Clean, Plant-Based Whole Foods with Brendan Brazier [Episode #437]
Â
This weekâs topic is: Clean, Plant-Based Whole Foods with Brendan Brazier
I am so excited to have a very special guest, Brendan Brazier, who is a best selling author, editor in chief of Alive magazine, cofounder of Vega and a former professional Ironman triathlete and a two-time Canadian 50km Ultra Marathon Champion. Listen in as Brendan shares how he went from being an athlete to eating plant-based, and how he got involved with the shocking new documentary, The Game Changers. Youâll never look at meat the same way again!
- How Brendan went from being an athlete to plant-based kingâŚ
- Brendan shares his breath work practices and how he implements them into his performance routineâŚ
- We discuss nutrition and the journey when switching to plant-basedâŚ
- Training and nutritionâŚ
- Biohackers, cutting corners and the trade-offsâŚ
- If being 100% plant-based is the ideal way of eatingâŚ
- The Game Changers film and the resistance around whether our bodies need meat or notâŚ
- Behind the mental and emotional connection and attachment to eating meatâŚ
- All the hype around alternative meats like the, Beyond MeatâŚ
- What the future looks like for Millennialâs and future generations when it comes to their food choicesâŚ

About Brendan Brazier
Brendan is the formulator and cofounder of Vega, bestselling author of the Thrive book series, creator and host of the Thrive Forward web series, and editor in chief of Thrive magazine. Heâs also a former professional Ironman triathlete and a two-time Canadian 50km Ultra Marathon Champion.
Brendan is regarded as one of the worldâs leading authorities on plant-based performance nutrition, and therefore works with several NHL, NFL, MLB, UFC, and Olympic athletes. Brendan now invests in and works with socially responsible food & tech companies whose mandate is to fix our food system and reduce the environmental strain of food production.
I LOVE HEARING FROM YOU!
There are lots of ways to share your responses or questions about the podcast:
- Comment below
- Connect on Twitter: @_kimberlysnyder
- Follow the conversation on my Instagram
- Comment on my Facebook Page
- Ask a question: mysolluna.com/askkimberly
Be sure to Subscribe to the Podcast and follow me on Soundcloud, so you never miss an episode!
HOW TO SUBSCRIBE
You may be really intrigued by podcasts, but you may just know how to listen or subscribe. Itâs very easy, I promise! To listen to more than one episode, and to have it all in a handier way, on your phone or tablet, itâs way better to subscribe so you never miss an episode!
Want to know what to expect from other episodes of the âFeel Good Podcast with Kimberly Snyderâ? My passion is to inspire and empower you to be your most authentic and beautiful self. We offer interviews with top experts, my personal philosophies and experiences, as well as answers to community-based questions around topics such as health, beauty, nutrition, yoga, spirituality and personal growth.
The intention of the Feel Good Podcast is to wellâŚhelp you really Feel Good in your body, mind and spirit! Feeling Good means feeling peaceful, energized, whole, uniquely beautiful, confident and joyful, right in the midst of your perfectly imperfect life. This podcast is as informative and full of practical tips and take-aways as it is inspirational. I am here to support you in being your very best! I have so much love and gratitude for you. Thank you for tuning in and being part of the community :).
LEAVE A REVIEW ON ITUNES
Listeners really respect the views of other listeners, so your response helps people find good material they are interested in! If you enjoyed the podcast, please tell your friends and give us a rating or review. Many thanks in advance.
<â¤ď¸ FAN OF THE WEEK>

- Plant-Based Diets for Athletes
- 9 Diet and Exercise Myths that People Wonât Stop Believing
- 5 EASY Lifestyle Shifts To Elevate Your Health!
- 9 Simple Diet Changes For a Healthier Lifestyle
- Home Town Farms- The Vertical, Organic, UrbanâŚand Better Way to Farm
- EWG Shopperâs Guide: The Smartest Way to Use Your $ to Buy Your Food!
- How to Absorb More Nutrients from Your Food!
- Probiotics
- Detoxy
- Digestive Enzymes
- Feel Good Starter Kit
- FREE Gift: 7-Day Meditation Series (DIGITAL COURSE)
- Recipes For Your Perfectly Imperfect Life
- Be a part of the community Join the Feel Good Circle
- Kimberly Snyderâs Books
- Four Cornerstones FREE PDF: Text the word: feelgood (833) 744-0079
- Additional resources in transcript
Brendanâs Interview
Other Podcasts you may enjoy!:
- How To Survive The Holidays & No Meat Athlete on Eating a Plant-Based Diet as an Athlete!
- Extreme Performance Training With Laird Hamilton
- Recipes & Good Ways To Get Iron on a Plant-Based Diet
- The Most Important Supplements To Take!
Transcript:
Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
Kimberly : Hi Beauties. Welcome back to our Monday interview podcast. I am so excited for our guest today who is my dear friend. Heâs sitting next to me on the couch in our home in Topanga. Brendan Brazier. He is a bestselling author, the editor in chief of a live magazine, the cofounder of Vega and a former professional Ironman athlete and a two time Canadian 50 kilometer ultra marathon champion. Itâs a lot of running Brendan. I feel tired just hearing that. So I have so much to pick Brendanâs brain about. He is enormously, enormously well versed and knowledgeable about all things plant-based about performance nutrition, and heâs an amazing entrepreneur.
Fan Of The Week
Kimberly : So weâre going to get into all of that in just one moment. I want to give a quick shout out to our fan of the week. Her name is Megie5 and she writes, âI have been making Kimberly Snyder and the Feel Good Podcast part of my morning routine and it has been so fulfilling. I have gained so much insight and connection with myself through this very well versed and motivating podcast. It has helped me in all realms, including emotional and physical wellbeing. Such a blessing to have discovered it.â
Share The Podcast and Leave a Review on Itunes
Kimberly : Maggie Five thank you so much for being part of our community. Thank you for our review, sending you a huge, huge virtual hug and sending you all the best and beauties for your chance to also be shouted out as the fan of the week, please just take a moment or two out of your day and leave us a review on iTunes. Itâs free, itâs easy. It could be one sentence and itâs just a great energetic way to support the podcast and help others find this information which could really benefit their lives. And while youâre at it, please also subscribe, that way you never miss any of these amazing interview podcasts or our Q and A podcasts which are on Thursdays. All right, so all that being said, Iâm so excited that Brendan is here with us today. Thank you so much for coming up, Brendan.
Interview with Brendan Brazier
Brendan Brazier: Oh, youâre welcome. Yeah, of course.
Kimberly : And youâre a Topanga person too. I know you have some property here. Youâre going to come to nature.
Brendan Brazier: Yeah. Iâve lived in Topanga for about seven years and now just in Venice temporarily.
Kimberly : Yes.
Brendan Brazier: Getting back to Topanga soon.
How Brendan went from being an athlete to plant-based king
Kimberly : So when I read your bio, itâs all these different parts. Youâre an athlete and now businessman and youâre just involved in all these different companies and the through line is seems to be plant-based. So how did that, it seems to maybe not take over your life, but itâs been such a big part of, the companies that youâre working on, the ones you created, how did that happen? How did it go from being an athlete to now youâre plant-based king?
Brendan Brazier: Yeah, it was really just me trying to perform better. I wanted to do professional athlete. When I was in high school, my goal was to do triathlon professionally and Ironman. And Ironman triathlon for those who donât know, itâs a 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike ride, and then a marathon. So 26.2 miles. So a long event, which the good thing about long events is that, success in them is more dependent on just work. Just how much time and effort you put in as opposed to talent. Shorter events, if you want to be a great sprinter obviously takes a lot of work but thereâs a lot of talent involved too. Whereas longer events you can offset your lack of talent with time.
Kimberly : And mental strength.
Brendan Brazier: Yeah. And, itâs funny you say that too because I never really thought of it that way just because I enjoy it. So itâs not, like Iâve been asked several times about, how do you focus for that long and how do you push yourself? And I just, I donât. Like I just enjoy the process. I enjoy being out there. And the mental part for me really came very easily just because I enjoy it. So it was never something, some people do these hard events to try and prove something to themselves or others. And for me it just wasnât like that. I just enjoyed being outside and running and biking and swimming. And so I thought, hey, if I can be a triathlete as a career, then that would be cool.
Kimberly : Wow.
Brendan Brazier: So thatâs what I started working for.
Kimberly : You enjoy the solitude. Because itâs almost meditative.
Brendan Brazier: Yeah. I havenât raced professionally in 15 years, but when I did, I raced full time professionally for seven years and I always trained alone and I donât know if thatâs really always the best if youâre trying to be competitive athlete, but I just really liked that. I just thought that the time is very meditative and I didnât think of it as that at the time, but I realized later looking back on it, I guess it was a form of active meditation. It was just do a lot of thinking when youâre riding a bike for six hours is like, what else do you do?
Kimberly : Yeah, you got a lot of time.
Brendan Brazier: I never listened to anything.
Kimberly : Really?
Brendan Brazier: Youâre just all, youâre just out there and your mind wanders and it, maybe itâll settle on something and youâll start thinking through different things and I find it, yes, just really helpful.
Brendan shares his breath work practices and how he implements them into his performance routine
Kimberly : And did you explore any sort of breath work practices or did you just naturally breathe? How it came to you, is that part of your performance?
Brendan Brazier: I do. I just naturally breathe. But I think thereâs actually something to be gained from breathwork. And Iâve talked with other athletes too who really have focused on that and I think had I done that, it might have helped me because thereâs a lot more to it than a lot of people realize that Iâve since realized. But no, I never done any formal breathwork. Obviously like the deeper breathing and when youâre cycling like belly breathing and really breathing in fully and things like that. But nothing really beyond that. Some athletes try and get it so that you can just breathe through their nose and theyâre not taking air through their mouth and some find that that can help. But Iâve never really done that.
We discuss nutrition and the journey when switching to plant-based
Kimberly : So then you started focusing on nutrition, you did a lot of research and then did you take baby steps? Did you try it out for yourself? Was it scary thinking, okay I want to switch to plant-based. What was the journey like?
Brendan Brazier: Well, this was about 1990 when I was around 15 and I had made the decision then that I wanted a professional career if I could have one as an athlete and then again making that connection that itâs really just about volume of work, just the longer the event, the more you can do, at that point is better, really is more as better in the beginning. And of course you can do more work if you regenerate your muscle tissue more quickly, you recover more quickly. So I started looking into recovery and what elements could help speed recovery. And so I found, there are a few things like ice baths and massage and stuff like that can help. But then I started looking at nutrition and I had no plan to try and eat a certain way. It was all performance-based, whatever could boost my performance and I tried a lot of different ways. I tried high carb, low carb, high protein, low protein. I was all different types of diets and some were better than others.
Brendan Brazier: But then I tried plant-based and at first it actually didnât work that well because I made common mistakes. I was just eating a lot of starch and not a lot of vegetables and not⌠It was very simple. Just high carb diet.
Kimberly : Just like pasta.
Brendan Brazier: Yeah. Basically. Right. So then I learned what I was lacking. So vitamin B12, iron, calcium, omega-3 fatty acids, complete protein and started finding sources and-
Kimberly : You were supplementing the B12, you started bringing in more supplements or were you using foods like nutritional yeast or protein powders?
Brendan Brazier: Yeah, it really started off with food and blending it all together
Kimberly : Yeah.
Brendan Brazier: But that took, many years later. But it was me just making it for myself. And then, yeah. And I started improving more quickly because I was able to train more. And so some of the people who were kind of my circle noticed that, I was just making these big stripes forward-
Kimberly : Theyâre like measurable, like your times were doing better.
Brendan Brazier: Yeah. Very, very noticeably. Inflammation went down, inflammation that I didnât even know I had. I think most people donât even really realize. So my range of motion got better. So my efficiency got better. Obviously if you donât have to work as hard to move a muscle, youâre saving energy with every movement so you just become more efficient.
Kimberly : Wow.
Brendan Brazier: So things like that, I never would have even considered. The flexibility is better, so your risk of injury goes down. Digestion got way better, so I just wasnât spending as much energy digesting. I found that I started sleeping better and sleeping more deeply, which meant I didnât have to sleep for as long, so I could sleep for seven hours instead of eight and be just as rested. So it was really like getting an extra hour a day, which was just, really nice to be able to sleep so much more efficiently. And then I was waking up rested and I didnât crave caffeine, I didnât crave sugar. So I was treating the cause of fatigue and not the symptom, if it works, but through stimulation, not through nourishment. So I just developed this whole kind of nutritional philosophy that I wrote about my first book called Thrive that came up.
Brendan Brazier: I did a self published version in 2004 and then it was published as a longer version by Penguin in 2007. So quite awhile back now. But itâs really just my nutritional philosophy and how I found eating, well thought out plant-based diet could really help. It was really just my own experience. Other athletes who tried it, found it worked well for them and a bunch of folks started eating that way and it helped them.
Training and nutrition
Kimberly : Well Iâm glad you didnât give up. Like you said in the beginning you were eating a lot of starch. How long was that period before you started educating yourself and was there almost like a tendency to want to go back to eating the chicken and the fish or whatever you were eating before?
Brendan Brazier: It was so long ago now, I donât actually remember how long that took, but I do know there was a bit of a period and so what I started doing is I wasnât eating, I kind of assumed it was just really, I wasnât having enough calories, so I started eating more peanut butter and nuts and seeds and things like that, which helped, but that wasnât ideal. So then as I learned more I got⌠And my diet isnât low fat. I would say itâs kind of moderate fat, but itâs just good quality. Raw foods obviously raw nuts and seeds and avocados, things like that. But yeah, then I was definitely getting enough calories, but I found too that, not all calories are the same. If you can digest food more easily, you spend less energy digesting and therefore you have more energy. So I call that high net gain nutrition. So making the switch from pasta and refined carbs to things like amaranth, quinoa, buckwheat, wild rice, which are all technically seeds. So they do sprout
Brendan Brazier: So more vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, antioxidants at a lower spend of energy. And thatâs the way I was thinking so much so for triathlon, because every bit of energy you spend, you have to get a return in terms of fitness or whatâs the point? And then you start dividing it up and you think, okay, if I spend this amount of energy in the pool, how much is that going to save me in a race? Is that better spent in running or cycling? Is that going to save me more time? So then you just, you become very, very mindful of output in return and you become obsessed with it really in triathlon because you only have so much time, so much energy. If you donât spend that energy right and you donât get the return, youâre wasting your time.
Kimberly : So were you charting, like the way you were approaching, it was more numerical or was it more just how you were feeling in your body?
Brendan Brazier: A lot of it was by feel, and again, this is back quite a while ago so I kept a very tight training and nutrition diary so I could see correlation between what I ate and how I performed and then it kind of work backwards. If you had a good race, you could know exactly what you did leading up to it and then start to build a bit of a template that you could then apply going forward. So that really helped me a lot. Because measuring things then too was tough. I mean maybe there are certain blood tests and things you could do, but I was also, trying to be a professional triathlete so you donât really make much money. And I was keeping it pretty lean as far as spending of money to try to, just make enough to get to races and try and recoup that spend and any prize money or sponsorships and being very mindful there too.
Brendan Brazier: So also comes back to the efficiency thing like, how do you spend money to get to a race if youâre not going to get a return in terms of prize money or sponsorship or something that kind of propels your career forward. So itâs always that cost balance. Yeah.
Kimberly : Right. How much do oils play into your diet? Youâre very similar to me. I eat a lot of seeds and nuts and avocados and sometimes I cook with some coconut oil, but Iâm not in the camp of dousing my food with a lot of oil. But Iâm not scared of it either.
Brendan Brazier: Yeah, no, Iâm very much the same and I know some folks are very, like some are no oil and just fat from the whole foods, seems to work for some people. I just really go by feel for me.
Kimberly : Well that.
Brendan Brazier: Iâve done this for so long, Iâm 44 now. I started when I was 15 eating plant-based and itâs just really a feel thing if⌠I think just over time your body just kind of works it out.
Biohackers, cutting corners and the trade-offs
Kimberly : So youâve been doing this for some time now and I love this approach about nutrient dense and high efficiency. What is your take on, I read this statistic recently about biohackers, some of them take 150 supplements a day. So thereâs this, wanting to tweak or cut corners and there does seem to be, fads that rise up like all the butter in the coffee and then things kind of dissipate. What do you think about that?
Brendan Brazier: Well, I appreciate people trying to break new ground and discover new things and perform better, whether itâs mentally or physically. So I do have an appreciation for that. But I personally, thereâs a trade-off too. Thereâs the thinking about it and the focusing on it, that if you donât do, youâre thinking about something else, which I think is a good thing.
Kimberly : Right.
Brendan Brazier: Like I donât focus on it so much that Iâm not thinking about other things. Like thereâs so much you can choose to focus on. And, I donât like the idea of taking a lot of pills and supplements either. Just remembering to and thinking and just having that part of your mindset. And Iâve gone through stages where I have taken basic supplements and stuff to see if I noticed anything and I really didnât.
Kimberly : So you donât take any now?
Brendan Brazier: No. Well, and I drink Vega each day and-
Kimberly : And Vega has B12.
Brendan Brazier: Yeah, it has B12 from a natural source and I eat a lot of fermented foods too
Kimberly : Iâm so aligned with your approach Brendan. Because I feel that whole foods are part of nature. And the more we align to nature, we naturally feel good. And wellness is so much more than just physical. Thereâs mental and emotional wellbeing and thereâs a lot of us that can go down that obsessive rabbit hole and then micromanage everything. And I donât think we were designed to live like that.
Brendan Brazier: I agree. And again, it comes back to that output return thing.
Kimberly : Yes.
Brendan Brazier: Are you willing to spend this thought and this time and this effort. And if you are, what return are you getting? And if you donât feel that return is worth it, then you can decide not to do it. So thatâs, without really realizing it, thatâs kind of how Iâve set up a lot of my life really. Just thereâs got to be return, why are you doing it? What are you getting out of it? What are you getting back? And even environmentally speaking, like growing food. In my second book, I dedicated the first third all about environmental resources.
Kimberly : Whatâs that one called?
Brendan Brazier: Itâs called Whole Foods to Thrive. And itâs really looking at the amount of land, water, fossil fuel used
More like this
Ep. 1023 | Optimizing your Preconception Health & Fertility with Dr Ann Shippy
Heart Healthy, Plant-Based Eating with Dr. Jenneffer Pulapaka [Ep. #1021]
Fawning: How We Can Lose Ourselves and How to Come Back with Dr. Ingrid Clayton [Episode #1018]
The Science of Longevity: Plaque Heart Scans, Cancer Screening, Glutathione & More with Dr. Julianna Lindsey [EP#1018]
Empowered Knowledge of Perimenopause for any Stage with Dr. Mariza Snyder [Ep. #1016]
Getting to the Root of Food and Other Addictions with Dr. Jason Giles [EP. #1015]
October Solluna Power Hour: Building Resilience & Strength Emotionally, Physically, and Spiritually [Episode #1014]
Handling Anxiety & Conflict in Kids (and Humans!) with Connection with NYT Bestselling Author Alyssa Blask Campbell [Episode 1013]
The Connection Between Body Movements and our Emotional & Physical health with Henry Abbott [EP. #1011]
September Solluna Power Hour: Essential Rhythms and Rituals to feel Grounded, Clear and Energized [Episode 1009]
Overcoming Trauma through Somatic Body Healing with Britt Piper [Episode 1008]
Relieving Anxiety and Panic with Dr. Nicole Cain [Episode 1007]
Practices to Do Right Before Bed to Improve Your Energy with Oliver Nino [Episode #1006]
Ep. 1005 | How Lifestyle and Bio-Identical Hormone options can help balance your hormones with Dr Erika Schwartz