Eating Clean is Useless

A little straw man here, a little twisting of the meaning of clean there and voila: trying to eat healthy is classist and racist.

Junk food is being marketed at poor uneducated people. Yes! That is even more reason to fight it, not find escuses to indulge in it. And if you are really into social justice and the like, that yoga guy and the whole white middle class is not the enemy of the poor black guys. They are not the owners of junk food mega corporations, nor do they pass laws to subsidize corn syrup.

If you want to "stick it to the man" stop buying his horrible products.

"Fuck you white middle class yoga guy, I'm eating all the Nestle shit I can find, take that!" - how dumb is this?

All of our fitness and nutrition advice is troubled by the cargo-culting, marketing-driven, personal-religion factors: if I go to a yoga class I spend a lot more time and money to get effects roughly similar to doing a high school gym class stretching regime each morning and evening. I paid $14 yesterday for the experience of a burger with a fancy name and an overly sweetened bun that was ultimately less satisfying than Burger King. If I buy and use supplements marketed by a bodybuilder, or try to follow their training program as printed in a magazine, I'm not going to look like the bodybuilder, and I will probably overtrain, because they weren't using the supplements at all, they were using a PED stack to train harder, eat more, and recover faster without overloading their system. Worrying about my body weight, BMI, or aesthetics is similarly Quixotic in that my body will prefer to stay in a certain range regardless of how I eat or train, and the numbers I can consistently improve tend to be "weight and reps" or "time and distance", while aesthetics and vanity numbers are much harder to aim towards.

To wit, it's more important to develop your own feedback loops for each of these things. There are serious concerns with fitness and nutrition in the U.S. but they aren't necessarily because it's impossible to get at the good stuff: it's just that eating beans and rice and oatmeal, making a habit of stretching and bodyweight exercise, and studiously logging one's training are all unfashionable, implicitly discouraged by most workplaces, and not well served by market forces.

Non-GMO and organic is mostly BS of course, but it's a fact that refined carbs are cheap and plentiful, so the poor consume proportionally more of them. They simply can't afford fruit and meat. This is in part because of the infinite shelf life of processed carbs, and in part because they're heavily subsidized by the government. Also, government dietary guidelines still push people towards relatively high carb diets, and snacking is encouraged from kindergarten and up, causing insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. The point being, the nutritional situation in the US is a clusterfuck, and GMO and organic stuff are kind of orthogonal to rectifying it.

"100-percent organic, locally sourced, non-GMO, and free of antibiotics"

Even if it does not have an effect on your health, three of those four (100-percent organic, locally sourced, and free of antibiotics) are at least good for the environment.

The fourth (free of antibiotics) is maybe even good for your health, in the long run: Over-use of antibiotics by farmers (not using them to cure sick animals, but to make animals grow faster) seems to be a big problem (creating resistent bugs)...

Edit (after reading a comment): I left out non-GMO here because I have ready about some evidence that - at least some GMOs - can be better for the environment and for your health.

To me eating clean means avoiding preprocessed food, the author is taking a much more extreme view which to me feels like a straw man.

If someone is used to junk food and switches to more fruit, veggies, lean meat and fish, I'm pretty sure they'll start noticing a difference after a little while. I know it worked for me (n=1).

This article seems to be making the implicit claim that "clean eating" refers to eating organic products. On the other hand, I've always understood the expression to just mean eating healthy, especially including plenty of vegetables. Has the meaning changed or have I just always misunderstood it?

'Clean eating' is suppose to be about eating minimally processed foods. You can eat plenty of GMO produce and mass produced meat and still eat 'clean'

The most appealing benefits of organic foods, in my household, are not to do with our own health. Instead, we adopt the practice under the information that organic farming is more sustainable and better for the environment. Top three search results for "organic food better for environment."

http://www.fao.org/organicag/oa-faq/oa-faq6/en/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/is-organic-agr...

http://www.thechicecologist.com/green-living/food-drink/is-o...

Regarding it being a "rich [white] people thing," either way, that may very well be, in practice. Is caring about sustainable farming and the environmental impact of our savage resouce consumption also a rich white people thing?

While the article is somewhat correct in that 'clean eating' is useless, what the hell is up with every single US News outlet literally stirring up racial tensions?

Back to the clean eating part - all my ancestors that I know of (grandparents, great-grandparents) at relatively unhealthy food. Tons of butter, lard, and carbs. True, it was natural-ish, they all grew up on a homestead, but far from the 'clean eating' ideal.

As for the racial tensions, WTF? Does every single article in every single outlet have to bring it up? All this does is make it worse in my experience.

To me "eating clean" means eating mostly vegetables by volume and mostly fat and protein by weight. For instance typical ketogenic/paleo diet. Eating "dirty" is theoretically doable. If one prototypical example of eating "dirty" is having a standard supermarket cake slice or mound of cereal and milk to fulfill daily caloric needs, then it is actually harder to maintain a "dirty" diet. Satiety becomes an unattainable goal. We simply cannot handle the insulin spikes well. We get hungry and cravings are more intense with such a diet. It is essentially impractical. It may also explain why there are so many obese in the world. "Eating clean" can be used as a marketing term to get people to fork over huge bucks for an oversold concept. But fundamentally, "eating clean" the way I define it is very cheap, tasty, and pragmatic. Especially for losing weight and maintaining a low weight.

Clickbait title leading to poorly written article by a mid 30s man-child wanting to justify eating Lucky Charms everyday because he left mom's house too soon.

"Eating clean is useless" is such a terrible statement to make, especially today. You want to eat crap, good for you, but don't try to avoid feeling bad about it.

I have a pet theory that food ideology is/has replaced conventional religion for a lot of folks. There is a need to feel 'virtuous' in our daily lives and since we gotta eat it's a convenient place to go. So we get all these strange ideologies and dogmas which don't seem to make us much healthier physically but maybe helps fills in some accumulated spiritual decay.

This article smacks of narrow-minded contrarianism for its own sake.

The cheapest thing one can do -- and healthier than the option of eating Lucky Charms daily -- is to grow one's own food. The space requirements are actually tiny -- it's possible to grow all of one's own veggies in something like 300 sq ft of space (in a mid-latitude region) and all one's own calories in something like 800 sq ft of space. It's cheaper to do it without sprays too, so you end up organic by default. I'd recommend interested folks check out ... Grow More Vegetables ... by John Jeavons and One Circle by David Duhon for how to do space-efficient veggie gardening.

Edited to add: I should have mentioned: I'm opposed to the fad diets that the article is attacking as much as I am to the contrarian posture the article takes. Growing food and eating it, and eating a variety of such homegrown foods with a mix of other things, seems sensible to me, and it's also cheaper than either highly-processed industrial food products or fad-oriented yuppie foods.

Is there a single definition of "clean"? The author has one definition which seems based on items commonly found on labels, like "non-gmo" or "certified organic", that gives consumers an easy way to feel good about what they are about to eat. The commenters here, however, seem to each have their own different idea. Is it keto? Is it organic/"chemical-free"? Can someone point me to one single definition of "clean" eating that isn't just what you feel is "clean"?

If there is, how does it line up with the author's definition? How does the actual definition fit with the content of the article?

If there isn't one definition, I'm sort of with the author on this one. "Clean" is whatever labels the consumers use to feel superior through what they are eating.

I eat organic fruit and vegetables mostly to avoid synthetic chemicals, and because you have more heirloom varieties which can offer better taste, but I'm not a vegetarian, so I'm okay with the blood meal and bone meal that goes into the product.

In respect to value, at least, bio/organic (real, not just misleading labeling) is suppose to be free of pesticides, and that's actually a good thing... I'm sure.

Regardless, I don't think even the WHO suggests there's a preference to organic food, but clearly indicates the danger of food contaminated with pesticides.

Even if most pesticides are now forbidden in most developed countries, we can see that in the USA legislation and regulation is being again "relaxed", which is not a good thing.

"And for 30 years I've somehow not only survived but thrived. "

At 30 years of age, your habits haven't caught up to you yet. A 30-year-old smoker could make the same claim.

Possible problems with GMO: - Harder to digest proteins - Possible new allergies for some people (because if slightly different proteins, or mixes from other plants) - Plants with build in pesticide - Patents - Plant monoculture - Plants that grow faster and are cheaper, but not optimized for taste.

Is the above list inherit to GMO's: no. Do I know if the GMO I am eating is suffering from this: no. As such until I get detailed information about your GMO, I prefer to avoid it.

Finally. So true. "Eating clean" is probably one of the best marketing campaigns in history; billions of dollars spent on products that make you feel healthier, but in reality, don't amount to shit.

It's all about calories in, calories out and macronutrient composition (carbs, fats, proteins). That's literally it.*

* Unless you seriously train for a sport, in which case the little stuff (eating time, micronutrients, # of meals, etc) matter.

I never understood the hate toward GMOs themselves, considering that genetic modification is practically the definition of agriculture as it's existed for thousands of years. Granted, we relied on artificial selection instead of, say, CRISPR, but still.

I do understand the hate toward companies like Monsanto, however. Hating all GMOs because of some unethical company peddling them seems heavy-handed and broad-stroked to me, though.

Link doesn't work in Australia. Just get redirected to https://www.vice.com/en_au.

Yet this works: https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/d385ak/eating-clean-is-us...

I thought the article was talking about eating food contaminated with dirt reading its title. Which I happen to agree with, small doses of bacteria do wonder for my immune system. It turned out to be an article of counterargument against antiGMO and organic food though.

The best evidence for eating healthy are girls who do yoga.

I am sorry but GMO is actually bad for you.... Monsanto tried to spread gmo corn in France, they tested it on rats for a year and the rats developed multiple tumors the size of an egg.

I think the author researched this article after selecting his position rather than vice versa. He keeps claiming health benefits have not been shown to be true. He goes so far as to say: "...organic produce tends to have more antioxidants—but those differences haven't been shown to improve health outcomes." Maybe, but I'm pretty sure they do. In my experience being around a good number of athletic people, the ones who look really good, as in others do double takes or give gratuitous compliments, are not the ones work out the most but instead the ones who eat the best.