In 2017 the National Osteoporosis Society (NOS) conducted a survey of 2000 adults. 40% of 18-25 year olds, they found, had been following the buzzy diet de jour: clean eating. This triggered a stark warning from the Bone Guys: get your shit together or in 15-20 years “broken bones [will be] the norm”. I’m paraphrasing, obviously. But NOS were highlighting a concern that many of my colleagues and I shared about the growing number of people eschewing dairy-based foods – not in favour of calcium-fortified alternatives – but for home-made, ‘unprocessed’, gluten and sugar-free, plant-based, and, ‘clean’ nut milks. The issue was not that people were going vegan necessarily, but that they were cutting out foods from a place of fear, usually guided by self-appointed ‘wellness experts’ and not being given sound nutritional advice about how to prevent your bones from turning to a powdery dust at age 45.
I doubt that I really need to explain what clean eating was to readers of this newsletter, but for the benefit of anyone who miraculously dodged that particular bullet, clean eating was a style of eating popularised on social media. There’s no standardised definition, but researchers Walsh and Baker wrote in their 2020 paper on clean eating published in the journal Food, Culture, and Society:
'practitioners of the diet are bound by their consumption of foods perceived to be ‘natural’ and wholesome, free of chemicals, additives, preservatives, refined and highly processed ingredients. Though used to describe a variety of diets (e.g., vegan, vegetarian, pescetarian and ketogenic), the dietary practice is predicated on the basis that one should consume foods recognized by the clean eating community as ‘healthy’, ‘pure’ and ‘clean’ and correspondingly, eliminate the consumption of foods considered to be unhealthy or impure.’
Clean eating was not something done privately for one’s own benefit, but a public performance, a form of conspicuous consumption that played out on Instagram (and eventually through books, public events, and traditional media). This performance not only signalled the ‘goodness’ of the food, but demonstrated the purity, virtue, and goodness of the eater themself. By contrast, those who did not, or could not, participate were impure; dirty; contaminated.
The NOS warning is a moment that sticks out in my mind – partially because I was summoned to Broadcasting House to talk about it and the thought still makes me want to puke – but mostly as part of the gradual exposing of clean eating as socially sanctioned disordered eating. The glitter was flaking off the proverbial shit.
Dishing the Dirt on Clean Eating
2016 and 2017 were peppered with these unravellings. There were qualified nutrition professionals demystifying wellness trends with evidence, something we take for granted now but at the time was something of a revolution. Then there was the writer and author Ruby Tandoh calling a spade a spade in Vice. And who could forget the time Ella Mills (aka Deliciously Ella) went on national TV to disavow the trend she pioneered, like 5 minutes before? Honestly, it was a time. It all kind of came to a head with the publication of Bee Wilson’s Guardian Long Read - Why We Fell For Clean Eating. Good riddance, we thought. Won’t be falling for that again!
Then of course, it was time to clean up the mess.
2018 and 2019 were the years of Eating Up and Just Eating It and asking Is Butter a Carb? We wrote books about healing our relationship with food, finding joy in eating, trusting our bodies, and learning, seemingly for the first time, that holy fuck, nutrition is a science and coconut oil does not have supernatural powers.
Job done, we thought.
Clean Eating Gets a Scienc-y Glow Up
Oh, FFS
In case you’re not sure what you just witnessed, this is a reel of Prof Tim Spector, founder of personalised nutrition app Zoe and a vocal critic of ultra-processed foods, essentially telling people to stop drinking milk unless it’s fermented; a message eerily similar to that being espoused by the Clean Eating Set in 2015.
It’s not just Spector. There’s a new wave of ‘clean eating’ pioneers – although they’d never call themselves that – who have made it their mission to get the country to eat better. Who asked them, I’m not sure. But unlike ten years ago, they’re no longer clad in £88 Lululemon leggings, but more likely to be sporting a stethoscope, an apron, or gardening gloves. Instead of being young white women in their early 20s; they’re middle-aged white dudes with grey hair. Their language has shifted too, of course. They know better than to use the label ‘clean’; they know that food doesn’t ‘detox’ our bodies, a job best left to the liver and kidneys; they know that ‘wellness’ is the frivolous younger sister of the much more serious and grown-up business of ‘health’.
With this shift in profile, something else has happened too. These older men use science to appeal to authority - a logical fallacy whereby we defer to people in positions of power (doctors, professors) even though rationally, we know they have the potential to share incorrect or misleading information. In effect, the reverence we hold for these authority figures overrides our own critical thinking.
This is not to criticise anyone who has bought-into what these men are saying; there are nuggets of truth in amongst the orange juice hyperbole. Besides, most of us mere mortals don’t have the scientific education to go toe-to-toe with doctors and professors. So in many ways it makes sense to defer to their expertise and links to an abstract in The Lancet.
They have science on their side! What could possibly go wrong?
Still, I’m left with an overwhelming sense of déjà vu.
Whether it’s Chris Van Tulleken subsisting on cherry tomatoes, nuts and raw carrots, or Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall telling us to add barley, spelt or quinoa to our morning bowl of porridge, the level of micromanagement, fear, and concerns about the purity of our diet is very 2014.
We may have moved past the labels ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’, but we’ve replaced them with the scientifically sounding and equally ill-defined ‘unprocessed’ and ‘ultra-processed’. We use ‘whole’, ‘natural’ and 'real'. We talk about cutting out ultra-processed foods (UPFs) for optimal ‘gut health’ and to manage the symptoms of ‘perimenopause’ in a desperate attempt to fill the gaping hole in women's’ health research. It is now no longer good-enough to get your 5-a-day; you must eat 30 plants a week. Or is it a day? It’s unclear.
I’ve tracked this heightened food neurosis in my own practice over the past few years. The shift from Clean Eating to Clean Eating But Make It Science has been a slow drip, but has reached a fever pitch in the past 18 months. I’ve been dedicating more time in sessions parsing out what we do and don’t know about UPFs or whether people really need to eat 30 plants a week. There's more concern over blood sugar 'spikes', and whether we need to optimise our gut health through fermented foods. There is undoubtedly a heightened anxiety about the minutiae of detail that feels worrying.
'I've noticed an increase in food anxiety recently, particularly related to 'sugar spikes' and UPFs. A few interactions that particularly stick out to me are worried parents who are also navigating things like food allergies and selective eating and actually don't know what to feed their kids anymore as they think the UPFs they used to rely on are now a no go, or they feel so shameful when they do feed their kids UPFs. I've also spoken to lots of people at different stages of disordered eating recovery who are so anxious and triggered by UPFs, often they know the messages are unhelpful and they try to ignore it, but it's an impossible and exhausting task.'
The sub Reddit r/ultraprocessedfood is a microcosm of this food neurosis. It has 25K users. Using the tag ‘Is this UPF?’ commenters post pictures of foods they’ve purchased or are thinking of purchasing. Then a 50 comment-long thread breaks out debating whether or not Tesco Croissants are UPF or not. The ingredient of most concern – underlined in red by the OP – was ascorbic acid.
Comment from Reddit thread r/ultraprocessedfood
That’s vitamin C.
Yes, it’s synthetic in the sense that it has been manufactured in a factory and added to food. But the chemical composition is no different than if the ascorbic acid was made in an orange or a pepper.
Vitamin C is added to foods for a variety of different reasons; as an antioxidant so you don’t have stale ass croissants for breakfast (aka a preservative); to stop foods from going brown, same as when you squeeze lemon juice on your apple slices; and to help with gluten formation in leavened products so you get a nice rise.
This lack of basic scientific literacy is what makes this iteration of clean eating so pernicious. As a consumer of UPF discourse it is so easy to get lost in the weeds of this additive or that. Trying to discern which individual foods are safe for consumption and getting tangled up in the minutiae.
At the macro level there is far from any kind of scientific consensus about what the problem actually is. Are there, as one Reddit user put it, ‘Frankenstein ingredients’ lurking in our food? Or are UPFs an indicator of a deeply unequal society?
UPF discourse – although seemingly cut and dry – reveals a number of tensions and contradictions. Sugar, white rice, and white flour, which we have been told for decades are nutritionally bereft belong in groups 1 and 2 of the Nova classification. Whereas nutritious staples of most British kitchens like Weetabix and baked beans, belong in group 4 - aka the 'ultra-processed' designation. Then there's the complication that some researchers have pointed out that significantly reducing UPFs in the food supply could lead to nutrient deficiencies.
But so-called experts on UPFs trade in certainty, absolutes and totalitarianism. Nuance, uncertainty, and caveats don’t sell books and supplements. The vast majority of studies on UPFs are observational, meaning that it’s hard to tease out cause and effect. The concept of eating 30 plants per week for a nebulous goal of ‘gut health’ is based on a single study that did not measure ‘gut health’. Yet people – mostly on Reddit and readers of The Guardian – and are tying themselves in knots trying to live by these food rules.
We may no longer call it clean eating, but there is without a doubt, a preoccupation with purity and perfection in our diets. ‘Unprocessed’ has become synonymous with ‘good’. ‘Processed’ and ‘ultra-processed’ are bad. Looking back at the definition proposed by Walsh and Baker for clean eating, it’s virtually indistinguishable from contemporary discourse on UPFs: ‘‘natural’; wholesome; free of chemicals additives, preservatives, refined and highly processed ingredients’.
Whatever words we use, the sentiment is the same. ‘Unprocessed’ foods are superior because they are pure and untainted. ‘Ultra-processed’ foods are contaminated – rendered impure – by ‘nasties’, nebulous ‘chemicals’, and vague concepts like ‘additives’, ‘flavourings’, and ‘preservatives’. As illustrated by the Croissant detectives, it doesn’t really matter what the contaminant is per se. What is important is that the whole food is sullied by its presence.
Purity and Defilement
Celebrated British social anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote about how the concepts of purity and defilement, while socially constructed, help maintain a sense of order. Baker and Walsh, (the same researchers who proposed a definition of clean eating) use Douglas’ work as a lens to make sense of the phenomenon of clean eating. While they are speaking to the visual aesthetics of clean eating on Instagram, the same is true of UPF discourse some ten years later.
‘Cleanness and uncleanness serve as symbolic functions to maintain society's boundaries; disgust felt towards those who transgress social boundaries. Purity is, thus, best understood as the achievement of an ordered system, collectively classifying acceptable foods to consume, while also rejecting others as pollutants; as a signifier, purity speaks to the collective through its relationship with the defiled, rather than simply being an inherent property or condition of a phenomenon’
Here we can substitute ‘cleanness’ and ‘uncleanness’ for ‘unprocessed’ and ‘ultra-processed’, which act, symbolically, to create a moral hierarchy; a transgression of these boundaries – that is, to eat ultra-processed food – also taints the eater.
Walsh and Baker, go on to say:
‘Douglas’ account of purity and defilement conceives of cleanliness as imputed to members of the in-group rather than the out-group and therefore strengthens the social relations of individuals in a given social grouping’
Plainly, when middle-class white men, in positions of power and privilege, foment fear and disgust about certain types of food – especially foods that are coded as working-class and poor – it is an attempt to further cement their power and privilege. It is a way to distance themselves from groups of people who they are revolted by.
Redditor nabster1973 makes no attempt to hide their disdain of people who consume ultra-processed baked beans. Here they use the deeply dehumanising term ‘sort of people’ to infer inferiority, suggesting that people who shop at Aldi or Lidl don’t share their righteous and noble quest to eliminate UPFs from their diet, as though people who shop there are a monolith only concerned with trivial pursuits.
Comment from Reddit thread
There is no acknowledgement of the privilege of time, transport, access, spoons, neuronormativity, able-body lack of mental illness or the many, many other resources required to be so particular about a can of beans. And while 20p may not be a lot for nabster1973, for others it’s a price differential they cannot afford. And without claiming to speak for ‘the sorts of people’ nabster1973 is referring to, I think it is safe to say that anyone in crisis who is simply trying to survive doesn’t have the capacity to think about beans. Not because they are feckless or irresponsible as nabster1973 is insinuating, but simply because they have more pressing priorities that generally involve fending off imminent hunger. Personally I can’t think of a more noble act than filling an empty belly with a warm meal.
It’s Raining Men
The fact that men are driving the conversation around UPFs (and the related is not insignificant. Spector, Dimbleby, Fearnley-Whittingstall, and Van Tulleken all have ideas about how we should eat. But how many of these men are doing the labour of feeding a family? And if they are, what, or more specifically, whose labour, is enabling that while they maintain their careers? Wives? Cleaners? Nannies and childminders?
'They really never talk about who does the work,' suggests Karen Throsby Professor of Gender Studies at Leeds University and author of Sugar Rush: Science, Politics and the Demonisation of Fatness. 'Or occasionally, they praise their female partners for being brilliant cooks – this is a clever way of maintaining the gendered division of labour because the women are figured as doing the work because they love it (making it not really work at all).'
By focusing on the science, with it’s neat and tidy numbers and graphs, men avoid the dirt, grit, and mess of cooking, as much as they avoid the mess and contradictions of UPFs themselves. Women are then tasked with making this daunting science accessible, translating it through palatable Instagram posts and cheerful cookbooks (like Melissa Helmsley’s ‘Real Healthy’). Even then, the labour of budgeting, list writing, shopping around for the best deals, prep, fridge and pantry audits, cooking, and tidy up are deeply concealed. When the labour is exposed, as with this ‘in progress’ shot from Hemsley, there is a glamour that doesn’t exist in the real-life chaos of a preparing dinner with a child wrapped around your leg begging you to play or help with homework. Most of us don’t have sun-drenched gardens for a start.
Since the labour falls to women, so too does the blame when they transgress boundaries and feed themselves or their children ‘impure’ and ‘defiled’ UPFs. As I’ve talked about before, UPFs didn’t liberate women, as many male writers have argued, but it becomes something else that is weaponised against them.
It’s also interesting to note that, while the backlash against the female dominated clean eating was swift and brutal, the men of clean eating have largely avoided scrutiny. It’s only fairly recently – perhaps within the past 6 months – that we’ve seen people becoming more vocally critical of anti-UPF discourse. A recent episode of Skeptics with a K episode made it clear that there was a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty around the concept of UPFs, but stopped short of naming names.
I’ve also seen more direct objections to Tim Spector’s cherry-picking and selective use of evidence.
Comment from @dr_idz on Spector's instagram post
This screenshot was taken from the milk reel shared above, but you have to scroll a fair way down to find any dissenting voices.
Why are people so afraid to challenge Spector et al? Why are the media – The Guardian and The New York Times in particular – giving these men so much coverage? I think there are many ways to answer this question. But the appeal to authority fallacy (sometimes referred to as authority bias) is strong here, in a way it wasn’t for the young women who launched the OG clean eating. Men are inherently seen as more trustworthy and above scrutiny.
Here’s a worked example. The appeal to authority fallacy goes like this:
Chris van Tulleken is an infectious diseases doctor and an expert in virology
He wrote a book about how bad UPFs are and is regularly quoted in the media
If CvT says UPFs are bad for you then it must be true
While CvT is a respected doctor and researcher, that doesn’t automatically make him an authority on UPFs. Even if he were an expert on UPFs, that doesn’t automatically mean that everything he says on the topic is correct.
Yet the media treat his word as gospel. Earlier this year The Guardian ran a story where CvT provided expert opinion on UPFs and food addiction. However, the scientific publication being discussed did not use any measure of UPFs, meaning you couldn't infer anything about the relationship between the two. Not only that, but food addiction is a deeply contested issue. The Guardian defaulted to van Tulleken’s authority and overrode even basic fact checking.
You can read my full analysis on that piece here. What I am interested in now, is why in 2016-17 young women were being lambasted all over the internet, yet men with prestigious academic pedigrees, or who are deeply embedded in our national food culture are getting a free pass for upholding a similarly stringent set of food rules? Ten years ago, the young women driving the conversation around clean eating were accused of promoting a dysfunctional relationship with food. Why are we so unwilling to say the same now?
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