears and the growing number of folks of like mind. It is known that genetic adjustment is very slow, generally taking a minimum of a thousand up to ten thousand generations (with about 20 years per generation), so that most of us could not yet have made this transition. Sears estimates that all but 25% of the world population may be sensitive--and another 25% of us very sensitive-- to the more serious effects he detects where grains are heavily used.

(May we digress here long enough to speculate that our fellow mammals, our cattle for instance, could hardly be genetically equipped yet to handle grains. In order to fatten cattle, we feed them low fat grain which upsets their normal insulin function and forces the accumulation of fat. Wouldn't this practice result in unwholesome meat and fat from a not-so-healthy animal?)

The Egyptians, it turns out, eating a diet so very similar to what is recommended today, were plagued with all our degenerative diseases, and on a big scale. The pictures they left of themselves were highly idealized. They were anything but tall, trim and slim, as the folds in the mummified skin, where fat had been contained, reveal. Unlike their neighbors, living outside the fertile valley and therefore still eating a hunter-gatherer diet, they were obese, had bad teeth and brittle bones, died of heart disease, strokes--the works. Their veins are full of plaque.

The trouble with grains, and with some vegetables, is that they have a high "glycemic index." That means that they not only contain too concentrated doses of carbohydrate, but that their carbohydrate enters the blood stream too swiftly. The system cannot tolerate surges of carbohydrate. I learned this very very well in the years I was struggling to get rid of sugar in the urine. When the system experiences repeated threats of surging carbohydrate, the pancreas, in a way of putting it, gets trigger happy. With its insulin secretions, it snatches the carbohydrate from the blood, slaps it into its own ready prison, the fat tissue, and locks the door. No matter the size of the meal or snack just eaten, the carbohydrate which is in it--needed by the body but mostly by the brain--is snatched from circulation. The person who ate it, after a brief lift, feels sluggish and foggy-headed--again. But what one experiences isn't the worst of it. The worst comes later, in serious, often life-threatening problems.

Glucose is used largely to feed the brain. (Of the glucose circulating in our system, more than 2/3 in fact, goes to the brain.) The body, on the other hand, when things are working right, runs primarily on fat. When there is more carbohydrate than the brain can use in its converted form, glucose, the body stores the excess as fat. This must happen, and quickly, for the brain simply cannot stand too much glucose. This store of fat is, up to a point, not only a healthy thing, but natural and necessary. It is a reserve, meant to fuel the body between meals, with a further surplus there when we need it, as during a time of sustained exertion and high caloric consumption. It was designed for quick deposits and easy withdrawals, on a daily basis. But when the insulin system is so overburdened in its effort to maintain an optimum level of carbohydrate in the system, it not only, as mentioned earlier, seizes carbohydrate too quickly and completely; it locks it up, determined that it is not going to get back into the blood stream. What this means is that as this state of affairs develops, the system loses two absolutely essential capacities: the capacity to extract fat from the fat store, and use it as needed, but, worse than that, the ability to burn efficiently the fat one has just eaten.

By this time all kinds of things are coming unraveled, with one's genetic predisposition determining which will unravel in each one of us.

Sears prescribes a pattern of eating that reaches roughly a 30/40/30 ratio in terms of calories from protein, carbohydrate and fat. This ratio is sought in every meal and snack, with, except for the nighttime, no more than four to six hours between episodes of eating. A food (with a few exceptions such as yogurt, milk and tempeh) is classified as either a protein, fat or carbohydrate. Protein that occurs in vegetables, with the exception of "pre-digested" proteins which are unusually available and complete, such as tofu or tempeh, is not counted. That is because most vegetable protein is locked too closely in fiber and comes with an unacceptably high portion of carbohydrate. Saturated fats are minimized; mono-unsaturated fats (e.g. olive oil, almonds, peanuts, sesame and avocado) are emphasized. We were amazed, but glad, to get the latest on flax seed and its oil--if too much is taken, it is an eicosanoid depressant, which gave it some of its short-term good effects. Fruit sugars, especially as they occur in apples, plums, peaches, many melons and berries, are much kinder to the system than grain sugars. To our surprise, rice cakes have a higher "glycemic index" than white sugar. (Diabetics, among others, are very familiar with these published tables of carbohydrates.) Gone from our diet are twelve-grain cereal and buckwheat waffles! Some vegetables are difficult to work with, because of their glycemic index: among them, some of our favorites, like carrots, winter squash, potatoes. Thank goodness, tomatoes are very good, and onions. And the greens, of course. Salads on this diet tend to be big.

Sears provides charts to help you determine what is an adequate amount of protein based on your lean body mass and your activity level. The carbohydrate and fat are pegged to the protein allowance. The system is equally adaptable to those of us who begin as "couch potatoes" and those who are tri-athletes.

We should mention that caloric intake tends to be lower than the American norm, but our experience is that with better "burning," one needs fewer calories. (Sears points out that life extension research consistently shows that test animals which are calorically undernourished live longer and are healthier.) I am down from about 2,100 calories a day to about 1,200, but that will change some when I quit burning the excess fat, one pound of which contributes 500 calories per day for a week. One tends to lose about a pound of fat per week. When one's body fat has been reduced to an optimum level, one can simply add more (mono-unsaturated) fat to his daily quota. One can also fine-tune the system to favor addition of muscle mass.

We all began to experience changes very quickly. We have been through, and are still engaged in, adjustments and tunings. We feel, in fact, that one of the greatest virtues of this approach is that it permits, it invites, re-tuning that inevitable changes in ourselves, whether by such things as altered circumstances or aging, require.

Blood tests for me (Warren), which can be compared with identical tests taken over a period of four years, show enough improvement after a month on the Zone that we feel we are prepared to share our experience.

[3/6/98 (almost two years later): We have edited this essay and are updating the chart of blood tests that had concluded the first report, to include new test results running through February of this year, 1998. The chart and current updated observations follow.]

In the nearly two years since we "entered The Zone," we have experienced many beneficial changes which we attribute to the diet. Because of the tests we were taking, related to Warren's prostate cancer, we have his blood test records going back to 1993. We think it is important to remember when considering these results that at the time we entered the Zone, we were not replacing a careless diet. On the contrary, we had for as many years as we can remember attempted to discover better grounds for better eating practices, along with attention to such things as mental and social hygiene. We had begun astute homeopathic consultation which continues. It is not that these other measures had failed. They had not. But we were well aware and puzzled that there were still pockets of problem which our best practices to date had not been able to correct. Following is a chart which reflects the marked changes in chemistries relating to carbohydrate metabolism, which came so dramatically with the new diet. Warren has also experienced a decrease in joint pain, improvement in sleep patterns, and improved digestion and bowel function, along with increased physical and mental agility. 

Blood Profile: Warren Stetzel
 
Desirable
9/28/95
3/15/96
4/24/96
5/24/96
7/17/96
10/9/96
4/4/97
2/16/98
H
200-240
Cholesterol
269
267
Begin
the
Zone
208
192
190
171
197
H
< 100
Triglycerides
155
103
63
47
45
30
37
 
H
> 75
HDL
43
n/a
44
44
50
44
56
 
E
< 4.0
Chol/HDL
6.26
n/a
4.73
4.36
3.80
3.89
3.52
 
S
< 2
Trig/HDL
3.60
n/a
1.43
1.07
0.90
0.68
0.66
 
H = Dr. Huggins's recommendations.
E = Drs. Eades and Eades's recommendations.
S = Dr. Sears's recommendations. In his picture, the Trig/HDL ratio is especially important.

 
Weight: in addition to the significant changes in Warren's blood profile noted above, his weight has declined streadily since April 24, 1996, when we first "entered the Zone," from 155.5 lbs. to a low of 128.5. Now he is back up to 133 as the return of testosterone is permitting a rebuilding of muscle mass. (Warren had been until August 1997 on a "chemical castration" program, a treatment for prostate cancer.)

Resting pulse has improved as well.  In November of 1995, it was often as high as 80 and commonly in the mid and upper 70's.  Since beginning the Zone, it has varied from 60 to 68.

Blood pressure has improved. It is lower and much less variable: Taking as an example the period since the first of January, 1998, the weekly readings have varied from 119/78 to 106/70.


 
Following are beneficial changes which Don Hartley noted after only six weeks in the Zone: