The key to a healthy relationship with food is to embrace as much variety as possible and try to keep some balance. And no one really likes kale.įortunately, in the real world, there is no need to exclude anything from your diet unless you have a genuine medical reason to do so (a tip – ask a medical doctor or a dietitian rather than an unqualified food blogger). We will be left with kale served in a bowl. They will then decide that avocado and coconut oil are too high in fat and the supply of quinoa is unsustainable. The endpoint will surely be when every Instagrammed meal consists of disappointing combinations of coconut oil, kale, avocado and quinoa. Inevitably, the advice being served is becoming more and more extreme. Image from Īs more new bloggers, Instagram stars and bandwagon-jumping celebrities appear, they have to fight for space in an increasingly crowded wellness market. For various pseudoscientific reasons, followers are told they must cut out wheat, gluten, grains, potatoes, rice, pulses, dairy, meat, fish, fruits or any combination of these depending on which new lifestyle guru is looking most appealing on social media this week. To hide the weight-loss goals that lie at its heart, it advocates cutting whole food groups from the diet, falsely claiming that perfectly nutritious ingredients are damaging to our health dirty and unclean. That implication is damaging and wrong.Īlthough sold as a pathway to effortless health, clean eating is simply an old-fashioned diet of exclusion. If certain foods are considered clean, then all others are, by implication, dirty. Their Instagram accounts document glamorous, aspirational lives centred round stylish kitchens, where these bright young stars perform assorted yoga moves next to an endless procession of avocado and quinoa-based delights.įor a movement that prides itself on being a joyous lifestyle rather than a dietary fad, it has always seemed odd to me that the trend for ‘clean eating’ leaves such an obvious clue to its pernicious nature within its name. Constant dieting, the grim but essential lifestyle accessory of 1980s and 1990s celebrities, has been abandoned by the millennial generation in favour of the effortless perfection of a wellness-centred lifestyle. Dozens of shiny new healthy-food gurus fill the pages of our magazines, newspapers and airwaves telling us about their food philosophies, their natural glow and their journey to perfect health through diet. Clean eating, we are told, is the new path to a happy, healthy lifestyle.
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