Thrive Foods Book Review

I was recently sent the book Thrive Foods written by the professional Ironman triathlete Brendan Brazier and creator of Vega, to review for my blog. Since I really like books about nutrition and healthy lifestyles, I was really excited to read it! While I was sent the book free of charge, the opinions are 100% my own, and if I had a negative opinion on a product you would know.

In this book, Brazier talks about plant-based foods and how they stack up nutritionally and how ultimately a plant-based diet will give us better health in the long run. He never specifically uses the term Vegan, but since I already knew his original book, Thrive, was a vegan nutrition guide, I knew Thrive Foods would focus on vegan foods as well. I like that he doesn’t use the term because who really cares about labels when we’re focusing on health and nutrition.

One section of the book interesting to me, the “Nutrient to Resource Ratio”. At first I was confused, but the chapter explains that the nutrient to resource ratio is the relationship between nutrient dense foods and how much energy is needed to produce them versus how much energy is needed to produce animal products (crops grown to feed the animal uses gallons and gallons of water). Brazier writes in Chapter 2, “as humans we obtain our energy from food, which we produce by burning fossil fuel. So essentially, we are trading the stored energy of fossil fuel (which originated from the sun) for caloric energy that’s of biological use to us”.

For example, producing animal protein creates more fossil fuel than it does to create a plant protein. The section on “Nutrient to Resource Ratio” goes on to say that making smart plant-based food choices have a greater impact on helping the environment and ultimately our health.

There are lots of numbers in this chapter and some of it was a bit confusing to me, but in the end I understand what Brazier is saying, that consuming less animal protein and eating a more plant-based diet in the end will lead to better health and a better planet. The book gets a lot more in-depth about this, so you’ll have to check it out to get a better idea of what he means. Right now you can actually pre-order the book on Amazon.

Thrive Foods also has an array of healthy recipes from different famous chefs, which include salads, pizzas, main courses, desserts, drinks and energy bars. Some I saw require a dehydrator, which I don’t have, so I’m not about to go and buy one to try a certain recipe. A lot of the them have some obscure ingredients also, so they would be pretty hard to whip up without a trip to a natural foods store. I prefer recipes that have staple ingredients that I already have on hand. But, I’m most excited to try the smoothie and energy bar recipes.

I also really liked that the back of the book had a glossary of nutrition terms and also a list and descriptions of nutrients, which I thought was great. Brazier also includes a list of his favorite restaurants. I liked this feature since I like to eat at plant-based, nutrition-conscious restaurants when I travel.

Although I’m not about to eliminate animal products completely from my diet, this book gave me some great insight into why one should. It would have a good impact on the environment and one’s health, but for now, I just love cheese and yogurt too much. But the book is definitely a great guide for someone who wants to.

Check out Vega’s facebook page to learn more about Brendan Brazier, download recipes or participate in the Vega Challenge.