So long Atkins, back to the Zone
Last Updated Aug 2007
This week Atkins' Nutritionals announced bankruptcy, thus officially signaling that
the low-carb craze of the past four years is now dead. In the rush to report the
demise of Atkins, the media as usual lumped the Zone Diet in with the Atkins diet.
Call me crazy, but I simply have a hard time understanding how the Zone Diet, which
contains more carbohydrate than protein or fat, can be called a low-carb diet. It
is simply mathematically impossible. What people tend to forget is that the Zone
Diet is based upon balance. It features the correct balance of protein,
carbohydrate, and fat to keep hormones within a zone that is not too high and not
too low. It is highly unlikely that people will go back to the high-carbohydrate,
low-fat diets because they are probably even worse than the Atkins diet in terms of
insulin control. So what is the next "new" thing in nutrition? Balance that
brings you squarely back into the Zone Diet. When people ask me what the best diet
is, I simply tell them that any diet that uses the term "high" or "low" to describe
it will never work on a long-term basis because of the hormonal disturbances it
causes. What you want is a moderate-carbohydrate, moderate-protein, moderate-fat
diet. The only diet that meets those criteria is the Zone Diet.