‘Zone’ Guru Has a Mantra: Cut the Carbohydrates

Barry Sears disapproves of my breakfast. He is unimpressed by my lunch. And my afternoon snack is just awful.

The breakfast: a toasted bagel, spread thickly with peanut butter.

“What was it--one of those big L.A. bagels?” he asks. “Basically, what you had was the politically correct version of a Dunkin’ Donut--the worst of all possible worlds. A lot of fat. And a lot of insulin. I bet that two hours after eating it you were famished again.”

The lunch: macaroni and cheese with cauliflower and broccoli on the side.

“Macaroni and cheese is just going to drive that insulin bonkers,” he says. “And where’s your protein? In the sauce? Hope springs eternal! Nice try!”

As for that sugar-laden Snickers bar from the vending machine: insulin city. Not good.

Sears, president of Sears Laboratories, a nutrition research institute he founded in Marblehead, Mass., is a diet guru. A former research scientist at Boston University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he’s the author of the 1995 bestseller “The Zone: A Dietary Road Map” as well as other “Zone” books from HarperCollins.

If you follow his dietary principles, he says, you can experience that fabulous state of body and mind in which one performs at one’s physical and mental peak--”the Zone,” in other words--not just fleetingly, but all the time.

And by keeping your body in “the Zone,” he says, you stand to gain much more than that top-of-the-world feeling. You’ll be around longer to feel that way. Staying in “the Zone,” Sears says, will help you lose weight permanently, and ward off such diseases as arthritis, diabetes, cancer and heart disease.

The key, he says, is to rein in the production of an important body hormone: insulin. And the key to doing that is to cut back on carbohydrate-laden foods (such as bread, potatoes, pasta, rice and sugary snacks), to eat more protein, and to make sure that each and every meal has the correct balance of protein to carbohydrate. (Thirty percent of your total calories should come from protein, and 40% from carbohydrate--instead of the 60% carbohydrate, 10% protein recommended by mainstream nutritionists.)

Eating too much carbohydrate, as well as too many calories, Sears believes, is the reason so many Americans are overweight.

“We have unleashed a wave of hormonal disturbances across our society. We have to move away from caloric thinking--no fat reaches my lips, no fat reaches my hips--to hormonal thinking.”

Food, he further maintains, if eaten in the correct fashion, with the right balance of protein and carbohydrate with every meal, could be the “wonder drug of the 21st century.” This wouldn’t be how he’d describe my bagel breakfast, which contained way too much carbohydrate and way too little protein for his liking.

As I chomped down on it, the starch of the bread was chopped into sugars. The sugars entered my bloodstream, stimulating the production of insulin, which instructed my body to store the excess sugar as fat.

This led to several things, Sears says: No. 1, it meant I was going to be hungry much sooner because too much insulin was made, and too much sugar removed from my blood, triggering hunger signals in my body once again.

No. 2, it was encouraging the pounds to creep on because of the storage of that sugar as fat. And No. 3, it disturbed the balance of other, important hormones in my body--hormones called eicosanoids--and put me at greater risk for illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes.

A much better breakfast, he says, was another I had recently: protein-rich cottage cheese, yogurt, fresh strawberries and a smidgen of granola. Plenty of protein, much less carbohydrate.

Here’s more of what a woman might eat on a typical day in “the Zone”:

* Breakfast: an omelet of six egg whites with two teaspoons of olive oil, two-thirds of a cup of cooked oatmeal and a cup of strawberries.

* Lunch: tuna salad with 4 ounces of tuna, mayo, two heads of lettuce, three cucumbers, three peppers, a quarter-cup of chickpeas and a piece of fruit for dessert.

* Snack: a 1-ounce slice of turkey and a half-piece of fruit.

* Dinner: 6 ounces of fresh salmon, four cups of steamed vegetables and a cup of mixed berries for dessert.

* Late-night snack: a glass of wine and 1-ounce piece of cheese.

Sears’ books are bestsellers, and he has a wide, devoted following of people who have tried his diet and swear by it. His theories, however, aren’t accepted by mainstream nutrition experts, who say that while insulin resistant people--who are at risk for type-2 diabetes, heart disease and hypertension--might wish to limit their carbohydrates, there’s no evidence that carbohydrate calories cause more weight gain than protein calories. They also doubt that Sears’ program will put you into a “Zone” that affects hormones and fights diseases in the manner he describes.

Sears, for his part, says, “I’m betting the farm on this one.” His father, grandfather and all three uncles died of heart attacks before the age of 54, and Sears, who’s now 52, doesn’t intend for that to happen to him.

“If I really thought some other dietary program would make me live longer,” he says, “I’d be following it.”

Barry Sears is a keynote speaker Sunday at 11 a.m. at The Times’ Festival of Health at USC.