Ella tries to rewrite her ‘clean’ history
AS DELICIOUSLY Ella, she inspired the ‘clean-eating’ fad that has become a source of controversy.
Now Ella Mills is going to great lengths to distance herself from the movement that has become linked with dubious diets – including rewriting her own history. The 25-year-old has made her name promoting the supposed health benefits of cutting meat, dairy and refined sugar from your diet and stressing the value of avoiding processed foods.
But in a BBC radio interview on Friday, the food writer insisted: ‘There’s a slight irony to the whole thing, having never described myself as “clean”.’
But the MoS has discovered she has used the word ‘clean’ on her blog. When we contacted her to point it out, she hastily rewrote passages to lose the word. On one post she had written: ‘For me, one of the hardest things about adopting a totally clean, healthy diet was finding the right snacks to eat.’
The passage now reads: ‘For me, one of the hardest things about adopting changing the way I ate was finding the right snacks to eat.’
In her first book, Ms Mills credited a vegan diet with helping her live with a debilitating illness at college. It became a bestseller and helped popularise spiralisers – kitchen gadgets that shred vegetables such as courgettes to make a spaghetti substitute. But she has distanced herself from recent negative connotations of ‘clean eating’.
Last night Mrs Mills said of the term: ‘I have distanced myself from it as I felt the meaning has changed and has been overused to package negative fads. I am removing the word “clean” from posts to ensure no relation to the new meaning of the word and what it has come to represent.’