Clean Eating: no processed/refined foods, no high sugar/fat foods, or no foods with dirt on them?
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The food-politics movement has infiltrated the "clean" food to further complicate matters with an entire layer of definition that has all to do with political bias and nothing to do with healthier eating. You can't just drink coffee, it has to be organic and made from beans that have been picked by someone earning a living wage in a country that doesn't put children to work and that has signed on to a climate change accord. Was your egg laid by a chicken in a cage? Oooh. Bad. It must be laid by a chicken running around outside. (In Canada, nothing runs around outside for long periods of the year. It's a period of time known as winter.) Then there's the whole non-gmo band wagon. Anything that has been improved by man to withstand the elements or insect attack or grow to maturity using less water than before and with a higher concentration of nutrients must, by virtue of it being hybradized or genetically modified, be bad and not clean. The original carrot was nothing like we know it to be today. We can thank the Dutch tulip growers for our carrot's size and colour. I guess it's okay if the plant was modified more than a hundred years ago?
I'm going over to my mom's today to harvest apples in her garden. They haven't been sprayed (this year, there were no bugs; but it's been sprayed in other years), and the tree is in an idylic corner of the garden, but near to constant traffic (exhaust) from two streets and a bus stop nearby. And the tree species is a fairly new one, it was tweaked by a reknowned horticulturalist at a research facility to enable the fruit tree to better survive the Canadian prairie winter temperatures. Are the apples clean if they've been hybradized in a lab? There are some in the "clean eating" camp that would say no.8 -
Personally I think of it as things that have gone through minimal processing, whole foods, making things yourself rather than buying them in a box. If it comes with a load of ingredients you can't pronounce on the label then it's probably not great.
Some people wouldn't include cake and cookies if they were trying to eat clean but my interpretation would be to have cake/cookies but make it myself from scratch rather than buying something from the shop that has added preservatives or e-numbers or something.
If it's been synthesized in a laboratory, it's not 'clean'. If it's grown, natural or an extract of them (like milk, sugar or flour which are from natural sources) then it's fine.
The bolded is another one I don't understand. If the ingredients on the box are the same ones I'd use to make the same dish in my kitchen at home, why is it a problem (dietarily) to buy it in the box?
I'm all for good, balanced nutrition, but there are lots of different paths to that goal.nutmegoreo wrote: »Personally I think of it as things that have gone through minimal processing, whole foods, making things yourself rather than buying them in a box. If it comes with a load of ingredients you can't pronounce on the label then it's probably not great.
Some people wouldn't include cake and cookies if they were trying to eat clean but my interpretation would be to have cake/cookies but make it myself from scratch rather than buying something from the shop that has added preservatives or e-numbers or something.
If it's been synthesized in a laboratory, it's not 'clean'. If it's grown, natural or an extract of them (like milk, sugar or flour which are from natural sources) then it's fine.
I've always found the bolded silly. If my vocabulary is more extensive, or if I were a science-type, then the cookies are safe for me, because I can pronounce the words.
I have ALWAYS hated the can't pronounce the ingredients thing. It doesn't mean the ingredient is bad for you. It means you need Hooked on Phoenics.
I've always thought it boiled down to a fear of the unknown. If an ingredient name is big and long and complicated, it must be scary, right?
Aaaaaand they don't have google?
But, yeah, definitely that too. Of course, I'll eat any that's not spicy or disgusting sounding (like snails).
I'm fine with spicy, but have come to appreciate how my long-term vegetarianism saves me from trying nearly everything that just sounds icky.
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I have a sister who won't eat anything that has ingredients she doesn't recognize. I told that means she's on the "ignorance diet." She still isn't talking to me.
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Personally I think of it as things that have gone through minimal processing, whole foods, making things yourself rather than buying them in a box. If it comes with a load of ingredients you can't pronounce on the label then it's probably not great.
Some people wouldn't include cake and cookies if they were trying to eat clean but my interpretation would be to have cake/cookies but make it myself from scratch rather than buying something from the shop that has added preservatives or e-numbers or something.
If it's been synthesized in a laboratory, it's not 'clean'. If it's grown, natural or an extract of them (like milk, sugar or flour which are from natural sources) then it's fine.
The bolded is another one I don't understand. If the ingredients on the box are the same ones I'd use to make the same dish in my kitchen at home, why is it a problem (dietarily) to buy it in the box?
I'm all for good, balanced nutrition, but there are lots of different paths to that goal.nutmegoreo wrote: »Personally I think of it as things that have gone through minimal processing, whole foods, making things yourself rather than buying them in a box. If it comes with a load of ingredients you can't pronounce on the label then it's probably not great.
Some people wouldn't include cake and cookies if they were trying to eat clean but my interpretation would be to have cake/cookies but make it myself from scratch rather than buying something from the shop that has added preservatives or e-numbers or something.
If it's been synthesized in a laboratory, it's not 'clean'. If it's grown, natural or an extract of them (like milk, sugar or flour which are from natural sources) then it's fine.
I've always found the bolded silly. If my vocabulary is more extensive, or if I were a science-type, then the cookies are safe for me, because I can pronounce the words.
I have ALWAYS hated the can't pronounce the ingredients thing. It doesn't mean the ingredient is bad for you. It means you need Hooked on Phoenics.
I've always thought it boiled down to a fear of the unknown. If an ingredient name is big and long and complicated, it must be scary, right?
Aaaaaand they don't have google?
But, yeah, definitely that too. Of course, I'll eat any that's not spicy or disgusting sounding (like snails).
I'm fine with spicy, but have come to appreciate how my long-term vegetarianism saves me from trying nearly everything that just sounds icky.
Disclaimer: I do not consider myself to be a clean eater, and I do make some things from boxes.
Have you found it to be the case that everything in the box is ingredients you would use from home? Because I have not found this to be true. Boxed foods generally have preservatives to increase shelf life that you don't need when you are assembling everything yourself. They might have different stabilizers and emulsifiers. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with some things added, just that it hasn't been my experience that a box will match a from scratch recipe.2 -
kshama2001 wrote: »Personally I think of it as things that have gone through minimal processing, whole foods, making things yourself rather than buying them in a box. If it comes with a load of ingredients you can't pronounce on the label then it's probably not great.
Some people wouldn't include cake and cookies if they were trying to eat clean but my interpretation would be to have cake/cookies but make it myself from scratch rather than buying something from the shop that has added preservatives or e-numbers or something.
If it's been synthesized in a laboratory, it's not 'clean'. If it's grown, natural or an extract of them (like milk, sugar or flour which are from natural sources) then it's fine.
The bolded is another one I don't understand. If the ingredients on the box are the same ones I'd use to make the same dish in my kitchen at home, why is it a problem (dietarily) to buy it in the box?
I'm all for good, balanced nutrition, but there are lots of different paths to that goal.nutmegoreo wrote: »Personally I think of it as things that have gone through minimal processing, whole foods, making things yourself rather than buying them in a box. If it comes with a load of ingredients you can't pronounce on the label then it's probably not great.
Some people wouldn't include cake and cookies if they were trying to eat clean but my interpretation would be to have cake/cookies but make it myself from scratch rather than buying something from the shop that has added preservatives or e-numbers or something.
If it's been synthesized in a laboratory, it's not 'clean'. If it's grown, natural or an extract of them (like milk, sugar or flour which are from natural sources) then it's fine.
I've always found the bolded silly. If my vocabulary is more extensive, or if I were a science-type, then the cookies are safe for me, because I can pronounce the words.
I have ALWAYS hated the can't pronounce the ingredients thing. It doesn't mean the ingredient is bad for you. It means you need Hooked on Phoenics.
I've always thought it boiled down to a fear of the unknown. If an ingredient name is big and long and complicated, it must be scary, right?
Aaaaaand they don't have google?
But, yeah, definitely that too. Of course, I'll eat any that's not spicy or disgusting sounding (like snails).
I'm fine with spicy, but have come to appreciate how my long-term vegetarianism saves me from trying nearly everything that just sounds icky.
Disclaimer: I do not consider myself to be a clean eater, and I do make some things from boxes.
Have you found it to be the case that everything in the box is ingredients you would use from home? Because I have not found this to be true. Boxed foods generally have preservatives to increase shelf life that you don't need when you are assembling everything yourself. They might have different stabilizers and emulsifiers. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with some things added, just that it hasn't been my experience that a box will match a from scratch recipe.
Some do, some don't.
I don't eat huge amounts of commercially prepared foods. When I do, I don't reject polysyllabic chemical-sounding ingredients out of hand, but I do read ingredients lists and think about what I want to eat. Context and dosage - to steal a phrase - is part of that assessment.
There exist commercial boxed foods that contain entirely ingredients I'd use if I made the dish myself. I have a food-snobby bias that actual food usually tastes better than engineered products, and that foods humans have eaten for centuries/millennia are evolution-tested for safety and nutritional effectiveness, generally speaking. Therefore, when I do buy a commercially prepared food (boxed, bagged, or frozen), I usually prefer to buy those foods that use ingredients I'd use in my kitchen to make a similar thing, at least mostly. They exist.
I find "avoid foods in boxes" to be nonsensical, as a rule of thumb. Read the ingredients and think about what you're buying and eating? That's a fine rule.
I'm objecting to "avoid boxed foods" for much the same reason people object to "shop the perimeter of the supermarket" and "avoid hard to pronounce ingredients". If one already has some ideas/prejudices about what kinds of things one wants to eat, maybe those are a sort of reminder (?). If one doesn't know much, they're silly rules of thumb that don't communicate what's really potentially meaningful about the foods. It doesn't help people; it just creates more confusion and food demonization.
Neither the box, nor making something at home, have much to do with the quality and value of a food. The ingredients quite possibly do, though.
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Rather than ‘clean eating’ I prefer saying I eat ‘whole foods’. Minimal processing, 5 or fewer ingredients that I can pronounce and know how to find them on my own. It isn’t about status for me. My mother and grandfather died of liver disease, which i believe was caused by unhealthy eating. I am trying to eat as healthy and whole as possible. I shop around the edges of the store and read every ingredient list.13
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Rather than ‘clean eating’ I prefer saying I eat ‘whole foods’. Minimal processing, 5 or fewer ingredients that I can pronounce and know how to find them on my own. It isn’t about status for me. My mother and grandfather died of liver disease, which i believe was caused by unhealthy eating. I am trying to eat as healthy and whole as possible. I shop around the edges of the store and read every ingredient list.
I love shopping in the bakery too!14 -
[quote/]I love shopping in the bakery too![/quote]
Well...the bakery is one edge I skip. 😁 I don’t eat many sugary items, either.
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nutmegoreo wrote: »Rather than ‘clean eating’ I prefer saying I eat ‘whole foods’. Minimal processing, 5 or fewer ingredients that I can pronounce and know how to find them on my own. It isn’t about status for me. My mother and grandfather died of liver disease, which i believe was caused by unhealthy eating. I am trying to eat as healthy and whole as possible. I shop around the edges of the store and read every ingredient list.
I love shopping in the bakery too!
Around the perimeter of my grocery is... bakery, deli, produce, frozen fish, meat counter, luncheon meats and refrigerated side dishes, dairy and coffee creamers, cheese slices and sticks, pudding cups and whipped cream, beer, and bulk beverages (ie cases of soda). Oh and then the lottery ticket machine.6 -
I just read through this entire thread. Why is everyone belittling others’ choices? If I try to eat whole, healthy, unprocessed foods, why does that matter to anyone? I am new to this ‘community’ but it really seems anything but that from what I’m seeing here.6
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I just read through this entire thread. Why is everyone belittling others’ choices? If I try to eat whole, healthy, unprocessed foods, why does that matter to anyone? I am new to this ‘community’ but it really seems anything but that from what I’m seeing here.
Nobody is belittling anyone's choices. What they are pointing out is the fallacy that you can only be healthy if you eat "clean" (whatever that means to the individual) and some of the arbitrary rules of "eating clean."
No one cares what you eat. What people here do care about is accurate information so people can make their own informed decisions.16 -
I just read through this entire thread. Why is everyone belittling others’ choices? If I try to eat whole, healthy, unprocessed foods, why does that matter to anyone? I am new to this ‘community’ but it really seems anything but that from what I’m seeing here.
IMHO clean eating suggests that if you're not eating clean, you're eating dirty, you don't care about your health. That if you aren't eating "whole food" you're eating junk. There is no reason you can't include processed food in a diet that is healthy.
I don't think most of the people in this thread care how you choose to eat. But folks post here all the time about how if you aren't eating clean you can't lose weight, you don't care about your health, you're just too lazy or undisciplined to eat right. I took this thread as a reaction to that. As a new poster maybe you haven't seen that here yet.
Welcome by the way
Sorry if your first view was one you felt judged by, but there is a lot to learn here! 8 -
I just read through this entire thread. Why is everyone belittling others’ choices? If I try to eat whole, healthy, unprocessed foods, why does that matter to anyone? I am new to this ‘community’ but it really seems anything but that from what I’m seeing here.
So, your food is "clean" (as opposed to the dirty food other people eat), your food is "whole" (as opposed to the broken or incomplete food other people eat), and your food is "healthy" (as opposed to the unhealthy food other people eat), and it's the other people who are belittling others' choices?? OK.
Edited to fix typo.7 -
Ok. Um, wow. I posted earlier in this thread what I thought the OP was referring to and how I implement that. Whole foods = the original food, not ‘broken’ food mentioned above. I’ve never said I eat ‘clean’. And if we can’t agree some foods are more healthy than others then we have a disconnect. It is very interesting to read the responses. I think I am going to have to stick to my diary and newsfeed and stay away from the ‘community’. 😃6
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The way I see it, there are two aspects to weight management -I just read through this entire thread. Why is everyone belittling others’ choices? If I try to eat whole, healthy, unprocessed foods, why does that matter to anyone? I am new to this ‘community’ but it really seems anything but that from what I’m seeing here.
There's the physiological part. Calories In vs. Calories Out, Carbs/Fats/Proteins, carbs => sucrose => glucose => fat storage/fat storage => glycogen => physical energy + H20 + CO2 (if you're lucky, and if I haven't got that last part wrong). It's very complicated and incredibly difficult, but it's the easy part.
The hard part is the psychological/social. Desserts are sinful, diet concoctions are "guilt-free." Eating fewer calories than your target is virtuous, exceeding it is failure. You could lose all your excess weight tomorrow, you just need to summon up some willpower. Too much milkshake makes too much Marsha. (Insert overweight public figure here) should just eat a salad once in a while. Desperate White Male ISO anyone who will go out with me (NO FATTIES!!!). Fatty Fatty, Two By Four....
And the two parts are inextricably entwined, like a cancer tumor and the vital organ that it has wrapped its myriad tentacles and tendrils around. I started this thread because I was confused by how the term "clean eating" was being used on another thread. That other thread was started in response to the OP's intense outrage over someone having logged an ice cream sundae in their food diary.
Whether the OP was outraged by the ingestion of the ice cream, the logging of the ice cream, or that the eater-logger did not exceed their calorie target for the day, remains unclear to me. But the level of outrage - both the OP's and many of the later posters' - was unmistakable, even more so than the level of judgement on this thread.
There is a lot of judgement on MFP, and a lot of fitness-snobbery and fat-shaming. There's also a lot of ignorance, semi-ignorance, misinformation, and misunderstanding. But it's the best fitness/weight-management community I've found on the internet so far. I hope you stay, @msdunny - you might be able to help improve it a bit.
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I just read through this entire thread. Why is everyone belittling others’ choices? If I try to eat whole, healthy, unprocessed foods, why does that matter to anyone? I am new to this ‘community’ but it really seems anything but that from what I’m seeing here.
I think it's largely critique of the very fuzzy term "clean eating" and the very fuzzy ways it's sometimes defined - definitions no more helpful than the original term. That term was the express subject of the thread.
As far as belittling others' food choices, I think you might implicitly be making an inaccurate assumption about how some of the people commenting actually eat themselves . . . in spite of the level of joking about junk foods.
I think the term "clean eating" is so unclear as to be useless: I don't use it. It doesn't communicate. I feel similarly about the uselessness of "ultra processed"/"unprocessed", "whole", and a lot of the other generalized terms often used to describe "clean" eating styles. (For example, it's somewhat common to look at diaries of those self-described as "eating clean, whole, unprocessed" and find it includes a list of supplements and protein powder. There's nothing at all wrong with eating/using those things IMO, but they're the antithesis of any reasonable definition of "whole" or "unprocessed".)
By all means, everyone should eat in the style s/he prefers. (I normally urge balanced nutrition, for health reasons. ).
Welcome to MFP, truly. Please stick around. It can be a bit of a rough and ready place, but I think you'll find most people pretty helpful, and some extraordinarily knowledgeable, when there's a specific call for information or help. The "show your sources" and "communicate clearly" biases help keep things on the helpful side, IMO, if occasionally a bit prickly.
P.S. FWIW, I ate 31 things today, all of them vegetarian. I believe only 3 of them had more than 5 ingredients: Ezekiel pita, organic raspberry kefir, pre-shredded 2% milk cheese. I think those also included my only added sugar for the day, except for the blackstrap molasses I put in my oatmeal. So, so "unclean". It's just food. 5 -
nutmegoreo wrote: »Personally I think of it as things that have gone through minimal processing, whole foods, making things yourself rather than buying them in a box. If it comes with a load of ingredients you can't pronounce on the label then it's probably not great.
Some people wouldn't include cake and cookies if they were trying to eat clean but my interpretation would be to have cake/cookies but make it myself from scratch rather than buying something from the shop that has added preservatives or e-numbers or something.
If it's been synthesized in a laboratory, it's not 'clean'. If it's grown, natural or an extract of them (like milk, sugar or flour which are from natural sources) then it's fine.
I've always found the bolded silly. If my vocabulary is more extensive, or if I were a science-type, then the cookies are safe for me, because I can pronounce the words.
Or if I have a lisp and can't pronounce spinach, I shouldn't eat it ???
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nutmegoreo wrote: »Personally I think of it as things that have gone through minimal processing, whole foods, making things yourself rather than buying them in a box. If it comes with a load of ingredients you can't pronounce on the label then it's probably not great.
Some people wouldn't include cake and cookies if they were trying to eat clean but my interpretation would be to have cake/cookies but make it myself from scratch rather than buying something from the shop that has added preservatives or e-numbers or something.
If it's been synthesized in a laboratory, it's not 'clean'. If it's grown, natural or an extract of them (like milk, sugar or flour which are from natural sources) then it's fine.
I've always found the bolded silly. If my vocabulary is more extensive, or if I were a science-type, then the cookies are safe for me, because I can pronounce the words.
Or if I have a lisp and can't pronounce spinach, I shouldn't eat it ???
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We'll get you a leper's cloak and a bell, so that you can wander through the metaphorical streets of your food diary shouting: "Unclean! Unclean!"P.S. FWIW, I ate 31 things today, all of them vegetarian. I believe only 3 of them had more than 5 ingredients: Ezekiel pita, organic raspberry kefir, pre-shredded 2% milk cheese. I think those also included my only added sugar for the day, except for the blackstrap molasses I put in my oatmeal. So, so "unclean". It's just food.
(I really hope the above turns out to be funny, because it was very much intended as a joke.)10 -
Rather than ‘clean eating’ I prefer saying I eat ‘whole foods’. Minimal processing, 5 or fewer ingredients that I can pronounce and know how to find them on my own. It isn’t about status for me. My mother and grandfather died of liver disease, which i believe was caused by unhealthy eating. I am trying to eat as healthy and whole as possible. I shop around the edges of the store and read every ingredient list.
I will repeat my earlier comment about this one:
I like "shop on the outside of the store". You know, where the bacon, bologna, fried chicken, donuts, pies and birthday cakes are...2
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