Is A High-Protein Diet Healthy?

Posting Date: 03/08/1999

Ross: I'm on the Zone diet and it seems to be working for me. I like it because it seems to be backed up with a lot of scientific studies, and it's a lifetime eating plan. What you eat depends on your lean body mass and how much exercise you get.

I know you've been critical about diet books. What do you think about this one?

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Dr. Dean: The Zone is basically a protein diet. In my upcoming book, I trace the history of protein diets back to the 19th century. Up until that point, there was a big movement in American eating habits away from meat, which was started by Kellogg - the cereal man.

Go out and rent the movie The Road to Wellville with Anthony Hopkins. It's one of his least popular movies, but it tells the whole story about Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of corn flakes, and it's actually true. Kellogg's ideas about healthy eating got very popular, and there was this anti-meat thing, then protein came roaring back. Since then, we seem to get swept up in a protein mania about every eight years.

One of the most important things we've found out about protein is its impact on life expectancy. When you feed animals more protein, they don't live as long. If you reduce their calories and protein, they live longer. Protein is also rough on the kidneys. We learned two weeks ago that if you put people with kidney failure on a low-protein diet, they don't need an artificial kidney machine.

But my main beef with diets - and this is a general remark and not specifically against the Zone - is that people go off of them at some point or make some kind of modification in their eating. Most diet books recognize this, and so they include a lifetime version for once you lose the weight you want to lose.

Now, I can guarantee you, if you take a careful look at what you're eating, you are eating fewer calories than you're burning, and that's why you're losing weight. But the secret that you might not want to admit to me is that you're not going to stick to this for the rest of your life. Your weight is likely to turn around on you, in which case you're going to be back in the same old fix. If it doesn't, that's good, and you can make modify your eating to maintain your weight.