Dr. Barry Sears Audio Interview – Parts 1 & 2

Dr. Barry Sears grew up in Long Beach, California, where he exhibited both an athletic and scientific bent. After graduating from Palisades High School at the age of 17, Sears went to Occidental College to major in chemistry. He played both basketball and volleyball in college, and even after he earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry from Indiana University in 1969, he continued to play volleyball at the national level. Sears became keenly interested in understanding heart disease when his father died of a massive heart attack at the age of 53. Within several years, his father’s three brothers all also died of heart attacks. This left Sears with a goal to find some way to combat heart disease. He came upon a study published by two researchers at a San Francisco hospital that claimed that arteriosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries, had been cured in rabbits by the injection of naturally occurring fats called phospholipids. Seizing on this one study, he started his own company in 1976, Lipid Specialties, Inc. The aim of Lipid Specialties was to come up with a phospholipid that could be created in the laboratory, and was thus patentable. Sears came up with several “new” phospholipids, and collaborated on animal studies of their effects with the drug manufacturer Upjohn.

After running out of private funding, Sears shifted his study of the effects of phospholipids on heart disease to a new venture: using phospholipid technology to deliver cancer-fighting drugs. Some drugs that were highly effective at shrinking tumors were nevertheless too toxic to help cancer patients unless they could be modified to go directly to the tumor sites. Sears’ phospholipids could safely carry new cancer drugs in the bloodstream. He took out several patents for drug-delivery systems using phospholipids.

But Sears’ interest veered again with the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1982 to three researchers who had uncovered the functioning of a class of hormones known as eicosanoids. Eicosanoids control a variety of systems within the body, including the cardiovascular system, the immune system, and the body’s system for regulating fat storage. The fatty acids Sears had been studying for years in his lipids work were also the building blocks of the eicosanoids. At this point Sears made a leap from biochemical research to nutritional science. He deduced that many diseases could be traced to an imbalance of eicosanoids. The best way to regulate eicosanoids, he theorized, was through food. In the early 1980s, Sears elaborated a theory of nutritional control of eicosanoids that evolved into the Zone diet.

Part 1

Part 2

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6 Responses to “Dr. Barry Sears Audio Interview – Parts 1 & 2”

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