by Henry Gould – Feb 11th, 2021

You might have heard; Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers just won Super Bowl LV. For Brady this was his 7th Super Bowl ring from 10 total visits to the big game. That’s a lot!

More impressive is the fact that Brady did this at the ripe old age of 43, making him the oldest quarterback to ever win a Super Bowl title. The NFL is definitely a young man’s league, with the average age of players clocking in at 26 years old and a typical career lasting only 3.3 years. Given these unprecedented results, it begs the question: what is Tom Brady’s secret?

Much has been made about Brady’s less than typical training regimes (as well as his unorthodox alternative medicine practitioner Alex Guerrero), but most of the intrigue comes from his diet. Famously, Brady had never eaten a strawberry until a joke-y visit to the Stephen Colbert show, and claims to avoid all nightshades – peppers, tomatoes, eggplants and potatoes – claiming they have inflammatory properties, sticking to an alkaline diet instead.

Now, it’s hard to argue with 7 Super Bowl rings. But whether that’s a product of very specific dietary restrictions that don’t have a lot of evidence behind them, or if it’s simply because he is already eating a healthy diet regardless of the type of vegetables.

There’s no doubt that inflammation is a concern for human health regardless of your athletic ability, especially for things like heart disease and cancer. However, if we paid attention in statistics class, we know that correlation doesn’t always equal causation. Just because Brady following a strict “no nightshade” diet correlates with him winning 7 Super Bowl’s, doesn’t mean the two are related. He might just be really good at football, have good coaching, lots of money to pay for trainers and medical treatment, as well as GM’s who sign good players to play with him, and so on and so on.

Regardless, it’s fun to see what the best are doing behind closed doors. Maybe you pick up some tips and use them in your day to day routine, maybe not, but it can help inform us what it takes to get to get the next level.

Men’s Health visited Tom and went through his fridge to see what he’s eating on the daily, as well as how he fuels up and recovers for a big game.

If you’re more skeptically minded, Vox.com did a good breakdown on his 2017 exercise and diet book, “The TB12 Method”, concluding that the grandiose claims of his strict diet are probably not backed up by science, and instead a product of living a healthy lifestyle.

Either way, I guess if it ain’t broke don’t fix it…

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By Henry Gould – Sept 19th, 2018

I’m not that old, but in my short stint on earth it feels like I’ve lived through a lifetime of diet and exercise fads. Atkins (low carb, high protein, high fat), South Beach (low carb, high fiber, low fat), Paleo (eating like a neanderthal), Tom Brady (no tomatoes or strawberries), Tae Bo (Billy Blanks doing air punches), the Diet Coke diet (only drinking Diet Coke) and the cotton ball diet (cotton balls soaked in liquid; likely to kill you)… how does one keep up!

The ketogenic diet has been getting a ton of press recently, not only for its celebrity adherents (Kardashians, Gwenyth Paltrow, Lebron James) but for the incredible claims attributed to it: weight loss, increased energy, even things like reduced autism and epilepsy symptoms.

Now, a true ketogenic diet is probably something quite different than what your friend at work did to lose 10kg’s before their wedding. Strictly speaking, a ketogenic diet is one that puts the body in a state of “ketosis”, which means using predominantly ketones (fat molecules) for energy, rather than glucose. A true ketogenic diet would be comprised of 60-75% fat, with the rest in protein and little to no sugar.

To really understand the basis for the ketogenic diet, we need to do a quick history and nutrition lesson. Firstly, humans have been on the earth for approximately 200,000 years. During this time, humans were hunter gatherers, eating what they found or killed. This meant plants they could forage and animals they could hunt and eat. Because animal fat is such a good source of energy, evolving to eat and process fat is something we are well adapted to do. On the flip side, sugar occurs quite rarely in nature outside of fruit and honey, so this would have almost never been available as an energy source. Therefore, our body developed a process for dealing with too much sugar in the bloodstream: insulin. If we don’t regulate our blood sugar, we can easily slip into a coma and die. Not good! This is also what diabetes is; an inability to regulate ones blood-sugar levels.

In addition to regulating our blood sugar, insulin works to help the body store excess sugar as fat. Because glucose is a great source of energy, the body figures it might need some for later. Keep in mind, the body still hasn’t caught up to the fact that we now live in warm houses with unlimited access to food, so if it keeps getting fed high sugar foods with more energy than it needs, it’s going to keep storing this as fat indefinitely.

Suffice to say, the diet we evolved on (plants, animal protein, fat, low sugar) and the one common in the developed world (processed foods and carbohydrates) are two very different things. Agriculture brought the advent of crops, and with these crops came more grains and more sugar. Although this was great for feeding a lot of people and building civilizations around, it has tended to have adverse effects on the health of the masses. Sugar is highly addictive, cheap and plentiful, so it makes sense why food companies pump it into just about everything.

Circling back on the ketogenic diet, lately I think it’s been used more as a buzzword and less as something followed to the letter of the law. Instead of eating 70% fat hoping to stay in “ketosis” (something unrealistic over a lifetime of eating), what people really mean is a diet low in sugar, low in refined carbohydrates (rice, pasta, bread) and high in protein, fat, and vegetables. Despite what you may think, vegetables do have a significant amount of carbohydrates in them, but because a lot of these are locked into “fiber”, the body is less able to extract them then it would a spoon full of sugar.

Personally, I feel that eating in this way is suited both to our evolutionary development, as well as what modern nutrition tells us is healthy over the course of a lifetime. Science has more or less overturned the previous thinking that eating fat made you fat, when in reality it’s sugar (and insulin) that regulate fat storage.  Apart from that, gauging expectations in any “diet” is important, keeping in mind that moderation is key. Kale might be good for you, but that doesn’t mean eating 2 bunches of kale a day is extra good for you. In fact, it might actually be bad!

Do your research, read both sides of the argument, and consult the advice of doctors and nutritionists before starting any drastic health changes.

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