Tom and Giselle’s Diet Is Nuts | Vol. 3 / No. 11.4

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A kind of nightshade you should *not* eat | Photo: Joshua Mayer, CC BY-SA 2.0
Unlike potatoes, peppers, and tomatoes, this is a kind of nightshade you should *not* eat | Photo: Joshua Mayer, CC BY-SA 2.0

You know you must be reaching “peak insane diet” when magazines like Cosmopolitan are calling your diet out for being nuts. And that’s exactly what happened on Monday when Yvette D’Entremont posted a piece called “All of the Reasons Why Tom and Gisele’s Diet Is Actually the Worst, Revealed.” Now, I’m not exactly the most knowledgeable person when it comes to celebrities. I didn’t immediately know who “Tom and Giselle” were (turns out they’re Tom Brady, who I did know about, and Giselle Bundchen, who I still didn’t), nor did I know they had a special diet. But I do now, oh do I.

After boston.com published a piece about their dictatorial health-conscious chef Allen Campbell, it’s actually shocking it took a full week for Cosmopolitan to respond. Maybe that’s how long it took for the crazy to sink in. Here’s direct quotes from Campbell:

No white sugar. No white flour. No MSG. I’ll use raw olive oil, but I never cook with olive oil. I only cook with coconut oil. Fats like canola oil turn into trans fats. … I use Himalayan pink salt as the sodium. I never use iodized salt.

[Tom] doesn’t eat nightshades, because they’re not anti-inflammatory. So no tomatoes, peppers, mushrooms, or eggplants. Tomatoes trickle in every now and then, but just maybe once a month. I’m very cautious about tomatoes. They cause inflammation.

What else? No coffee. No caffeine. No fungus. No dairy.

The kids eat fruit. Tom, not so much. He will eat bananas in a smoothie. But otherwise, he prefers not to eat fruits.

Okay, white sugar, sure. That’s pretty terrible for you. White flour… well, okay. The glycemic index thing could… I guess… MSG? Okay, that’s a common misconception. Only cooking with coconut oil sounds a little out there, too… and… okay just stop.

“Himalayan pink salt.” Look, iodized salt is good for you. Himalayan pink salt is literally no better and ever so slightly possibly worse for you, so stop wasting your money.

“Tom doesn’t eat nightshades.” What? Also: in what universe is a mushroom a nightshade? And so I suppose he doesn’t eat potatoes, then?

“No coffee.” But coffee is good for you (when ingested, anyway).

“No fungus.” But mushrooms are good for you!

“No dairy.” You know what? To hell with balance, right? Who needs it.

“He prefers not to eat fruits.” I’m… just going to let that one stand on its own.

They also eschew all GMO foods as well as gluten. GLUTEN. As D’Entremont puts it so succinctly:

Campbell has managed to fit in every single piece of dietary insanity on the planet into one meal plan. It’s borderline impressive how someone can cram so much non-scientifically based information, fear-mongering of healthy foods, and just plain old bullshit into one neatly tied, organically wrapped package.

I can’t even with this one. Go check out the whole piece in Cosmo. I’m going to go bake some bread with white flour, eat some chili made with GMO tomatoes, and revel in my gluten-rich, nightshade-filled diet.

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 Richard Ford Burley is a writer and doctoral candidate at Boston College, as well as an editor at Ledger, the first academic journal devoted to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In his spare time he writes about science, skepticism, feminism, and futurism here at This Week In Tomorrow.