Tom Brady Is Standing By the Out-There Health Advice in His Book

Illustration by John Ueland for “Debunking Tom Brady’s Diet“

Tom Brady is standing by the health advice in his new book, The TB12 Method, despite criticism from doctors, dietitians, and exercise scientists.

“It’s really my experience, so I don’t think anyone can tell me what my experiences have been,” Brady said during a Monday radio interview with WEEI’s Kirk and Callahan. “I really have a great feeling of what I believe works and doesn’t work. Everyone has their own belief systems I think with everything, especially in the sense of health and wellness.”

While Brady does couch many of his beliefs with qualifiers, some of the more controversial theories in the book have drawn scrutiny from experts. Among them: The idea that hydration can prevent sunburns, a claim that has been roundly dismissed by doctors. “These days, even if I get an adequate amount of sun, I won’t get a sunburn, which I credit to the amount of water I drink,” the book reads. But even drinking up to 300 ounces of water a day, as Brady says he does, would not protect the skin from UV exposure, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center dermatologist Caroline Kim told Boston.com.

The book is also chock full of non-traditional sports and fitness advice, in addition to more familiar tips about eating healthfully, sleeping well, and cutting back on alcohol. It espouses everything from the notoriously sturdy quarterback’s central tenet of pliability, or “the daily lengthening and softening of muscles before and after physical activity,” to the idea that brain training exercises can “increase the speed and accuracy with which I take in sensory information and improve my ability to process, store, and retrieve that information.” Both pliability and brain training have attracted skepticism from medical experts, and studies have even shown that brain training doesn’t do much.

Nonetheless, Brady told Kirk and Callahan that he feels good about his tome. “I just wanted to do something [in a] very simple, plain, easy to understand way that people could follow that can be very holistic,” he said. “I think I really achieved that, just based on things that I have experienced and that have worked for me.”