The Amazing Michael Phelps (and his amazing diet)

The New York Post and Wall Street Journal ran articles during the Olympics making the claim that Michael Phelps’ diet contains 12,000 calories each day. It could be true. Phelps is 6’4”, and weighs 195 pounds. If he were sedentary, he would need about 2,500 calories a day, but he swims five hours a day, six days a week. If you or I swam 5 hours we would burn over 4,000 calories. However, we don’t swim like Michael Phelps. Phelps could easily burn 8,000 calories during five hours of swimming. And with his huge muscle mass, he might burn more calories per pound when he is relaxing or sleeping than most people his weight. So 12,000 calories a day is not impossible, although it might be a bit exaggerated.

The more important question is: what kind of calories does Michael Phelps eat? The press reports say that his breakfasts include three fried-egg sandwiches with lots of cheese, a five-egg omelet, a bowl of grits, three slices of French toast, and three chocolate-chip pancakes. Lunch includes a pound of pasta, two ham and cheese sandwiches, and 1,000 calories of energy drinks. Dinner is another pound of pasta, one whole pizza, and more energy drinks.

That’s a lot of saturated fat, and a lot of eggs. Fat packs more than twice the calories per ounce than carbohydrates or protein do, so a high-fat meal is an efficient way to take in lots of calories. But saturated fats are unhealthy, even in a magnificently fit young adult. That kind of daily saturated fat intake, year after year, likely would increase a person’s risk later in life of developing atherosclerosis, heart disease, and stroke.

What about all those eggs? Until recently eggs were considered unhealthy, because the egg yolk contains a lot of cholesterol. However, the best evidence is that most of us can eat an egg a day without any risk because, surprisingly, our blood cholesterol is raised a lot more by saturated fat in our diet than by cholesterol. In fact, some people have the good luck of being born with genes that keeps dietary cholesterol from raising their blood cholesterol much at all. (One exception to all this: epidemiologic studies find that people with diabetes who eat an egg a day, or more, may have an increased risk for heart disease. Scientists haven’t explained why this may be true.)

Unless Phelps is one of the lucky people who can eat large amounts of cholesterol-containing foods without his blood cholesterol levels rising, if he were to continue eating that amount of eggs for the next couple of decades, it would also probably be unhealthy.

So my advice to Michael Phelps would be to work hard with a nutritionist to transition his diet from foods containing lots of saturated fats to foods containing lots of monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats—foods that deliver the energy he needs, that are every bit as delicious as his current, incredible diet, but that are much, much healthier for his heart and arteries. He should replace red meat with poultry and fish, putting olive oil rather than butter or stick margarine on his bread, substituting nuts for chips, whole grains for refined grains, brown rice for white rice, couscous instead of pasta. This advice won’t do a thing to make him a better swimmer. In fact, how could anything make him a better swimmer than he is—or than any other human being has ever been? But it could make a big difference to him later in life. And as his athletic career winds down, and he is burning fewer calories each day, he will need to make major adjustments in his total calorie intake.

When it comes to swimming, it’s good to be like Mike. Just don’t try to eat like him.

Is your diet anything like Michael Phelps’ diet? How have you changed your diet to make it healthier? What foods have you removed from your diet? What foods have you added?

Anthony Komaroff, M.D., is the Simcox-Clifford-Higby professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS), and editor-in-chief of Harvard Health Publications at HMS. He is a practicing senior physician and was formerly director of the Division of General Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital.