The Clean Eating Delusion...

In practice “clean eating” tends to be avoiding whatever food is the latest boogeyman in the pseudoscientific diet-advice industry. Today this often includes eating organic, avoiding GMOs, avoiding gluten, avoiding perceived “chemicals,” eating “natural” which can mean many things but often means avoiding processed foods and food additives, and sometimes eating raw foods.

It is important to emphasize that none of these food beliefs are science based. After 50 years of research there is no evidence for any health benefit to eating organic. After 20 years of research there is no evidence of any health risk to any currently available GMO foods.

About one percent of the population has true gluten sensitivity, called celiac disease. For everyone else there is no current consensus that gluten causes any problems. This story is more complicated, though, as there are also wheat allergies, and some people with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) are sensitive to FODMAPs, which are in many of the same foods as gluten.

Avoiding “toxins” includes a large category of claims, but essentially misses the point that the dose makes the toxin. Sure, there are toxins everywhere – substances that in high enough dose will cause adverse health effects. Water is a toxin if drunk in sufficient quantities. The important question is, what is the dose? It is easy to scare people, however, with the notion that there are toxins in their food or water, without putting that information into its proper context.

Closely related to this is the avoidance of “chemicals.” This is a particularly naive position, as everything is a chemical. Water is a chemical (H2O). You can give even common substance a long technical chemical name and make is sound scary, giving rise to popular memes in which the contents of a banana or blueberry are listed in scary chemical names.

In order to avoid “Food Babe” level ignorance on this issue (“if you can’t pronounce it, you shouldn’t eat it”), some have made the distinction between natural and synthetic chemicals. This is a false dichotomy, however. How much processing or change to a naturally occurring chemical makes it synthetic? Also, there is no reason to suspect that chemicals which happen to occur in nature have any greater tendency to be healthful than synthetic chemicals. This is just another manifestation of the appeal to nature fallacy.

There are legitimate reasons to be concerned about eating too much processed food, as it tends to contain lots of sugar, fat, and/or salt. This has to do more with trends in the food industry, rather than anything inherent to processing foods rather than eating foods prepared from scratch. This is where reading labels can be helpful, and there also needs to be pressure on the food industry to provide more transparency and healthful options. But avoiding processed foods is no guarantee of healthy eating either, as there are many unprocessed sources of excess fat, sugar, and salt.

Eating raw is nothing but pure nonsense. Cooking changes food, mostly for the better, making certain nutrients more accessible and digestion easier. Some types of cooking, or overcooking, (such as boiling vegetables) can remove nutrients from certain foods, but it is not necessary to eat raw in order to get adequate nutrition (and of course, microwaves are no better or worse than any other source of heat).

Raw eating often involves pure pseudoscience, such as the claim that it is better to eat food that is alive, and cooking kills food. Stomach acids also kill food, by the way. Raw claims vary from the pseudoscientific to the mystical, with claims about the essence of food.