The Clean Eating Lie

With acknowledgement from Giles Coren, writing in the Times whose words are copied in parts. The language contained isn’t Deanne’s.

Anyone looking at Clean Eating, The Dirty Truth BBC Horizon would have seen some of the main myths of clean eating demolished including “Dr” Robert Young’s Alkaline Diet message and health claims.

Every diet claims to be the one that works; F-Plan, Cabbage Soup, Dukan, etc etc. We all signed a great sigh of relief when each was discredited or shown not to work, and we said   “I’m not eating another mouthful of cabbage, steak, kale smoothie etc. again” and we dived straight back into eating whatever we most liked that we felt had been taken away from us under false pretences.

As political events have a long backlash well after the event has ended (e.g. Vietnam war),  the same backlash happens about the history of healthy eating. We were told 50 years ago that fat was bad for us (however it shows up) and people are still terrified of drinking real (whole) milk.

So why are the Brits so overweight? It is because the discrediting of each diet rings in our dumb brains as a de facto endorsement of everything it had prohibited.  “You see”  we cry “I always knew that the experts didn’t know what they are talking about” so we tuck in like never before. Because diets invented by morons ( to deal with their own personal physical problems) to cater for other morons or suckers,  are always discredited down the line, often by other morons who have even more moronic ideas. All they want is to pick up the morons who are looking around for the next quick fix says Coren.

Systems like clean eating, detoxes, kale smoothies, NEVER eat meat or you’re a bad person; are just invented by morons who want to turn your own failure to grasp the simple messages of good nutrition into money, and they are addling your brain.

We just need to be less stupid. The rules for eating properly and staying slim are so obvious that it makes my eyes bleed says Coren.

Just don’t eat things out of packets or wrappings. Don’t eat in front of a screen or on transport or in the street. Don’t eat standing up, without cutlery or from a box. Don’t eat anything delivered to your door or passed to you in a car through a hatch or because you saw it advertised on TV. Don’t eat just because you are bored and don’t eat anything which contains ingredients you cannot visualise. Above all don’t eat or even drink anything which your grandmother would not have recognised as food and drink. And don’t solve your problems in a bottle of alcohol.

Regarding the last paragraph, I agree with him with the exception of a bit of dark chocolate.