Tom Brady, best known as the quarterback for the New England Patriots and husband to supermodel Gisele Bundchen, has ascended from professional athlete to certified celebrity. Given the tabloid scrutiny of all aspects of Brady’s life, many people might be wondering how he and his wife stay in shape and whether or not Tom Brady is a vegan.
Tom Brady is not quite a vegan. The football superstar eats a plant-based diet most of the year, but includes protein when needed. However, Brady’s diet is much more restrictive than the average plant-based fare in which most vegetarians and vegans partake.
Read more below to learn more about Tom Brady’s career, his intense diet and workout routine, and how his wife convinced him to adopt plant-based eating.
Brady and Bundchen: A Love Story
Tom Brady is arguably the best quarterback of all time. Drafted to the NFL in 2000, Brady played 20 seasons with the New England Patriots, leading the team to six Super Bowl victories during his storied career.
Along the way, Brady met the world’s most famous supermodel, Gisele Bundchen. The golden couple met through friends in 2006 and married in 2009, ultimately hosting two wedding ceremonies.
Plant-Based Eating and the Environment
Given both Brady and Bundchen have high-profile jobs in the public eye, both kept strict diets and exercise regimes, but it was Bundchen who introduced mostly plant-based eating into their lifestyle. Bundchen, who grew up in Brazil, is heavily invested in environmentalism, and the destruction of her native country’s famed rainforest prompted the model to seek ways she and her family could make small environmental impacts.
Vegan and vegetarian eating is considered one of the major ways an everyday person can help clean up the environment. The production of livestock leaves a far greater, and more detrimental, impact on the environment than growing crops.
Though Brady initially struggled with the switch to mostly vegetable-fare, Bundchen claims the pro football star is now on board, saying, “In the beginning he was like, it was a little, you know, different for him. But now he loves it, and he wouldn’t have it any other way, because he feels better.” Not only that, but Brady embraced the new diet so much that he eventually wrote a book about it.
Fancy and Fresh Fare
However, Brady and Bundchen don’t just follow a mostly vegan diet for the majority of the year. They take their meals seriously and follow stringent rules when cooking or having others cook for them.
Brady and Bundchen’s personal chef, Allen Cambell, gave Boston Magazine readers a peek behind the curtain, saying, “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 salmon.”
You can watch a discussion about the details of Brady and Bundchen’s diet in the YouTube video below.
A Pristine Pantry
On top of that, there is a long list of items not allowed in their kitchen, including: white sugar, white flower, MSG, certain types of oil, iodized salt, nightshades, coffee, caffeine, mushrooms, dairy and even most fruits. Campbell himself advocates a plant-based philosophy and gets along well with the superstar couple.
You can often find Bundchen and Brady showing off healthy portions of their favorite foods on social media, along with snaps of their workouts.
Though Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen’s diet would be hard for many to follow, not to mention pricey depending on location, it’s clear it works well for the celebrity couple, even if all of their claims aren’t backed by scientific research. Regardless, the famed couple has the time and money to spend on achieving a mostly plant-based diet that works for them and their lifestyle together.