The Unique Cooking Technique Tom Cruise Swears By

He's spent forty years as one of the world's biggest movie stars. His steadfast commitment to the theatrical experience resulted in "Top Gun: Maverick", which was supposed to go straight to streaming, becoming a billion-dollar hit while providing a much-needed boost to struggling movie theaters after the pandemic. He will be honored with an Honorary Oscar next year, which is only fair after he got totally robbed of an Oscar for "Magnolia." To some, Tom Cruise is the human manifestation of the movies. But what does he eat? Aside from copious amounts of popcorn, Cruise mostly subsists on antioxidant-rich snacks, as well as food prepared using a method called "low-temperature cooking." (Suffice it to say, you won't find him eating the Tom Cruise Christmas cake.)

After watching him climb the tallest building in the world and dangle from the wings of two different biplanes, one might reasonably assume that Tom Cruise has no fear of death. But you don't retain your youthful appearance as well as he has without watching your diet, and Cruise is indeed quite careful about what he eats. Instead of meals, he prefers to snack over the course of the day, eating foods like blueberries, nuts, and dark chocolate. (We're far from the days when he ate chocolate cake for three days straight.) When he has to dine out, he eats steamed, unseasoned white fish and vegetables. He avoids drinking alcohol. And when he's by himself, he has his chef use low-temperature cooking methods for his food.

So what exactly is low-temperature cooking? Well, it's just what it sounds like: making use of cooking methods which use less heat to cook food at a lower temperature. If you have a slow cooker or a sous vide machine at home, you've made use of low-temperature cooking before. But the selling points for those methods have to do with convenience (for the former) and precision (for the latter). Cruise, on the other hand, seems to be more interested in the health benefits of low-temperature cooking.

You see, when you cook food, you alter its nutritional quality — depending on how you cook it, it can be for better or for worse. Some cooking methods have a way of reducing certain vitamins and minerals, like vitamin C, potassium, and magnesium. By cooking with low temperatures, your food may retain more of those vitamins, making it more nutritious. To most people, the nutritional difference between a poached chicken breast and a baked chicken breast is probably negligible, but Tom Cruise is not most people.

Are we telling you to go out and buy a Crock Pot right now? Of course not. Every person's needs are different, and in any case it's going to be much easier for someone with Cruise's resources to stick to such an extreme diet than it would be for you. But if you try his diet and it doesn't work for you, take solace in the fact that it's far from the weirdest belief you could have adopted from Tom Cruise.