Clean eating’s not a fad, it’s an eating disorder

ThE young woman sitting in front of me is trying to convince me that sugar is evil. ‘Glucose is simply a source of energy. Your body needs it in order to survive,’ I reply.

she looks at me impatiently. ‘It rots the liver,’ she replies. ‘It doesn’t,’ I counter.

I’m having an argument with her about why she can’t survive on vegetables alone. her diet is almost exclusively based on salad. You don’t need to be a doctor to realise that this is why she is painfully thin and keeps fainting, but she’s watched a Youtube video on the evils of carbohydrates, so she’s convinced I’m wrong.

she has an eating disorder, but is convinced she doesn’t. Instead, she is simply ‘clean eating’.

I’ve had similar conversations with patients time and time again. Clean eating is not an innocent trend that’s come along to counter unhealthy diets. It’s not going to solve the obesity crisis. It’s simply an eating disorder by another name.

It’s an epidemic and it’s been spread on sites in the Wild West of the internet, which take no responsibility for the pernicious messages that are promoted.

this week, the National Osteoporosis society said that clean eating was a ‘ ticking time bomb’ that will leave young people with weak bones. they estimate that 40 per cent of youngsters have tried it. Judging by the number of patients I’ve seen, I’d say that was a conservative figure.

Every person I see in my daily eating disorder clinic is ‘clean eating’. Every single one. I’m sick of hearing about it and the hours I — and the specialists I work with — spend trying to counter this misinformation. It’s used as a way of justifying increasingly restrictive and unhealthy diets.

What’sworse, it’s given the veneer of respectability by celebrities insisting that their bodies are the results of cutting out entire food groups and omitting to say that they also spend hours in the gym, have good genetics and rely on airbrushed, photoshopped images.

Well, let me tell you, they are peddling a lie.

In the clinic where I work, we have had several patients in treatment who we know post online about clean eating. Yet they have an eating disorder — a severe, enduring mental illness. My colleagues and I have had various debates about what to do; how we should intervene because we know what they post is a lie, yet it can be hugely influential. they promote an impossible ideal; a fantasy served up as reality.

the food they take pictures of is never eaten. When they write about what they have eaten that day, they omit to tell of the bingeing and purging that occurs late at night when they eat 2,000 calories of cake and ice cream, and then spend the next hour vomiting it back up in the bathroom. Is it really a good idea to take eating advice from people whose relationship with food is so abnormal they have a mental illness?

Of course, there will be those who say they follow ‘clean eating’ and don’t have an eating disorder. they will say they are healthy, that it’s modern food that is harmful and they have eradicated this from their lives.

Rubbish. the central tenet, the very nugget at the core of its belief system, is flawed. the very notion of ‘clean’ eating suggests that some food is dirty or bad, and this simply isn’t the case.

It’s an inherently disordered way of viewing the world. there are healthy and unhealthy quantities of different types of food, but food in itself is just food. By suggesting that some food is bad sets up a false and unhealthy way of looking at what we eat.

Particularly worrying is that many of the promoters of this trend have little or no proper nutritional qualifications and aren’t qualified dietitians, yet they feel at liberty to stipulate what is ‘healthy’ and what is not.

the whole movement is based on anecdote and dodgy science rather than concrete evidence. any diet that promotes excluding groups of foods or demonises types of food, setting up an unhealthy idea in people’s minds, is not promoting health.

It’s downright dangerous.