‘Phillies Extra’ Q&A: Bryce Harper on clean eating, a favorite indulgence, the value of TikTok, and more

Harper discussed his devotion to his personal health plan, which includes farm-raised and organic food and avoiding seed oils. “People kind of think it’s a little crazy, but it works for me.”

Aside from returning to the lineup, Bryce Harper is looking forward to something else when the Phillies visit Toronto this week: the tiramisu.Read moreYong Kim / Staff Photographer

by Scott Lauber

Published June 2, 2025, 10:09 a.m. ET

When the Phillies open a series in Toronto this week, Bryce Harper expects to be back in the lineup after a five-game absence with a bruised right elbow.

But he’s looking forward to something else, too: tiramisu.

Harper is devoted to clean eating. He likes everything farm-raised and organic, not store-bought. He avoids seed oils and drinks single-origin coffee. He partners with Just Ingredients, a Utah-based company that gets grass-fed whey protein from New Zealand. Among his favorite things, something that he said “nobody knows about me,” is baking bread with Kamut flour, which contains less gluten and more protein than regular wheat.

“People kind of think it’s a little crazy,” Harper said, “but it works for me.”

But Harper has his indulgences, including tiramisu from his favorite place in Toronto. He recently joined Phillies Extra, the baseball show from The Inquirer, to discuss several topics, including his commitment to health and wellness.

Here’s an excerpt from our wide-ranging conversation, which has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Watch the full interview below.

Q: Can you describe your devotion to being all-natural, to eating clean and why you do it?

A: I think obviously 2020 was a tough year for everybody. You didn’t understand kind of what was going on. It was scary at the time. A lot of people were going through a lot of things. People were sick. So I thought to myself, ‘What can we do to kind of be proactive in the situation?’ Obviously there was not a ton of research about what was going on at the time. So, we kind of flipped the script and we’re like, ‘You know what, let’s start eating better. Let’s start looking at ingredients. Let’s start looking at what we’re putting into our bodies and our system. What can we do?’ And so we went full-blown granola, you could say.

People kind of think it’s a little crazy, but it works for me. It works for [his wife] Kayla, it works for my family, as well. We feel a difference. Obviously what works for me might not work for somebody else, so I’ll never try to push it on anybody else. But I can let people know how I feel and what I feel on a daily basis. That’s looking at ingredients, that’s looking at certain things that you put into your system and put into your body, and that’s a lot of back and forth. Like eating things [and saying,] ‘OK, I feel this way on this, I feel this way on this, let’s stay away from that and let’s be gung-ho on some other things.’ Talking about holistic medicine and things like that.

My doctor out in Utah that I work with a lot — he went to Johns Hopkins, went through the whole route of being a really good doctor and everything else, and kind of went the other way and started doing holistic medicine. He’s incredible. I do blood work every three months, understanding what my body is going through, what it’s doing if I’m going through sicknesses, if I have mold — all these things in your body.

We travel so much that it can take a toll on you. Playing every single day, having kids, being up at night at 2, 3 o’clock in the morning, how can I amplify my body and the way of my life, and feeling great every day going into it where my body doesn’t feel so great because of the travel? So keeping track of all the things that I put into my system, keeping track of my sleep, keeping track of everything and trying to prolong what I can do on a baseball field but also prolong my life.

I’m not trying to live to 150 years old or anything like that, but it’s just being able to play with my grandkids and being able to hang out with [his son] Krew as much as possible and ‘go, go, go’ with him because at 5-6 years old he is ready to roll every day. Dad has to put that cape on and do that, and I love doing that. So, I want to be able to do it to the full extent of my body and my mind and everything else.

Q: You’ve said you want to play into your 40s. You’re only 32, so there’s a long way to go. But when we talk about longevity in modern sports, Tom Brady is the gold standard. People have heard about his “TB12 Method.” If we had the “BH3 Method,” what would be some of the rules to live by?

A: I want this to be out there: What works for me might not work for somebody else. And so, the things that I do for myself, I believe in wholeheartedly, and somebody else might not do that, and that’s OK. If somebody wants to eat Panda Express and do that, totally fine. I don’t care. And I’m not saying just Panda or whatever. But that’s OK. That’s fine. You do your thing. And if you’re 80/20 and you’re 80% good and 20% bad, great. It’s very, very hard to stay on the path every single day. And I get that, especially when I travel. But it became very easy for me to understand what places I want to eat at and where I want to go and things like that.

TikTok has been a huge thing for me. Because I can find so many restaurants around the world or country that we’re traveling to, and they’re very hole-in-the-wall, mom-and-pop, and I love that. Your little mom-and-pop, eight-to-10-seats breakfast spots, lunch spots, things like that are so cool because you’re able to really invest in the community of different cities or towns and really rely on local farming, local ingredients. Less ingredients is way better.

Seed oils is a big one for me. Trying to eat organic as much as possible. The only thing about organic ingredients and things like that is sometimes it’s not the greatest, so you have to read the label. You have to understand what you’re putting into your system. But if I can get a lot of things from local farming — Pennsylvania has such good local farming with Lancaster County being right there — so we get a lot of our dairy products and our egg products. Anything off the farm, that’s what I want. They really understand, especially in Lancaster, how to treat their animals and the way they process their stuff and everything else. I do really good on beef. I love beef products, so my body amplifies when I eat beef. It really does. And so, for my blood work and everything else, I can see that. …

I’ll just give you something that I do in the morning. … I drink matcha in the morning, and I’ll have a coffee in the afternoon. But in the morning, if I do like a beef meatball — I’ll do those like throughout the week — or if I do ground beef in the morning, pasture-raised eggs, sourdough toast, and some avocado with some fruit. So it’s just very simple, but it works for me. I love that type of food. People might be like, ‘Well I like pancakes’ and everything else. That’s awesome. I love pancakes, too, but I know how I feel when I eat pancakes compared to what I eat with the breakfast that I do. And I love that type of food.

I can kill my craving with fruit. Like honey, fruit, things like that. I really, really like that. And so I can kill cravings that way if I am craving something. But don’t get me wrong, I love tiramisu, too. And so I’m going to have that. … There’s this place in Toronto that has an incredible tiramisu. And so, when I’m in Toronto, no doubt, I’m going to have some tiramisu. Is it good for me? Probably not. But I need that craving just a little bit so I can feel that and know, ‘Hey, this is what I want.’

And so, that’s just certain things that I can kill my cravings on. But staying as on plane as much as I can, understanding that I feel great on certain foods when I don’t feel good on other certain foods.