Clean Eating Bashing?

tigersword

I agree! This is myFITNESSpal, not myWEIGHTLOSSpal. Eating clean contributes to fitness in more ways than eating twinkies at a deficit does.

Why does eating twinkies mean you aren't fit?

If you can leave a twinky on a shelf for 10 years and still eat it... that isn't food, it's a chemical **** storm. Eating clean(er) has benefits to the body far beyond the waist line! Do your research mate and see the benefits!

If you seriously believe that, then trying to have a serious conversation with you is hopeless. A Twinkie has a shelf life of around 20 days. No box of Twinkies sits on a shelf for more than a couple weeks. A Twinkie is a sponge cake. Nothing more.

ILiftHeavyAcrylics

Cookies are nutrient dense.
Vegetables are extremely sparse nutritionally.

People so worship at the alter of micronutrients, downright pointlessly I might add, and so demonize macronutrients, that discussion of nutrients is nonsensical. One would survive FAR longer on a diet of pure cookies than a diet of pure broccoli.

Welp, that's all I needed to hear.

ldrosophila

I agree! This is myFITNESSpal, not myWEIGHTLOSSpal. Eating clean contributes to fitness in more ways than eating twinkies at a deficit does.

Why does eating twinkies mean you aren't fit?

If you can leave a twinky on a shelf for 10 years and still eat it... that isn't food, it's a chemical **** storm. Eating clean(er) has benefits to the body far beyond the waist line! Do your research mate and see the benefits!

If you seriously believe that, then trying to have a serious conversation with you is hopeless. A Twinkie has a shelf life of around 20 days. No box of Twinkies sits on a shelf for more than a couple weeks. A Twinkie is a sponge cake. Nothing more.

Woah woah...look at this highly processed beverage 2.6billion year old water what the heck do you think Monsanto did to this water to make it last so long? When I think of all the chemicals in this water I shudder.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/21/world/americas/ancient-water-tasting/

Sabine_Stroehm

fwiw, the "new" "returned" twinkie is said to have a 45 day shelf life.

RllyGudTweetr

fwiw, the "new" "returned" twinkie is said to have a 45 day shelf life.

Said, by whom?

How much of that is due to the fact that - like its predecessor - it's made without dairy products, according to those who said that the new shelf live is 45 days?

magerum

I agree! This is myFITNESSpal, not myWEIGHTLOSSpal. Eating clean contributes to fitness in more ways than eating twinkies at a deficit does.

Why does eating twinkies mean you aren't fit?

If you can leave a twinky on a shelf for 10 years and still eat it... that isn't food, it's a chemical **** storm. Eating clean(er) has benefits to the body far beyond the waist line! Do your research mate and see the benefits!

:huh:

I've got a bridge to sell you.

QuietBloom

The Twinkie, deconstructed. From NPR.

_______________________________________________________

We have to confess: When we heard that Twinkies will have nearly double the shelf life, 45 days, when they return to stores next week, our first reaction was — days? Not years?

Urban legend has long deemed Twinkies the cockroaches of the snack food world, a treat that can survive for decades, what humanity would have left to eat come the apocalypse. The true shelf life — which used to be 26 days — seems somewhat less impressive by comparison.

While the Twinkie is indeed a highly processed food — its three dozen or so ingredients include polysorbate 60, sodium stearoyl lactylate and others that could only come from a lab — it isn't any more so than thousands of other food products out there.

"It is absolutely typical of all processed foods," says Steve Ettlinger, who spent five years tracing the origins of ingredients in many processed foods for his book, .

"Perhaps disappointing to foodies, it's mostly flour and sugar," he tells The Salt.

So why does the Twinkie persist in the popular imagination as a paragon of delicious, unnatural food creations? Perhaps it is the way the snacks seem to override our senses. Unwrapped from their plastic packaging, these sponge cakes appear impossibly soft, their filling so creamy — not rancid, as logic tells us that any milk product left out for days must surely be.

Indeed, most of the items on Twinkies' long list of ingredients go into pulling off that hat trick. Normally, you need butter, milk and eggs to give cakes their moisture and tenderness.

But butter, milk and eggs spoil, so Twinkies needed a way to defy the laws of baked-good longevity. That job is filled by ingredients like monoglycerides and diglycerides, emulsifiers — also found in real milk — that love to bind with oil, and sodium stearoyl lactylate, which likes to bind with water, Ettlinger says.

The butter flavor comes from diacetyl, the same compound food scientists use in microwave popcorn and .

Eggs get a culinary understudy: polysorbate 60, an emulsifier derived from oil palm trees, corn syrup and ethylene oxide (which, Ettlinger says, is "derived from an oil well"). With polysorbate 60, he says, "you can get this wonderful goo that resembles egg yolk, only more powerful." There is the teensiest bit of real egg in Twinkies — about 1/500th of an egg in each cake, by Ettlinger's calculations. "I could never fathom why," he says.

Interestingly, though all these ingredients help extend the Twinkies' shelf life, the only proper "preservative" used is sorbic acid, he says.

So yes, there's a lot of food science packed into the yellow baked snack, though the exact proportions of the recipe remain top secret. (Ettlinger says he was once jokingly told by a Twinkie bakery in Maine that "if I knew the actual recipe for the creme, they would have to kill me.")

And though we're dying to know just what changes Hostess Brands LLC has made to keep Twinkies "fresh" nearly twice as long — from 26 days to 45 days — when they return to shelves on July 15, that, too, is likely to remain a mystery. (A representative for Hostess, which is under , told the Associated Press that the longer-lasting Twinkies were actually introduced by the old company shortly before it was liquidated.)

Of course, we've all heard of people who've kept their Twinkies around for much longer — including a Maine school that's held on to one snack cake for , part of a very long-running science experiment. (That Twinkie hasn't crumbled yet, but in photos, it appears a ghastly ash gray.)

Heck, at NPR's Science Desk, we even started our own experiment a year and a half ago, after . Our findings? So far, the subject shows no signs of disintegrating — or of still being edible: It's now hard as a rock.

QuietBloom

Wow, just skimming through these posts, I see that even those who choose to 'eat clean' all have different definitions of what that entails.

To say you 'eat clean' is meaningless because of this. There is no ultimate definition of what is 'clean eating'.

No one knowingly ingests pesticides, parasites or those ever ethereal 'toxins'. No one.

/thread.

Really? I think most of us do. Every day. Knowingly.

Do tell!

GingerLolita

I think the biggest issue is that the bashers think clean eaters are demonizing particular foods. However, most clean eaters I've communicated with on here identify themselves as "mostly clean" and recognize that they sometimes make less-clean choices. Clean eating makes me feel better, as many clean eaters agree, so I don't see what's wrong with that.

Contrarian

So. What does everyone think about hunting?

Carnivor0us

So. What does everyone think about hunting?

I think it's great.

tigersword

So. What does everyone think about hunting?

Let me just ask my friend the West African Rhin- Oh.

jofjltncb6

Great.

Now I want a Twinkie.

Cranquistador

Great.

Now I want a Twinkie.

NO

tigersword

I think the biggest issue is that the bashers think clean eaters are demonizing particular foods. However, most clean eaters I've communicated with on here identify themselves as "mostly clean" and recognize that they sometimes make less-clean choices. Clean eating makes me feel better, as many clean eaters agree, so I don't see what's wrong with that.

Here's the issue. "Mostly clean" is a complete copout. People who subscribe to IIFYM would then mostly also be considered "clean eaters" based on that criteria. So then why is it that "clean eaters" are the ones who act superior, and insist that if you follow IIFYM you must just be eating Big Macs and Twinkies exclusively?

Clean eating is a marketing gimmick, that's all it is.

ILiftHeavyAcrylics

I think the biggest issue is that the bashers think clean eaters are demonizing particular foods. However, most clean eaters I've communicated with on here identify themselves as "mostly clean" and recognize that they sometimes make less-clean choices. Clean eating makes me feel better, as many clean eaters agree, so I don't see what's wrong with that.

This goes back to my question, which never got answered.

What percentage of the time does a person need to eat "clean" in order to be a clean eater? It sounds from this thread like many clean eaters eat about like I do-- clean except for the ice cream and cookies. Which sounds to me like "not clean at all." It seem to me like saying you're a vegetarian except for the times you eat meat.

ILiftHeavyAcrylics

Great.

Now I want a Twinkie.

But poison.

jofjltncb6

Great.

Now I want a Twinkie.

NO

Likelihood of me eating a Twinkie just quadrupled...

...and that would involve getting in my car and going to the store to buy some.

mammamaurer

I agree! This is myFITNESSpal, not myWEIGHTLOSSpal. Eating clean contributes to fitness in more ways than eating twinkies at a deficit does.

Why does eating twinkies mean you aren't fit?

NO ONE SAID THAT! This is exactly what I'm talking about.

It was implied that eating twinkes = not fit.

Still waiting on the three ways eating clean contributes more to fitness than eating "twinkies" or whatever else does.

It was not implied. You inferred it.

3 Reasons: Meeting your nutritional needs before you eat exclusively snacks is on its face better for you or nutritional guidelines would not exist at all. Twinkies take a great deal of processing and transporting of ingredients to accomplish, which contributes to water and air pollution, neither or which are good for you. Twinkies contain a lot of corn-based ingredients which contribute to the mono-cropping of American and threaten the sustainability of the food system.

Do your own freaking research on Twinkies. You are lazy for making me do it for you.

I see some people on here that survive exclusively on fast food and I really don't want to pay for your Obamacare for you.

you make me wanna:

jwdieter

Here's the issue. "Mostly clean" is a complete copout. People who subscribe to IIFYM would then mostly also be considered "clean eaters" based on that criteria. So then why is it that "clean eaters" are the ones who act superior, and insist that if you follow IIFYM you must just be eating Big Macs and Twinkies exclusively?

On one side you have people talking about what they eat most of the time, and on the other you have people talking about what they eat some of the time. And if you look at the diaries, it's not particularly clear there's a difference. It's a stupid argument both ways.