The New Orleans Saints quarterback and reigning Offensive Player of the Year on his gadget addictions and secret love of romantic comedies
Interviewed by Scott Stein
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Off-season acquisition
My child was just born this January, so my off-season was all about having a baby. We got him a little drum. I’m always taking the drumsticks and playing a little tune for him, and he’s always grabbing the sticks out of my hands and chewing on them.
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Rock ’n’ roll
When the quarterbacks work out together, we listen to ’80s music. The bands sing about all kinds of crazy stuff. A lot were one-hit wonders — but their one hit was awesome! My song: Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive.”
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Whole-wheat toast with peanut butter, organic raw white Hawaiian honey, and a sliced banana on top.
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Social media
I’m a BlackBerry guy. I use it to do a lot of texting and to send out Twitter messages. It’s such a great way to stay connected to fans and give updates on what’s going on with the team.
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Motto
“Your actions speak so loudly, I can’t hear what you’re saying.” Don’t tell me about it; show me.
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Refreshments
Most of the time I drink Penta water. I’m not saying Penta cures cancer, but science shows it acts like an anti-inflammatory and as a catalyst to help you digest vitamins faster. If I want a bit of flavor, I’ll drink Izze, this carbonated fruit drink that’s as healthy as you can get. During the off-season my one vice is root beer. My favorite is Virgil’s microbrewed root beer.
Vintage ride
I love the idea of owning an old car, but I know nothing about taking care of them. I really wanted an old Bronco or Blazer, so my second year in the league I had the bright idea to get a 1970 K5 Blazer. It was red with a white top that I could take off to cruise convertible style, and it had big old 38-inch mud tires. It was awesome — a real beach cruiser. I ended up selling it a couple of years later, but I got my money’s worth.
Home improvement
The Kaleidescape. It’s a system of hard drives that runs throughout your house that you can download movies and music to. You can pull up anything from it to watch on any TV. It’s pretty expensive, but it’s awesome. Each drive holds a terabyte of information — a thousand gigs — and I have 14.
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Overseas trip
I’ve been on four USO trips to seven different countries and had a chance to meet so many troops. Both of my grandfathers were in World War II — one in the army and one in the marines — so I feel strongly about supporting the military, especially in this day and age when there’s so much going on overseas. These men and women are really sacrificing everything. I want to make sure they know how much we appreciate them.
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Book
Golf’s Sacred Journey: Seven Days at the Links of Utopia, by David L. Cook. It’s a book about golf, but it’s really a book about life.
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Movies
There are so many. You’ve got Gladiator. You’ve got 300. You’ve got Braveheart. Then you go the comedy route: Caddyshack’s up there, and Wedding Crashers. I have to say that The Hangover was hilarious. If you go the serious drama route, Legends of the Fall was great. And Seven Pounds was good too. Like any married man, I get dragged to a lot of romantic comedies, but I don’t mind them. Maybe that’s why it’s not embarrassing.
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Clubs
My secret weapons are Callaway’s 52-degree wedge and the appropriately named rescue club. They’re my old trusties. I really just get a confidence boost with those clubs.
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Escape
Audubon Park in New Orleans. It’s huge, with a two-mile jogging and biking trail. It also has the New Orleans zoo and an 18-hole golf course that’s rated one of the country’s top 10 executive courses. You have these big, beautiful oak trees that are hundreds of years old hanging down and draping over the course. It’s one of my absolute favorite places.
Away stadium
Arrowhead in Kansas City. I played there once a year as a Charger. There are great fans, it’s loud, and it has a lot of history. I like those kinds of places.
I collect military coins. Each unit in each branch of the armed forces has its own. They give you one as a sign of appreciation. I got one from General Petraeus and one from four-star admiral Mike Mullen. I actually made my own when I went to Guantánamo Bay to reciprocate with the troops there. It is shaped like a football, with a picture of an American flag, a marine sniper, and three words: attitude, courage, discipline. You flip it over and it has a football helmet with the Saints logo, No. 9, Drew Brees. It’s cool.
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Eats
It’s hard, because I know all the chefs in New Orleans, and if I give you one the rest will get mad at me. But the food you can get here you can’t get anywhere else. At Delmonico, it’s the tender pork with dirty rice. Charbroiled oysters at Drago’s, the shrimp and tasso at Commander’s Palace, and the turtle soup at K-Paul’s, plus their steak with debris sauce — it’ll probably clog your arteries within five seconds, but it’s so fantastic.
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Workout gear
On the road I use Fitness Anywhere’s TRX, a total resistance suspension trainer. It’s basically made of straps and buckles. You can take it anywhere — strap it to a pole, behind a door — and use it to work every part of your body: balance, speed, agility, core strength, shoulder and leg strength, and power. I train with it every day.
Good-luck charm
On my right wrist I wear a rubber bracelet that says FINISH STRONG.
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October 5th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
I use the TRX straps to work out,too! I love them!
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October 5th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
that toast sounds delicious. Thank you for the recipe Breesus.
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October 21st, 2009 at 9:07 am
Anyone needing the bracelets should give me a shout out…we provide them for Drew and his team and are also the owner of the trademark…thanks. Dan Green, Founder of Finish Strong
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Dan Green Reply:
October 21st, 2009 at 9:08 am
Oh, and yes, this bracelet pictured was provided by me to MJ….
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ebarnes Reply:
February 4th, 2010 at 2:18 am
what is the website for the bracelets?
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December 24th, 2009 at 11:24 pm
Hey what was he thinking, that’s crazy
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January 23rd, 2010 at 6:48 am
Penta Water pseudoscience
AquaScams home | Water Cluster Quackery | What is Pseudoscience?| About water
Penta Water is one of many bottled waters whose manufacturers claim to have “restructured” the water in some way that provides special health benefits. In my opinion, there is no credible scientfic evidence for either the altered water structure or for the health benefits.
Penta Water has been marketed for several years, formerly by a company known as Bio-Hydration Research Labs. It is sometimes referred to as “Penta-Hydrate Water”. The principal marketing claims are that it is “the purest bottled water on the market”, and that it is “restructured” to reduce the “cluster size”, making it more amenable to uptake by the body.
Penta Water is made by a succession of steps, the details of which have varied (6 steps until early 2005, 14 since then.) In general, these steps include various forms of filtration, reverse osmosis, de-ionization, UV-light, “molecular redefinition” (currently referred to as the “Penta Process) and oxygenation treatment. All except the last two are conventional and generally effective methods that are widely employed in both domestic water treatment and in the manufacture of bottled beverages. The descriptions of the last two of these treatments (on an earlier Web page) are rather weird and lack scientific support.
Hype
Comments
The description of the Molecular Redefinition process concludes with the following ungrammatical sentence: “Penta processing tank where the water molecule clusters are reduced using a patent pending physics process. ” There is no evidence in the reputable scientific literature that the structure of pure water can be altered by any type of treatment. Please see the Cluster Quackery page.
“The final treatment step is in the oxygenation tank where molecular oxygen is dissolved into the water at a very high concentration. The purpose of oxygenation … is to create a partial pressure drive mechanism that within the intestines will deliver the water into the blood stream faster.” The highlighted portion of this statement is pseudoscientific nonsense. The presence of dissolved oxygen in the gut has nothing to do with uptake of water by the blood. The current oxygenation level is claimed to be only 40-60 ppm
(The purple background indicates claims that I consider false, misleading or meaningless)
Following are some other claims found on sites promoting Penta Water; those portions which I consider to be “junk science” are in colored type.
Bunk
Debunk
Bio-Hydration Research Lab .. has developed a patented process to reduce water containing mostly large molecular clusters into water with a stable, high concentration of smaller clusters. Because Penta water is “thinner,” the body does not have to break down as many of the clusters in order to use it to hydrate cells There is no evidence that water cluster size can be changed, or that any benefit could accrue if any such changes were possible. The claim that Penta water is “thinner” appears to be contradicted by the statement below that it has a “higher viscosity than normal water.”
Penta is the Purest Bottled Water on the Market No justifcation of this claim is offered. There is no evidence that chemically “pure” water is any healthier or more beneficial than any water that meets EPA drinking water standards. Their claim that it is highly “pure” is inconsistent with the claim that it has different physical properties (see below) than ordinary water.
Penta is the Only Bottled Water with a Patented Physics Process
A recently-issued U.S. Patent 6521248 describes the way in which this product is presumably made by subjecting water to rapid variations in pressure that are supposed to create gas bubbles that break up the water structure and create a “plasma” of negative ions that confer antioxidant properties. There is no scientific basis for these claims; I suspect that this is a typical “junk patent” intended more for marketing than for protection of a real invention. I was unable to find any registration record of the “Penta Water” trademark in the U.S.P.T.O. database.
Some sales site have claimed that in vitro studies show that Penta Water increases “cell survivability by 266%”, dissolves kidney stone material three times faster than normal water, and decreases “DNA chromosomal mutation rates” to 29% compared to distilled water. [link] No references are given to these unverifiable studies.
“Penta has been shown through highly technical scientific testing (Raman spectroscopy) to have 30 percent smaller molecular water clusters. It has also been observed that Penta has a higher boiling point and higher viscosity than normal water. Penta’s unique structure is also patented and has been verified in a published, peer-reviewed study conducted by scientists at Moscow’s General Physics Institute.” [link] This is erroneous nonsense; the “bonds” between water molecules are so weak that they are continually being broken and reformed on a nanosecond time scale. Moreover, the attractions that the water channels in the cell walls exert on each H2O molecule are greater than those between molecules, so H2O molecules pop through the channels without the need for any outside help.
Penta’s proprietary anti-oxidant and cellular regenerative abilities make it well suited for application to the skin. Preliminary evidence suggests that Penta’s ability to absorb through the skin enables the rebuilding of collagen in the dermis. [link] The idea that a water to which oxygen has been added can have anti-oxidant properties defies common sense. There is no scientific evidence that any kind of water can be absorbed through the skin, let alone aid the “rebuilding of collagen”.
One of the Penta pages gives several references to “research” that allegedly supports some of the manufacturer’s claims. In my view, they do not:
Reference
Comment
A.F. Bunkin, A.A. Nyrmatov, and S.M. Pershin: Study of Cluster Molecular Structures in Various Types of Liquid WatersUsing Spontaneous Raman Spectroscopy. Physics of Vibrations 10(2) 2002. This obscure Russian journal has changed its name to Physics of Wave Phenomena . The authors observe slightly narrower O-H-stretching band widths in Penta water, which they interpret as indicative of somewhat smaller average hydrogen-bond concentration per unit volume, and thus, smaller “cluster” size. One weakness of this paper is the lack of any clear characterization of the experimental and control samples. In my experience, Russian work of this kind, often sponsored by commercial interests, is frequently unreliable.
” In September 2002, scientists at the Moscow University conducted a study to compare the effects of Penta on intracellular alkalinity/acidity. …” The absence of any specific reference makes it impossible to confirm this apparently unpublished study. The concept of “intracellular alkalinity/acidity” in this context is meaninless pseudoscience.
“Moscow University scientists also conducted a study to gauge the effects of Penta on cell survivability. Comparing cells cultured in Penta to cells cultured in double distilled water scientists concluded that cells prepared in Penta water demonstrated an increase in cell survivability of 266 percent.” The absence of any specific reference makes it impossible to confirm this apparently unpublished study. It is highly unlikely that cells of any kind could survive the osmotic stress associatd with a distilled water medium, so this conclusion strikes me as nonsense.
” In October 2001, a study was completed at the University of St. Thomas Department of Health and Human Performance in St. Paul, Minnesota, which demonstrated a significant increase in athletic performance…” Another apparently unpublished (and unverifiable) study.
AquaRx AquaPhoneyonics
The {AquaRx Research} site appears to be a classier and more “scientific” looking promotion for Penta Water technology. There are links to a legitimate (albeit irrelevant) scientific paper on nuclear-spin isomers of water, and others to what seem intended to look like scientific articles but bear no author’s names or publication information. One of these is titled “Comparison of distilled & AquaRx, water for staining of cervical cancer cells”, which could easily mislead a lay person to think that the product could be useful as a diagnostic tool for this disease.
UK Advertising Standards Council ruling on Penta Water
The British equivalent of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has issued the following ruling in response to complaints about some of Penta’s claims:
“The Authority concluded that the information submitted was not sufficient to prove Penta water had health benefits over and above those of ordinary water or was structured differently from ordinary water. The Authority told the advertisers not to repeat claims that implied the product was chemically unique, had been restructured or molecularly redesigned, or hydrated cells and improved physical performance better than tap water.”
Some other commentaries on Penta Water
James Randi shares some of his thoughts on this product
Guardian’s “Bad Science” column: Penta backs out of Randi challenge
Wikipedia article on Penta Water
Better than Penta: “Skepta Water’s” 96-step purification process
Stephen Lower is a retired faculty member of the Dept of Chemistry, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby / Vancouver, Canada
contact the author
30 May 2005 – This page is best rendered by the Mozilla/FireFox browser
[Reply]
March 24th, 2010 at 12:19 pm
drew brees is one of my favorite things
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October 3rd, 2010 at 12:01 pm
some of my friends are crazy about him dont know why
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February 8th, 2011 at 11:25 pm
Peanut butter, Hawaiian honey, and banana on wheat slice sounds good right about now! Good call! And boy is he a hunk…lol!
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