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| The Top 100 Zone Foods: The Zone Food Science Ranking System | 
 enlarge | Author: Barry Sears
Publisher: Collins Living
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
Buy Used: $0.01
You Save: $15.99 (100%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 416242
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6 x 0.9
ISBN: 0060988940
Dewey Decimal Number: 613.2
EAN: 9780060988944
ASIN: 0060988940
Publication Date: January 1, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 1-5 of 8 | | NEXT » |
 It's not as complicated as Sears wants you to believe August 14, 2006
12 out of 19 found this review helpful
Sears wants you to think he has come up with a complicated system which he calls The Zone.
In reality, all you need is to eat naturally, like our ancestors did thousands years ago. Eat greens, vegetables, berries, fruit, mushrooms, nuts. Eat lean meat (our ancestors hunted for healthy, lean animals). Eat egg whites, but avoid yolks. Most of the modern contaminants stick to fat molecules, and yolks are mostly fat. Plus it's the wrong type of fat, as chickens are not fed properly. Eat wild fish (but not too often; don't forget about pollutants).
That's it. Forget grains (and everything that comes from them, of course). Forget potatoes and hard beans, soda and juices. Forget vegetable oils. All that junk is completely unnatural for humans to eat; our ancestors couldn't imagine that was edible. And that's why we have diseases that they didn't have.
Forget milk. Milk is only good for babies under 3 years old. Studies show that milk (and even yogurt) causes hyperinsulinemia (insulin "spikes" that lead to diabetes etc.) in adults.
Yes, his advice to take fish oil is great. Farm-raised animals are fed with junk food; consequently, they lack certain fatty acids that are vital for our health. Fish oil is a convenient way of restoring the balance. But Sears' fish oil is not the purest and cheapest on the market.
I'm a physiologist, and I've helped a number of people to change their eating habits. Those people have gotten rid of many problems, like obesity, allergies, asthma, arthritis, and excessive fatigue. And they don't complain that the food is not delicious enough. They learned to use their imagination a little bit and combine various healthy foods to create their nice and simple "recipes", and realized they enjoy their food even more than before.
 Now one of my favorites May 10, 2004
21 out of 22 found this review helpful
Actually, this is one of my favorite Zone books. Maybe it has to grow on you. When you start studying what biochemist Barry Sears writes about, your eyes may glaze over. You only really need one book to begin with, it's just a matter of assimilating a new kind of information about how to balance your nutrition. This one has an excellent section describing most of the Zone basics, and it sharpens the focus on the nutritional attributes of the best foods - information you cannot get in the other Zone books. Dr. Sears lays out his formula for ranking all the nutrients in food straightforwardly, and you find out HOW MUCH better for you broccoli, caulifower, or spinach are instead of cereal, pasta, or bread. Since no foods are actually forbidden in the Zone, the proportions are still up to you. Of course, if you insist on consuming hydrogenated oils, you do so at your own risk! In my opinion, we live in an age with too many refined and processed foods. Barry Sears has given us a survival guide for modern times. It's the healthiest, most adaptable and most sustainable nutrition plan out there.
 a nutrition book more than a recipe book May 4, 2004
21 out of 21 found this review helpful
This book is more about the nutrition facts of vegetables, meats and fruits. And there's info on vitamins as well. Since I started the zone diet 1 week ago, I watched my blood sugar go from 260 (after meals, considered diabetic), drop to 176 (considered borderline). I don't use too many of the zone recipes, rather I adapt my normal cookbooks to the zone way of cooking, which is very easy to do. This book, the top 100 zone foods, was very good for me because it lists the nutrition facts of each fruit, vegetable or protein. And the amount of each vegetable that would make up 1 zone block. You, the cook, decides how to mix and match your daily veggies and fruits in your own recipes. After reading this book, I found out that artichokes and eggplants lower blood cholesterol, kale is rich in folate (which helps prevent artery wall damages), apples and okra have soluble fibers which help stabilize blood sugars, and onions are more powerful at lowering blood sugar naturally than medications (which have a slingshot effect - they work for a short time, and if you stop taking them, your blood sugar goes right back up). Just these facts were worth it for me to buy this book. Like all Chinese, we believe food and medicine is the same. I'd rather do it by diet than having to spend $$$ for medications. Besides, all medications have long term side effects. The only reason I gave this book 4 stars, is because they don't have information on a lot of asian veggies that we eat on daily basis - gailan (chinese broccoli), amaranth leaves, pea shoots, bamboo shoots, gobo (burdock root), opo squash, wintermelon, bean sprouts, daikon (icicle radish), loofah squash, yo choy, sen choy (red spinach), tree ear mushrooms, shiitake mushrooms, etc etc. It would be great to see Dr. Sears include more "exotic" fruits and veggies in his next version.
 A waste of paper March 11, 2002
69 out of 80 found this review helpful
This is a horrible book; the other Zone books are much more useful. The recipes are best avoided; the "Did you know?" section about each food is irritatingly trite; the information content of the book is low. The only interesting thing to mention is that the quantities of various foods required to make up a "Zone block" have altered considerably since Sears published "Enter the Zone" in 1995. The pattern seems to be that (1) the recommendations for fat are doubled to 3 grams (but the number of peanuts that is said to fulfill that recommendation remains at 6), and (2) the amounts of high-fiber vegetables have increased enormously, for example "artichoke, 1 medium" becomes "artichoke, 4 large", "broccoli, 1 cup" becomes "broccoli, 3 cups", "spinach, 4 cups" becomes "spinach, 20 cups". The curious statement that 1/2 nectarine is equivalent to 1 peach remains, however (a puzzle to botanists everywhere).
Zone Recipes for Dummies January 28, 2002
25 out of 25 found this review helpful
Understanding "The Zone" is one thing. Developing menues, based on "The Zone", is another thing. Thank you, Dr. Sears, for providing so many alternatives for those of us who have neither the imagination nor the time to develop such recipes on our own. The amount of research necessary to create such a variety of recipes is more than I could possibly do on my own, and greatly enhances the pleasure of being in the zone. The book,"The Zone", provides a thorough explanation of the concept. This book, which, along with the recipes, contains brief explanations of the "zone" concept along with tables and charts, is an excellent complement to "The Zone", and I recommend it highly.
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