Food is one of the great joys of life — is there anything better in life than getting together with friends and family, to share a great meal?
It’s a pretty human urge to want to eat good food — taste encouraged us to eat more so we wouldn’t starve, and also helped us avoid foods that tasted bad so we wouldn’t get sick.
It’s also natural for us to want to look good and feel good — society worships youth and athleticism. It feels good to be noticed.
Further there’s health —we want to live a long, vibrant life, with the ability to do all the things we love.
The problem — it’s maybe not possible to have our cake and eat it too? I have an Aunt who enjoys her good eats who at 82 is still eating anything and everything she wants. Although she’s basically the bionic woman at this point, being kept alive by the miracles of modern medicine — and barely.
A wide variety of outcomes in the short and long terms, based on the choices we make with our food. This is an essay for those of us who would like to feel and be healthier — but don’t seem to quite be getting there.
The Current State of Nutrition Science
So it’s been 20yrs Atkins blew up the food pyramid amidst the epidemic of obesity and diabetes. And it feels like it’s been chaos ever since — as the debate over whether a healthy diet contains carbs or not persists. It’s left it feeling like we’re all stuck having to choose between the Mediterranean and Keto diets, and experiment with our own health? Like a lab rat — yikes!
The mediterranean diet being the choice of experts was so hard for me to ignore - in spite of the fact that they were very wrong for decades with their food pyramid! This diet is how most people I know eat — you can eat bread, pasta, and rice — but a fair number still seem to struggle with weight issues and diabetes? So that doesn’t seem ideal??
The Keto diet gets so much buzz on social media — curiosity got the best of me and I gave it a try. As someone who grew up on the old food pyramid, it was paradigm-shifting to experience how fat is able to keep people feeling fuller longer — a seeming solution to the epidemic of obesity. Also enjoyed the mental energy. The downside was the drop in physical energy — and once I took a break, I didn’t want to go back. So sustainability for me was a problem.
The experimenting wouldn’t feel so bad, if it left me feeling reassured that one might be better than the other- but instead it had me feeling like maybe a lack of resolution over the issue of carbs means an even better approach may exist?
TB12 — Tom Brady Searches For Ways to Stay Young
Tom Brady the football player may not a scientist or a doctor, but at 44 he’s still managing to play better than those half his age. His book outlines what he eats in a day, and so for $20 and with too much time on my hands, I decided to give it a read.
When Brady was about 28 (or about mid-career for a football player :D), he and his trainers started trying to develop a regimen that would help him minimize the risk of injury and extend his ability to perform at his peak for as long as possible — basically, they went in search of anti-aging regimens.
People think of athletes as physical greats — maybe to be the best of the best in athletics, the greats also have to be good at additional things … like mindset? In his book, Brady displays many of the approaches the best in other fields all seem to share — not being satisfied with either/or choices; looking past conventional wisdom to search for better ways, by conducting thorough research, sweating the details, being willing to take risks, and embrace the new, etc etc?
Brady and his team identified inflammation as the cause of aging, using food to try and keep his body young, designing his diet and exercise regime to be as anti-inflammatory as possible.
So What is Inflammation Exactly? (Info from other sources)
This part’s really long, and probably worth skipping unless anyone’s curious to learn more?? Basically, scientists have found that foods high in vitamins/minerals, fiber, omega-3s, and anti-oxidants may help keep disease at bay. While other foods like sugar may tend to facilitate their development.
* * * * * * * * CAN PROBABLY SKIP THIS PART * * * * * * * *
I hadn’t heard a ton about inflammation before reading Tom Brady’s book — but apparently chronic inflammation has been shown be associated with a whole host of diseases? The following excerpt is from another book I picked up, Fighting Inflammation: How to stop the damage before it compromises your health, by Harvard Medical School:
And here’s an explanation for why researchers say food can cause inflammation, or reduce it — guess inflammation is caused by gut bacteria? (Same booklet)
This study here from University of Groningen links what we eat to the flourishing of bacteria that increase or decrease the risk of developing certain diseases.
What the table above seems to say??
- Eating plant protein instead of animal protein may help prevent cancer
- Drinking buttermilk (fermented beverages?) can help prevent cancer too
- Protein and fruit instead of soda is anti-inflammatory
- Mediterranean diet without junk food is anti-inflammatory
- Mediterranean diet without junk food, but with lean beef as anti-inflammatory as well
- Junk food is bad
- Eating cheese without carbs can increase the risk of colon cancer
- Decreasing carbs (keto) may increase the risk of colon cancer
- Junk food without veggies can increase the risk of colon cancer
- Keto that’s more animal than plant can increase the risk of colon cancer
- Junk food can lead to MS?
While the study below from Univ of S Carolina tries to put together a list of individual vitamins/minerals/foods/components that may be pro-inflammatory or anti-inflammatory …
* * * * * * * * OKAY, END OF THE RESEARCH STUDIES * * * * * * * *
Looks like there’s a lot of vitamins/minerals and anti-oxidants on the list … as well as omega-3s, fibre?
Tom Brady’s TB12 diet focuses on foods packed with as many of these anti-inflammatory components as possible, while trying to limit the foods that are pro-inflammatory.
What Tom Brady Eats in a Day
So here’s the type of foods that TB eats in a day — he’s not vegan because he eats meat, and he’s not keto because he eats bananas …
Some other observations/findings of what he’s doing differently from Mediterranean, Keto, and the rest of the NFL apparently!
1. Superstar Tom eats mostly superstar foods (IE Not all foods are created equally)
The Mediterranean Diet recommends eating a diet of 50% whole grains a day, treating them all the same. Whereas TB limits his intake to the ones that pack the most nutrients.
I found a nutrition comparison tool on the web, and the results are listed below. The anti-inflammatories are the fiber and omega-3s — so when it comes to whole grains, it looks like of the two chia has more? Here’s a comparison based on calorie:
A lot of the nutrients of whole grains appear to be in the bran and the germ — maybe those with a smaller diameter and more surface area might tend to have more of those things, and less starchy middle?
2. TB does not eat a lot of carbs, protein, or calories
I put all the food from his list into a spreadsheet, and added up the macros — TB’s diet is not really Mediterranean either, because he only eats 30% carbs. So he’s for sure charting is own course.
And look how much fibre he manages to pack into a day!
So the carbs he eats are high-quality carbs packed with fibre, the fat he eats are high-quality fats packed with omega-3s, and his protein comes from plants to limit saturated fats. There are pics of sample meals coming up …
3. TB custom tailors his food to his level of physical activity
Most people once they choose between Mediterranean or Keto will stick with it — but TB chooses what to eat based on his schedule.
In the morning, he eats a breakfast heavier in carbs and protein, but lower in fat …
While post workout, his lunch is more like this — do Omega-3s help with recovery, or something like that? This is the only meat he eats in the day, and it’s limited to a 4oz serving size …
For dinner, there is more veggies and olive oil — and not a lot of protein at all …
4. TB does eat steak — and when he does, he makes sure it’s only 4oz
You can see what 4oz of meat along with 3–4cups of veggies looks like here — it’s basically a couple of strips of goodies, mixed into a mound of salad!
That’s something he talks about, is how portion sizes for food are much smaller than we might think, because of how supersize everything has become at restaurants (see below). So maybe it’s not that the amount of food he eats is so small, it’s that the amount of food the rest of us are eating is so large?? :o
5. And when TB eats steak, he eats the vegetables first
To resist the temptation of eating the tasty stuff first and then having the healthy stuff taste less appealing, he makes sure to eat the healthy stuff otherwise there’s a chance it doesn’t get eaten at all, lol
Takeaways, Applying These Ideas to Ourselves
So instead of choosing to eat foods that taste good, or help make us look and feel better, Tom Brady’s diet focuses on trying to find and eat foods that provide high quality fuel for his workouts that hopefully help heal his body and keep it young?
- carbs for fuel
- protein for fuel
- omega-3s for recover?
- fibre for digestion and gut microbiome
- vitamins/minerals for the gut++
It kind of seems to be working!
It’s pretty interesting after learning all of the above, to then go back and try to see how TB’s plan compares/contrasts with Mediterranean and Keto.
The Mediterranean diet recommends eating 50% carbs, which is a lot of fuel! And most of us probably don’t manage to eat nearly enough fiber with even that much. Maybe an improvement over the old food pyramid — but also still maybe too many carbs, and too many low quality carbs to be optimal for most of us? Would eating more high fiber from whole grains sich as chia and wheat germ/bran be better than eating starchy carbs like whole wheat pasta with the bigger glucose spikes/crashes?
Some takeaways for Keto — was going to maybe talk about extra protein and the concept of diminishing marginal returns, but this essay has gotten super long and it’s getting late, and I want to turn in soon. Are chia seeds and wheat germ/bran low carb? Would it be possible and preferable to add those to a keto diet, to add more fiber?
Didn’t even get around to talking about beans/legumes!!
Also, am no longer able to think up a flowy way to mention the benefits of keeping a doctor in the loop, who can monitor our health from the inside with blood and urine tests. Especially important for those of us who are a certain age!
In sum: Tom Brady the football star is also an advancer of science haha! Lots of food for thought in his book — enjoyed it!
