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A review by mamaxke
Thrive: The Vegan Nutrition Guide to Optimal Performance in Sports and Life by Brendan Brazier

1.0

I am really kind of surprised at how many great ratings this book has received. In a lot of places it read like he had been doing all of his research online - and trusting all kinds of crazy sites as factual. He doesn't site any of his information and even in the resource list at the end - he has sources from the 70s and 80s...the book came out in 2007, and there were only a handful of sources from 2003. One in 2006 was Michael Pollen, which, while a great book, is not exactly a primary source. One of my favorite examples was "So complete is this wonder-food that, when consuming nothing other than chlorella, human life can be sustained for an extended period. This was discovered by NASA when the space agency was looking at ways to sustain astronauts for space travel." Now, just guessing here, but I'm thinking that if NASA did a study - the results were a little more precise than "an extended period" which means nothing. Extended over what?
I bought this thinking it would be a bit more about his actual experiences - he claims to have come to this diet style from experimentation on his own diet and training. That would at least have been interesting to read instead of all this pseudo-science that he puts in here. Especially as he never claims to be a scientist or dietician or in any way have any nutritional or medical knowledge. So I would have appreciated more about his training and how he felt eating certain things - a personal story, which is all he seems qualified to write.
And then the recipes. Almost none of them even sounded remotely worth trying.
There are a lot of times where he sounds like he is simply repackaging Dr. Fuhrman's books (and indeed, he recommends reading Eat to Live in his list of resources) - he coins his own terms for all the same concepts. But then he recommends eating lots of oil - because it is nutritionally more dense than the seeds it comes from. Which makes absolutely no sense.
Anyway, really wasn't what I thought it was going to be, and really wasn't quite worth reading.
Oh, and of course he is trying to sell you his own products throughout - even while he tells you that whole foods are best.