Clean eating

Out of the borders - Food cultures

So there can be dirty food?

by Elena Leiterer

Like most trends nowadays, the “clean eating” trend appeared to me on social media. At a certain point, my “for you page” was filled with posts on healthy recipes, all with the hashtag clean eating in the caption. Without actively following the trend, I was suddenly in a bubble of highly ambitious young, primarily female influencers who promised their recipes and tricks would give me a healthy body and better quality of life.

So on Youtube, I searched for healthy and tasty recipes and discovered channels only dedicated to “clean” food and recipes. These videos and posts mainly worked for me in finding new recipes and trying to stay “healthy”.

And it’s undeniable how cooking by yourself with fresh ingredients can have good health benefits. However, after spending a lot of time in this bubble, I noticed how my mindset started to change. Yet how did the trend come about first?

Birth of the trend

Clean eating was first invented as a diet by the model Tosca Reno in 2006. With her book “The Eat-Clean Diet”, the trend started mainly as a diet to lose weight.

Nowadays the clean eating trend has turned into a lifestyle focusing mainly on natural nutrition. “Eating clean” superficially means consuming pure, fresh and unprocessed foods. But like with other diets, there is a more strict approach to the trend where the consumption of alcohol, sugar and animal products is prohibited. Also, their clean eating can mean following rules additionally, like eating many but small meals per day or avoiding fats in general.

Adverse effects of the trend on social media

Like almost every lifestyle-trend in today’s society, social media has put the clean eating trend in vogue. There are 47,6 million (15.11.22) posts with the hashtag #cleaneating only on Instagram. The trend spread by influencers and has developed into a flourishing industry. Most of these influencers promote “clean” products or their recipes.

Social media gives these food bloggers the power to influence consumers’ eating habits and mindsets, especially young people. The clean eating trend makes no exception. And that’s why video titles like this;

can be concerning. Under the haze of clean eating, the focus shifts from eating healthy to becoming obsessed with eating with the strict roles of the diet. The origin of the now “lifestyle trend” was to lose weight, and any diet promising that outcome can lead to an eating disorder for certain people. And that’s when the trend for the time being healthy can become unhealthy when people go to one extreme.

The healthy trend has the main issue. The word “clean” can lead to food shaming. It implies that particular food that does not fall under the definition of clean eating, like fats and processed food, is dirty and wrong and this obsession with eating clean can turn into:

Orthorexia Nervosa

The eating disorder, including this unhealthy obsession with “healthy food”, is called Orthorexia Nervosa. The eating disorder usually begins with a person cutting down on certain food groups, such as red meat or processed foods, to make their diet “more healthy.” It can even go to a point where rules of the trend, for example, not eating any fats at all, can negatively affect one’s health.

By cutting out too many food groups, nutritional deficiencies can happen. Fats, for example, are often mistakenly considered unhealthy. Moreover, lubricants such as olive oil or avocado oil contain essential fats your body needs to support your immune system. Nutritional deficiencies can lead to a weak immune system and brain fog (inability to focus, remember things, and use logic).

Besides the physical effect, Orthorexia Nervosa shows particularly in the psychical form. People suffering from eating disorders are constantly worrying about their food. Any situation concerning food can cause a lot of stress. Especially social problems like eating at a restaurant with friends or having dinner with your family because of the fear of not having anything to eat that’s healthy or pure. This behavior can significantly impact social relationships and make you feel isolated.

Concluding the “clean eating trend” can be healthy or not depending on how the person interprets it. The issue is with social media

promoting wrong standards and contributing to people taking the diet to an extreme where it becomes unhealthy. An additional problem and the problem with the trend is how it started as a weight loss diet. There are still unhealthy tendencies in the form of rules that can lead to eating disorders. Writing this article I learned to be cautious about obsessing about what I eat and try to keep the balance between eating healthy and allowing myself to eat what I want.

Sources:

(288) Essstörung Orthorexie: Zwanghaft gesund! | Muss ich mich besser ernähren? Folge 4/5 - YouTube

(288) Orthorexie: Gesund leben als Essstörung | Auf Klo - YouTube

Orthorexia Nervosa - Social Medias Dark Side | Nutrifix | Building Healthier Workplaces

Clean Eating - Was bedeutet dieser Trend eigentlich?