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What is clean eating?
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Bry_Lander wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »@nikkimendez666 if you have followed the thread you must know your answer is full of holes. What is a "whole food"?
Eggs are whole but aren't plant-based.
I imagine you'll allow grains and nuts to be shelled and hulled. How about grinding for flour? Is that much processing allowed in your plan?
How about pressing olives for their oil?
Drying grapes in to raisins?
If you eat only unprocessed "whole foods" could you eat a meal of hemp seeds, raisins, and broccoli as long as they weren't mixed together?
I don't think people consider applying physical force (crushing, mixing, shucking, grinding, pressing, etc.) to food as unacceptable processing, at least that is my interpretation. Unwanted processing to me is industrially injecting / mixing / treating food with chemicals to make them more profitable for corporations, ie, food coloring, preservatives mixed in a test tube, steroids, anti-biotics, hormones, etc., that don't add to the nutritional value of the food.
Aye, there's the rub, isn't it? We are dealing with many interpretations for the same idea. Hence my Venn diagram. Your use is dastardly difficult to define, as one must speak to motive.
What if a farmer's wife is doctoring her family's food in order to extend it's shelf-life, and thereby save the family money? The additives in her arsenal include salt, sugar, vinegar, gelatin, and pectin. If she mixes these ingredients in a bowl instead of a test-tube, does her final product become "clean"?
Take the lowly pickle. It has at least three of the preservatives mentioned above. None of the processing adds to the food's nutritional value; all it does is extend the shelf-life of the cucumber, saving the family money. Is a pickle dirty?
Yes, it is tricky. Maybe the line is drawn between the processing that is inherent in the creation of the food, like a pickle, and the processing that is just a corporate strategy by companies that industrially create and distribute foods to increase profitability.
So perhaps it is analyzing what ingredients / processes that are required to make a pickle and balancing those against what ingredients / processes a company uses to mass produce pickles in an effort to minimize the cost of processing and maximize the product's shelf life. In most cases I would rather eat a home processed pickle from the farmer's wife's fridge that she grew and canned herself than one from the jar that rolled off the assembly line at Vlasic. The addition of Yellow #5 and Polysorbate 80 are not there to benefit my nutrition.
So Vladimir Von Oreo made under communism is cleaner than capitalist Oreo? I'm not seeing why corporatism and profit motive matter in how clean a food is.
Most people consider raw organic produce rather clean but most of it reaches people via chains of large corporations. Indeed, advertising the concept of clean and natural is a corporate strategy in itself.
I talked about this earlier from an insider perspective... I think you were the only person to comment on it.0 -
Bry_Lander wrote: »janejellyroll wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »
I agree, taste is as big or a bigger priority than nutrition for a lot of people. That still doesn’t sell me on consuming Yellow #5 and Polysorbate 80.janejellyroll wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »@nikkimendez666 if you have followed the thread you must know your answer is full of holes. What is a "whole food"?
Eggs are whole but aren't plant-based.
I imagine you'll allow grains and nuts to be shelled and hulled. How about grinding for flour? Is that much processing allowed in your plan?
How about pressing olives for their oil?
Drying grapes in to raisins?
If you eat only unprocessed "whole foods" could you eat a meal of hemp seeds, raisins, and broccoli as long as they weren't mixed together?
I don't think people consider applying physical force (crushing, mixing, shucking, grinding, pressing, etc.) to food as unacceptable processing, at least that is my interpretation. Unwanted processing to me is industrially injecting / mixing / treating food with chemicals to make them more profitable for corporations, ie, food coloring, preservatives mixed in a test tube, steroids, anti-biotics, hormones, etc., that don't add to the nutritional value of the food.
Aye, there's the rub, isn't it? We are dealing with many interpretations for the same idea. Hence my Venn diagram. Your use is dastardly difficult to define, as one must speak to motive.
What if a farmer's wife is doctoring her family's food in order to extend it's shelf-life, and thereby save the family money? The additives in her arsenal include salt, sugar, vinegar, gelatin, and pectin. If she mixes these ingredients in a bowl instead of a test-tube, does her final product become "clean"?
Take the lowly pickle. It has at least three of the preservatives mentioned above. None of the processing adds to the food's nutritional value; all it does is extend the shelf-life of the cucumber, saving the family money. Is a pickle dirty?
Yes, it is tricky. Maybe the line is drawn between the processing that is inherent in the creation of the food, like a pickle, and the processing that is just a corporate strategy by companies that industrially create and distribute foods to increase profitability.
So perhaps it is analyzing what ingredients / processes that are required to make a pickle and balancing those against what ingredients / processes a company uses to mass produce pickles in an effort to minimize the cost of processing and maximize the product's shelf life. In most cases I would rather eat a home processed pickle from the farmer's wife's fridge that she grew and canned herself than one from the jar that rolled off the assembly line at Vlasic. The addition of Yellow #5 and Polysorbate 80 are not there to benefit my nutrition.
Home cooks frequently add ingredients that aren't there to benefit the nutritional value of the food. I'm not sure why a company doing this is worse or less "clean" than a home cook doing it.
I agree with all of this. Eating the perfect diet is aspirational, and completely unrealistic (in my life, anyways). I don’t have a jar of pickles made by a farmer’s wife in my fridge, I have Vlasic pickles, and I get my dose of food coloring and emulsifiers accordinglylemurcat12 wrote: »I'm not against reading labels and learning about ingredients if one is unsure what they are/why they are there, but this is actually related to why I don't like the clean eating thing. Back when I was over-neurotic about food (from my current perspective), I'd do things like refuse to eat pickles unless I made them myself, but the truth is that my lifestyle is such that it's something of a hassle to make pickles (but yay for those of you who make them regularly, I always mean to start doing that and canning stuff and so on) and it was kind of silly to avoid eating perfectly good store-bought pickles just because in theory I wanted to be making them myself. It's also silly to feel that logging them is a failure and not living up to some standard.
I realize that for some you don't get all self-judgmental or neurotic about it, and that's great, but I worry that newbies get the message that their eating habits aren't good enough unless they cut out all such foods that really has nothing at all to do with weight loss (or, IMO, health/nutrition) and end up making the perfect the enemy of the good so it all just seems way more hard and time-consuming than it needs to be. Easy healthy or simply improving one's diet is much simpler and need not require a huge investment of time. I can whip up a dinner with lots of vegetables and some lean protein in a snap (and part of why I can do that is that I will live with relying on dried pasta or canned beans from time to time and not see that as some failure or lesser-than option vs what I should be doing).
I would hope that the new people understand the failures that are inherent in attempting to eat a less-processed diet, and not get too discouraged at having to settle for what is readily available.
I'm not trying to sell you on consuming anything you don't want to consume. But I'm asking you what is the distinction between a company adding an ingredient to a food to enhance taste, appearance, or texture and a home cook doing the same? I don't see a meaningful difference.
It is just a preference. Do you want mom's homemade bread with 6-7 ingredients or Subway's with 30+ ingredients? You can go down the list of ingredients that Subway adds and there is a purpose for each one (prolonging the shelf life, firmness, color, texture, etc.), but that doesn't inspire me to choose their bread over the homemade version. (And for the sensitive people out there, I'm not saying you are a bad person for eating at Subway, I have had their bread on countless occasions, so please don't be hurt by my criticism...)
Just to be clear, it's not about being a bad person. It's about priorities and not beating yourself up over dumb things. You can get bread of all sorts from the supermarket (I never buy bread from the supermarket, but just because I don't eat bread at home much and am picky about it) or from restaurants (I'm fond of a sandwich place that is pretty embarrassing in their focus on the the trendy this and that, and I bet their bread doesn't have lots of ingredients, although number of ingredients isn't a focus of mine). So if there are ingredients you'd prefer to avoid or quality differences, I totally get that, but why tell yourself that supermarket bread or bakery bread or whatever is "less clean" or "not clean" (and I still don't get how "less clean" is distinct from dirty). I just don't get that. I am all for eating in an aspirational way -- I have ideas about how I'd like to eat that I don't always live up to -- but I don't get how it helps to tell myself that my meals are clean or not clean or that I eat semi clean or whatever. I try to eat well, to prioritize nutrient dense food and quality and to also enjoy what I eat (which means trying to cook it in a way that makes it taste good).0 -
lemurcat12 wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »janejellyroll wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »
I agree, taste is as big or a bigger priority than nutrition for a lot of people. That still doesn’t sell me on consuming Yellow #5 and Polysorbate 80.janejellyroll wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »@nikkimendez666 if you have followed the thread you must know your answer is full of holes. What is a "whole food"?
Eggs are whole but aren't plant-based.
I imagine you'll allow grains and nuts to be shelled and hulled. How about grinding for flour? Is that much processing allowed in your plan?
How about pressing olives for their oil?
Drying grapes in to raisins?
If you eat only unprocessed "whole foods" could you eat a meal of hemp seeds, raisins, and broccoli as long as they weren't mixed together?
I don't think people consider applying physical force (crushing, mixing, shucking, grinding, pressing, etc.) to food as unacceptable processing, at least that is my interpretation. Unwanted processing to me is industrially injecting / mixing / treating food with chemicals to make them more profitable for corporations, ie, food coloring, preservatives mixed in a test tube, steroids, anti-biotics, hormones, etc., that don't add to the nutritional value of the food.
Aye, there's the rub, isn't it? We are dealing with many interpretations for the same idea. Hence my Venn diagram. Your use is dastardly difficult to define, as one must speak to motive.
What if a farmer's wife is doctoring her family's food in order to extend it's shelf-life, and thereby save the family money? The additives in her arsenal include salt, sugar, vinegar, gelatin, and pectin. If she mixes these ingredients in a bowl instead of a test-tube, does her final product become "clean"?
Take the lowly pickle. It has at least three of the preservatives mentioned above. None of the processing adds to the food's nutritional value; all it does is extend the shelf-life of the cucumber, saving the family money. Is a pickle dirty?
Yes, it is tricky. Maybe the line is drawn between the processing that is inherent in the creation of the food, like a pickle, and the processing that is just a corporate strategy by companies that industrially create and distribute foods to increase profitability.
So perhaps it is analyzing what ingredients / processes that are required to make a pickle and balancing those against what ingredients / processes a company uses to mass produce pickles in an effort to minimize the cost of processing and maximize the product's shelf life. In most cases I would rather eat a home processed pickle from the farmer's wife's fridge that she grew and canned herself than one from the jar that rolled off the assembly line at Vlasic. The addition of Yellow #5 and Polysorbate 80 are not there to benefit my nutrition.
Home cooks frequently add ingredients that aren't there to benefit the nutritional value of the food. I'm not sure why a company doing this is worse or less "clean" than a home cook doing it.
I agree with all of this. Eating the perfect diet is aspirational, and completely unrealistic (in my life, anyways). I don’t have a jar of pickles made by a farmer’s wife in my fridge, I have Vlasic pickles, and I get my dose of food coloring and emulsifiers accordinglylemurcat12 wrote: »I'm not against reading labels and learning about ingredients if one is unsure what they are/why they are there, but this is actually related to why I don't like the clean eating thing. Back when I was over-neurotic about food (from my current perspective), I'd do things like refuse to eat pickles unless I made them myself, but the truth is that my lifestyle is such that it's something of a hassle to make pickles (but yay for those of you who make them regularly, I always mean to start doing that and canning stuff and so on) and it was kind of silly to avoid eating perfectly good store-bought pickles just because in theory I wanted to be making them myself. It's also silly to feel that logging them is a failure and not living up to some standard.
I realize that for some you don't get all self-judgmental or neurotic about it, and that's great, but I worry that newbies get the message that their eating habits aren't good enough unless they cut out all such foods that really has nothing at all to do with weight loss (or, IMO, health/nutrition) and end up making the perfect the enemy of the good so it all just seems way more hard and time-consuming than it needs to be. Easy healthy or simply improving one's diet is much simpler and need not require a huge investment of time. I can whip up a dinner with lots of vegetables and some lean protein in a snap (and part of why I can do that is that I will live with relying on dried pasta or canned beans from time to time and not see that as some failure or lesser-than option vs what I should be doing).
I would hope that the new people understand the failures that are inherent in attempting to eat a less-processed diet, and not get too discouraged at having to settle for what is readily available.
I'm not trying to sell you on consuming anything you don't want to consume. But I'm asking you what is the distinction between a company adding an ingredient to a food to enhance taste, appearance, or texture and a home cook doing the same? I don't see a meaningful difference.
It is just a preference. Do you want mom's homemade bread with 6-7 ingredients or Subway's with 30+ ingredients? You can go down the list of ingredients that Subway adds and there is a purpose for each one (prolonging the shelf life, firmness, color, texture, etc.), but that doesn't inspire me to choose their bread over the homemade version. (And for the sensitive people out there, I'm not saying you are a bad person for eating at Subway, I have had their bread on countless occasions, so please don't be hurt by my criticism...)
Just to be clear, it's not about being a bad person. It's about priorities and not beating yourself up over dumb things. You can get bread of all sorts from the supermarket (I never buy bread from the supermarket, but just because I don't eat bread at home much and am picky about it) or from restaurants (I'm fond of a sandwich place that is pretty embarrassing in their focus on the the trendy this and that, and I bet their bread doesn't have lots of ingredients, although number of ingredients isn't a focus of mine). So if there are ingredients you'd prefer to avoid or quality differences, I totally get that, but why tell yourself that supermarket bread or bakery bread or whatever is "less clean" or "not clean" (and I still don't get how "less clean" is distinct from dirty). I just don't get that. I am all for eating in an aspirational way -- I have ideas about how I'd like to eat that I don't always live up to -- but I don't get how it helps to tell myself that my meals are clean or not clean or that I eat semi clean or whatever. I try to eat well, to prioritize nutrient dense food and quality and to also enjoy what I eat (which means trying to cook it in a way that makes it taste good).
I don't understand why saying "this meal isn't as clean as I'd like" is much different than "this meal falls short of how I'd like to eat". Sounds like to-may-toes vs. to-mah-toes to me.
Except in the first case the meal could be both not clean and how I'd like eat.0 -
Need2Exerc1se wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »janejellyroll wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »
I agree, taste is as big or a bigger priority than nutrition for a lot of people. That still doesn’t sell me on consuming Yellow #5 and Polysorbate 80.janejellyroll wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »@nikkimendez666 if you have followed the thread you must know your answer is full of holes. What is a "whole food"?
Eggs are whole but aren't plant-based.
I imagine you'll allow grains and nuts to be shelled and hulled. How about grinding for flour? Is that much processing allowed in your plan?
How about pressing olives for their oil?
Drying grapes in to raisins?
If you eat only unprocessed "whole foods" could you eat a meal of hemp seeds, raisins, and broccoli as long as they weren't mixed together?
I don't think people consider applying physical force (crushing, mixing, shucking, grinding, pressing, etc.) to food as unacceptable processing, at least that is my interpretation. Unwanted processing to me is industrially injecting / mixing / treating food with chemicals to make them more profitable for corporations, ie, food coloring, preservatives mixed in a test tube, steroids, anti-biotics, hormones, etc., that don't add to the nutritional value of the food.
Aye, there's the rub, isn't it? We are dealing with many interpretations for the same idea. Hence my Venn diagram. Your use is dastardly difficult to define, as one must speak to motive.
What if a farmer's wife is doctoring her family's food in order to extend it's shelf-life, and thereby save the family money? The additives in her arsenal include salt, sugar, vinegar, gelatin, and pectin. If she mixes these ingredients in a bowl instead of a test-tube, does her final product become "clean"?
Take the lowly pickle. It has at least three of the preservatives mentioned above. None of the processing adds to the food's nutritional value; all it does is extend the shelf-life of the cucumber, saving the family money. Is a pickle dirty?
Yes, it is tricky. Maybe the line is drawn between the processing that is inherent in the creation of the food, like a pickle, and the processing that is just a corporate strategy by companies that industrially create and distribute foods to increase profitability.
So perhaps it is analyzing what ingredients / processes that are required to make a pickle and balancing those against what ingredients / processes a company uses to mass produce pickles in an effort to minimize the cost of processing and maximize the product's shelf life. In most cases I would rather eat a home processed pickle from the farmer's wife's fridge that she grew and canned herself than one from the jar that rolled off the assembly line at Vlasic. The addition of Yellow #5 and Polysorbate 80 are not there to benefit my nutrition.
Home cooks frequently add ingredients that aren't there to benefit the nutritional value of the food. I'm not sure why a company doing this is worse or less "clean" than a home cook doing it.
I agree with all of this. Eating the perfect diet is aspirational, and completely unrealistic (in my life, anyways). I don’t have a jar of pickles made by a farmer’s wife in my fridge, I have Vlasic pickles, and I get my dose of food coloring and emulsifiers accordinglylemurcat12 wrote: »I'm not against reading labels and learning about ingredients if one is unsure what they are/why they are there, but this is actually related to why I don't like the clean eating thing. Back when I was over-neurotic about food (from my current perspective), I'd do things like refuse to eat pickles unless I made them myself, but the truth is that my lifestyle is such that it's something of a hassle to make pickles (but yay for those of you who make them regularly, I always mean to start doing that and canning stuff and so on) and it was kind of silly to avoid eating perfectly good store-bought pickles just because in theory I wanted to be making them myself. It's also silly to feel that logging them is a failure and not living up to some standard.
I realize that for some you don't get all self-judgmental or neurotic about it, and that's great, but I worry that newbies get the message that their eating habits aren't good enough unless they cut out all such foods that really has nothing at all to do with weight loss (or, IMO, health/nutrition) and end up making the perfect the enemy of the good so it all just seems way more hard and time-consuming than it needs to be. Easy healthy or simply improving one's diet is much simpler and need not require a huge investment of time. I can whip up a dinner with lots of vegetables and some lean protein in a snap (and part of why I can do that is that I will live with relying on dried pasta or canned beans from time to time and not see that as some failure or lesser-than option vs what I should be doing).
I would hope that the new people understand the failures that are inherent in attempting to eat a less-processed diet, and not get too discouraged at having to settle for what is readily available.
I'm not trying to sell you on consuming anything you don't want to consume. But I'm asking you what is the distinction between a company adding an ingredient to a food to enhance taste, appearance, or texture and a home cook doing the same? I don't see a meaningful difference.
It is just a preference. Do you want mom's homemade bread with 6-7 ingredients or Subway's with 30+ ingredients? You can go down the list of ingredients that Subway adds and there is a purpose for each one (prolonging the shelf life, firmness, color, texture, etc.), but that doesn't inspire me to choose their bread over the homemade version. (And for the sensitive people out there, I'm not saying you are a bad person for eating at Subway, I have had their bread on countless occasions, so please don't be hurt by my criticism...)
Just to be clear, it's not about being a bad person. It's about priorities and not beating yourself up over dumb things. You can get bread of all sorts from the supermarket (I never buy bread from the supermarket, but just because I don't eat bread at home much and am picky about it) or from restaurants (I'm fond of a sandwich place that is pretty embarrassing in their focus on the the trendy this and that, and I bet their bread doesn't have lots of ingredients, although number of ingredients isn't a focus of mine). So if there are ingredients you'd prefer to avoid or quality differences, I totally get that, but why tell yourself that supermarket bread or bakery bread or whatever is "less clean" or "not clean" (and I still don't get how "less clean" is distinct from dirty). I just don't get that. I am all for eating in an aspirational way -- I have ideas about how I'd like to eat that I don't always live up to -- but I don't get how it helps to tell myself that my meals are clean or not clean or that I eat semi clean or whatever. I try to eat well, to prioritize nutrient dense food and quality and to also enjoy what I eat (which means trying to cook it in a way that makes it taste good).
I don't understand why saying "this meal isn't as clean as I'd like" is much different than "this meal falls short of how I'd like to eat". Sounds like to-may-toes vs. to-mah-toes to me.
Except in the first case the meal could be both not clean and how I'd like eat.
Perhaps because you align your food choices, the "how [you'd] like to eat," with cleanliness. I align my choices to balance taste, calories, and nutrition. When I fall short of how I like to eat, it has nothing to do with the types and/or sources of food and everything to do with tasting bad and/or exceeding my calorie goal. The two phrases are only alike if cleanliness is the goal.
As a side note, at what point does the extreme not-cleanness of a food, the gulf between the ingredients' natural states and the finished product, reach the point where it is considered dirty?0 -
I'm beginning to get the difference between "dirty" (as a complete antithesis to clean) and "less clean" and actually find it quite a helpful distinction. It's not a case of extremes, black & white, clean or dirty... at it's most pragmatic it's maybe just a case of doing the best one can to eat naturally/healthily/avoiding unnecessary chemicals and additives, knowing that "100% clean" is pretty difficult most of the time, and settling for "somewhat less clean" like let's say 80% clean or whatever.
I also bake my own bread and I found Bry's analogy between home baked bread and let's say subway bread quite helpful.
I think it's about pragmatism rather than extremism?
0 -
I'm beginning to get the difference between "dirty" (as a complete antithesis to clean) and "less clean" and actually find it quite a helpful distinction. It's not a case of extremes, black & white, clean or dirty... at it's most pragmatic it's maybe just a case of doing the best one can to eat naturally/healthily/avoiding unnecessary chemicals and additives, knowing that "100% clean" is pretty difficult most of the time, and settling for "somewhat less clean" like let's say 80% clean or whatever.
I also bake my own bread and I found Bry's analogy between home baked bread and let's say subway bread quite helpful.
I think it's about pragmatism rather than extremism?
See, to me, this just reinforces the fallacious appeal to nature behind such an approach.0 -
tincanonastring wrote: »Need2Exerc1se wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »janejellyroll wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »
I agree, taste is as big or a bigger priority than nutrition for a lot of people. That still doesn’t sell me on consuming Yellow #5 and Polysorbate 80.janejellyroll wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »@nikkimendez666 if you have followed the thread you must know your answer is full of holes. What is a "whole food"?
Eggs are whole but aren't plant-based.
I imagine you'll allow grains and nuts to be shelled and hulled. How about grinding for flour? Is that much processing allowed in your plan?
How about pressing olives for their oil?
Drying grapes in to raisins?
If you eat only unprocessed "whole foods" could you eat a meal of hemp seeds, raisins, and broccoli as long as they weren't mixed together?
I don't think people consider applying physical force (crushing, mixing, shucking, grinding, pressing, etc.) to food as unacceptable processing, at least that is my interpretation. Unwanted processing to me is industrially injecting / mixing / treating food with chemicals to make them more profitable for corporations, ie, food coloring, preservatives mixed in a test tube, steroids, anti-biotics, hormones, etc., that don't add to the nutritional value of the food.
Aye, there's the rub, isn't it? We are dealing with many interpretations for the same idea. Hence my Venn diagram. Your use is dastardly difficult to define, as one must speak to motive.
What if a farmer's wife is doctoring her family's food in order to extend it's shelf-life, and thereby save the family money? The additives in her arsenal include salt, sugar, vinegar, gelatin, and pectin. If she mixes these ingredients in a bowl instead of a test-tube, does her final product become "clean"?
Take the lowly pickle. It has at least three of the preservatives mentioned above. None of the processing adds to the food's nutritional value; all it does is extend the shelf-life of the cucumber, saving the family money. Is a pickle dirty?
Yes, it is tricky. Maybe the line is drawn between the processing that is inherent in the creation of the food, like a pickle, and the processing that is just a corporate strategy by companies that industrially create and distribute foods to increase profitability.
So perhaps it is analyzing what ingredients / processes that are required to make a pickle and balancing those against what ingredients / processes a company uses to mass produce pickles in an effort to minimize the cost of processing and maximize the product's shelf life. In most cases I would rather eat a home processed pickle from the farmer's wife's fridge that she grew and canned herself than one from the jar that rolled off the assembly line at Vlasic. The addition of Yellow #5 and Polysorbate 80 are not there to benefit my nutrition.
Home cooks frequently add ingredients that aren't there to benefit the nutritional value of the food. I'm not sure why a company doing this is worse or less "clean" than a home cook doing it.
I agree with all of this. Eating the perfect diet is aspirational, and completely unrealistic (in my life, anyways). I don’t have a jar of pickles made by a farmer’s wife in my fridge, I have Vlasic pickles, and I get my dose of food coloring and emulsifiers accordinglylemurcat12 wrote: »I'm not against reading labels and learning about ingredients if one is unsure what they are/why they are there, but this is actually related to why I don't like the clean eating thing. Back when I was over-neurotic about food (from my current perspective), I'd do things like refuse to eat pickles unless I made them myself, but the truth is that my lifestyle is such that it's something of a hassle to make pickles (but yay for those of you who make them regularly, I always mean to start doing that and canning stuff and so on) and it was kind of silly to avoid eating perfectly good store-bought pickles just because in theory I wanted to be making them myself. It's also silly to feel that logging them is a failure and not living up to some standard.
I realize that for some you don't get all self-judgmental or neurotic about it, and that's great, but I worry that newbies get the message that their eating habits aren't good enough unless they cut out all such foods that really has nothing at all to do with weight loss (or, IMO, health/nutrition) and end up making the perfect the enemy of the good so it all just seems way more hard and time-consuming than it needs to be. Easy healthy or simply improving one's diet is much simpler and need not require a huge investment of time. I can whip up a dinner with lots of vegetables and some lean protein in a snap (and part of why I can do that is that I will live with relying on dried pasta or canned beans from time to time and not see that as some failure or lesser-than option vs what I should be doing).
I would hope that the new people understand the failures that are inherent in attempting to eat a less-processed diet, and not get too discouraged at having to settle for what is readily available.
I'm not trying to sell you on consuming anything you don't want to consume. But I'm asking you what is the distinction between a company adding an ingredient to a food to enhance taste, appearance, or texture and a home cook doing the same? I don't see a meaningful difference.
It is just a preference. Do you want mom's homemade bread with 6-7 ingredients or Subway's with 30+ ingredients? You can go down the list of ingredients that Subway adds and there is a purpose for each one (prolonging the shelf life, firmness, color, texture, etc.), but that doesn't inspire me to choose their bread over the homemade version. (And for the sensitive people out there, I'm not saying you are a bad person for eating at Subway, I have had their bread on countless occasions, so please don't be hurt by my criticism...)
Just to be clear, it's not about being a bad person. It's about priorities and not beating yourself up over dumb things. You can get bread of all sorts from the supermarket (I never buy bread from the supermarket, but just because I don't eat bread at home much and am picky about it) or from restaurants (I'm fond of a sandwich place that is pretty embarrassing in their focus on the the trendy this and that, and I bet their bread doesn't have lots of ingredients, although number of ingredients isn't a focus of mine). So if there are ingredients you'd prefer to avoid or quality differences, I totally get that, but why tell yourself that supermarket bread or bakery bread or whatever is "less clean" or "not clean" (and I still don't get how "less clean" is distinct from dirty). I just don't get that. I am all for eating in an aspirational way -- I have ideas about how I'd like to eat that I don't always live up to -- but I don't get how it helps to tell myself that my meals are clean or not clean or that I eat semi clean or whatever. I try to eat well, to prioritize nutrient dense food and quality and to also enjoy what I eat (which means trying to cook it in a way that makes it taste good).
I don't understand why saying "this meal isn't as clean as I'd like" is much different than "this meal falls short of how I'd like to eat". Sounds like to-may-toes vs. to-mah-toes to me.
Except in the first case the meal could be both not clean and how I'd like eat.
Perhaps because you align your food choices, the "how [you'd] like to eat," with cleanliness. I align my choices to balance taste, calories, and nutrition. When I fall short of how I like to eat, it has nothing to do with the types and/or sources of food and everything to do with tasting bad and/or exceeding my calorie goal. The two phrases are only alike if cleanliness is the goal.
As a side note, at what point does the extreme not-cleanness of a food, the gulf between the ingredients' natural states and the finished product, reach the point where it is considered dirty?
No, you are misreading my posts. I have an understanding of the phrase "clean eating" that I've been familiar with for many decades, so I answered the OP's question. I don't really have a problem determining how clean a food is, but I have never suggested that I am a clean eater.
On the side note, as I've stated a few times in this thread already, I'm not familiar with viewing food as dirty unless it has dirt on it. In the definition I'm familiar with there is no 'dirty' opposite end of the clean eating spectrum. Eating a Twinkie, for example, would not be "eating clean". That does not make the Twinkie dirty. It means it doesn't meet the definition.0 -
Need2Exerc1se wrote: »tincanonastring wrote: »Need2Exerc1se wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »janejellyroll wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »
I agree, taste is as big or a bigger priority than nutrition for a lot of people. That still doesn’t sell me on consuming Yellow #5 and Polysorbate 80.janejellyroll wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »@nikkimendez666 if you have followed the thread you must know your answer is full of holes. What is a "whole food"?
Eggs are whole but aren't plant-based.
I imagine you'll allow grains and nuts to be shelled and hulled. How about grinding for flour? Is that much processing allowed in your plan?
How about pressing olives for their oil?
Drying grapes in to raisins?
If you eat only unprocessed "whole foods" could you eat a meal of hemp seeds, raisins, and broccoli as long as they weren't mixed together?
I don't think people consider applying physical force (crushing, mixing, shucking, grinding, pressing, etc.) to food as unacceptable processing, at least that is my interpretation. Unwanted processing to me is industrially injecting / mixing / treating food with chemicals to make them more profitable for corporations, ie, food coloring, preservatives mixed in a test tube, steroids, anti-biotics, hormones, etc., that don't add to the nutritional value of the food.
Aye, there's the rub, isn't it? We are dealing with many interpretations for the same idea. Hence my Venn diagram. Your use is dastardly difficult to define, as one must speak to motive.
What if a farmer's wife is doctoring her family's food in order to extend it's shelf-life, and thereby save the family money? The additives in her arsenal include salt, sugar, vinegar, gelatin, and pectin. If she mixes these ingredients in a bowl instead of a test-tube, does her final product become "clean"?
Take the lowly pickle. It has at least three of the preservatives mentioned above. None of the processing adds to the food's nutritional value; all it does is extend the shelf-life of the cucumber, saving the family money. Is a pickle dirty?
Yes, it is tricky. Maybe the line is drawn between the processing that is inherent in the creation of the food, like a pickle, and the processing that is just a corporate strategy by companies that industrially create and distribute foods to increase profitability.
So perhaps it is analyzing what ingredients / processes that are required to make a pickle and balancing those against what ingredients / processes a company uses to mass produce pickles in an effort to minimize the cost of processing and maximize the product's shelf life. In most cases I would rather eat a home processed pickle from the farmer's wife's fridge that she grew and canned herself than one from the jar that rolled off the assembly line at Vlasic. The addition of Yellow #5 and Polysorbate 80 are not there to benefit my nutrition.
Home cooks frequently add ingredients that aren't there to benefit the nutritional value of the food. I'm not sure why a company doing this is worse or less "clean" than a home cook doing it.
I agree with all of this. Eating the perfect diet is aspirational, and completely unrealistic (in my life, anyways). I don’t have a jar of pickles made by a farmer’s wife in my fridge, I have Vlasic pickles, and I get my dose of food coloring and emulsifiers accordinglylemurcat12 wrote: »I'm not against reading labels and learning about ingredients if one is unsure what they are/why they are there, but this is actually related to why I don't like the clean eating thing. Back when I was over-neurotic about food (from my current perspective), I'd do things like refuse to eat pickles unless I made them myself, but the truth is that my lifestyle is such that it's something of a hassle to make pickles (but yay for those of you who make them regularly, I always mean to start doing that and canning stuff and so on) and it was kind of silly to avoid eating perfectly good store-bought pickles just because in theory I wanted to be making them myself. It's also silly to feel that logging them is a failure and not living up to some standard.
I realize that for some you don't get all self-judgmental or neurotic about it, and that's great, but I worry that newbies get the message that their eating habits aren't good enough unless they cut out all such foods that really has nothing at all to do with weight loss (or, IMO, health/nutrition) and end up making the perfect the enemy of the good so it all just seems way more hard and time-consuming than it needs to be. Easy healthy or simply improving one's diet is much simpler and need not require a huge investment of time. I can whip up a dinner with lots of vegetables and some lean protein in a snap (and part of why I can do that is that I will live with relying on dried pasta or canned beans from time to time and not see that as some failure or lesser-than option vs what I should be doing).
I would hope that the new people understand the failures that are inherent in attempting to eat a less-processed diet, and not get too discouraged at having to settle for what is readily available.
I'm not trying to sell you on consuming anything you don't want to consume. But I'm asking you what is the distinction between a company adding an ingredient to a food to enhance taste, appearance, or texture and a home cook doing the same? I don't see a meaningful difference.
It is just a preference. Do you want mom's homemade bread with 6-7 ingredients or Subway's with 30+ ingredients? You can go down the list of ingredients that Subway adds and there is a purpose for each one (prolonging the shelf life, firmness, color, texture, etc.), but that doesn't inspire me to choose their bread over the homemade version. (And for the sensitive people out there, I'm not saying you are a bad person for eating at Subway, I have had their bread on countless occasions, so please don't be hurt by my criticism...)
Just to be clear, it's not about being a bad person. It's about priorities and not beating yourself up over dumb things. You can get bread of all sorts from the supermarket (I never buy bread from the supermarket, but just because I don't eat bread at home much and am picky about it) or from restaurants (I'm fond of a sandwich place that is pretty embarrassing in their focus on the the trendy this and that, and I bet their bread doesn't have lots of ingredients, although number of ingredients isn't a focus of mine). So if there are ingredients you'd prefer to avoid or quality differences, I totally get that, but why tell yourself that supermarket bread or bakery bread or whatever is "less clean" or "not clean" (and I still don't get how "less clean" is distinct from dirty). I just don't get that. I am all for eating in an aspirational way -- I have ideas about how I'd like to eat that I don't always live up to -- but I don't get how it helps to tell myself that my meals are clean or not clean or that I eat semi clean or whatever. I try to eat well, to prioritize nutrient dense food and quality and to also enjoy what I eat (which means trying to cook it in a way that makes it taste good).
I don't understand why saying "this meal isn't as clean as I'd like" is much different than "this meal falls short of how I'd like to eat". Sounds like to-may-toes vs. to-mah-toes to me.
Except in the first case the meal could be both not clean and how I'd like eat.
Perhaps because you align your food choices, the "how [you'd] like to eat," with cleanliness. I align my choices to balance taste, calories, and nutrition. When I fall short of how I like to eat, it has nothing to do with the types and/or sources of food and everything to do with tasting bad and/or exceeding my calorie goal. The two phrases are only alike if cleanliness is the goal.
As a side note, at what point does the extreme not-cleanness of a food, the gulf between the ingredients' natural states and the finished product, reach the point where it is considered dirty?
No, you are misreading my posts. I have an understanding of the phrase "clean eating" that I've been familiar with for many decades, so I answered the OP's question. I don't really have a problem determining how clean a food is, but I have never suggested that I am a clean eater.
On the side note, as I've stated a few times in this thread already, I'm not familiar with viewing food as dirty unless it has dirt on it. In the definition I'm familiar with there is no 'dirty' opposite end of the clean eating spectrum. Eating a Twinkie, for example, would not be "eating clean". That does not make the Twinkie dirty. It means it doesn't meet the definition.
Sorry, I was using the indefinite you. I didn't mean to imply you felt that way, but I can't see how those two phrases are even remotely close if one doesn't classify themselves as a clean eater.
Is there a degree system, as in "Twinkies have a 13 degree deviation from clean?" This is why "clean" makes no sense when it comes to food.0 -
To me it makes sense that most foods are somewhere on a spectrum of clean/natural/healthy/unmanipulated (call it what you like...)
Sausages for instance...... you can get some meat from your local farmer who just killed a pig, just add some spices and make your own etc OR you can buy some ASDA Smart price sausages which contain only 30% meat and heaps of stabilisers/raising agents/preservatives. Neither will be "100% clean" as neither is simply an unadulterated piece of pork, but it stands to reason that the first will be superior nutritionally to the latter?0 -
BecomingBane wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »@nikkimendez666 if you have followed the thread you must know your answer is full of holes. What is a "whole food"?
Eggs are whole but aren't plant-based.
I imagine you'll allow grains and nuts to be shelled and hulled. How about grinding for flour? Is that much processing allowed in your plan?
How about pressing olives for their oil?
Drying grapes in to raisins?
If you eat only unprocessed "whole foods" could you eat a meal of hemp seeds, raisins, and broccoli as long as they weren't mixed together?
I don't think people consider applying physical force (crushing, mixing, shucking, grinding, pressing, etc.) to food as unacceptable processing, at least that is my interpretation. Unwanted processing to me is industrially injecting / mixing / treating food with chemicals to make them more profitable for corporations, ie, food coloring, preservatives mixed in a test tube, steroids, anti-biotics, hormones, etc., that don't add to the nutritional value of the food.
Aye, there's the rub, isn't it? We are dealing with many interpretations for the same idea. Hence my Venn diagram. Your use is dastardly difficult to define, as one must speak to motive.
What if a farmer's wife is doctoring her family's food in order to extend it's shelf-life, and thereby save the family money? The additives in her arsenal include salt, sugar, vinegar, gelatin, and pectin. If she mixes these ingredients in a bowl instead of a test-tube, does her final product become "clean"?
Take the lowly pickle. It has at least three of the preservatives mentioned above. None of the processing adds to the food's nutritional value; all it does is extend the shelf-life of the cucumber, saving the family money. Is a pickle dirty?
Yes, it is tricky. Maybe the line is drawn between the processing that is inherent in the creation of the food, like a pickle, and the processing that is just a corporate strategy by companies that industrially create and distribute foods to increase profitability.
So perhaps it is analyzing what ingredients / processes that are required to make a pickle and balancing those against what ingredients / processes a company uses to mass produce pickles in an effort to minimize the cost of processing and maximize the product's shelf life. In most cases I would rather eat a home processed pickle from the farmer's wife's fridge that she grew and canned herself than one from the jar that rolled off the assembly line at Vlasic. The addition of Yellow #5 and Polysorbate 80 are not there to benefit my nutrition.
So Vladimir Von Oreo made under communism is cleaner than capitalist Oreo? I'm not seeing why corporatism and profit motive matter in how clean a food is.
Most people consider raw organic produce rather clean but most of it reaches people via chains of large corporations. Indeed, advertising the concept of clean and natural is a corporate strategy in itself.
I talked about this earlier from an insider perspective... I think you were the only person to comment on it.
I just had lunch at Panera and the signage inside the store made me think of what you said in that post.0 -
janejellyroll wrote: »BecomingBane wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »@nikkimendez666 if you have followed the thread you must know your answer is full of holes. What is a "whole food"?
Eggs are whole but aren't plant-based.
I imagine you'll allow grains and nuts to be shelled and hulled. How about grinding for flour? Is that much processing allowed in your plan?
How about pressing olives for their oil?
Drying grapes in to raisins?
If you eat only unprocessed "whole foods" could you eat a meal of hemp seeds, raisins, and broccoli as long as they weren't mixed together?
I don't think people consider applying physical force (crushing, mixing, shucking, grinding, pressing, etc.) to food as unacceptable processing, at least that is my interpretation. Unwanted processing to me is industrially injecting / mixing / treating food with chemicals to make them more profitable for corporations, ie, food coloring, preservatives mixed in a test tube, steroids, anti-biotics, hormones, etc., that don't add to the nutritional value of the food.
Aye, there's the rub, isn't it? We are dealing with many interpretations for the same idea. Hence my Venn diagram. Your use is dastardly difficult to define, as one must speak to motive.
What if a farmer's wife is doctoring her family's food in order to extend it's shelf-life, and thereby save the family money? The additives in her arsenal include salt, sugar, vinegar, gelatin, and pectin. If she mixes these ingredients in a bowl instead of a test-tube, does her final product become "clean"?
Take the lowly pickle. It has at least three of the preservatives mentioned above. None of the processing adds to the food's nutritional value; all it does is extend the shelf-life of the cucumber, saving the family money. Is a pickle dirty?
Yes, it is tricky. Maybe the line is drawn between the processing that is inherent in the creation of the food, like a pickle, and the processing that is just a corporate strategy by companies that industrially create and distribute foods to increase profitability.
So perhaps it is analyzing what ingredients / processes that are required to make a pickle and balancing those against what ingredients / processes a company uses to mass produce pickles in an effort to minimize the cost of processing and maximize the product's shelf life. In most cases I would rather eat a home processed pickle from the farmer's wife's fridge that she grew and canned herself than one from the jar that rolled off the assembly line at Vlasic. The addition of Yellow #5 and Polysorbate 80 are not there to benefit my nutrition.
So Vladimir Von Oreo made under communism is cleaner than capitalist Oreo? I'm not seeing why corporatism and profit motive matter in how clean a food is.
Most people consider raw organic produce rather clean but most of it reaches people via chains of large corporations. Indeed, advertising the concept of clean and natural is a corporate strategy in itself.
I talked about this earlier from an insider perspective... I think you were the only person to comment on it.
I just had lunch at Panera and the signage inside the store made me think of what you said in that post.
That campaign at Panera drives me crazy. I used it as an example last week when someone was asking for clean dessert recipes. Since Panera says all their food is clean, I guess that means a nutty chocolate chipper cookie and a skinny vanilla latte (what I usually order) is clean. Sweet - I'm a clean eater!0 -
Need2Exerc1se wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »janejellyroll wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »
I agree, taste is as big or a bigger priority than nutrition for a lot of people. That still doesn’t sell me on consuming Yellow #5 and Polysorbate 80.janejellyroll wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »@nikkimendez666 if you have followed the thread you must know your answer is full of holes. What is a "whole food"?
Eggs are whole but aren't plant-based.
I imagine you'll allow grains and nuts to be shelled and hulled. How about grinding for flour? Is that much processing allowed in your plan?
How about pressing olives for their oil?
Drying grapes in to raisins?
If you eat only unprocessed "whole foods" could you eat a meal of hemp seeds, raisins, and broccoli as long as they weren't mixed together?
I don't think people consider applying physical force (crushing, mixing, shucking, grinding, pressing, etc.) to food as unacceptable processing, at least that is my interpretation. Unwanted processing to me is industrially injecting / mixing / treating food with chemicals to make them more profitable for corporations, ie, food coloring, preservatives mixed in a test tube, steroids, anti-biotics, hormones, etc., that don't add to the nutritional value of the food.
Aye, there's the rub, isn't it? We are dealing with many interpretations for the same idea. Hence my Venn diagram. Your use is dastardly difficult to define, as one must speak to motive.
What if a farmer's wife is doctoring her family's food in order to extend it's shelf-life, and thereby save the family money? The additives in her arsenal include salt, sugar, vinegar, gelatin, and pectin. If she mixes these ingredients in a bowl instead of a test-tube, does her final product become "clean"?
Take the lowly pickle. It has at least three of the preservatives mentioned above. None of the processing adds to the food's nutritional value; all it does is extend the shelf-life of the cucumber, saving the family money. Is a pickle dirty?
Yes, it is tricky. Maybe the line is drawn between the processing that is inherent in the creation of the food, like a pickle, and the processing that is just a corporate strategy by companies that industrially create and distribute foods to increase profitability.
So perhaps it is analyzing what ingredients / processes that are required to make a pickle and balancing those against what ingredients / processes a company uses to mass produce pickles in an effort to minimize the cost of processing and maximize the product's shelf life. In most cases I would rather eat a home processed pickle from the farmer's wife's fridge that she grew and canned herself than one from the jar that rolled off the assembly line at Vlasic. The addition of Yellow #5 and Polysorbate 80 are not there to benefit my nutrition.
Home cooks frequently add ingredients that aren't there to benefit the nutritional value of the food. I'm not sure why a company doing this is worse or less "clean" than a home cook doing it.
I agree with all of this. Eating the perfect diet is aspirational, and completely unrealistic (in my life, anyways). I don’t have a jar of pickles made by a farmer’s wife in my fridge, I have Vlasic pickles, and I get my dose of food coloring and emulsifiers accordinglylemurcat12 wrote: »I'm not against reading labels and learning about ingredients if one is unsure what they are/why they are there, but this is actually related to why I don't like the clean eating thing. Back when I was over-neurotic about food (from my current perspective), I'd do things like refuse to eat pickles unless I made them myself, but the truth is that my lifestyle is such that it's something of a hassle to make pickles (but yay for those of you who make them regularly, I always mean to start doing that and canning stuff and so on) and it was kind of silly to avoid eating perfectly good store-bought pickles just because in theory I wanted to be making them myself. It's also silly to feel that logging them is a failure and not living up to some standard.
I realize that for some you don't get all self-judgmental or neurotic about it, and that's great, but I worry that newbies get the message that their eating habits aren't good enough unless they cut out all such foods that really has nothing at all to do with weight loss (or, IMO, health/nutrition) and end up making the perfect the enemy of the good so it all just seems way more hard and time-consuming than it needs to be. Easy healthy or simply improving one's diet is much simpler and need not require a huge investment of time. I can whip up a dinner with lots of vegetables and some lean protein in a snap (and part of why I can do that is that I will live with relying on dried pasta or canned beans from time to time and not see that as some failure or lesser-than option vs what I should be doing).
I would hope that the new people understand the failures that are inherent in attempting to eat a less-processed diet, and not get too discouraged at having to settle for what is readily available.
I'm not trying to sell you on consuming anything you don't want to consume. But I'm asking you what is the distinction between a company adding an ingredient to a food to enhance taste, appearance, or texture and a home cook doing the same? I don't see a meaningful difference.
It is just a preference. Do you want mom's homemade bread with 6-7 ingredients or Subway's with 30+ ingredients? You can go down the list of ingredients that Subway adds and there is a purpose for each one (prolonging the shelf life, firmness, color, texture, etc.), but that doesn't inspire me to choose their bread over the homemade version. (And for the sensitive people out there, I'm not saying you are a bad person for eating at Subway, I have had their bread on countless occasions, so please don't be hurt by my criticism...)
Just to be clear, it's not about being a bad person. It's about priorities and not beating yourself up over dumb things. You can get bread of all sorts from the supermarket (I never buy bread from the supermarket, but just because I don't eat bread at home much and am picky about it) or from restaurants (I'm fond of a sandwich place that is pretty embarrassing in their focus on the the trendy this and that, and I bet their bread doesn't have lots of ingredients, although number of ingredients isn't a focus of mine). So if there are ingredients you'd prefer to avoid or quality differences, I totally get that, but why tell yourself that supermarket bread or bakery bread or whatever is "less clean" or "not clean" (and I still don't get how "less clean" is distinct from dirty). I just don't get that. I am all for eating in an aspirational way -- I have ideas about how I'd like to eat that I don't always live up to -- but I don't get how it helps to tell myself that my meals are clean or not clean or that I eat semi clean or whatever. I try to eat well, to prioritize nutrient dense food and quality and to also enjoy what I eat (which means trying to cook it in a way that makes it taste good).
I don't understand why saying "this meal isn't as clean as I'd like" is much different than "this meal falls short of how I'd like to eat". Sounds like to-may-toes vs. to-mah-toes to me.
Except in the first case the meal could be both not clean and how I'd like eat.
It all comes back to the implication of "clean," and I understand that you cannot see why it bothers some of us when used in the food context.
And again, because in the current commonplace usage, including on MFP, it's not about a continuum, but being either "clean" or not. One can fall short of one's goals for one's diet on a particular day and not conclude "I'm not a healthful eater." If one eats "unclean" foods, presumably one would not be a "clean eater." (Or else, I ask once again, how is being a "clean eater" different from the rest of us who merely try to eat healthful, nutrient-dense meals for the most part such that it is defended as a special, different way of eating that requires special groups and recipes.)0 -
WinoGelato wrote: »janejellyroll wrote: »BecomingBane wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »@nikkimendez666 if you have followed the thread you must know your answer is full of holes. What is a "whole food"?
Eggs are whole but aren't plant-based.
I imagine you'll allow grains and nuts to be shelled and hulled. How about grinding for flour? Is that much processing allowed in your plan?
How about pressing olives for their oil?
Drying grapes in to raisins?
If you eat only unprocessed "whole foods" could you eat a meal of hemp seeds, raisins, and broccoli as long as they weren't mixed together?
I don't think people consider applying physical force (crushing, mixing, shucking, grinding, pressing, etc.) to food as unacceptable processing, at least that is my interpretation. Unwanted processing to me is industrially injecting / mixing / treating food with chemicals to make them more profitable for corporations, ie, food coloring, preservatives mixed in a test tube, steroids, anti-biotics, hormones, etc., that don't add to the nutritional value of the food.
Aye, there's the rub, isn't it? We are dealing with many interpretations for the same idea. Hence my Venn diagram. Your use is dastardly difficult to define, as one must speak to motive.
What if a farmer's wife is doctoring her family's food in order to extend it's shelf-life, and thereby save the family money? The additives in her arsenal include salt, sugar, vinegar, gelatin, and pectin. If she mixes these ingredients in a bowl instead of a test-tube, does her final product become "clean"?
Take the lowly pickle. It has at least three of the preservatives mentioned above. None of the processing adds to the food's nutritional value; all it does is extend the shelf-life of the cucumber, saving the family money. Is a pickle dirty?
Yes, it is tricky. Maybe the line is drawn between the processing that is inherent in the creation of the food, like a pickle, and the processing that is just a corporate strategy by companies that industrially create and distribute foods to increase profitability.
So perhaps it is analyzing what ingredients / processes that are required to make a pickle and balancing those against what ingredients / processes a company uses to mass produce pickles in an effort to minimize the cost of processing and maximize the product's shelf life. In most cases I would rather eat a home processed pickle from the farmer's wife's fridge that she grew and canned herself than one from the jar that rolled off the assembly line at Vlasic. The addition of Yellow #5 and Polysorbate 80 are not there to benefit my nutrition.
So Vladimir Von Oreo made under communism is cleaner than capitalist Oreo? I'm not seeing why corporatism and profit motive matter in how clean a food is.
Most people consider raw organic produce rather clean but most of it reaches people via chains of large corporations. Indeed, advertising the concept of clean and natural is a corporate strategy in itself.
I talked about this earlier from an insider perspective... I think you were the only person to comment on it.
I just had lunch at Panera and the signage inside the store made me think of what you said in that post.
That campaign at Panera drives me crazy. I used it as an example last week when someone was asking for clean dessert recipes. Since Panera says all their food is clean, I guess that means a nutty chocolate chipper cookie and a skinny vanilla latte (what I usually order) is clean. Sweet - I'm a clean eater!
It's a truly ridiculous campaign. I saw today they were selling "gluten conscious" cookies. I am not even sure what what means.
I also paid ten dollars for what seemed like two dollars worth of salad ingredients, so there is that too.0 -
janejellyroll wrote: »WinoGelato wrote: »janejellyroll wrote: »BecomingBane wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »@nikkimendez666 if you have followed the thread you must know your answer is full of holes. What is a "whole food"?
Eggs are whole but aren't plant-based.
I imagine you'll allow grains and nuts to be shelled and hulled. How about grinding for flour? Is that much processing allowed in your plan?
How about pressing olives for their oil?
Drying grapes in to raisins?
If you eat only unprocessed "whole foods" could you eat a meal of hemp seeds, raisins, and broccoli as long as they weren't mixed together?
I don't think people consider applying physical force (crushing, mixing, shucking, grinding, pressing, etc.) to food as unacceptable processing, at least that is my interpretation. Unwanted processing to me is industrially injecting / mixing / treating food with chemicals to make them more profitable for corporations, ie, food coloring, preservatives mixed in a test tube, steroids, anti-biotics, hormones, etc., that don't add to the nutritional value of the food.
Aye, there's the rub, isn't it? We are dealing with many interpretations for the same idea. Hence my Venn diagram. Your use is dastardly difficult to define, as one must speak to motive.
What if a farmer's wife is doctoring her family's food in order to extend it's shelf-life, and thereby save the family money? The additives in her arsenal include salt, sugar, vinegar, gelatin, and pectin. If she mixes these ingredients in a bowl instead of a test-tube, does her final product become "clean"?
Take the lowly pickle. It has at least three of the preservatives mentioned above. None of the processing adds to the food's nutritional value; all it does is extend the shelf-life of the cucumber, saving the family money. Is a pickle dirty?
Yes, it is tricky. Maybe the line is drawn between the processing that is inherent in the creation of the food, like a pickle, and the processing that is just a corporate strategy by companies that industrially create and distribute foods to increase profitability.
So perhaps it is analyzing what ingredients / processes that are required to make a pickle and balancing those against what ingredients / processes a company uses to mass produce pickles in an effort to minimize the cost of processing and maximize the product's shelf life. In most cases I would rather eat a home processed pickle from the farmer's wife's fridge that she grew and canned herself than one from the jar that rolled off the assembly line at Vlasic. The addition of Yellow #5 and Polysorbate 80 are not there to benefit my nutrition.
So Vladimir Von Oreo made under communism is cleaner than capitalist Oreo? I'm not seeing why corporatism and profit motive matter in how clean a food is.
Most people consider raw organic produce rather clean but most of it reaches people via chains of large corporations. Indeed, advertising the concept of clean and natural is a corporate strategy in itself.
I talked about this earlier from an insider perspective... I think you were the only person to comment on it.
I just had lunch at Panera and the signage inside the store made me think of what you said in that post.
That campaign at Panera drives me crazy. I used it as an example last week when someone was asking for clean dessert recipes. Since Panera says all their food is clean, I guess that means a nutty chocolate chipper cookie and a skinny vanilla latte (what I usually order) is clean. Sweet - I'm a clean eater!
It's a truly ridiculous campaign. I saw today they were selling "gluten conscious" cookies. I am not even sure what what means.
I also paid ten dollars for what seemed like two dollars worth of salad ingredients, so there is that too.
It has gotten really out of hand... gluten conscious. FFS. I prefer to eat gluten until I'm unconscious personally.
0 -
lemurcat12 wrote: »Need2Exerc1se wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »janejellyroll wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »
I agree, taste is as big or a bigger priority than nutrition for a lot of people. That still doesn’t sell me on consuming Yellow #5 and Polysorbate 80.janejellyroll wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »@nikkimendez666 if you have followed the thread you must know your answer is full of holes. What is a "whole food"?
Eggs are whole but aren't plant-based.
I imagine you'll allow grains and nuts to be shelled and hulled. How about grinding for flour? Is that much processing allowed in your plan?
How about pressing olives for their oil?
Drying grapes in to raisins?
If you eat only unprocessed "whole foods" could you eat a meal of hemp seeds, raisins, and broccoli as long as they weren't mixed together?
I don't think people consider applying physical force (crushing, mixing, shucking, grinding, pressing, etc.) to food as unacceptable processing, at least that is my interpretation. Unwanted processing to me is industrially injecting / mixing / treating food with chemicals to make them more profitable for corporations, ie, food coloring, preservatives mixed in a test tube, steroids, anti-biotics, hormones, etc., that don't add to the nutritional value of the food.
Aye, there's the rub, isn't it? We are dealing with many interpretations for the same idea. Hence my Venn diagram. Your use is dastardly difficult to define, as one must speak to motive.
What if a farmer's wife is doctoring her family's food in order to extend it's shelf-life, and thereby save the family money? The additives in her arsenal include salt, sugar, vinegar, gelatin, and pectin. If she mixes these ingredients in a bowl instead of a test-tube, does her final product become "clean"?
Take the lowly pickle. It has at least three of the preservatives mentioned above. None of the processing adds to the food's nutritional value; all it does is extend the shelf-life of the cucumber, saving the family money. Is a pickle dirty?
Yes, it is tricky. Maybe the line is drawn between the processing that is inherent in the creation of the food, like a pickle, and the processing that is just a corporate strategy by companies that industrially create and distribute foods to increase profitability.
So perhaps it is analyzing what ingredients / processes that are required to make a pickle and balancing those against what ingredients / processes a company uses to mass produce pickles in an effort to minimize the cost of processing and maximize the product's shelf life. In most cases I would rather eat a home processed pickle from the farmer's wife's fridge that she grew and canned herself than one from the jar that rolled off the assembly line at Vlasic. The addition of Yellow #5 and Polysorbate 80 are not there to benefit my nutrition.
Home cooks frequently add ingredients that aren't there to benefit the nutritional value of the food. I'm not sure why a company doing this is worse or less "clean" than a home cook doing it.
I agree with all of this. Eating the perfect diet is aspirational, and completely unrealistic (in my life, anyways). I don’t have a jar of pickles made by a farmer’s wife in my fridge, I have Vlasic pickles, and I get my dose of food coloring and emulsifiers accordinglylemurcat12 wrote: »I'm not against reading labels and learning about ingredients if one is unsure what they are/why they are there, but this is actually related to why I don't like the clean eating thing. Back when I was over-neurotic about food (from my current perspective), I'd do things like refuse to eat pickles unless I made them myself, but the truth is that my lifestyle is such that it's something of a hassle to make pickles (but yay for those of you who make them regularly, I always mean to start doing that and canning stuff and so on) and it was kind of silly to avoid eating perfectly good store-bought pickles just because in theory I wanted to be making them myself. It's also silly to feel that logging them is a failure and not living up to some standard.
I realize that for some you don't get all self-judgmental or neurotic about it, and that's great, but I worry that newbies get the message that their eating habits aren't good enough unless they cut out all such foods that really has nothing at all to do with weight loss (or, IMO, health/nutrition) and end up making the perfect the enemy of the good so it all just seems way more hard and time-consuming than it needs to be. Easy healthy or simply improving one's diet is much simpler and need not require a huge investment of time. I can whip up a dinner with lots of vegetables and some lean protein in a snap (and part of why I can do that is that I will live with relying on dried pasta or canned beans from time to time and not see that as some failure or lesser-than option vs what I should be doing).
I would hope that the new people understand the failures that are inherent in attempting to eat a less-processed diet, and not get too discouraged at having to settle for what is readily available.
I'm not trying to sell you on consuming anything you don't want to consume. But I'm asking you what is the distinction between a company adding an ingredient to a food to enhance taste, appearance, or texture and a home cook doing the same? I don't see a meaningful difference.
It is just a preference. Do you want mom's homemade bread with 6-7 ingredients or Subway's with 30+ ingredients? You can go down the list of ingredients that Subway adds and there is a purpose for each one (prolonging the shelf life, firmness, color, texture, etc.), but that doesn't inspire me to choose their bread over the homemade version. (And for the sensitive people out there, I'm not saying you are a bad person for eating at Subway, I have had their bread on countless occasions, so please don't be hurt by my criticism...)
Just to be clear, it's not about being a bad person. It's about priorities and not beating yourself up over dumb things. You can get bread of all sorts from the supermarket (I never buy bread from the supermarket, but just because I don't eat bread at home much and am picky about it) or from restaurants (I'm fond of a sandwich place that is pretty embarrassing in their focus on the the trendy this and that, and I bet their bread doesn't have lots of ingredients, although number of ingredients isn't a focus of mine). So if there are ingredients you'd prefer to avoid or quality differences, I totally get that, but why tell yourself that supermarket bread or bakery bread or whatever is "less clean" or "not clean" (and I still don't get how "less clean" is distinct from dirty). I just don't get that. I am all for eating in an aspirational way -- I have ideas about how I'd like to eat that I don't always live up to -- but I don't get how it helps to tell myself that my meals are clean or not clean or that I eat semi clean or whatever. I try to eat well, to prioritize nutrient dense food and quality and to also enjoy what I eat (which means trying to cook it in a way that makes it taste good).
I don't understand why saying "this meal isn't as clean as I'd like" is much different than "this meal falls short of how I'd like to eat". Sounds like to-may-toes vs. to-mah-toes to me.
Except in the first case the meal could be both not clean and how I'd like eat.
It all comes back to the implication of "clean," and I understand that you cannot see why it bothers some of us when used in the food context.
And again, because in the current commonplace usage, including on MFP, it's not about a continuum, but being either "clean" or not. One can fall short of one's goals for one's diet on a particular day and not conclude "I'm not a healthful eater." If one eats "unclean" foods, presumably one would not be a "clean eater." (Or else, I ask once again, how is being a "clean eater" different from the rest of us who merely try to eat healthful, nutrient-dense meals for the most part such that it is defended as a special, different way of eating that requires special groups and recipes.)
Using my definition the difference would be vocabulary. I do find it amusing that you suggest there is a commonplace usage for the term though. I thought the fact that there is not was the whole point of this thread. 0 -
I'm beginning to get the difference between "dirty" (as a complete antithesis to clean) and "less clean" and actually find it quite a helpful distinction. It's not a case of extremes, black & white, clean or dirty... at it's most pragmatic it's maybe just a case of doing the best one can to eat naturally/healthily/avoiding unnecessary chemicals and additives, knowing that "100% clean" is pretty difficult most of the time, and settling for "somewhat less clean" like let's say 80% clean or whatever.
I also bake my own bread and I found Bry's analogy between home baked bread and let's say subway bread quite helpful.
I think it's about pragmatism rather than extremism?
I guess my issue here is that you seem to be equating "naturally" and "healthily" and "avoiding unnecessary chemicals and additives," whereas I would not (and this is why I find the confusion of clean -- usually defined as not processed -- and healthful bothersome).
For example, I mentioned my own ideas about how I like to eat, or goals, which I don't live up to all the time (or even a lot of the time). They roughly overlap what I think of as healthy plus what helps me eat within my calorie goals and which also relate to non nutrition-related goals (i.e., environmental, animal welfare, local community).
So for me this includes such things as eating a wide variety of vegetables, ideally at every meal, eating some protein at all meals, choosing whole grains over more refined grains when possible, home cooking or local restaurants over chains (when possible), paying attention to where my meat is sourced (I do this well when eating at home, not always otherwise, and I buy meals too often), so on.
I don't see a real benefit to avoiding something more processed just because it is processed (again, my smoked salmon example -- and I will add that claiming salmon is more "natural" when you live in the middle of the midwest like I do, or that bananas and broccoli are right now vs. some smoked (preserved) salmon or frozen vegetables or dried pasta, etc. -- doesn't actually seem like a logical or obvious distinction even before we get into the stuff I totally disagree with, like ground meat). Part of this, I admit, is that I like restaurants and buying lunch (I waste money on it because I am picky about where I buy and spend too much often). But even ignoring my personal preferences, and laziness, if I buy from a place with ingredients similar to what I'd use -- and no, I don't think they use more ingredients in the bread than I do when I bake, any more than my local Italian place adds many more ingredients to pizza than I do when cooking it at home, from scratch -- why is this less "clean" or, more significantly, in any way less conducive to my well-being or health other than, of course, watching out for extra (but "natural" calories like those added from olive oil and butter or the like?
I'm getting over my knee-jerk irritation with the term "clean" and finding this conversation more interesting than anticipated -- and I do understand the "try to avoid extra additives when possible" thing a lot more than the weird holier than thou "absolutely no processed food" declarations from people who of course eat processed food, but I still don't quite get the benefit of the distinctions described above, or even see how you can say that bananas in Chicago in February (or at any time) = natural, but dried pasta is not.0 -
Bry_Lander wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »@nikkimendez666 if you have followed the thread you must know your answer is full of holes. What is a "whole food"?
Eggs are whole but aren't plant-based.
I imagine you'll allow grains and nuts to be shelled and hulled. How about grinding for flour? Is that much processing allowed in your plan?
How about pressing olives for their oil?
Drying grapes in to raisins?
If you eat only unprocessed "whole foods" could you eat a meal of hemp seeds, raisins, and broccoli as long as they weren't mixed together?
I don't think people consider applying physical force (crushing, mixing, shucking, grinding, pressing, etc.) to food as unacceptable processing, at least that is my interpretation. Unwanted processing to me is industrially injecting / mixing / treating food with chemicals to make them more profitable for corporations, ie, food coloring, preservatives mixed in a test tube, steroids, anti-biotics, hormones, etc., that don't add to the nutritional value of the food.
Aye, there's the rub, isn't it? We are dealing with many interpretations for the same idea. Hence my Venn diagram. Your use is dastardly difficult to define, as one must speak to motive.
What if a farmer's wife is doctoring her family's food in order to extend it's shelf-life, and thereby save the family money? The additives in her arsenal include salt, sugar, vinegar, gelatin, and pectin. If she mixes these ingredients in a bowl instead of a test-tube, does her final product become "clean"?
Take the lowly pickle. It has at least three of the preservatives mentioned above. None of the processing adds to the food's nutritional value; all it does is extend the shelf-life of the cucumber, saving the family money. Is a pickle dirty?
Yes, it is tricky. Maybe the line is drawn between the processing that is inherent in the creation of the food, like a pickle, and the processing that is just a corporate strategy by companies that industrially create and distribute foods to increase profitability.
So perhaps it is analyzing what ingredients / processes that are required to make a pickle and balancing those against what ingredients / processes a company uses to mass produce pickles in an effort to minimize the cost of processing and maximize the product's shelf life. In most cases I would rather eat a home processed pickle from the farmer's wife's fridge that she grew and canned herself than one from the jar that rolled off the assembly line at Vlasic. The addition of Yellow #5 and Polysorbate 80 are not there to benefit my nutrition.
So Vladimir Von Oreo made under communism is cleaner than capitalist Oreo? I'm not seeing why corporatism and profit motive matter in how clean a food is.
Most people consider raw organic produce rather clean but most of it reaches people via chains of large corporations. Indeed, advertising the concept of clean and natural is a corporate strategy in itself.
It is fascinating how the same companies that spent 50+ years jamming extra salt, sugar, fat, and industrially strategic (for lack of a better term) ingredients in food to make it taste, look, feel, and smell better while giving it an incredibly long shelf life changed strategies fairly recently, removing a lot of the industrial additives they pioneered and touting that as a revolutionary product development initiative.
0 -
Food companies are in the business of giving the consumer what they want. The rhetoric they use is amusing to say the least...Bry_Lander wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »@nikkimendez666 if you have followed the thread you must know your answer is full of holes. What is a "whole food"?
Eggs are whole but aren't plant-based.
I imagine you'll allow grains and nuts to be shelled and hulled. How about grinding for flour? Is that much processing allowed in your plan?
How about pressing olives for their oil?
Drying grapes in to raisins?
If you eat only unprocessed "whole foods" could you eat a meal of hemp seeds, raisins, and broccoli as long as they weren't mixed together?
I don't think people consider applying physical force (crushing, mixing, shucking, grinding, pressing, etc.) to food as unacceptable processing, at least that is my interpretation. Unwanted processing to me is industrially injecting / mixing / treating food with chemicals to make them more profitable for corporations, ie, food coloring, preservatives mixed in a test tube, steroids, anti-biotics, hormones, etc., that don't add to the nutritional value of the food.
Aye, there's the rub, isn't it? We are dealing with many interpretations for the same idea. Hence my Venn diagram. Your use is dastardly difficult to define, as one must speak to motive.
What if a farmer's wife is doctoring her family's food in order to extend it's shelf-life, and thereby save the family money? The additives in her arsenal include salt, sugar, vinegar, gelatin, and pectin. If she mixes these ingredients in a bowl instead of a test-tube, does her final product become "clean"?
Take the lowly pickle. It has at least three of the preservatives mentioned above. None of the processing adds to the food's nutritional value; all it does is extend the shelf-life of the cucumber, saving the family money. Is a pickle dirty?
Yes, it is tricky. Maybe the line is drawn between the processing that is inherent in the creation of the food, like a pickle, and the processing that is just a corporate strategy by companies that industrially create and distribute foods to increase profitability.
So perhaps it is analyzing what ingredients / processes that are required to make a pickle and balancing those against what ingredients / processes a company uses to mass produce pickles in an effort to minimize the cost of processing and maximize the product's shelf life. In most cases I would rather eat a home processed pickle from the farmer's wife's fridge that she grew and canned herself than one from the jar that rolled off the assembly line at Vlasic. The addition of Yellow #5 and Polysorbate 80 are not there to benefit my nutrition.
So Vladimir Von Oreo made under communism is cleaner than capitalist Oreo? I'm not seeing why corporatism and profit motive matter in how clean a food is.
Most people consider raw organic produce rather clean but most of it reaches people via chains of large corporations. Indeed, advertising the concept of clean and natural is a corporate strategy in itself.
It is fascinating how the same companies that spent 50+ years jamming extra salt, sugar, fat, and industrially strategic (for lack of a better term) ingredients in food to make it taste, look, feel, and smell better while giving it an incredibly long shelf life changed strategies fairly recently, removing a lot of the industrial additives they pioneered and touting that as a revolutionary product development initiative.0 -
To me it makes sense that most foods are somewhere on a spectrum of clean/natural/healthy/unmanipulated (call it what you like...)
Sausages for instance...... you can get some meat from your local farmer who just killed a pig, just add some spices and make your own etc OR you can buy some ASDA Smart price sausages which contain only 30% meat and heaps of stabilisers/raising agents/preservatives. Neither will be "100% clean" as neither is simply an unadulterated piece of pork, but it stands to reason that the first will be superior nutritionally to the latter?
Why would "clean" used in a sense that distinguished homemade pork sausage from homemade pork chops or pulled pork be meaningful at all?
Also, say the homemade stuff uses a fattier cut and the storebought is leaner and has fewer calories (a common distinction between the kind of bacon I buy and the much lower cal stuff you can find at the supermarket, even apart from the horror of turkey bacon)? Many would say the leaner stuff is healthier (and let's say it does not have any additives that you question -- is one clearly "healthier" or "more nutrient dense"? I'm not afraid of pork fat, but the leaner stuff has the benefit of more protein per calorie and the added pork fat really just adds taste and calories.
(And of course the Bible says all of this pork, ground or no, is obviously unclean -- again, that there's a religious and purity connotation to the usage is one reason I am never going to be that comfortable with it.)0 -
Need2Exerc1se wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »Need2Exerc1se wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »janejellyroll wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »
I agree, taste is as big or a bigger priority than nutrition for a lot of people. That still doesn’t sell me on consuming Yellow #5 and Polysorbate 80.janejellyroll wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »@nikkimendez666 if you have followed the thread you must know your answer is full of holes. What is a "whole food"?
Eggs are whole but aren't plant-based.
I imagine you'll allow grains and nuts to be shelled and hulled. How about grinding for flour? Is that much processing allowed in your plan?
How about pressing olives for their oil?
Drying grapes in to raisins?
If you eat only unprocessed "whole foods" could you eat a meal of hemp seeds, raisins, and broccoli as long as they weren't mixed together?
I don't think people consider applying physical force (crushing, mixing, shucking, grinding, pressing, etc.) to food as unacceptable processing, at least that is my interpretation. Unwanted processing to me is industrially injecting / mixing / treating food with chemicals to make them more profitable for corporations, ie, food coloring, preservatives mixed in a test tube, steroids, anti-biotics, hormones, etc., that don't add to the nutritional value of the food.
Aye, there's the rub, isn't it? We are dealing with many interpretations for the same idea. Hence my Venn diagram. Your use is dastardly difficult to define, as one must speak to motive.
What if a farmer's wife is doctoring her family's food in order to extend it's shelf-life, and thereby save the family money? The additives in her arsenal include salt, sugar, vinegar, gelatin, and pectin. If she mixes these ingredients in a bowl instead of a test-tube, does her final product become "clean"?
Take the lowly pickle. It has at least three of the preservatives mentioned above. None of the processing adds to the food's nutritional value; all it does is extend the shelf-life of the cucumber, saving the family money. Is a pickle dirty?
Yes, it is tricky. Maybe the line is drawn between the processing that is inherent in the creation of the food, like a pickle, and the processing that is just a corporate strategy by companies that industrially create and distribute foods to increase profitability.
So perhaps it is analyzing what ingredients / processes that are required to make a pickle and balancing those against what ingredients / processes a company uses to mass produce pickles in an effort to minimize the cost of processing and maximize the product's shelf life. In most cases I would rather eat a home processed pickle from the farmer's wife's fridge that she grew and canned herself than one from the jar that rolled off the assembly line at Vlasic. The addition of Yellow #5 and Polysorbate 80 are not there to benefit my nutrition.
Home cooks frequently add ingredients that aren't there to benefit the nutritional value of the food. I'm not sure why a company doing this is worse or less "clean" than a home cook doing it.
I agree with all of this. Eating the perfect diet is aspirational, and completely unrealistic (in my life, anyways). I don’t have a jar of pickles made by a farmer’s wife in my fridge, I have Vlasic pickles, and I get my dose of food coloring and emulsifiers accordinglylemurcat12 wrote: »I'm not against reading labels and learning about ingredients if one is unsure what they are/why they are there, but this is actually related to why I don't like the clean eating thing. Back when I was over-neurotic about food (from my current perspective), I'd do things like refuse to eat pickles unless I made them myself, but the truth is that my lifestyle is such that it's something of a hassle to make pickles (but yay for those of you who make them regularly, I always mean to start doing that and canning stuff and so on) and it was kind of silly to avoid eating perfectly good store-bought pickles just because in theory I wanted to be making them myself. It's also silly to feel that logging them is a failure and not living up to some standard.
I realize that for some you don't get all self-judgmental or neurotic about it, and that's great, but I worry that newbies get the message that their eating habits aren't good enough unless they cut out all such foods that really has nothing at all to do with weight loss (or, IMO, health/nutrition) and end up making the perfect the enemy of the good so it all just seems way more hard and time-consuming than it needs to be. Easy healthy or simply improving one's diet is much simpler and need not require a huge investment of time. I can whip up a dinner with lots of vegetables and some lean protein in a snap (and part of why I can do that is that I will live with relying on dried pasta or canned beans from time to time and not see that as some failure or lesser-than option vs what I should be doing).
I would hope that the new people understand the failures that are inherent in attempting to eat a less-processed diet, and not get too discouraged at having to settle for what is readily available.
I'm not trying to sell you on consuming anything you don't want to consume. But I'm asking you what is the distinction between a company adding an ingredient to a food to enhance taste, appearance, or texture and a home cook doing the same? I don't see a meaningful difference.
It is just a preference. Do you want mom's homemade bread with 6-7 ingredients or Subway's with 30+ ingredients? You can go down the list of ingredients that Subway adds and there is a purpose for each one (prolonging the shelf life, firmness, color, texture, etc.), but that doesn't inspire me to choose their bread over the homemade version. (And for the sensitive people out there, I'm not saying you are a bad person for eating at Subway, I have had their bread on countless occasions, so please don't be hurt by my criticism...)
Just to be clear, it's not about being a bad person. It's about priorities and not beating yourself up over dumb things. You can get bread of all sorts from the supermarket (I never buy bread from the supermarket, but just because I don't eat bread at home much and am picky about it) or from restaurants (I'm fond of a sandwich place that is pretty embarrassing in their focus on the the trendy this and that, and I bet their bread doesn't have lots of ingredients, although number of ingredients isn't a focus of mine). So if there are ingredients you'd prefer to avoid or quality differences, I totally get that, but why tell yourself that supermarket bread or bakery bread or whatever is "less clean" or "not clean" (and I still don't get how "less clean" is distinct from dirty). I just don't get that. I am all for eating in an aspirational way -- I have ideas about how I'd like to eat that I don't always live up to -- but I don't get how it helps to tell myself that my meals are clean or not clean or that I eat semi clean or whatever. I try to eat well, to prioritize nutrient dense food and quality and to also enjoy what I eat (which means trying to cook it in a way that makes it taste good).
I don't understand why saying "this meal isn't as clean as I'd like" is much different than "this meal falls short of how I'd like to eat". Sounds like to-may-toes vs. to-mah-toes to me.
Except in the first case the meal could be both not clean and how I'd like eat.
It all comes back to the implication of "clean," and I understand that you cannot see why it bothers some of us when used in the food context.
And again, because in the current commonplace usage, including on MFP, it's not about a continuum, but being either "clean" or not. One can fall short of one's goals for one's diet on a particular day and not conclude "I'm not a healthful eater." If one eats "unclean" foods, presumably one would not be a "clean eater." (Or else, I ask once again, how is being a "clean eater" different from the rest of us who merely try to eat healthful, nutrient-dense meals for the most part such that it is defended as a special, different way of eating that requires special groups and recipes.)
Using my definition the difference would be vocabulary. I do find it amusing that you suggest there is a commonplace usage for the term though. I thought the fact that there is not was the whole point of this thread.
I think the definitions all revolve around "avoiding processed food." People just have weird ideas about what processed means.0
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