When everyone’s favorite diet junkie, Oprah Winfrey, announced she’d be embarking on a 21-day “vegan cleanse” in another attempt to yo-yo her body into a size 14, Brendan Brazier shook his head – and then asked himself how he might capitalize on her misguided efforts to emulate his lifestyle. “I think fads are dangerous, and whatever a cleanse is, it’s probably going to be dangerous too,” says Brazier, 33. His baggy jeans and black hoodie give Brazier the appearance of a teenager – but not many eat like him. His lunch today is three platefuls of brown rice, avocado and olive oil. A longtime poster-boy for meat-free fitness in his native Canada, Brazier adopted the lifestyle at 15 as a high-school running phenom. Convinced through trial-and-error that plant foods promoted the fastest recovery from training, Brazier disproved naysayers, including his own coaches, and became the only professional vegan triathlete in North America. In 10 years, he completed dozens of events and enjoyed back-to-back wins at the grueling Canadian Ultramarathon 50K. When his athletics were sidelined by a car accident in 2004, Brazier wrote Thrive, a manifesto on plant-based nutrition. The book was picked up by Penguin Canada in 2007 and hit U.S. markets later that year as The Thrive Diet. But despite bestselling success north of the border, including the launch of Vega, Brazier’s line of energy bars and protein powder, Thrive’s American sales were lukewarm. Brazier’s luck in the U.S. may be about to change, thanks to a word he is belatedly embracing: vegan. Brazier’s hand was forced when his American publishers, De Capo Press, added “vegan” to the book’s subtitle. The word doesn’t appear once in Brazier’s book, and he acquiesced to the re-titling with trepidation, worried about being lumped with “the extreme PETA freak types, wearing a lettuce bikini in the middle of winter.” But it’s hard to resist history. An earlier boost for veganism came in 2007, when US Weekly published a photo of Victoria “Posh Spice” Beckham holding a copy of Skinny Bitch in an L.A. bookstore: the series of snarky, plant-based diet plans “for hot, skinny chicks” catapulted to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Brazier disdains what he calls “the crash diet trend”, but he’s ready to ride the coattails of Skinny Bitch success, and market himself as a healthy alternative. Brazier’s publishers are confident that “vegan” is the new “Atkins” – with staying power. “The diet book market is so fleeting, but this is a long-term, sustainable way to live,” he says. Since publishing Thrive, Brazier’s commitment to veganism has moved beyond athletics. He has twice spoken before Congress to protest meat industry subsidies, and is working with producers in New York to narrate a documentary on nutrition and economic sustainability. For Brazier, diet has widespread implications: if standard American fare - burgers, soda, mac & cheese - remain cheap and accessible, he argues that taxpayers will be forced to pay for an increasingly sick nation. “It’s a vicious cycle, and a less healthy society will inevitably be less prosperous,” he says. “Being healthy makes economic sense, too.” Brazier, who still competes casually in marathons, admits that his lifestyle isn’t easily emulated. A diet of raw-food bars and super-sized salads would send the average American into a fiber-induced sprint to the bathroom, not to mention the cost of Brazier’s ultra-healthy diet (a single Vega bar retails for around $3). Brazier lives in his own vegan utopia, but denies that the lifestyle is beyond the reach of ordinary people. “It’s not about perfection. I’d rather see three people eat one vegan meal a day than one person eat vegan all the time,” he says. “The payoff to health of that one meal would be huge.” Brazier seems to be enjoying his own payoff as well: Whole Foods has starting stocking copies of Brazier’s re-titled book, and in the past month it shot from #507,000 to #3,457 on the Amazon bestseller list. But if he wants to reinvent the face of vegan living, Brazier’s still got his work cut out for him: Skinny Bitch is at #137. |