There is No Such Thing as Clean Eating
With this article, the intention is not to undermine your efforts if you are following a diet that is “clean”. Consider me your dietary pimp. And as Patrice O’Neal put it best, a pimp simply gives options.
What Is Clean Eating?
No one knows. Good ideas can be defined. They have an elevator pitch, that the intended audience can easily understand. The problem with ‘clean eating’ is that it can’t be objectively defined. It is entirely subjective.
This might sound like over-intellectualizing what should be a straightforward concept to grasp. One might have a point, but let’s examine how it is defined when searched for in Google.
The practice of eating primarily unprocessed and unrefined foods
This is not entirely true, as most ‘clean’ diets include processed grains like rice or wholewheat options of other processed foods. Particularly if you take the definition from bodybuilding spheres.
But, even if we were to go with this definition or a hybrid between this one and the classic bodybuilding approach to this concept, it becomes clear that there is no such thing as ‘clean’ eating.
Context
If I were to eat a diet I considered to be ‘clean’, then surely I would attain results that benefit me either in body composition or health outcomes. However, foods considered ‘clean’ are typically low calorie, high in satiety and sometimes high in fibre. These are all great things in most contexts. I am, in fact, an advocate for increasing fibre intake to stave off metabolic diseases.
However, some individuals require much higher calorie intakes. Take me, for example. I am not an athlete, just a regular person who trains five to six times a week, coupled with a mostly sedentary job.
Yet I require approximately 3,500 calories to maintain my weight, and over 4,000 calories if I am bulking. Getting in this many calories from all ‘clean’ foods would be an absolute nightmare. My stomach would be like a rock, and I would undoubtedly feel sluggish from eating such a large volume of food.
For lifters just starting out, who are not yet tracking their calories, it can also result in chronic under-eating. It feels like you’re eating a lot while eating chicken and rice four times daily, but you may only be clocking 2,400 calories. In my case, this would mean that what I thought was a bulk, would actually mean under-eating by 1,100 calories.
Unintended Consequences
In my early twenties, I would eat chicken, rice and canned tuna every day whilst adhering to a mostly ‘clean’ diet. What I did not know at the time is that a diet involving these foods every day, and sometimes multiple times per day, may have had toxic results.
Tuna contains one of the largest mercury concentrations among fish, which is toxic to the nervous system in high doses. Rice absorbs a hefty amount of arsenic from the soil it’s grown in. Given that I am now stuck with unexplained polyneuropathy as an adult, some of these unhealthy diet habits during key developmental phases, may have contributed to this.
Even dietary fibre in high enough amounts can have negative consequences. Fibre plays a crucial role in digestion, moving food through the intestines, but if this happens too quickly due to too much fibre, this can lead to malabsorption of critical vitamins and minerals.
Now, let’s keep things in context here. I am not saying that people should generally have hang-ups about consuming rice, lean fish and dietary fibre. But for some individuals who require abnormally high-calorie intakes, there is a risk of over-consuming any food. These are just examples that quickly come to mind.
Adherence
The term ‘Majoring in the Minors’ comes to mind when I hear someone discuss ‘clean eating’ or ‘clean foods’.
“ When you attempt to optimise for a 100% solution in any direction, you cause a whole cascade of consequences, which you weren’t even aware of”
Clean eating is one of these situations in that it can cause a severe rebound effect in the form of binge eating. Any form of restrictive diet poses this risk and is the reason why diets have a failure rate as high as 95%, depending on which source you cite.
In contrast, adhering 100% of the time to a way of eating that is 75% optimal is absolutely doable for a lifetime. I learned this lesson the hard way. In my childhood and early adulthood, I was a chronic binge eater. This eating pattern would only worsen the more I attempted to diet.
It wasn’t until 2015, thanks to Layne Norton’s content and the flexible dieting movement, that I could fully take back control of my eating by understanding the science behind nutrition. For better, or for worse, I am someone who has a deep need to fully understand every aspect of everything I am doing.
“Natural”
Some claim that certain foods are ‘natural’, as opposed to other foods, or that ‘unprocessed’ is necessarily better. This is the naturalistic fallacy at work, where one presumes that because something is ‘natural’, it is superior. I understand this line of thinking, as I found myself sucked in by such reasoning in the past, trying diets such as keto and paleo, which both prioritise a diet free from processed foods.
What proponents of these diets often leave out is that many of the natural foods available in nowadays would not be available to us were we actually back in caveman days. Coming from Ireland, I would never know what a banana was, never mind the colourful mix of foreign berries that accompany just one of my many meals throughout the day.
Also, honey is considered natural and is, in a way, manufactured by bees. We, too, are functions of nature, just like bees, and rally together in a hive-like fashion to manufacture and process food for our needs. I would therefore make the case that even man-made foods are natural, given that man is a function of nature. All foods are fundamentally a collection of chemical compounds.
The Takeaway
Pardon the pun.
Eating a diet rich in nutritious foods will do wonders for your health, energy and mood, but you don’t have to limit yourself to only consuming these foods. Modern problems require modern solutions, and we face a lack of time and an overabundance of highly palatable, processed foods, which are even part of how we socialise.
And that’s OK. Life is a series of tradeoffs, so I will not deny myself the delight and convenience of processed foods every now and then, in addition to a diet which covers all my nutritional needs.
As always, energy balance (calories in: calories out) will yield the most significant results for one’s physique, health outcomes and body composition. Don’t get caught in the trap of majoring in the minors. This is a waste of finite discipline, willpower and energy that can be better used in other areas of life.