There is No Such Thing as Clean Eating

With this article, the intention is not to undermine your efforts if you are following a diet that is “clean”. It is to give you more options and dramatically increase your odds of lifetime adherence to healthier eating habits.

What Is Clean Eating?

No one knows. Good ideas can be defined. They have an elevator pitch, that the intended audience can easily understand. The problem with ‘clean eating’ is that it can’t be objectively defined. It is entirely subjective.

This might sound like intellectualising what should be a straightforward concept to grasp. One might have a point, but let’s examine how it is defined when searched for in Google.

The practice of eating primarily unprocessed and unrefined foods

This is not entirely true, as most ‘clean’ diets include processed grains like rice or wholewheat options of other processed foods. Particularly if you take the definition from bodybuilding spheres.

But even if we were to adopt this definition, it is rooted in a flaw in logic: the naturalistic fallacy. The idea is that if something is derived from nature, it must healthier than a processed alternative. But this is not always the case.

Context is Key

If I were to eat a diet I considered to be ‘clean’, I would surely attain results that benefit me either in body composition or health outcomes. However, foods considered ‘clean’ are typically low in calories, high in satiety, and sometimes high in fibre. These are all great things if weight loss is your prime directive.

However, some individuals require much higher calorie intakes. Take me, for example. I am not an athlete, just a regular person who trains five to six times a week and has a mostly sedentary job.

Yet I require approximately 3,500 calories to maintain my weight and over 4,000 calories to build muscle mass. Getting in this many calories from all ‘clean’ foods would be an absolute nightmare. My stomach would be like a rock, and I would undoubtedly feel sluggish from eating such a large volume of food, and I run the risk of over-consuming certain nutrients.

For lifters just starting out who are not yet tracking their calories, "clean eating" result in chronic undereating. It feels like you’re eating a lot while eating high-volume / low-calorie foods, but you may be severely under-eating and not know it.

Unintended Consequences

In my early twenties, I would eat copious amounts of chicken, rice, and canned tuna while adhering to a mostly ‘clean’ diet. Not only was I chronically under-eating, but I did not know at the time that such a diet may lead to toxic results.

Tuna contains one of the largest mercury concentrations among fish, which is toxic to the nervous system in high doses. Rice absorbs a hefty amount of arsenic from the soil it’s grown in. Given that I am now stuck with unexplained polyneuropathy as an adult, some of these unhealthy diet habits during key developmental phases may have contributed to this. Or perhaps it was so many years of under-eating on what was supposedly a bodybuilders' diet.

Even dietary fibre in high enough amounts can have negative consequences. Fibre plays a crucial role in digestion, moving food through the intestines, but if this happens too quickly due to too much fibre, this can lead to malabsorption of critical vitamins and minerals.

Now, let’s keep things in context here. I am not saying that most people should have hang-ups about consuming rice, lean fish and dietary fibre. I am definitely a proponent of increasing fibre intake.

But for some individuals who require abnormally high-calorie intakes, there is a risk of over-consuming nutrients that are typically seen as a positive, in most consequences.

Adherence

The term ‘Majoring in the Minors’ comes to mind when I hear someone discuss ‘clean eating’ or ‘clean foods’.

“ When you attempt to optimise for a 100% solution in any direction, you cause a whole cascade of consequences, which you weren’t even aware of” - Brett Weinstein

Clean eating is one of these situations in that it can cause a severe rebound effect in the form of binge eating. Any form of restrictive diet poses this risk and is the reason why diets have a failure rate as high as 95%, depending on which source you cite.

In contrast, adhering 100% of the time to a way of eating that is 75% optimal is absolutely doable for a lifetime. I learned this lesson the hard way. In my childhood and early adulthood, I was a chronic binge eater. This eating pattern would only worsen the more I attempted to diet.

It wasn’t until 2015, thanks to Layne Norton’s content and the flexible dieting movement, that I could fully take back control of my eating by understanding the science behind nutrition. For better, or for worse, I am someone who has a deep need to fully understand every aspect of everything I am doing.

“Natural”

Some claim that certain foods are ‘natural’, as opposed to other foods, or that ‘unprocessed’ is necessarily better. This is the naturalistic fallacy at work, where one presumes that because something is ‘natural’, it is superior. I understand this line of thinking, as I found myself sucked in by such reasoning in the past, trying diets such as keto and paleo, which both prioritise a diet free from processed foods.

What proponents of these diets often leave out is that many of the natural foods available in nowadays would not be available to us were we actually back in caveman days. Coming from Ireland, I would never know what a banana was, never mind the colourful mix of foreign berries that accompany just one of my many meals throughout the day.

Additionally, we have all, at some point, been exposed to medical interventions, vaccinations, etc, which we have to thank for the fact that we will most likely live beyond our thirties.

Nutrition is no different. We can actually fortify foods and supplement our needs beyond what is "natural" to derive a life expectancy beyond that of a caveman.

What About Obvious Culprits? Like Sugar!

Sugar is not inherently bad for you. I know that sounds like an obvious falsehood, but the evidence does not support that once caloric intake is controlled for. This clinical trial fed one group over 100g (20 teaspoons) of table sugar per day, while feeding another group just 10g. Both groups were eating 1,100 calories and saw the same reductions in weight and the same improvements in all major markers of health.

All carbohydrates are broken down into glucose (sugar), and if you don't get it from carbohydrates, your body will convert protein into sugar via a process called gluconeogenesis.

Additionally, if you have a high caloric requirement like I do, some processed, fast sugars can be a great caloric supplement to a diet full of lean protein sources, fresh fruits, and vegetables.

Tradeoffs

The term orthorexia has gone out of fashion in the social media age of cult-like diets, and it's a shame. Time and time again, I see plenty of high-functioning, intelligent individuals fall victim to headlines that create fear around specific foods.

There are no 'clean' foods and no perfect diets; there are just tradeoffs when it comes to nutrition.

Solution

If you've found this article has created more questions for you around nutrition, I'm glad. You actually have far more flexibility and options than you may think when it comes to eating healthy.

Start viewing your nutrition as a budget, where you focus on the aspects of nutrition that will deliver the biggest impact:

1. Caloric Restriction
2. Eating enough Protein
3. Eating enough Fibre
4. Getting in plenty of Fruits and Vegetables
5. Beyond this, rewarding yourself regularly with whatever foods fit within your caloric budget, that make it easier for you to consistently eat healthy for life.

If you would like help creating this calorie budget, you can book a call with me here, or drop me a direct message on LinkedIn. I'd be more than happy to talk you through sustainable, evidence-based approaches to a healthier you.