Balanced Diet Bars

Balanced Diet Bars Began With Dr. Sears and the Zone

Entrepreneurship has improved out lives by making the Zone diet easy and affordable, as well as healthy.

These days, when somewhat talks about balanced diet bars, most likely they are referring to the Zone diet balance of 40% carbohydrates, 30% protein and 30% fat, as described by Dr. Barry Sears in his Zone books.

Balanced Diet Bars Can Help You Lose Weight

It is possible somebody is just referring to what used to be called a balanced diet of eating foods from the four food groups of meat, fruits and vegetables, grains and dairy products -- which the United States federal government used to recommend.

But I think most of us realize it's difficult to get all four of those food groups into one diet bar, and I don't believe anyone expects that in a meal bar. Besides, nobody talks about the four food groups anymore. The United States Department of Agriculture switched to the Food Pyramid some years ago, to encourage Americans to base our diets on grains, which is one reason why we're getting fatter and need to eat fat bars to lose weight.

Dr. Barry Sears began his research into an optimally balanced diet in the 1980s. By 1989 he developed what he called a Biosyn Bar, which met Zone guidelines.

History of Balanced Diet Bars

The Balance Company was started and incorporated in 1992 as Bio Foods, Inc. One of its founders was Dick Lamb, who'd been eating Biosyn bars from Dr. Barry Sears. This was before the Zone diet became known.

Sears and Lamb had been planning to go into the business together, but the deal fell through. A patent was pending on the bars, but Lamb and three others started Bio Foods, Inc. The Canadian company Bariatrix manufactured them.

To complicate the story, Dr. Sears' sister Sheri Sears and her friend Bill Logue started a company Zone bar company PR* Nutrition Inc which was acquired by Twin Lab in 1998.

In 1992 Dr. Sears started Surfactant Technologies, Inc. to market his bars, and came out with an improved version called the Eicotec Bar. In 1993 Dr. Sears went into partnership with Matt Freeze and Pure Distributors under the company name Envion to sell Zone favorable products made by Surfactant Technologies, Inc through network marketing. In 1994 Pure began selling a consumer version of Eicotec called the BioZone Bar.

Dr. Sears Created Balanced Diet Bars

At some point, I'm sure that Sears was involved with developing the marketing for Pure. But prior to July 1996 he was not associated with the company. I say that based on attending a seminar on network marketing held by Randy Gage in that time period.

Gage at that time was a consultant to Matt Freese. Many of the other attendees were distributors of his MLM company and they told me that their current bars tasted better than Dr. Sears' bars.

According to court records, Dr. Sears repudiated his marketing agreement with Pure in August 1996. Apparently he was not getting paid royalties as agreed. And he wished to open up medical centers to use Zone technology on patients, and Freese believed this broke their contract.

Right after that, Sears began the Eicotech Corporation and began marketing Eicotech bars.

In 1998 Bio Foods changed its name to the Balance Bar Company and was publicly listed under the stock ticker symbol BBAR on the Nasdaq exchange.

They have a number of lines of balanced diet bars.

However, only the Original line contains the 40/30/30 Zone dietary recommended proportions of carbs, protein and fat.

Diet Bars -- lose weight.