The Mediterranean Zone Quotes

“The industrialization of food is the primary reason for the growth of high-glycemic carbohydrates in the diet. High-glycemic carbohydrates are those that enter into the bloodstream as rapidly as glucose. Yes, these carbohydrates are in junk food, but let’s not forget white bread, white pasta, white rice, and white potatoes. Sad but true, the whole-grain versions of these same carbohydrates are also high-glycemic carbohydrates. As you increase any of these foods in your diet, you will increase the secretion of the hormone insulin.”
― Barry Sears, The Mediterranean Zone: Unleash the Power of the World's Healthiest Diet for Superior Weight Loss, Health, and Longevity

“If you have balanced your plate correctly, then for five hours after the meal, you will not be hungry because you have stabilized blood sugar levels. Because of those stable blood sugar levels, you will also have peak mental acuity for the same time period. The lack of hunger and improved mental focus also indicate that you have been successful in reducing inflammation in your body during that same five-hour period. That’s it. It seems easy enough, except you have to do it every five hours for the rest of your life to maintain hormonal balance and the resulting control of inflammation. That’s a small price to pay for a longer and better life. And if you have a bad meal (and we all will), don’t worry, since you are only one meal away from getting back into the Zone.”
― Barry Sears, The Mediterranean Zone: Unleash the Power of the World's Healthiest Diet for Superior Weight Loss, Health, and Longevity

“The liver is the primary manufacturing site for taking in fats and repackaging them in the form of lipoproteins for delivery to peripheral tissues. Insulin resistance disrupts this lipid repackaging process. Triglyceride levels rise, high-density cholesterol levels decrease, and low-density lipoproteins become smaller, more dense, and more atherogenic (more likely to increase the formation of plaques in the arteries). All of these risk factors increase the likelihood of developing cardiovascular disease. The reason that these small dense LDL particles are atherogenic is that it appears they are more easily oxidized in the blood. This is why the levels of oxidized LDL are far more predictive of future heart disease than total LDL levels are. As insulin resistance (really cellular inflammation) spreads to the muscle, the glucose in the blood stays elevated, increasing the production of more glycosylated proteins (AGE) that increase inflammation throughout the body. The best way to measure insulin resistance is by using a euglycemic insulin clamp, which is an extremely complex procedure done only under research conditions. The best surrogate marker of insulin resistance is the ratio of triglycerides (TG) to high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol in the blood. The higher the TG/HDL ratio, the greater the level of insulin resistance in the liver. So what are good levels of the TG/HDL ratio? These are shown below: Ideal Fair Poor At risk <1 1–2 3.5 >3.5 You usually find a TG/HDL ratio of less than one in elite athletes or people who follow the Mediterranean Zone. The average American has a TG/HDL ratio of 3.5, indicative of developing widespread insulin resistance. By the time the TG/HDL is greater than 4, you have metabolic syndrome (pre-diabetes) or fully developed type 2 diabetes. An alternative method of determining insulin resistance is the levels of fasting insulin. This is a more expensive test than the TG/HDL ratio so insurance companies don’t like to reimburse it. If you are able to get such a test, here are the numbers you are looking for in terms international units per ml (IU/ml). Ideal Fair Poor At risk <5 5–10 10–15 >15 Since insulin resistance is the result of cellular inflammation, by following a strict Mediterranean Zone dietary program supplemented with purified omega-3 fatty acids and polyphenols, you can expect to see significant changes within thirty days. Once you are in the Zone, your challenge is to stay there for a lifetime. These markers of wellness will provide continued clinical sentinels in the blood to alert you if you are moving out of the Zone. The correction to get back into the Zone is easy. Just follow the dietary instructions in this book.”
― Barry Sears, The Mediterranean Zone: Unleash the Power of the World's Healthiest Diet for Superior Weight Loss, Health, and Longevity

“Being in the Zone is determined by clinical evidence, not hope. Your blood chemistry will tell you with absolute clarity whether you are in the Zone, and if not, you will have a clear indication from your test results what you have to do from a dietary standpoint to get there. Broadly speaking, there are three distinct metabolic measurements that determine if you are in the Zone: (1) your levels of cellular inflammation, (2) your long-term control of blood sugar levels, and (3) your levels of insulin resistance. This is not a multiple-choice test. Only when all three markers are in the appropriate ranges can you be considered to be in the Zone. Unfortunately, when we use those criteria, it appears that less than 1 percent of Americans can be considered to be well.”
― Barry Sears, The Mediterranean Zone: Unleash the Power of the World's Healthiest Diet for Superior Weight Loss, Health, and Longevity

“As you develop insulin resistance in the liver and muscle, you are also beginning to develop insulin and leptin resistance in the hypothalamus. As a consequence, both insulin and leptin (which act as satiety signals) are not recognized and hunger increases. As you eat more calories to try to satisfy your hunger, you gain more body fat due to increasing hyperinsulinemia. In addition, the excess calories also cause increased inflammation in the hypothalamus, which further increases hunger by interfering with incoming satiety signals. If left untreated, metabolic syndrome eventually becomes type 2 diabetes. This usually occurs within ten to twenty years after the initial diagnosis. The insulin producing beta cells of the pancreas simply become exhausted by the continued demand to make more insulin to control the ever-increasing levels of blood glucose. It appears part of this exhaustion is due to the infiltration of macrophages that attack the beta cells. As the pancreas becomes less able to produce insulin, the blood glucose levels begin to skyrocket, increasing the levels of oxidative stress throughout the body. Oxidative stress activates NF-κB, and cellular inflammation increases correspondingly. With the development of diabetes comes a host of other inflammation-related diseases, such as heart disease, Alzheimer’s, ocular disorders, kidney failure, neuropathy, and impaired wound healing (which can lead to infection, gangrene, and eventually amputation). Not a very pleasant picture.”
― Barry Sears, The Mediterranean Zone: Unleash the Power of the World's Healthiest Diet for Superior Weight Loss, Health, and Longevity

“Let’s start with insulin. If you consume too many high-glycemic load carbohydrates, then blood glucose levels rapidly rise. Because blood glucose is toxic at high levels, the body responds by secreting insulin to drive excess blood glucose into your fat, muscle, and liver cells. If the rise in blood glucose is too rapid, then there is often an over-secretion of insulin, and then blood glucose levels drop too low, leading to hypoglycemia. This is what happens when you eat a big meal of pasta at noon, and two hours later you have a difficult time keeping your eyes open. To address the low blood glucose problem caused by consuming high-glycemic load carbohydrates, the brain implores you to begin searching for any high-glycemic food (candy bar, chips, or ideally a sugar-laden soda) that can quickly restore the low blood glucose levels. The use of these foods becomes a way of self-medicating to elevate low blood glucose levels. This may explain why the most popular spot in a hospital at the end of a work shift is the vending machine. However, if you can’t find a convenient source of glucose to quickly restore blood sugar levels, then the brain has an alternative mechanism to do so: increasing cortisol secretion to break down muscle into glucose via a process known as neo-glucogenesis. This is what happens when you follow ketogenic low-carbohydrate diets such as the Atkins diet. The common party line for advocates of ketogenic diets is that the brain prefers ketones to glucose for energy. I simply don’t buy that argument. Even under total starvation conditions, the brain levels of glucose never drop to less than 40 mg/dl due to neo-glucogenesis. At lower blood glucose levels (such as 25 to 35 mg/dl), the brain goes into lethargy, convulsions, and potentially a coma. If ketones generated by ketogeneic diets were such great sources of energy for the brain, then theoretically blood glucose levels could drop to zero and the brain would be completely happy. Researchers at Harvard Medical School demonstrated that cortisol levels increased by 18 percent after three months on the Atkins diet. Some of the consequences of increased cortisol levels are (1) you are hungrier (due to increased insulin resistance), (2) sicker (due to depressed immune function), and (3) less mentally sharp (due to destruction of neurons in the hippocampus region of the brain by their continuing exposure to excess cortisol). Three pretty good reasons to maintain adequate levels of blood glucose—not too much so the body secretes more insulin to reduce potentially toxic glucose levels in the blood, but not too little, which would cause the overproduction of cortisol in order to produce enough glucose for the brain.”
― Barry Sears, The Mediterranean Zone: Unleash the Power of the World's Healthiest Diet for Superior Weight Loss, Health, and Longevity

“Then in 1999 researchers began studying the population records of the women who were in their last trimester of pregnancy during the Dutch Famine. Their children were more obese and had higher rates of diabetes and heart disease compared to children who were born either before or after the Dutch Famine. It became apparent that the calorie restriction experienced by their mothers more than fifty years earlier had resulted in negative health consequences for their children in the womb. Scientists call this fetal programming. It is especially powerful in the last trimester of pregnancy when the mother’s diet greatly influences the epigenetic changes to the fetal DNA to prepare them for what their new environment will be outside the womb. During the Dutch Famine there was a complete mismatch of the mother’s diet during their pregnancy relative to what the dietary environment their child would experience after their birth. The result was these children had an altered metabolism—one that was suited to famine conditions, rather than abundance. This epigenetic mismatch resulted in increased incidence of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. The fact that all these conditions (obesity, diabetes, and heart disease) are linked by increased diet-induced inflammation suggests that some of those epigenetic changes taking place during the Dutch Famine may also have turned on selected genes that resulted in enhanced diet-induced inflammation once adequate food was available. This is because the fetus was programmed in the womb for highly restricted calorie intake conditions, which was totally mismatched for abundance of calories available after the birth.”
― Barry Sears, The Mediterranean Zone: Unleash the Power of the World's Healthiest Diet for Superior Weight Loss, Health, and Longevity

“Since the brain needs about 130 grams of glucose per day, it makes sense to eat approximately that amount of carbohydrate each day. The rest of your body can easily live off stored fat, but the brain can’t.”
― Barry Sears, The Mediterranean Zone: Unleash the Power of the World's Healthiest Diet for Superior Weight Loss, Health, and Longevity

“The strength of an anti-oxidant molecule can be measured by its ability to neutralize free radicals. This can be quantified in a test tube to provide a quantitative ranking system known as the oxygen radical absorption capacity (ORAC), which estimates the potential of a given amount of a food product to act as an anti-oxidant. It has been shown that the ORAC value of a food ingredient is correlated with the levels of polyphenols in the same ingredient. Some polyphenols are best at neutralizing free radicals in the water-soluble environment (such as in your blood) whereas others work best in the lipid environment (as in lipoprotein particles or in cell membranes). Therefore what you need is a total ORAC value that represents the combination of both types of anti-oxidant activities. The higher the total ORAC level of a food ingredient, the better its potential ability to act as an anti-oxidant. Listed below are some of the total ORAC values of common foods. A more complete list can be found in Appendix G.”
― Barry Sears, The Mediterranean Zone: Unleash the Power of the World's Healthiest Diet for Superior Weight Loss, Health, and Longevity