HLife | Healthy Living Redefined

You saw him as one of the poster boys for our Protein Myth Part 1 article first, and now professional Ironman triathlete and bestselling author Brendan Brazier sat down with HLife for an extensive interview where we get down to the nitty-gritty of plant-based nutrition. As one of the principal advocates for a vegan diet and the creator of the Vega line of nutritional products, Brazier has also written Thrive and Thrive Fitness, books in which he discusses the benefits of eating everything the plant kingdom has to offer, especially for athletic performance, and physical as well as mental health.

In this interview we tackle the usual suspects – protein and calcium – as well as policy and education, food issues (the topic of his upcoming third book, to be published next year), travel, and even his favorite salad recipe.

Silvie Celiz: Have you been vegan all your life?

Brendan Brazier: No, just since I was 15.

Maryl Celiz: What made you go vegan?

BB: I just wanted to be a better athlete, speed up recovery time, so I could train more, improve faster, and I tried a bunch of different diets. I would eat whatever would make me a better athlete. And I tried vegan. It didn’t work well at first, but then I learned how to do it properly and it was totally an advantage.

MC: What didn’t work, specifically?

BB: I was eating a lot of refined carbs at first – pasta, lots of bread, lots of peanut butter, high-calorie food. Then, I just did a lot of research and found out what I was lacking. It took a while to really sort it out, and now I find it really is an advantage. Now, when I get interviewed by a conventional newspaper, they’ll say “wow, you do all this stuff and you’re vegan. That’s amazing.” Well, actually, I am able to do all this stuff because I am vegan. They think that it’s a disadvantage somehow, but it’s the opposite, there’s definitely an advantage. Fortunately, I’m becoming less and less unique. More people are doing this – because it works. To be a vegan athlete is becoming more common, which is great. All the top level athletes I know eat mostly plant-based, if not completely. It’s not simple, but it works – when you do it right. Yeah, sure, if you fill up on vegan junk food, you’re gonna feel terrible. But if you eat really good plant-based, whole, nutrient-rich, alkaline-forming foods, you’ll feel good, and you’ll perform well.

SC: You highlight the benefits of a plant-based diet for strength training in particular on your site.

BB: It totally works for strength athletes, too, for building muscle. This is because plant-based food is alkaline-forming, and when you eat alkaline foods, it reduces inflammation, and if you reduce inflammation, you increase functionality. And more functional muscles have the ability to lift heavier weight. Lifting heavier weight is what builds bigger, stronger muscles. So, being vegan doesn’t make you a stronger, better athlete, but it allows you to make yourself a stronger, better athlete. It allows you to work harder, and that’s what ultimately makes you a better athlete. It’s just facilitating your body’s ability to work harder, more efficiently.

MC: You mentioned the benefits of coconut oil in your lecture. Can you expand on that?

BB: Coconut oil has medium-chain triglycerides. So it’s a type of fat and it acts more like a carbohydrate than a fat, and it goes to your liver, gives you energy straight away. I often put coconut oil on dates and have that right before a workout – it’s just quick, simple energy. I use it as part of some of my recipes too in Thrive. It’s in Vega Sport, too, in powder form. [EDITOR'S NOTE: Coconut oil is also great for cooking because, unlike olive or many other oils,  it can be moderately heated without creating toxic by-products.]

SC: Is organic important to you?

BB: To me, “grown without herbicides and pesticides” is important, but not necessarily certified organic. Certification is very expensive and a lot of small farms can’t afford it. When we were choosing ingredients for Vega initially back in 2004, only one or two were certified organic. They were all grown without herbicides or pesticides, but farms were small and didn’t have certification. But we would rather buy from them than buy from the major ones that were now also getting into Walmart and by supporting these small farms we made an agreement that they had to use part of the money that we give them towards their certification. So, now they are certified. And the ingredients haven’t changed – just the paperwork. You can go to Walmart and get certified organic – from China – and that’s really not important. What’s important is to help these small, local farms get their certification by buying from them.

SC: So, doing your homework with the small farms and supporting those that have good practices so they can get their certification.

BB: It’s also good because there’s more competition, more farms that are certified organic, so that means that one isn’t going to get the upper hand and get too big, which is what happened with Monsanto – they have too much power. If there would’ve been competition that came in earlier, it would’ve prevented that from happening. It’s good for everyone, it’s good for the consumer because it keeps the prices down, good for manufacturers because then we have a broad group of farmers to buy from, so if there’s a flood in one region, we can get from the other region. And it’s good for local farmers, because now they have more people to sell their stuff to.

SC: How easy is it for you to travel so much being a vegan?

BB: It’s actually really easy because I’m in places like Whole Foods all the time giving talks, so I’m always around good food. I just go to the produce section and buy a lot of it, go to the salad bar, eat really simply. For me it’s really easy because I don’t need to sit down and have a meal – I just graze as I go.  So if I have a grapefruit, oranges, bananas, figs, dates, things like that, just kinda eat them as I go. I have Vega bars with me, of course, too. I just keep it pretty simple.

MC: What did you tell Congress when you went to talk to them in 2006?

BB: The gist was trying to get government-funded programs that would help get the education in schools, so that at a young age people would know, not just what is good and what is not good in terms of food, but they would know how to apply that information. Also, wherever there is unhealthy foods sold, there should be healthy food options. Because kids will take the path of least resistance. So, if there’s a vending machine there, full of junk, kids are gonna eat it. If there’s one full of junk and one full of good food and kids know the benefits of the good food – they know they’d perform better in sports, think more clearly, and they feel better when they eat it – they’re gonna give that a try. So, it’s not about getting rid of bad food – if people want bad food, fine, but I think giving healthy food an equal opportunity is important.

MC: And also the subsidies for specific foods.

BB: The subsidies. We, the taxpayer, subsidize the meat industry, because it takes so much energy, land and water to produce meat that if we charged fair market value for that meat, hamburgers would be $25-$35 – out of range. So, government has to subsidize that to make it viable. It’s not a free market system, which is not good. To make that worse, we then subsidize the system to fix that – the medical system – to treat people with problems that have been developed by eating the wrong types of food. So, whether you eat meat or not, or support the meat industry or not, your taxes do, and that’s kind of frustrating because a percentage that we make is paying for, and goes directly to, these industries. And then, for people who don’t take care of themselves, we subsidize health care. I would rather have programs in place and spend our government/taxpayer money to help prevent people from getting sick and not being dependent on this health care system and the insurance premiums. It’s the goal of government to have everyone insured – and that’s great – but how about just making it so people don’t get sick?

SC: Answer the calcium question for us. Vegans always get asked how they get enough calcium without dairy.

BB: It’s not that we don’t get enough calcium in our diets – it’s that we take too much out of our bones by eating acid-forming foods. If you eat meat, dairy, white flour or synthetic drugs – it’s all acid-forming. Calcium, which is alkaline, is pulled from the bones into the blood, so that the blood can always be neutral (the body is very resourceful). But over time, one, two, three decades of eating the standard American diet of acid-forming food, you get weak bones, because the calcium just gets drawn into the bones to balance that acidity. And that’s why we’re seeing people getting osteoporosis int heir 20s now, having grown up with the standard American diet. It’s not lack of calcium – it’s that we’re taking it out of our bones. And milk too, you know, it’s acid-forming when you pasteurize it. There are much better sources. We’re not really meant to drink cow’s milk, it just doesn’t make sense, an adult human drinking something that was designed for a baby calf. It’s the wrong species eating this. It doesn’t  digest well, it doesn’t help our bones. It’s not a coincidence that the top five countries with osteoporosis are also the top five dairy-consuming countries. The connection is pretty clear.

MC: What about protein?

BB: Well I think quality is way more important than quantity. I’m 165 lbs, so I should, according to a conventional sports-nutrition book, eat about 165 grams of protein a day – and I don’t eat half that. The protein I get is from leafy greens, which is about 45% protein, pretty high, and hemp, a natural source of protein, as well as lentils, legumes, beans, peas, so it’s about quality. I get probably about 70 grams a day.

SC: Do you eat them cooked or sprouted?

BB: Sprouted when I can, sometimes cooked. The whole foods have protein in them, it’s the refined foods that don’t. White flour doesn’t have protein, but if you have amaranth or quinoa or buckwheat, they’re 20%-25% protein. That’s good quality.  When I cut back on protein, I did lose a little bit of weight but I didn’t lose any strength at all, so my strength-to-weight ratio went up. So, as an endurance athlete, it was good because my endurance went up. It’s all about function.

MC: What’s in your typical salad?

BB: Different types of lettuce, kale, sometimes a bit of nutritional yeast, different types of seaweed like dulse, a good dressing made up of apple cider vinegar and Vega oil. Also, usually avocado, different sprouted things, carrots, beets, sometimes cucumber.

SC: Lets talk about Vega. How does Vega play into the whole foods recommendation, since it is a powder?

BB: The first ingredient in Vega is hemp. Hemp is a seed and it is harvested and pressed. What’s left is hemp oil and what is called ’seed cake’, that is then milled. So, the change is pretty minimal in what you get from the seed and what goes into the powder in Vega. It stays intact – rice protein, pea protein is the same, maca is a root vegetable that is just dried and put in there. It’s just the liquid removed. I live on a property where you can grow stuff. If everyone lived like that, grow their own lentils, and make all their stuff, great. But we’re busy. And we want quick stuff. The number one store for Vega is in Manhattan, because people need food, they need it fast and they want healthy food that makes them feel good, so it’s a great option for that. If you’ve got the land and time and wanna grow all your stuff, I’m totally for that and do it myself. But reality hits and most other people in the country don’t have that advantage that Southern California has in land.

MC: In Thrive Fitness, you mention that exercise has benefits – for the mind.

BB: Yeah, it’s all about the mental benefits, not just the creativity but your subconscious benefits, you solve problems more quickly, keeping your brain active. There are reports that say that your chances of developing neurological diseases are less likely. Learning new things, like playing basketball until you start getting good at it, has a benefit. Once you learn it, that benefit goes away. Then you gotta try something new. That actually builds physical mass in your brain. Your brain actually physically grows, and that will make it less likely that you’ll get diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Repeat pattern exercise will stimulate the right-brain creative side, but then there’s the learning of new movements that will help those neurological receptors be created. So there’s two different types of movements you can do to work on different aspects of your brain. And it’s in the process too, this is about the end result but it’s also about the doing.

MC: And you’re writing a new book.

BB: It won’t come out until Spring of 2011, but it’s a food issues book, to do with food and the resources it takes to produce food. But not just food – nutrients. It’s about looking at the value of nutrition as opposed to the value of volume of food. So, it’s the opposite of genetic modification. It’s about using as few resources to create nutrient-density, pointing to plant-based nutrition. The amount of resources it takes to produce animal foods and the nutrients you get in exchange, it’s way out of line, not even close to what you get with plant-based foods.