LI Celebrity Alert: Drew Brees

Breaking news! Just in time for the Super Bowl!

Drew Brees is lactose intolerant!

(He is the quarterback for the New Orleans Saints football team.)

It's a standing joke in American "journalism" that in the days before the Super Bowl, every column inch of every newspaper page (or today every gigabyte of every hard disk) in Super Bowl cities must be filled with something, anything, Super Bowl-related, no matter how trivial. So kudos to Nola.com for living up to this venerable tradition.

Ron Thibodeaux of The Times-Picayune actually managed to track down the favorite pizza place. When he was in college. A decade ago. It was, so the claim goes, Bruno's in West Lafayette, Indiana. And even better, we know what his favorite pizza was.

"Drew is lactose intolerant, so he’d go with the Bruno’s Meat - just sausage, pepperoni, bacon and ham," said Orlando Itin, known to everyone in town as "Big O."

Itin hasn't talked with Brees about adding the quarterback's name to the menu, but if that happens, he already has a name picked out: "It’s the Drew Brees No Cheese!"

Go Saints!

UPDATE: I did further checking after receiving a comment that Brees was really allergic to milk rather than lactose intolerant. Apparently that's correct. Here's the article from Sports Illustrated.

Brees's long list of food allergies includes dairy, wheat, gluten, eggs and nuts.

Still a dairy-free celebrity for our purposes. Even better, he now becomes an example of what I need to point out regularly. People don't know the difference between lactose intolerance and milk allergy and get them confused on a regular basis.

And it's also a good example of something equally important to point out: never assume that a filler article about Super Bowl trivia has any pretense to accuracy.