Perfect Proportions And Careful Combinations - Popular Diets: Obesity

Content provided by the Faculty of the Harvard Medical School

Perfect proportions and careful combinations

Books: The Zone; Eat Right 4 Your Type

Compared with low-fat or low-carb diets, these diets are more complex and require more work in terms of figuring out what and how much of specific foods you're allowed to eat.

Rationale. Several diets sell the idea that specific proportions of nutrients or certain combinations of foods are essential to weight loss. If you want to enter "The Zone," you must create meals and snacks that contain 9 grams of carbohydrate for every 7 grams of protein and 1.5 grams of fat (40% carbohydrate, 30% fat, and 30% protein). According to Barry Sears, the scientist who developed it, the diet helps control the body's production of hormones such as insulin, but there's no clear evidence to suggest this is true or whether it aids weight loss.

The "Eat Right 4 Your Type" diet promotes the wholly unscientific idea that your blood type determines what you should eat, along with how you should exercise, what supplements you need, and what type of personality you have. Following it isn't easy, since you must remember lists of "good" and "bad" foods. It isn't balanced, something you can tell from the long list of recommended supplements. And it makes it hard to prepare meals for a family with several different blood types.

Bottom line. Proper proportions or correct combinations force you to focus on what you are eating, which helps most people eat fewer calories each day. That's where any weight loss from these diets comes from, not from any nutritional or physiologic secrets the diet developers have uncovered.

Last updated:	June 20, 2007