Health & Fitness

What Is Clean Eating, Anyway?

Click on the #cleaneating hashtag on Instagram and over 35 million images will appear on your screen, portraying everything from colourful salads to flat stomachs and beaming teenagers clutching green smoothies. There’s no denying the power of the movement but, asks Lisa Niven, is that power being used for good or bad – and what does it actually mean anyway?
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Romas Foord
Romas Foord

What is clean eating?

Good question. The importance of fresh, unprocessed food and plenty of vegetables has been known for decades, but we’ve seen it persistently hammered home with the rise of wellness bloggers such as Deliciously Ella’s Ella Mills, Madeleine Shaw, and Amelia Freer in the past few years. Clean eating was a term that emerged from this movement, arguably initially used to describe fresh, nutrient-rich food cooked from scratch. What it suggests now, however, is less clear. Some associate it with an organic diet, others an alkaline diet, and yet more with a vegan diet - some use it to justify very restrictive meal plans that don't seem to amount to much more than vegetables, nuts and seeds. Some swap lunch for "energy balls" and call it clean, or courgetti is smothered in cheese-free pesto (Italians, look away) and served as a main meal. Many of the bloggers and social-media stars associated with it are known for eschewing entire food groups – think dairy, gluten, grains, animal products – so those diet restrictions have become attached to the definition. The Oxford Dictionary defines clean eating as: “Relating to a diet consisting of unprocessed, unrefined, and nutrient-rich food, typically eaten as small meals throughout the day,” so for now we’ll go with that.

Who is associated with the movement?

Another contentious issue. There’s the plant-based diet of Ella Mills, the alkaline-based recipes of Natasha Corrett and the somewhat heartier, often meat-based meals of the Hemsley sisters. Some such as Clean Eating Alice’s Alice Liveing directly associate themselves with the term, whilst others are more reluctant to be grouped under the clean eating umbrella since it has received criticism for its often extreme methods. Even Mills - the poster child of "clean" - has now distanced herself, speaking out against the term in BBC documentary Clean Eating – The Dirty Truth. “When I first read the term it meant natural, unprocessed," she said. “Now it doesn’t mean that at all. It means diet. It means fad.”

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Why has it dominated the headlines?

If you're trying to put numbers on the popularity of clean eating as a phenomenon, just look to social media. Mills has more than 1.2 million Instagram followers, Natasha Corrett's Honestly Healthy has over 300,000 and 24-year-old Niomi Smart boasts an enormous 1.8 million. Many consumers have wholeheartedly embraced the movement – kale hit the mainstream, chia became a word we'd heard of, coconut oil went from a weird health food-store item to a supermarket staple and John Lewis sold one Nutribullet every 30 seconds on Black Friday in 2014. Even the likes of Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson adapted their offerings to meet the demand for cleaner eating, with the former releasing two books based around "super foods" and the latter tackling chia seeds and making headlines with her recipe for avocado on toast (though it should be noted that Lawson later argued that her "healthier" recipes were primarily developed to accommodate "faddy" friends). In 2014, the World Health Organisation halved the daily recommended allowance for sugar to six teaspoons per person, whilst Time made scientists' U-turn on butter being bad for you a cover story that same year. So far, so healthy – right?

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The clean eaters ran up against problems when detractors pointed out that many of them were doling out dietary advice without having any real qualifications, with some extolling the "benefits" of cutting out several food groups at once. "Some of the information promoted is not evidenced-based, and can conflict with advice offered by professionals. This is confusing, stressful and frustrating for those trying to take care of their health," says Aisling Piggot, a dietician and spokesperson for the British Dietetic Association. "Just because someone is famous or thin - or both! - does not give them a qualification in nutrition."

The word "orthorexia" also made its way into our vernacular, describing those with an unhealthy obsession surrounding "healthy" food. Is this somewhat muddied focus on wellness actually making us less well?

Media fanfare aside, has it done us any good?

There's no denying that the UK could use a little advice when it comes to eating in a healthier way. Whilst our grandparents grew up cooking more or less everything from scratch, we're accustomed to frequent restaurant dinners, microwave meals and 11pm Deliveroo orders. A 2016 PwC study found that healthy eating is now increasingly on consumers' agendas, with 47 per cent of the 18 to 35 group reporting healthier eating habits between 2015 and 2016 than in the year before.

"The fact that it has become fashionable for people to pay more attention to their diet and consider the nutritional value in meals and food choices is one positive outcome of clean eating," Piggot says. "Many clean eating trends promote the importance of fresh and unprocessed food, which is great to see, and whilst most people fall in and out of fad diets they may have some take-home messages like ‘it’s easy to cook from fresh’, or ‘I don’t need to buy processed foods all the time'."

Rosemary Ferguson, a model-turned-naturopathic-nutritionist who works out of Harley Street and moves in the same circles as the “clean eaters”, agrees that – whilst she doesn't like the term itself – the move towards an awareness of nutrition has positive outcomes.

Jenny Van Sommers

"Eating healthily isn’t rocket science - we used to eat so much better simply because most meals were prepared at home from scratch using simple ingredients such as meat, fish, veg, and unrefined carbs," she tells us. "Simple, fresh food is the easiest way to know you are doing the right thing. Yes, try to pack as much nutrition into food and liquids as you can - it is your fuel and it will have a huge effect on how you feel - but it is not only about the body beautiful, you need to keep you happy, too."

And what negative effects has it had?

"Medical experts suggest that there is an industry of clean eating that is not science-based or healthy, but is a highly marketable and commercially driven fad," says Elaine Slater, a psychologist who consults for The Priory and is resident psychologist for the British Fashion Council at London Fashion Week. "On some levels clean eating has morphed from a sense of awareness about food and turned reasonable concerns into obsessions and fears. The trend and associated hype have created a perfect platform for food shaming and a fixation with righteous eating."

The eliminating of entire food groups by those without legitimate allergies has also been roundly criticised by doctors and dieticians, who point to a varied diet instead for optimum health. "The idea that some foods are clean, sends the message that others are ‘dirty’. This instills a negative relationship with foods that may have benefits – whether nutritional or psychological," Piggot argues.

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Former Bake Off contestant Ruby Tandoh wrote a 2016 piece for Vice about her previous obsession with wellness and subsequent eating disorder, whilst writer Hadley Freeman (who herself suffered from anorexia) retorted in The Guardian that the blaming of the wellness trend for eating disorders is far-fetched and – ultimately – wrong. "Honestly, I wish we could pin anorexia on something like wellness, because deleting Instagram is a lot quicker than 20 years of therapy," she said.

And then there's the effect it has on our food. Chef and food writer Gizzi Erskine, who describes herself as "pro the sentiment of clean eating where it means cooking from scratch, but against the term," argues that an obsession with nutrition that disregards actual enjoyment of food is a negative one.

"Healthy eating got really complicated because some people made it about taking things away – so gluten-free, dairy-free, vegan... Also there were a lot of recipes which came out from that clean eating side of things that were, for me, not recipes - so I found that really disheartening as a cook. I really give a fuck about food, you know?”

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Erskine released her book Gizzi's Healthy Appetite in 2015, promoting the use of fresh food and good ingredients to create balanced meals without cutting any food groups out or leaning too heavily on “fad” ingredients. She also launched a healthy fast food company, Pure Filth, with Rosemary Ferguson in late 2017.

"My biggest pet hate is coconut oil – people are using it in everything nowadays because they’re told it’s the healthiest oil. It is a healthy oil, but I believe as a cook we should use everything through from butter to ghee to rapeseed oil,” she said. "And if I’m cooking Italian, I’m using olive oil. Coconut oil in a bolognese? No. It tastes of coconut!"

What should we take away from it?

The one thing that every person we spoke to agreed upon was the need for balance. Yes, the clean eating movement has made the notion of healthy eating confusing, but the take-home message of eating unprocessed, fresh food with a good balance of vegetables remains an important one. Every single dietician or nutritionist we spoke to was keen to stress that there is a way to eat mindfully without going to extremes.

“It is time to take the concept of clean eating, which is fundamentally a simple good message, back to basics,” Slater told us. “In avoiding the commercially-driven aspects of the movement and listening to fully qualified experts in nutrition we can learn to eat healthily, calmly and intuitively.”

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Arguably some of the angry reactions to the clean eating movement come from our national unwillingness to change our habits surrounding eating. Remember when Jamie Oliver tried to revolutionise school dinners in 2006, and faced parents passing junk food to their children through the school gates? Nobody likes being told what to do – and less still being told that what they are currently doing is wrong – particularly when the information is so muddled. So whilst “magic” solutions might seem like an easy answer, the wisest way to tackle healthy eating seems to be to stick to the good old “a little bit of everything” adage - plus a whole load of veg.

“The problem with us as a country is we love extremes. Why do we find it easier to do the Atkin’s diet, or a gluten-free diet than to just be sensible and practise moderation?” Erskine said. “Sugar is obviously bad for us, but I’m not going to give up a brownie once in a while. There are some foods out there that are dirty. I mean, there are some really dirty burgers out there, and junk foods have grim ingredients lists. But burgers can be clean and brownies can be clean – use good ingredients and make them yourself at home. As far as I’m concerned, the sensible thing is to have as varied a diet as possible most of the time, and every once in a while just say, fuck it.”

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