'Clean food' is a dangerous fad
The trendy nutritional advice that's more likely to make you ill than healthy
There’s 25-year-old Madeleine Shaw, a ‘holistic nutritional health coach’ who believes in ‘enlivening the hottest, happiest and healthiest you’ and offers a ‘chia seed egg substitute’ to use in recipes. Ella Woodward, 23, bounced back from a rare illness after adopting a new plant-based diet and entices her followers with sweet potato brownies. Tess Ward, 23, has written a cookbook called The Naked Diet which replaces the conventional chapter headings — ‘Breakfasts’, ‘Starters’, ‘Mains’, ‘Puddings’ —with ‘Pure’, ‘Raw’, ‘Stripped’, ‘Clean’ and ‘Detox’. And there’s the Hemsley sisters, Jasmine and Melissa, whose bestselling cookbook The Art of Eating Well contains no recipes with grains, gluten or refined sugar.
Woodward recommends raw, rather than pasteurised, coconut water, which is tinted pink ‘because of all those antioxidants’ and warns about the dangers of dairy. Milk, she says, ‘can actually cause calcium loss in our bones! This is because milk causes the pH of our bodies to become acidic which triggers a natural reaction in our bodies to bring the pH of our blood back to neutral’. When we drink milk, she says, calcium is drawn from our bones in order to rebalance the acidity it causes, which can result in a calcium deficit.
This is news to nutritionists. Milk can, if consumed in absurdly excessive quantities, lead to a condition called milk-alkali syndrome — but this is more commonly caused by over-consumption of calcium supplements than by guzzling milk. More common is calcium deficiency, which the NHS says can be caused by cutting out dairy products.
Sian Porter, a consultant dietitian, warns that ‘if people do not plan really carefully for substitutes for food groups then you can end up malnourishing yourself.’ So these diets are not simply a silly fad that might leave you a little skinnier. The pursuit of wellness and ‘clean eating’ could, in the long-term, make you unwell. ‘Often, these people have found that an approach works for them, and that’s great,’ says Porter. ‘But it doesn’t mean that it will work for anyone else.’
The trendy nutritional advice that's more likely to make you ill than healthy
There’s 25-year-old Madeleine Shaw, a ‘holistic nutritional health coach’ who believes in ‘enlivening the hottest, happiest and healthiest you’ and offers a ‘chia seed egg substitute’ to use in recipes. Ella Woodward, 23, bounced back from a rare illness after adopting a new plant-based diet and entices her followers with sweet potato brownies. Tess Ward, 23, has written a cookbook called The Naked Diet which replaces the conventional chapter headings — ‘Breakfasts’, ‘Starters’, ‘Mains’, ‘Puddings’ —with ‘Pure’, ‘Raw’, ‘Stripped’, ‘Clean’ and ‘Detox’. And there’s the Hemsley sisters, Jasmine and Melissa, whose bestselling cookbook The Art of Eating Well contains no recipes with grains, gluten or refined sugar.
Woodward recommends raw, rather than pasteurised, coconut water, which is tinted pink ‘because of all those antioxidants’ and warns about the dangers of dairy. Milk, she says, ‘can actually cause calcium loss in our bones! This is because milk causes the pH of our bodies to become acidic which triggers a natural reaction in our bodies to bring the pH of our blood back to neutral’. When we drink milk, she says, calcium is drawn from our bones in order to rebalance the acidity it causes, which can result in a calcium deficit.
This is news to nutritionists. Milk can, if consumed in absurdly excessive quantities, lead to a condition called milk-alkali syndrome — but this is more commonly caused by over-consumption of calcium supplements than by guzzling milk. More common is calcium deficiency, which the NHS says can be caused by cutting out dairy products.
Sian Porter, a consultant dietitian, warns that ‘if people do not plan really carefully for substitutes for food groups then you can end up malnourishing yourself.’ So these diets are not simply a silly fad that might leave you a little skinnier. The pursuit of wellness and ‘clean eating’ could, in the long-term, make you unwell. ‘Often, these people have found that an approach works for them, and that’s great,’ says Porter. ‘But it doesn’t mean that it will work for anyone else.’