Before you approach the Zone Diet for children or people with special needs, there is one tip that has proved generally true: no matter what diet you intend to follow or put your child through, no matter the amount of good things you have heard or read about it, first consult with your doctor.

The Zone Diet for Kids

The Zone diet requires care in timetabling meals and the amounts of macro nutrients. It is unlikely that children will be happy to follow such a fastidious diet. Dr. Sears recommends, however, that children should eat balanced meals too, because it will be easier for them, as adults, to keep to a healthy diet.

Dr. Sears offers advice for parents who wish to keep their children in the Zone. He suggest, for example, creating zone-balanced meals from foods they are sure to love (string cheese, chocolate protein powder). They can keep peeled-off, pre-cut fruit at hand to make it easy to snack on with cheese pieces. They can let children dip their vegetables in sauces they like.

Once on the Zone diet, children are not allowed to skip meals. Soda, fruit juice, or partially hydrogenated fats (like most peanut butters) should be eliminated from their diet. Zone nutritionists advise parents to be “generous” about block numbering in children's diet. The children are growing, and usually consume more energy than adults.

Despite all these “tips”, the Zone diet is generally not recommended for children and teenagers. The main objections are that Zone is a low-calorie diet, that it does not provide important nutrients and that it deprives the body of its main energy source, glucose.

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Zone Diet Pregnancy Recommendations

Dr. Sears recommends Zone Diet for pregnant or breast-feeding women as long as they pay attention to an adequate food-block increase, such as the following:

• Pregnant women should increase their Zone food ratio up to 14 blocks/daily (that leads to an approximate total of 1300 calories daily.
• Breast-feeding women should have a daily ratio of 1.5 to 2 Zone food blocks to increase the daily ratio (an approximate total of 1200kcal)

Traditional dietary standards advise pregnant women to increase their daily calorie intake by at least 300; women who exclusively breast-feed their baby are advised to add 500kcal to their diet.

Nutritionists and physicians do not therefore usually recommend Zone Diet for pregnant or breast-feeding women.

Dr. Barry Sears insists that the Zone Diet works for people suffering from type II diabetes and heart diseases. This is explicable in a way, because Zone Diet does not encourage excesses of any kind, apart from calorie limitation, of course. But the American Heart Association does not approve of the Zone diet. In its view, the Zone encourages consumption of meat protein, which could also contain fat, while it decreases carbohydrate intake.

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