Top 100 Zone Foods: The Zone Food Science Ranking System
by: Barry Sears
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Reviews:
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.
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.
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).