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Dr Barry Sears takes you on a tour of the top 100 Zone foods, offering capsule summaries of their nutritional benefits, along with delicious recipes and Zone Food Block information for each food item.

Being in the Zone has just been made easier now that The Top 100 Zone Foods is available as a convenient mass market paperback. Dr Barry Sears selects the top 100 Zone foods and shows you how to mix and match them to form perfectly balanced Zone Meals. For each food item there is a brief description of its health and nutritional bragging points followed by one or two easy–to–prepare Zone–approved recipes and the appropriate Zone Block information for foolproof Zone cooking.

After explaining how to enter and stay in the Zone, Dr Sears shows why not all foods are created equal – at least from a nutritional and hormonal point of view. Organising the Top 100 into protein, carbohydrates and fats, he shows you how to combine your favourite foods to form hundreds of appropriately balanced and deliciously prepared meals such as Prawn Scampi with Vegetables, Mediterranean–Style Chicken, Spinach Feta Pie, Lemon Meringue, and Strawberry Mousse.

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.


a nutrition book more than a recipe book   May 4, 2004
 21 out of 21 found this review helpful

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.


A waste of paper   March 11, 2002
 69 out of 80 found this review helpful

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).


Zone Recipes for Dummies   January 28, 2002
 25 out of 25 found this review helpful

Understanding "The Zone" is one thing. Developing menues, based on "The Zone", is another thing. Thank you, Dr. Sears, for providing so many alternatives for those of us who have neither the imagination nor the time to develop such recipes on our own.

The amount of research necessary to create such a variety of recipes is more than I could possibly do on my own, and greatly enhances the pleasure of being in the zone.

The book,"The Zone", provides a thorough explanation of the concept. This book, which, along with the recipes, contains brief explanations of the "zone" concept along with tables and charts, is an excellent complement to "The Zone", and I recommend it highly.