In Defence of Clean Eating

Congratulations, you’ve made it through January 2017. We can now turn our backs on that inaugural month and all the short lived health crazes that accompanied it. Veganuary and dry january both featured prominently on social media this year, the last vestiges of many new leafs which abounded just a few weeks ago have fallen into the annals of history for yet another year. We’ve already reached peak gym membership 2017.

In this time I’ve been ruminating about diet, health and ‘clean eating’ after it received another bashing in the the wake of the BBC Horizon programme ‘Clean Eating — The Dirty Truth’. In this programme, Dr Giles Yeo explores the world of clean eating from a scientific perspective, to find out what foundations lay, if any, behind the over-exposed Instagram accounts of these cleanliness gurus.

Charlatans.

I found the programme highly divisive and quite partisan in it’s despatching of clean eating. The message was clear, that clean eating is the territory of unqualified, faux-scientific characters with unsubstantiated evidence, if any at all, for their health claims. I felt sad to see miracle cancer cure charlatan Robert O Young lumped in with bloggers like Ella Mills (nee Woodward), because the context of their respective approaches is very, very different.