What is the Zone?

Being in the Zone is how you slow down aging by simultaneously reducing inflammation while increasing the repair of inflammatory damage.  The Zone is a highly dynamic physiological state controlled by your diet.  Like any validated medical technology,  the Zone is determined by your blood chemistry.  Your blood will tell if you are in the Zone or not.  In the Zone, you can better reduce, resolve, and repair the inflammatory damage caused by any injury.  The result is decreasing the onset of age-related chronic diseases to extend your healthspan.

Healthspan is defined as your longevity minus years of chronic disability.  The future goal of medicine will not be treating the symptoms of a particular chronic disease but increasing our healthspan.  For example, many chronic diseases are associated with chronic low-level inflammation.  However, what causes this chronic inflammation was not apparent until recently; it’s inhibiting the “master switch” of your metabolism.

Metabolism is how we convert food into energy to keep us alive.  It also controls your immune system, inflammation, repair of damaged tissue, and your rate of aging.  The master regulator of metabolism is an ancient enzyme known as AMPK.  If AMPK activity is optimized, you live longer.  If AMPK activity is inhibited, you gain weight, develop various chronic diseases at an earlier age, and accelerate your rate of aging.  When you are in the Zone, your levels of AMPK are optimal to achieve a longer and better life.  More importantly, AMPK activity is under robust dietary control. 

Metabolism is too complex and dynamic to be controlled by a drug.  Drugs act like a light switch that turns a single enzyme or receptor on or off.  Metabolism is like a mixing board in a studio that the sound engineer must constantly balance.  This is especially true for AMPK, with your diet acting as the sound engineer.  You must keep AMPK in a zone to maintain an efficient metabolism.  This is especially true for removing a growing population of senescent cells that are the underlying cause of aging and the development of chronic diseases associated with aging.   Senescent cells are transformed cells like cancer cells.  Instead of growing uncontrollably, senescent cells now generate new sources of inflammation inside the body that speed up aging by increasing the levels of inflammation in every organ in your body.

Furthermore, senescent cells can turn other cells into new senescent cells.  In this regard, senescent cells are often called “zombie cells .” 

Under normal conditions, your immune system quickly eliminates these senescent cells.  However, if AMPK activity is not optimal, the ability of the immune system to remove these zombie cells is compromised, and their population begins to grow. 

Any increase in zombie cells accelerates aging and the earlier appearance of the chronic diseases associated with aging, as shown below:

You can reprogram your immune system using Metabolic Engineering®  to recognize and eliminate senescent cells more effectively by optimizing AMPK.  As you age, AMPK activity decreases, and the population of senescent cells begins to grow.  Metabolic Engineering® was developed to reduce the levels of senescent cells by increasing the activity of AMPK inside each of your 30 trillion cells.  

There is no magical nutrient or drug that gets you the Zone.  However, Metabolic Engineering® is a proven dietary program to get you to the Zone and keep you there.  Each dietary component of Metabolic Engineering® works as part of a complex team to activate the AMPK necessary to orchestrate the removal of zombie cells.

Metabolic Engineering® consists of three distinct nutritional components. 

The first requirement is to reduce diet-induced inflammation.  This requires restricting calories but without hunger or fatigue.  The Zone diet was developed to meet both criteria. 

The second dietary requirement is to resolve chronic residual low-level inflammation that promotes the generation of senescent cell formation.  This can be accomplished by adequate intake of omega-3 fatty acids, which are precursors of powerful hormones that are key to eliminating chronic inflammation. 

The third and final component is the sufficient intake of polyphenols to reduce oxidative stress and activate AMPK.  The activation of AMPK is essential to repair damaged tissue and remove senescent cells. 

No single dietary intervention is sufficient by itself to reprogram your metabolism to remove senescent cells; they should be considered as a synergistic team working in a highly orchestrated sequence.  Thus, using Metabolic Engineering® as an integrated dietary system allows you to reduce the population of senescent cells in the body, thus slowing down the rate of aging and delaying the development of the symptoms of chronic disease associated with aging.

In the Zone, you can reduce the population of zombie cells, thereby slowing the rate of aging, decreasing the appearance of the symptoms of chronic disease, and increasing your healthspan.  Metabolic Engineering® makes it possible by treating diet as if it were a drug to be taken at the correct dose and at the right time.