Is Tom Brady’s diet the secret behind his success?
A loyal Patriots fan, Timothy Caulfield recently confessed in Policy Options Magazine that, should the seriously “dreamy” Tom Brady ever need a kidney, “I’m there for him.”
But not even Brady’s epic Super Bowl win is enough to make Caulfield question whether he’s been wrong all along about the quarterback’s freakishly restricted diet, certain elements of which, writes Caulfield, holder of the University of Alberta’s Canada research chair in health law and policy, “register as full-out kook.”
Brady and his supermodel wife Gisele Bündchen reportedly follow an 80- per- cent alkaline, 20- per- cent acidic diet — a meal plan the NFL quarterback famously told Sports Illustrated in 2014 provides “balance and harmony through my metabolic system.”
Brady shuns white sugar, white flour, nightshade vegetables ( tomatoes, eggplant, mushrooms), most fruits (“I’ve never eaten a strawberry in my life,” he told New York magazine last year), caffeine, MSG, iodized salt ( pink Himalayan only) and dairy.
He does enjoy avocado-based ice cream.
The “ageless wonder” quarterback credits his insanely disciplined diet for his success and, at 39, says he has no plans for retiring (“Too bad babe,” he reportedly told Bundchen when she asked him to hang up his jersey after the Patriots stunning comeback Sunday. “I’m having too much fun.”)
But is there any science to support his eating plan?
“He’s such a good example of an anecdote overwhelming the data,” Caulfield says. “And the media usually give him the ‘ you-can’t- argue-with success’ treatment.”
Parts of Brady’s diet are undoubtedly healthy, Caulfield allows. He’s eating more “real” food. He avoids junk food. All good, he says.
“But what often happens with these fad diets is, a little bit of good is wrapped in a blanket of pseudoscience, and the whole package is sold even though there’s no data to support it.”
Brady appears to subscribe to an alkaline diet popularized by Robert O. Young, author of “The pH Miracle” book series. Young is an American naturopath now facing three years and eight months in a California jail for practising medicine without a licence. According to the BBC, he bought his PhD from a diploma mill.
The alkaline view is based on the ( scientifically discredited) theory that people need to consume a diet high in alkaline foods in order to maintain the pH of the blood. If blood becomes too acidic, the hypothesis holds, the body starts leaching calcium and other minerals from the bones, muscles and major organs, and bad things start to happen. Dr. Rena Mendelson begs to differ. Our bodies naturally control our pH levels, says Mendelson, a professor of nutrition at Ryerson University in Toronto.
“It’s not something we even need to be conscious of, because our normal homeostatic mechanisms allow us to adapt to a range of different foods or fluids or what- ever it is we consume,” she says.
“How would the rest of us be walking around and performing well in our dayto- day life if we had to pay attention to the acidity or alkalinity of the foods we consume?”
There’s nothing wrong with a diet high in vegetables and whole grain. Eliminating one food also isn’t a problem, Mendelson says. Strawberries aren’t essential. Neither are tomatoes.
But tossing out an entire food group — nightshades, for example — can be problematic. Nightshades are high in nutrients, high in the proven Mediterranean diet and are actually anti-inflammatory, says University of Calgary registered dietician Tanis Fenton.
We don’t need pure sugar. But neither do we need to cut out fruit because it has sugar, she says. Last year, Fenton published a review of the association between diet acidic load, and cancer. Her conclusion: “Almost no actual research” exists to prove or disprove these diets for cancer prevention or treatment.
Brady is a phenomenal athlete, Fenton says. “And he very modestly is suggesting his diet is the reason, but, no. That’s not good evidence, because it’s a case study — it’s one individual, and an individual endowed with a wonderful genetic predisposition to be an athlete, obviously. Because diet alone doesn’t make us phenomenal athletes like him.”
Still, Caulfield’s research has shown people subscribe to celebrities over any other source of authority.
Brady isn’t alone: Think of swimmer Michael Phelps’ embrace of “cupping” at the Rio games, and super- cold cryotherapy devotee LeBron James. There’s a sociological phenomenon that suggests we can’t help, consciously or not, be influenced by celebrities, Caulfield says. “We’re all comparison machines — we can’t help but compare ourselves to others. For most of human history that was a pretty small cohort. Now it’s people like Tom Brady.”
But he worries the pseudoscience noise complicates the story about how to live a healthy lifestyle. “It makes it sound like eating healthy is hard and expensive. People will go, ‘if I had Tom Brady’s personal chef I would eat healthy, too.’ And that’s a terrible message,” he says.
“Eating healthy doesn’t have to be complicated.”