No one brags about eating junk food. A healthy diet includes vegetables and avoids too much sugar, and if you eat this way, you can feel good about eating ‘clean’. But you know what? Eating clean is a trap.
Sure, it feels good to eat a “clean” meal or two. Never mind that there is no consistent definition of “clean”. I liked the word when I first heard it, because it meant unprocessed food (fresh vegetables, home-cooked meals) and wasn’t tied to any particular theory, such as a low-carb or low-fat diet. But the vagueness that once made it attractive has been recovered. Today, anything can be clean if it’s sold by someone standing on a beach looking gorgeous.
It was probably inevitable. For years we’ve heard that diets don’t work; what it takes to be healthy is a lifestyle change. So combine this generally sensible concept with our modern infatuation with an enviable lifestyle, and you have an influencer (Instagrammer, movie star, supplement salesman, etc.) who can paint you a picture of the amazing person you will become if you eat like them.
Here’s how the appeal works: each guru presents a simple idea held up by a scaffolding of half truths and cherry picked data. Debunk one small pillar, and the others still stand. Nobody has time to debunk them all, and if you try, you look like a killjoy. But from a distance, that one big idea looks like a beacon of clarity in a confusing world.
Here are some examples: You just need to eat nothing but vegetables. Or avoid most vegetables. Or cut out gluten. Or eliminate dairy, grains, and sugar.
These aren’t variations on one basic idea of healthy eating; they’re each a different gimmick masquerading as common sense. Bee Wilson writes in The Guardian that we’ve been snookered by a “dream of purity in a toxic world” and “[w]e are so unmoored that we will put our faith in any master who promises us that we, too, can become pure and good.”
This fantasy backfires, though, when we look at the foods and diets and people who don’t qualify as “clean.” Does that mean that other foods, and the people who eat them, are “dirty”? It’s not like quinoa is that different from rice, or sweet potatoes are that different from regular potatoes. Coconut sugar is far more expensive than regular sugar, as Wilson points out, but nutritionally almost identical.
The same goes for processed food. It’s not as if processing is inherently bad. (Cooking is a form of processing, after all). Twinkies, for example, aren’t “unclean.” They’re just high in sugar and low in a lot of healthy nutrients, so it makes sense not to eat too many of them.
Without the halo of clean eating, we’re back to evaluating foods on their merits, and figuring out whether they fit into the diet that makes sense for each of us. Sorry if that’s less romantic.
