Tom Brady blasts big food companies, GMOs in new self-help book
Five-time Super Bowl champion Tom Brady blasts big food companies, referring to them as more like “chemical companies than anything else,” in his new self-help book out Tuesday.
In “The TB12 Method: How to Achieve a Lifetime of Sustained Peak Performance,” Brady writes that “most of what we buy in the supermarket are food-like products or compounds marketed and sold to us as ‘food.’ They’re not food. They’re refinements or inventions that someone made up.”
The Patriots quarterback uses fruits and vegetables as an example saying that apples, bananas, and tomatoes are ripened by ethylene gas to make them available all year round.
“But are those real?” Brady adds. “Moreover, a lot of studies show that the mineral content of our soil has declined steadily since the 1950’s, along with the nutritional value of the fruits and vegetables that grow in that soil.”
Brady goes on to criticize the industry’s use of genetically modified organisms or GMOs, which currently make up around 75% of processed foods on grocery store shelves in the U.S. today, according to the Grocery Manufacturer Association. A GMO is an organism whose genetic makeup has been altered by the techniques of genetic engineering so that its DNA contains one or more genes not normally found there. Almost 90% of the corn and soybeans grown in the U.S. are genetically-modified, according to the Non-GMO Project.
“Does that sound like something you’d want to eat? It sounds like a chemistry experiment to me,” Brady writes.
This isn’t the first time, he’s gone after big food either. In 2015, he called out Coca-Cola (NYSE:KO) and Kellogg’s (NYSE:K) Frosted Flakes during a radio interview, saying that he thinks the brands manipulate people into buying their products.
"I think we've been lied to by a lot of food companies over the years, by a lot of beverage companies over the years," Brady told WEEI’s Dennis & Callahan Morning Show in 2015. "But we still [believe] it. That's just America, and that's what we've been conditioned... We believe that Frosted Flakes is a food... of course they taste very good. And of course all those companies make lots of money selling those things. They have lots of money to advertise... That's the education that we get. That's what we get brainwashed to believe, that all these things are just normal food groups, and this is what you should eat."
He then went on to describe Coca-Cola as “poison for kids.”
"You'll probably go out and drink Coca-Cola and think 'Oh yeah, that's no problem.' Why? Because they pay lots of money for advertisements to think that you should drink Coca-Cola for a living? No, I totally disagree with that. And when people do that, I think that's quackery. And the fact that they can sell that to kids? I mean, that's poison for kids. But they keep doing it,” Brady said.
A Coke spokesperson later released a statement saying "All of our beverages are safe and can be enjoyed as part of a balanced lifestyle." The company added that it offers many low‐ and no‐calorie drinks, along with smaller portion sizes of its regular drinks.