The day I witnessed the sinister side of the clean eating cult
DURING the spring of 2014, Jordan Younger noticed that her hair was falling out in clumps. At the time, the 23year-old believed she was eating the healthiest of all diets. She was a ‘gluten-free, sugar-free, oil-free, grain-free, legume-free, plant-based raw vegan’.
As The Blonde Vegan, Younger was a New York ‘wellness’ blogger, one of thousands on Instagram (where she had 70,000 followers).
Despite having no qualifications as a nutritionist, Younger had sold more than 40,000 copies of her own $25, five-day ‘cleanse’ programme — a formula for an all-raw, plantbased diet majoring on green juice.
But this ‘clean’ diet Younger was selling as the route to health was making her sick.
Far from being super-healthy, she was suffering from a serious eating disorder: orthorexia, an obsession with consuming only pure and perfect foods. Her periods had stopped and her skin had an orange tinge from all the sweet potato and carrots she consumed (the only carbohydrates she ate).
eventually, she sought psychological help, and began to slowly widen her dietary repertoire, starting with fish. As she recovered, Younger faced a new dilemma.
‘What would people think,’ she agonised, ‘if they knew The Blonde Vegan was eating fish?’
She levelled with her followers in a blog post entitled ‘Why I’m Transitioning Away From Veganism’. Within hours, Younger was receiving irate messages from vegans demanding money back for the cleanse programmes and T-shirts they’d bought from her site.
She lost followers ‘by the thousands’ and received angry messages, including death threats. Some trolls even accused her of being a ‘fat piece of lard’ without the discipline to be truly clean.
Diets and quack cures have a long, colourful history, but previously they existed on the fringes of food culture.
‘Clean eating’ was different because it established itself as a challenge to mainstream ways of eating.
Powered by social media, it has been more absolutist in its claims and more popular in its reach than any previous school of modern nutritional advice.
At its simplest, clean eating is about ingesting nothing but ‘whole’ or ‘unprocessed’ foods.
Some versions of clean eating are vegan, while others espouse various meats (preferably sourced from the wild) and something mysteriously called ‘bone broth’ (stock, to you and me).
At first, clean eating sounded modest and even homespun: rather than counting calories, you ate as many nutritious homecooked substances as possible.
But it quickly became clear that clean eating was more than a diet; it was a belief system that propagated the idea that the way most people eat is impure.
‘much of the food on offer to us today is nutritionally substandard,’ opined Jasmine and melissa Hemsley, who have become best-selling champions of ‘nutrient dense’ food.
Seemingly out of nowhere, a universe of coconut oil, dubious promises and spiralised courgettes emerged. Almost as soon as it became ubiquitous, clean eating sparked a backlash.
Nigella Lawson was speaking for many when she expressed ‘disgust’ for it being a judgmental form of body fascism. The baker Ruby Tandoh said it was an incitement to eating disorders.
In June, the American Heart Association reported that the coconut oil beloved by clean eaters had ‘no known offsetting favourable effects’, and could actually result in higher LDL [i.e. bad] cholesterol.
A few weeks later, Anthony Warner, a biochemist and food consultant who blogs as The Angry Chef, called clean eating a world of ‘nutrib **** cks’. And when Dr Giles Yeo, a geneticist at Cambridge University, investigated the scientific evidence for the trend in BBC Two’s Horizon: Clean eating — The Dirty Truth, he found nothing to support the claims made by its gurus.
But however much the concept of clean eating has been refuted and reviled, it shows few signs of dying. Check out the proliferation of cookbooks promising us inner purity and outer beauty.
And even if you have never knowingly tried to ‘eat clean’, it’s impossible to avoid the trend because it has influenced the range of foods available to us.
Take avocados — beloved of clean eaters — which now outsell oranges in the UK, while quinoa is in every supermarket and kale is as common as lettuce. Susi Richards, who was until recently head of product development at Sainsbury’s, is surprised by the pace of demand for products fitting the clean eating credo.
Families who would once have eaten potato waffles are now experimenting with lower carb butternut ‘squaffles’ (slices of butternut squash cut to resemble a waffle), she says.
To understand how clean eating took hold, it’s necessary to realise just how terrifying food has become for millions of people today. In the post-war decades, most countries underwent a transition to a Westernised diet high in sugar, meat, fat, salt, refined oils and processed concoctions, and low in vegetables.
This diet brought with it dramatic rises in ill-health. In prosperous countries, large numbers of people became wary of the modern food supply and what it was doing to our bodies: type 2 diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease, allergies, and a host of other complaints influenced by diet, from Alzheimer’s to gout. Into this atmosphere of anxiety and confusion stepped a series of gurus offering messages of simplicity and reassurance: eat this way and I will make you fresh and healthy again. It’s hard to pinpoint the start of the clean eating trend but in the early 2000s, two distinct versions became popular in the U.S. — one based on the creed of ‘real’ food, and the other on the idea of ‘detox’. The advent of social media allowed the basic idea to spread as early adopters of clean eating shared their artfully photographed green juices and rainbow salad bowls. The first and more moderate version of ‘clean’ food started in 2007, when Tosca Reno, a Canadian fitness model, published The eat-Clean Diet. She claimed to have lost 75lb and transformed her health by avoiding all overly-refined and ‘processed foods’.
MeANWHILe, a second version of clean eating was emerging — popularised by actress Gwyneth Paltrow after she praised the ‘clean detox system’ developed by a former cardiologist from Uruguay, Alejandro Junger, on her lifestyle website, Goop.
This system required a radical elimination diet based on liquid meals and an exclusion of caffeine, alcohol, dairy and eggs, sugar, all vegetables in the ‘nightshade family’ (tomatoes, aubergines etc), and red meat, among other foods.
During this phase, Junger recommended home-made juices and soups, or his own powdered shakes. After the detox period, Junger advised cautiously reintroducing ‘toxic triggers’ such as wheat (‘a classic trigger of allergic responses’) and dairy (‘an acid-forming food’).
From 2009 to 2014, the number of Americans who avoided gluten more than tripled. It also became fashionable to drink a pantheon of non-dairy milks, ranging from oat milk to almond milk.
Anne Dolamore of the independent cookery publishers, Grub Street, saw first-hand how
It’s the ‘ultra-healthy’ diet fad beloved by countless young women. But, as BEE WILSON found, criticise it at your peril
quickly and radically clean eating transformed the market. She watched aghast as cookbooks piled up from a ‘never-ending stream of blonde, willowy authorities’, many of whom seemed to be devising diets based on little but their own experience.
Indeed, almost all of the authors of the British clean eating best-sellers started as bloggers or Instagrammers, many of them beautiful women in their early 20s who were convinced that the diets they’d invented had cured them of various ailments.
‘Food has the power to make or break you,’ wrote amelia Freer in her 2014 bestseller eat. Nourish. Glow. (which has sold more than 200,000 copies). Freer was leading a busy life as a personal assistant to Prince Charles when she realised that her stomach ‘looked and felt as if it had a football in it’ from too many snatched dinners of cheese on toast or ‘factorymade food’.
By giving up ‘processed’ and convenience foods along with gluten and sugar, she claimed to have found the secret to ‘looking younger and feeling healthier’.
There was something paradoxical about the way these books were marketed. What they were selling purported to be an alternative to a sordidly commercial food industry. Yet clean eating is itself a wildly profitable commercial enterprise, promoted using photogenic young bloggers on multibillion dollar tech platforms.
By 2016, 18 out of the 20 top sellers in amazon UK’s food and drink book category had a focus on healthy eating and dieting.
The irony, however, was that the kind of wellresearched books Grub Street’s anne Dolamore and others once published no longer sold so well, because health publishing was now dominated by social media celebrities.
THeN again, there are those who argue in favour of giving credit where credit is due. Giles Yeo agrees that many of the clean eating recipes he tried for his Horizon documentary are ‘a tasty and cool way to cook vegetables’.
But why, he asks, do these authors not simply say ‘I am publishing a very good vegetarian cookbook’?
‘The poison comes from the fact that they are wrapping the whole thing up in pseudo-science,’ Yeo says. ‘If you base something on falsehoods, it empowers people to take extreme actions and this is where the harm begins.’
I can pinpoint the exact moment that my own feelings about clean eating changed from ambivalence to outright dislike.
I was on stage at the Cheltenham literary Festival with dietician renee mcGregor (who works with Olympic athletes and eating disorder sufferers) to take part in a clean-eating debate with nutritionist madeleine Shaw, author of Get The Glow and ready Steady Glow. I’d been rather taken by the upbeat tone of Shaw’s book (‘stop depriving yourself and start living’) and humorous approach (‘I often surprise myself by finding new things to spiralise’).
But underneath the brightness there were notes of restriction (‘as ever, all my recipes are sugar and wheat-free’, Shaw announces) that I found worrying and confused.
I was more alarmed by her ninepoint food ‘philosophy’, which dictates that all bread and pasta should be avoided because they are ‘full of chemicals, preservatives and genetically modified wheat’, and ‘not whole foods’.
I asked Shaw why she told people to cut out all bread, and was startled when she denied she’d said any such thing. She was also challenged on how the restrictions of clean eating often segued into debilitating anorexia or orthorexia.
‘But I only see the positive,’ said Shaw, now wiping away tears.
It was at this point that the audience descended into outright hostility, a crowd of 300 clean eating fans shouting and hissing for mcGregor and myself to get off stage.
They were angry with us because we were challenging her. To insist on the facts made us come across as cruelly negative. We had punctured the happy belief-bubble of ‘glowiness’ that they had come to imbibe from Shaw. That night in Cheltenham, I saw that clean eating had assumed elements of a cult. as with any cult, it could be something dark and divisive if you got on the wrong side of it. after Giles Yeo’s documentary was aired, he was startled to find himself subjected to relentless online trolling. ‘They said I was funded by Big Pharma [he isn’t], and therefore obviously wouldn’t see the benefits of a healthy diet over medicine. These were outright lies.’
It’s clear that clean eating, for all its good intentions, can cause real harm, both to truth and to human beings.
Over the past 18 months, dietitian renee mcGregor says that ‘every single client with an eating disorder who walks into my clinic doors is either following or wants to follow a ‘clean’ way of eating’.
Clearly, not everyone who has bought a clean-eating book has developed an eating disorder. But a movement with the premise that normal food is unhealthy has certainly muddied the waters of ‘healthy eating’ for everyone else, by planting the idea that a good diet is one founded on absolutes.
The calamity of clean eating is not that it is entirely false. It is that it contains ‘a kernel of truth’, as Giles Yeo puts it. ‘When you strip down all the pseudo babble, they are absolutely right to say that we should eat more vegetables, less refined sugar and less meat,’ he said.
The problem is it’s near impossible to pick out the sensible bits of ‘clean eating’ and ignore the rest.
Bee Wilson’s latest book is First Bite: How We learn To eat. This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in The Guardian.