Have you heard of Phi? The Golden Ratio of mathematics? The legs of a golden triangle (an isosceles triangle with a vertex angle of 36°) are in a golden ratio to its base and, in fact, this was the method used by Pythagoras to con¬struct phi. The ratio of the circumradius to the length of the side of a decagon is also phi, Phi is found throughout mathematics and was the basis of some quasi-religious sects finding the Devine in nature. What does this have to do with health, longevity and per¬formance? Possibly nothing, but there does exist another Golden Ratio: namely the 40-30-30 ratio of food macronutrients espoused by the Zone, which for many holds the key to their performance goals.

Like Phi, the ratios described by the Zone have been open to broad interperatation. Unlike Phi, however, it is obvious when de¬tractors have neither read nor followed the Zone, let alone bothered to check the num¬bers, when the Zone is called “low carb” or “high protein.” Modern nutritional science seems to suffer simultaneously from the in¬ability to interpret empirical findings and the lack of insight necessary to couch ques¬tions germane to health and fitness from a reasonable theoretical basis. Much of the confusion surrounding the Zone can be at¬tributed to the developer of the Zone him¬self, Barry Sears, because of his omission or underplay of key information. This is unfor¬tunate, as the Zone offers a remarkable de¬gree of dietary precision.

I would like to set the Zone amidst a broader context and make sure people understand there are multiple facets to the Zone. I’ll use myself as an example and walk through the WHOLE Zone process. I also want to look at the Zone from a Paleo perspective. To do this, I will compare it to the recommenda¬tions of Loren Cordain. I discovered a few surprising things in this process that iron¬ically paint the Zone as a diet of extreme moderation.

The basic “How To” portion of the Zone fo¬cuses around one’s protein requirements. Whether one uses the book or the handy online calculator, one must find his or her lean body mass and factor that into an activ¬ity level to discover the number of blocks needed. CrossFit founders Greg and Lauren Glassman can perform the feat of prescrib¬ing blocks based on an individual’s height, weight, and visible leanness. Typically they are within one block of what the sophisti¬cated calculators recommend, and this is based in part on the fact that most women require 10-12 blocks and most men fall in the 15-17 range.

I am 172 lbs and approximately 6-8% body¬fat. This leaves me with 158 lbs of lean body weight, and with a Physical Activity factor of .7 (158 X 0.70, Enter the Zone pg 80), this leaves me with 118. I divide the 118 by 7 (for each block there is 7g of protein) and my Zone block recommendation is 17. I have been doing 16 as per the Glassmans’ recommendation, so you see this is pretty close.

The Physical Activity Factor is an important point that needs clarification. It is a surprise to most that doing the CrossFit Workout of the Day 3 on 1 off or 5 on 2 off along with martial arts training or other activity only places them in the 0.7-0.80 activity level. The WOD although very intense is not long and does not require that much energy to go through. For one to score the 1.0 level, sev¬eral hours of practice in addition to a dedi¬cated strength and conditioning program is necessary. This is an important point we will look at more later. In short, I was shocked by how “inactive” I was and pretty spooked at the prospect of dropping my calories to Zone Levels. In light of what we know from caloric restriction, intermittent fasting and the work of Art De Vany, I should not have been so nervous about the prospect of some short term caloric restric¬tion with adequate nutrition. This was a classic example of over thinking a situation. Occa¬sionally it pays to forget what we know in favor of what we can learn. For now, have some faith you will not wither away and starve on the appropriate block recommendations.

Remember blocks? The deal with blocks is that they are a convenient unit of measure, like the Mole in chemistry and physics or the Dozen in baking. Specifically, blocks are: protein 7g, carbohydrate 9 g, and each fat block is 1.5 g. Once one knows what a block of any given food is, constructing a two, three or four block meal is easy.

Going back to my seventeen block daily re¬quirement, this means I need seventeen to¬tal blocks each day. That is seventeen blocks each of protein, carbohydrate and fat. Ide¬ally these blocks are broken into five or six meals/snacks. Seventeen blocks could be split into 5 x 3 block meals with a 2 block snack. One can apportion this anyway they like, but it is better to make meals small and frequent. One need only use the May 2004 issue of the CrossFit Journal to construct meals of the proper proportions.

Let’s take a moment and do a little book¬keeping with regards to caloric content and macronutrient ratios. For carbohydrates, we have 9g/block x 17 blocks; for protein it is 7g/block x 17 blocks; and for fat it is 1.5g/block x 17 blocks. This means we have 153 grams of carbohydrates, 119 grams protein (we already knew this one) and 25.5 grams of fat. Don’t forget, we need to double our fat at this point, as the Zone assumes a hid¬den block of fat in most protein sources. That means an additional 25.5 grams of fat. My caloric breakdown (carbo¬hydrates and protein both have 4 calories per gram and fat has 9) looks like: C-612, P-476, F-459, with total calories at 1547. If we are diligent and check our work the ratios actually come out to be: C-39.6%, P-30.8%, F-29.7%. Fairly close to 40-30-30, no?

This is one of the first places Barry Sears really loses people, and a reason why research on the Zone has gone badly awry. Sears hangs so much of his evi¬dence regarding the Zone on the performance of elite level athletes, yet he says virtually nothing about the specifics of their process! This has made the little independent research into the Zone all but worthless. Sears asserts that this ap¬parent caloric deficit (the ADA would put my caloric needs at around 2800 Cal vs the Zone’s 1550) is fine for the rest of your life. If one is quite sedentary this may be the case, but if one is an athlete, this is not go¬ing to work forever. This is where the Ath¬letes Zone comes in.

Barry Sears is a master of cooking and re-cooking his material in a staggering number of books but there is only one page in all of them that makes the recommendation of ramping up the mono-unsaturated fat in the diet to support activity level. In Mastering the Zone pg. 42, we get the goods, in a way. We are never told how to ratchet up the fat content, just that it can be done. I suspect the reason why Sears is virtually mute on this fact is that once one increases the fat content the original 40-30-30 is placed in a questionable light. I had never heard of the ramp up until Greg Glassman mentioned that most CrossFitters following the Zone settle at a level of 3-5 times their original fat content. In practical terms, this means that once one has leaned out on the basic Zone, they will increase fat content of each meal between 3 and 5 times. Ideally one takes a week or more at each level to get a feel for things and find their best performance with the least possible calories.

Let’s see what this ramp up does both to ca¬loric content and macronutrient ratios:



Once one has revved up to the Athletes Zone it appears one is consuming both a low carb and low protein diet! We recently had a very long debate on the CrossFit mes¬sage board regarding the potential health dangers of the Zone. One of the main argu¬ments was that the Zone is a “high protein diet.” Perhaps we should only show the 5x version of this diet to the folks with this ar¬gument. Frequently, however, the Zone is called a low carbohydrate diet, which, if one is at the original 40-30-30 level, we can explain away by saying “40% of calories come from low glycemic sources, mainly vegetables and fruits.” But what if we are at the 5x level? Did I just start Atkins because our carb percentage is at 24%?! Obviously the answer is no. I am still taking in around 150g of carbs per day. Low perhaps by ADA and vegetarian standards, but far above the level typically recommended by the seri¬ously low carb crowd.

Approaching this purely from an empirical, black box perspective, we can reap all the Zone has to offer, and perhaps this is where we should leave it. But how do we know for sure the Zone is not high protein or low carb? What standards are being used here when these statements are made? When our Doctor says “high protein diets will destroy your kidneys,” does this have any basis in reality, or should our health care providers have a bit more exposure to anthropology and a bit less pharmacology?

To understand what is happening here and place all of this in a meaningful context, we need to look at some studies of intermit¬tent fasting and caloric restriction, and then some of Loren Cordain’s work.

The study, “Intermittent fasting dissociates beneficial effects of dietary restriction on glucose metabolism and neuronal resistance to injury from calorie intake,” looks at the effects of intermittent fasting and longevity. I want to devote a whole article to this topic in the future, but for now it can simply be used to shed some light onto our Zone un¬derstanding.

Essentially, the acts of caloric restriction and intermittent fasting increase nitrogen (protein) retention. The presence of ketone bodies from high fat intake accentuates this even further. What this means is that when one is following the low calorie 40-30-30 Zone, the mild caloric restriction combined with the by-products of body fat metabo¬lism (ketones), greatly reduce the need for protein. Once one has leaned out it is ad¬ditional dietary fat that provides sufficient calories and ketone bodies to spare protein. One question you may have is how we are getting ketosis when we are not completely glycogen depleted? In simple terms, all of our metabolic machinery is in action all the time. Under the conditions of intense exer¬cise, intermittent fasting and increased fat intake, concentrations of circulating ketone bodies increase dramatically, even when liver glycogen has not been fully depleted. Ketones are powerful, and we will look more closely at them in the future.

THE PALEO DIET

Just as a refresher, Paleo really refers to what we are eating, or perhaps more suc¬cinctly, what we are not eating. That means no grains, legumes or dairy. Unless one is a serious paleo purist, some “non-paleo” but “good” items make the cut such as olive oil and tomatoes. Now that we have established what to eat, how much of any given thing should we eat? A place many have gone to answer this question is the diets of historical and contemporary hunter gatherers (HGs). Dr. Boyd S. Eaton did this back in the early 1980’s and used the Ethnographic Atlas to determine how much fish, fowl, meat, fruit, veggies, etc. our ancestors ate. From this in¬formation, he made recommendations as to what we should be eating. His paper was a powerful turning point for many research¬ers, including Loren Cordain.

Professor Cordain was a successful exer¬cise physiologist teaching at Colorado State University when he found Dr. Eaton’s pa¬per. This paper was apparently a moment of enlightenment for Prof. Cordain, as he from then on approached the research of diet and exercise from the perspective of “Evolution via Natural Selection.” What does this have to do with the Zone, Paleo diet, and most importantly, your performance and happi¬ness? I’m getting there!

Prof. Cordain, being the inquisitive guy that he is, started looking at Dr. Eaton’s paper and found that it was thermodynamically im¬possible to obtain all the calories sufficient for life on the largely plant based diet given the environment of our ancestors (pre-agri¬culture). What had been missed was a large amount of small game that ended up in the “Gathered Plants” section of the atlas. When Prof. Cordain made some adjustments to the previous calculations, he found that MOST HGs (over 73%) derived most of their en¬ergy (>/= 56%-65%) from animal foods. You can read that whole article at www.thepaleodiet.com/articles/AJCN%20PDF.pdf, but here are a few key points:

1] Peoples living further and further from the equator rely less and less on gathered plants and more on hunted/fished foods.

2] Regardless of location, there exist sea¬sonal shifts in macronutrient content.

3] An “average” Paleolithic diet might look like C-23 P-38 F-39

Compared to the Zone, we have some obvi¬ous similarities but some significant points of departure. The ratios look pretty good, especially when compared to the Athletes Zone. One obvious difference is the greatly increased protein intake. Cordain’s findings point toward a protein intake more than DOUBLE that of the Zone. Over 350g/day on average for me! Before the Nephrologists in all of you scream out in protest, please consider this is based upon contemporary and historical HGs. These people did not keel over from sudden onset kidney dis¬ease. There are plenty of research citation on Medline debunking the high protein = kidney disease myth.

Another apparent departure from the Zone is the total caloric content that Cordain re¬comends. From Cordain’s perspective, I should be consuming/expending ~3900Cals. This based upon his work here: www.thep¬aleodiet.com/articles/Int%20J%20Sport%20Article.pdf

It looks like things are getting further and further apart, but if you remember we used a 0.70 Activity Factor to determine my pro¬tein/caloric needs. This was based on my activity level, which according to Cordain and these molecular geneticists:
http://jp.physoc.org/cgi/content/full/543/2/399, is too low. If we assume an activity level con¬sistent with that of our ancestors and give me a 1.0 Activity Factor, my total caloric in¬take at a scaled up 5x Athletes Zone is 3700. The Zone is still lower in protein than Cor¬dain’s recommendations, but it is not so far off as to not make sense from a theoretical perspective, and well, the Zone just works! My main point with all of this is that if the diet we evolved on is “reasonably” safe (a remarkable number of people would argue this point) then a protein intake 50% LESS (such as we find in the Zone) is by default safe.

What can we take form all of this besides some paper to line the birdcage?

1] The Zone has a very distinctive start¬ing phase and a ramp-up phase for athletes. This has been seriously un¬der-emphasized and is perhaps the primary reason the Zone has not met broader acceptance. It is interesting that a research biochemist who has lived in a world where reproducibility is everything does not adequately com¬municate how to reproduce his diet!

2] The Zone is perfectly compatible with what we know about human origins with regards to amounts and ratios of food. It is lower in protein but it may be that the Zone optimizes protein uti¬lization. There is no doubt that when we increase the intake of a macronu¬trient we increase its utilization as an energy source. It makes sense that one would want to be fat adapted but not protein adapted. The Zone may ac¬complish both tasks very effectively.

3] The Zone appears to home in on a ca¬loric and macronutrient level consis¬tent with our energy expenditure even when the activity level is less than what may be optimum for our species. This is pretty intriguing to me. I sus¬pect that both our performance and results would optimize when our ac¬tivity reaches that 1.0 Activity Factor (or 50 Kcal/kg per day from Cordain’s work) and our food is scaled to match. Art De Vany has talked at great length about living at high-energy flux. Lots of activity and lots of food. I am seeing a convergence of both clinical experi¬ence and theory.

NEXT TIME

One troubling aspect of the Zone (I’m not the only one with this opinion) is its static nature. If we have learned anything from CrossFit and Evolutionary Fitness, it is that intermittency describes and supports opti¬mum human performance, longevity and health. Next month I will look at a punc¬tuated phase-shift program, The Metabolic Diet, by Mauro Di Pasquale. It is my hope that delineating the similarities between these approaches will help both in what program to choose and ultimately adher¬ence to a healthy program for life.