The good side of Zone Diet is we can make our own prescription:
calculate our precise "drug" need, plan our meals and
consult the Zone diet food list to choose the most favorable items.
You should keep in mind that there's no forbidden food in the
Zone diet. Yes, the Zone instrumentary classifies foods into most
favorable, moderately favorable and least favorable. But there
are good reasons for that.
Zone favorable foods are:
- low-fat protein (chicken breast or skinless turkey breast,
egg whites, most seafood, mushrooms, soy products);
- carbohydrates from vegetables and fruit;
- mono saturated fats that have a high HDL cholesterol level
and low LDL.
Unfavorable means not forbidden, but not recommended. For example,
the Zone diet does not tell you not to eat pasta or rice, but
to think of them as "condiments". If you eat one meal
out of the Zone, this does not mean that your previous efforts
are wasted. The next 40-30-30 ratio meal will bring you back "in
the zone".
There are some well known medical reasons which encourage the
Zone approach to food. Type II diabetes risk is higher if you
eat high glycemic foods (potatoes or high processed foods: white
bread, pasta, rice, sugar). Cardiovascular diseases are likely
when LDL cholesterol level in the blood (known as "bad cholesterol")
is much higher than HDL cholesterol level (also named "good
cholesterol"). This difference is caused by a diet in which
we frequently ingest saturated and polysaturated fats, with high
LDL level.
