Anyone familiar with Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma has learned that North Americans consume mainly processed food—often fast food—in the form of corn, fat, and meat, bought at large grocery retail stores, containing an average supply of approximately three days’ to one week’s worth of shelf stock before the next truck arrives.

Most of our fresh food—even our “organic” food—is similarly industrialized. The relatively small percentage of organic consumers in North America still constitutes such a vast number of people buying and eating free-range eggs and a supposedly better quality of broccoli that the scale of the organic business, from farmer to retailer, must of necessity be so large that it bears little resemblance to our mind’s conception of what an organic farm should be.

The subtext of The Thrive Diet is that this system of food consumption is not very good for us. But we know this. Our rate of obesity, disease, and allergies has steadily risen over the few generations of time that Canadians and Americans have based their diets entirely on what’s available at the grocery store, or worse, at the fast-food window. As corn and corn products have increasingly crowded out other ingredients in our processed food over the last two and a half decades, our waistlines have ballooned.

The Thrive Diet purports to be a weight-loss program—and no doubt practitioners who follow it carefully will likely lose weight—but one suspects that this is merely a marketing tool for author Brendan Brazier’s much deeper conviction that a whole-food vegan diet is much healthier for not only average North Americans but high-performance athletes as well. And he makes a strong case for his thesis.

Brazier’s interest in our nutrition began with his athletic aspirations. As a teenager, he adopted the long-term goal of becoming a world-class Ironman competitor as his career. Over many years of training and competing, Brazier developed the idea that stress interferes with the body’s natural ability to recover from training. And it isn’t just the stress of overwork or other anxiety that Brazier is talking about—although that’s bad for us too—instead, he identifies nutritional stress as the true culprit inhibiting his own better sport performance and our good health generally. Nutritional stress, according to Brazier, results from not “eating enough natural, unprocessed foods rich in vitamins, minerals, enzymes, high-quality protein fibre, essential fatty acids, antioxidants, and good bacteria (probiotics).” These components of our diet are found in “nutrient-dense whole foods,” as they “support cellular regeneration, which rebuilds new body tissue.”

It makes sense: eat better food, have a healthier body. And there’s lots of good research out there supporting Brazier’s conclusions—although one major flaw with this book is that the author never cites any evidence supporting his claims, except in a list of references at the end, which is helpful but not the same as seeing the research discussed in the text—but Brazier takes his conclusions to what most athletes, certainly, would consider extreme. For example, athletes have been conditioned by now to consume large portions of animal-based protein throughout the day and especially following their workouts. The conventional wisdom recommends this as the only way that an athlete will adequately replace muscle tissue that would otherwise be lost following the demands of heavy daily exercise. Brazier’s plant-based diet—indeed, his suggestion that we need not be concerned about the total calories we consume—flies in the face of what many consider an essential nutritional platform.

Readers unfamiliar with vegan diets will find the excellent twelve-week meal plan with accompanying recipes odd, to say the least. But as unusual and challenging as The Thrive Diet may be to the high-performance athlete, let alone the average North American meat-eater, the premise of the book and the author’s clarity and logic are convincing. The Thive Diet is definitely worth looking into.

Published in 2007 by Penguin, $24.00.