TOM BRADY IS A BEAUTIFUL IDIOT

Before I dive in, I want to get some things out of the way.

First, Tom Brady is a beautiful man, or so I’m told. And you know what? I can see it.

Look at him. He looks like he’s paralyzed from the neck down, and Gisele just flopped him down on the couch, but she hasn’t turned him toward the TV yet. But, you know, in a hot way. Those eyes, combined with that sweatsuit? He’s smoldering, yet comforting, like a baked potato. What a specimen.

Also, Tom Brady is the greatest quarterback of all time. Maybe I would have argued about this with you five years ago, but now it is certain. At no point in this article will I impugn Tom Brady’s football prowess or the annoyingly successful dynasty of football dominance that is the New England Patriots. Any comments toward me that bear any resemblance to the following will therefore be interpreted as signs of uncontrollable idiocy on your part:

• Tom Brady is the greatest QB of all time
• You’re just jealous of Tom Brady
• You’re only saying this because your team sucks
• Everyone else cheats too
• Yeah but his wife is hot
• The NFL is against us
• It’s not our fault the rest of the AFC East is bad
• Why don’t you also hate [some other team]

Anyone using the phrase “they hate us cause they ain’t us” will be blocked.

Now, on to business.

It’s always hard to criticize the nutritional or fitness regimens of very fit people. After all, they’re very fit people, so whatever crazy thing they espouse must work, right?

Wrong. Turns out athletes can be morons just like us! And Tom Brady is one of the worst of them, when it comes to bad advice. Let’s take a look!

Tom Brady Claims Never To Have Eaten A Strawberry

This one’s not definitely bullshit, but I find it extremely unlikely that a boy raised in the South Bay of California has never eaten a strawberry in his life. I will offer at least five dollars to anyone who can prove to me that Tom Brady, at some point in his 40 years, has ingested a strawberry.

Tom Brady Thinks That Drinking Water Prevents Sunburn

From a profile in Sports Illustrated:

When I was growing up, and playing outside in the sun, I got sunburned a lot. I was a fair-skinned Irish boy, after all. 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. I always hydrate afterward, too, to keep my skin from peeling. When I once told that to my sister, she said, ‘You mean I don’t have to use all those moisturizers and facial products to keep my skin looking good? I should just drink as much water as you do? I think you should market your TB12 Electrolytes as a beauty product.’ I just laughed.”

WHAT A CUTE AND SUBTLE WAY TO MENTION YOUR PERSONAL BRAND OF ELECTROLYTES HAHA. Shoehorned marketing aside, this, as it turns out, is bullshit.

Yes, “fair-skinned” people are more susceptible to burning than darker-skinned people, because they have less melanin in their skin. Melanin absorbs UV radiation to keep it from damaging your skin, and it’s what makes tan people tan and brown people brown and black people black. It can’t totally stop sun damage, but it goes a long way. And yes, Thomas Edward Patrick Brady, Jr. might be the most Irish boy in all the land. But drinking water won’t make a goddamn bit of difference.

From Dr. Sourab Choudhry, board certified dermatologist at Brooklyn Dermatology:

“This is fake news. The only thing that prevents sunburn is minimizing time spent in the sun during peak hours (10am-2pm), wearing sun protective clothing and sunscreen.”

But what about preventing peeling after a sunburn?

“After a sunburn, your skin peels when the superficial skin cells have been killed and their being sloughed off by the body. Being hydrated has nothing to do with getting a sunburn, or whether your skin peels.”

Bummer. Turns out water isn’t magic after all.

Tom Brady Swears By An Alkaline Diet

I honestly don’t fully understand what this is supposed to mean, and Sports Illustrated is too busy jerking Brady off to question anything he says. Seriously, this profile is 3700 words long and never stops to say “by the way, none of this is even a little bit scientific. The subtitle of the article is “Tom Brady wants to play ‘forever.’ With his new-age prep, he might get close.” Journalists are not actually required to verbally fellate celebrities, but apparently no one told SI. Anyway, in that same profile:

He subscribes to the 80-20 theory — but it’s not 80 percent healthy food, 20 percent unhealthy. It’s 80 percent alkaline, 20 percent acidic. The idea, he says, is “to maintain balance and harmony through my metabolic system.”

Brady’s personal chef broke it down further to Boston.com:

So, 80 percent of what they eat is vegetables. [I buy] the freshest vegetables. If it’s not organic, I don’t use it. And whole grains: brown rice, quinoa, millet, beans. The other 20 percent is lean meats: grass-fed organic steak, duck every now and then, and chicken. As for fish, I mostly cook wild salmon.

It’s very different than a traditional American diet. But if you just eat sugar and carbs—which a lot of people do—your body is so acidic, and that causes disease. Tom recently outed Frosted Flakes and Coca-Cola on WEEI. I love that he did that. Sugar is the death of people.

So what’s the deal with this alkaline diet stuff? The idea is that eating certain “alkaline” foods will raise the pH of your whole body, preventing your body from becoming too acidic, which would apparently be bad.

As it turns out, though, eating foods with a high or low pH won’t change the pH of your blood in any significant way. New York-based registered dietitian Lauren Harris-Pincus explains.

“The bottom line is that our bodies have a very narrow window for pH, or we would die. Once everything hits your stomach, it’s all acid.”

Yes, this diet conveniently ignores the fact that your stomach acid is strong enough to dissolve wood and metal. Turns out avoiding strawberries won’t change that.

Tom Brady Thinks His Muscles Are “Pliable”

This is a major cornerstone of the TB12 method, a methodology espoused in his book which I refuse to link to here.

Part of that methodology is the theory that for maximum health and performance, muscles should be “pliable.” This is not the same as “flexible,” says Brady, but means that his muscles are “soft” and not “stiff.”

Apparently, weight training and sprinting and stuff — you know, what most people call “exercise” — only make your muscles “dense” and “hard,” opening you up to injury. So instead of traditional training, according to that physical marvel in the photo above, you should do…whatever the fuck he’s talking about here:

“Think of a deep, rigorous massage, but much more focused, and in my case using complex techniques based on an understanding of the biomechanics of what it takes for me to throw a football and function at peak levels as an athlete who accelerates, decelerates, runs, cuts, and more, as well as the daily acts of living that complement my off-field life.”

Does that all make sense? No? Don’t worry, they’ll go into more detail in the book, explaining how you can’t just massage the muscles, you have to vibrate them and stretch them at the same time, ideally with a vibrating foam roller that Tom Brady’s website CONVENIENTLY offers for only two hundred fucking dollars.

There’s just one problem: “pliability” isn’t a thing. “It’s balderdash,” says Stuart Phillips, a professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and an expert in muscle physiology, in this NY Times breakdown. No one’s studied it. No one else even talks about it. The words “pliable” and “muscle” are not put together by anyone except Tom Brady and shitty pulp romance writers who ran out of synonyms.

Tom Brady Avoids Nightshades

In case you didn’t know what a nightshade is, it’s a catch-all term for the family of plants that includes peppers, potatoes, eggplants, and tomatoes. Brady avoids these plants out of fears that they cause inflammation, joint and muscle pain, and even cancer later in life.

Spoiler: they don’t. From Harris-Pincus:

“There hasn’t been any real research that shows nightshades cause inflammation — even the Arthritis [Foundation] states that it’s a myth that nightshades are inflammatory. Tomatoes are high in lycopene, which prevents prostate cancer, so leading men away from eating tomatoes does them a disservice.”

So not only are tomatoes not deadly, they might even be beneficial for MEN OF A CERTAIN AGE. If Tom Brady gets prostate cancer, I reserve the right to throw a tomato at him.

Tom Brady Thinks Avocado Ice Cream Is Delicious

It’s made of avocado, cashews, coconut, dates, and cocoa powder. I tried it. It’s gross.

Tom Brady Shilled A Drink To Cure Concussions

It’s what it sounds like. There was a drink powder called NeuroSafe that allegedly “protects your brain from the consequences of sports-related traumatic brain injury.” In an ad, they showed Tom Brady holding the Lombardi Trophy and quoted him as saying:

“NeuroSafe makes me feel comfortable that if I get a concussion I can recover faster and more fully. There is no other solution on the market today that can do what NeuroSafe does. It’s that extra level of protection that gives me comfort when I’m out on the field.”

Clearly, this was all bullshit, and the company shut down years ago, but Brady has made no attempt to distance himself from the product. In this interview, he offers the following spineless deflection:

“When you say ‘this sounds like quackery,’ there’s a lot of things that I see on a daily basis in Western medicine and I think ‘wow, why would they ever do that, that is crazy, that doesn’t work,’ and that’s just the way life is.”

So to clarify, Tom Brady, a man with a bachelors degree in general studies and no other medical credentials whatsoever, is baffled by modern medicine, therefore his magic brain dust will prevent concussions.

Tom Brady Has A Real Sketchy Business Partner

Much of the bullshit I’ve been talking about comes from a partnership with Alex Guerrero, Brady’s business partner in TB12, LLC. Guerrero, however, has his fingers in every bullshit pie you can think of.

He started with Supreme Greens. This is from the Supreme Greens website:

Finding nothing on the market that would satisfy his or his patient’s needs, he began to use his extensive knowledge in herbology to develop his own formulations. With the knowledge that the soil used to grow our food has been stripped of vital minerals and nutrients, he believes that supplementation has become an essential part of our lives. However, not all supplements are created equal. With the scientific knowledge that all living matter has energy, Dr. Guerrero developed products that retain their life force, thereby improving the body’s ability to absorb vital nutrients.

Even the untrained eye should be able to tell that’s bullshit, but if you don’t trust the untrained eye, you can instead consult the very trained eyes of the FTC, who banned him from ever calling himself a doctor again, due to the fact that — SURPRISE — he’s not one. His degree was a master’s degree (not a doctorate) in Chinese medicine from a college that doesn’t exist any more.

Furthermore, he claimed to have conducted “clinical studies” on patients suffering from cancer, AIDS, multiple sclerosis, and Parkinson’s disease. He claimed that all of them were terminal, and that after eight years, all but eight were still alive. That study never happened.

NeuroSafe was Guerrero’s idea too. So is the book from earlier in this post. Almost everything Brady tells the world about the secrets to his longevity and health came from Guerrero, and there’s no reason to believe any of it. Boston Magazine has a long story on this if you’re interested. But I saved the best for last.

Tom Brady Is A Trump Fan

I generally don’t talk politics on this blog because it’s too overwhelming and too many people already talk about it. My role, as I see it, is to point out stupidity that you hadn’t already noticed, not stupidity that’s thrown in your face every single day. In service of that, I will not be clarifying when I say that Donald Trump is a compulsive liar who looks like someone snaked a shower drain and then dumped what they found on a sweet potato. This is a fact, and if you are a Trump fan and are bothered by that then you can fuck all the way off.

Anyway, in September of 2015, Brady put a “Make America Great Again” hat in his locker, prominently facing out. And before you say that’s coincidence, remember that Brady has been interviewed in front of that locker 16 times a year for the last 15 years. He knows damn well what he’s doing. When asked if Trump could win, Brady said, “I hope so. That would be great.”

This was after Trump had already called Mexicans rapists, said John McCain wasn’t a war hero because he got captured, and made his “blood coming out of her wherever” comment when Megyn Kelly asked him some tough questions at a debate, so it’s not like Brady didn’t know Trump was a scumbag. Plus, Brady claims to be “good friends” with Trump, has been for a while, and we all know Trump has been a scumbag for his entire adult life, so there was ample reason not to publicly take a side. Brady, instead, took a side.

Then the Billy Bush tape came out and Trump said that “grab her by the pussy” was just locker-room talk. So a reporter asked Brady, Trump’s “good friend,” whether he’d be ok with his kids hearing Trump’s version of “locker room talk.” Brady walked away.

Then, right after the inauguration and before the Super Bowl, someone asked him again. His “good friend” Donald Trump had just made his first of what would be several failed attempts to ban Muslims from the country, and airports were in chaos as they tried to deal with policy-by-tweet. Brady’s answer was as follows:

What’s going on in the world? I haven’t paid much attention. I’m just a positive person.

Fuck you, Tom Brady. Normally an athlete’s non-athletic life is his own, and I don’t care. But you started this. You put the hat at eye level in your locker. You doubled down on your support of America’s #1 Douchebag. You made no attempt to distance yourself from his comments, no matter how egregious they got. Even other Republicans had strong words for Trump after the Billy Bush tape came out, but Tom Brady just smiled and left the room.

And then, when your “good friend” was elected and started immediately trying to make everything in the world worse, you didn’t care.

And you know what? This isn’t deflection. This isn’t Tom Brady struggling to distance himself from a fellow famous person he knows and trying to walk the line between popular opinion and political consequences. I genuinely believe that Tom Brady had no idea what was going on in the world. I genuinely believe that when asked about “locker room talk,” he didn’t have a fucking clue what Trump had said. When he voiced his support for Trump in the first place, it never crossed his vacant mind that there might be anything risky about doing so. His thought process never extended beyond “Hey, I know that guy.”

Tom Brady is rich enough to insulate himself from the world entirely, spending every iota of his time and energy on selling his $200 cookbook, eating artichokes, and studying game tape. He could go the rest of his life without talking to someone he didn’t want to. He doesn’t know what’s going on in the world because he doesn’t have to.

So he doesn’t care that his golf buddy is a rapist, a liar, and a maniac. He doesn’t care that his bio-ceramic pajamas don’t enhance recovery, or that tomatoes aren’t poison, or that water doesn’t prevent sunburn. He sits in his soft little world and bangs his supermodel wife and and signs his name to whatever bullshit crosses his line of sight, because he’s Tom Brady and nothing short of nuclear armageddon will actually effect him. He may be beautiful, but there’s nothing but fluff in that head.