Recently, Tom Brady’s personal exercise and diet guru, Alex Guerrero, has come under fire for being, as Boston Magazine dubbed Guerrero, a “glorified snake-oil salesman.” On Monday, Brady defended Guerrero -- while also taking aim at a pair of American institutions.
“I disagree with a lot of things that people tell you to do,” Brady said on WEEI. “You’ll probably go out and drink Coca-Cola and think, ‘Oh yeah, that’s no problem.’ Why? Because they pay lots of money for advertisements to think that you should drink Coca-Cola for a living? No, I totally disagree with that. And when people do that, I think that’s quackery. And the fact that they can sell that to kids? I mean, that’s poison for kids. But they keep doing it. And obviously you guys may not have a comment on that because maybe that’s what your belief system is. So you do whatever you want, you live the life you want. . . .
“I think we’ve been lied to by a lot of food companies over the years, by a lot of beverage companies over the years. But we still do it. That’s just America, and that’s what we’ve been conditioned to. We believe that Frosted Flakes is a food. . . . You just keep eating those things, and you keep wondering why we have just incredible rates of disease in our country. No one thinks it has anything to do with what we put in our body.”
Brady’s assault on Coke and Tony the Tiger was sparked by the attack on Guerrero, who once got on the wrong side of the Federal Trade Commission by claiming that a drink called NeuroSafe could help athletes recover from concussions faster. (Russell Wilson approves of this message.)
Brady and Guerrero are now in business together, preaching the power of prevention. It’s quite likely that, after Brady retires from the NFL, he’ll focus on growing that business, persuading athletes and/or their parents to spend a bunch of money for avocado ice cream and other stuff aimed at making the body not break or crack or fray when facing the normal physical forces that come from playing football.
Regardless of whether their methods are effective, plenty of people will fork over plenty of cash in the hopes that there’s a way to counter the realities of basic Newtonian physics, as applied to human bones, tendons, muscles, and ligaments.