Barry Sears - Soy Zone: 101 Delicious and Easy-to-Prepare Recipes

The success of the Zone books that I have written during the past five years is primarily due to my team, who are not only my co-workers, but also my closest friends. These include my wife, Lynn Sears, who does much of the editing of my books, and my brother, Doug Sears, who has a very clear insight and understanding of how to translate cutting-edge science into easily understood terms for the general public. In addition, I wish to especially thank Deborah Kotz for her excellent advice and input in helping develop this book and Jill Sullivan for her insightful comments.

Special thanks go to Roberto Mighty, who orchestrated the various soy recipes from a variety of talented Soy Zone chefs. It is the expertise of these chefs that makes it easy to integrate the Soy Zone into your daily lifestyle. These Zone chefs include Rachel Albert-Matesz, who is a cookbook author and has written more than 150 articles that have appeared in such magazines as Vegetarian Times, Vegetarian Gourmet, Veggie Life, and Vegetarian Journal. Also among these Soy Zone chefs are Janet Candela, a longtime vegetarian chef, and Shoshana Levinson, who holds a masters degree in human nutrition and biology and is a certified nutrition specialist in Connecticut. Her nutrition counseling services are focused on weight management and the treatment of chronic conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, allergies, and digestive disorders. Finally, there is my long-term colleague Dr. Ren Espy, who uses many soy-based Zone meals for her patients.

At the same time, I also have a team at ReganBooks that consistently does an outstanding job of fine-tuning my books for the general public. For this particular book, I want to give special thanks to Vanessa Stich, Cassie Jones, Rene Iwaszkiewicz, and Doug Corcoran for their excellent editing.

Of course, my greatest thanks always go to Judith Regan, who had the courage and foresight to support the Zone, and in the process helped improve the lives of millions of people.

I hope you now realize that the Soy Zone Diet may be the most powerful drug for improving daily performance (both mental and physical), for losing excess body fat, and for living a longer and healthier life. Although I use the phrase Soy Zone Diet, this is not a short-term program as much as a lifelong food management system. This system will give you better health through enhanced hormonal control, using the foods you already enjoy eating.

This is the seventh book I have written about the Zone technology. My first book, The Zone, was written primarily for cardiovascular physicians to alert them to the power that food has to alter hormone levels, specifically how the levels of the hormones insulin, glucagon, and eicosanoids vary with the macronutrient composition of each meal. However, The Zone is not the best introduction for a beginner to understand how simple the Zone technology is to follow. Thats why I strongly recommend reading my recently published A Week in the Zone as a great introduction to Zone basicsplus Zone-Perfect Meals in Minutes and Mastering the Zone as more detailed how-to books for using the Zone Diet. Once you understand basic Zone logic, then you can refer back to The Zone to better understand the biochemistry behind it. And if you really want to learn how to reverse aging and extend your life, then I strongly recommend reading The Anti-Aging Zone . This is my manifesto of the entire Zone technology that Ive developed. Although The Anti-Aging Zone is more complex than The Zone, it provides the information and motivation to make the Zone Diet your lifelong ally to increase and enhance your longevity by reversing the aging process.

Although each of my books represents the latest research on the complex relationship between diet and hormonal response available at the time each book was written, the field is constantly changing. You can access the latest information on my dietary program from my website, www.drsears.com, which discusses my latest thoughts on this constantly evolving program. In addition, I continually update my site with new recipes (many of them vegetarian), new research information, and simple tips to make the Zone Diet incredibly easy to follow on a lifelong basis.

The mission of my web site is to serve as a clearinghouse for information not only about the Zone Diet but also about the latest research concerning how diet can affect various hormones and how these hormones have an impact on your longevity. Since this information is rapidly evolving, www.drsears.com should be your primary Internet destination to help you understand new research findings that I present to you in a digestible form (no pun intended).

Also consider www.drsears.com as your personal cyberspace resource to understand and easily integrate the lifestyle steps necessary for a longer and better life. If you would like to receive additional useful information showing you how simple and easy Zone living can be, please call this toll-free number: 1-800-404-8171.

Throughout this book, I have constantly stressed that the Zone Diet will lower insulin levels. Im not just presenting a scientific theory. My statement is backed up by several well-regarded research studies that have been published over the last few years. These studies have strongly validated the concept of the Zone Diet: You can lower your insulin levels if you balance the amount of carbohydrates you eat with your amount of protein (which usually means decreasing your intake of carbohydrates while increasing your intake of protein).

The first data validating the Zone Diet appeared in 1998 in two separate studies involving Type 2 diabetics. (About 90 percent of diabetics have the Type 2 kind, which means their bodies make too much insulin because their cells need large amounts in order to respond to the hormone.) As a result of having too much insulin, Type 2 diabetics are more likely to have heart attacks, strokes, amputations, blindness, and impotence than the general population. More important, they die five to ten years earlier than the general population.