Are you aware of pseudoscience?
Pseudoscience is a set of beliefs or principles mistakenly believed to be based on scientific fact. Many reading this will have come across it, if only because pseudoscience (fake science) has the ability to make headlines – as anyone who read about the so-called ‘Blue Monday’ last week may or may not be aware.
On Friday, another example of pseudoscience made the headlines: ‘clean eating’.
You might have heard of it, but do you actually know what the definition of ‘clean eating’ is? Unlikely – because there isn’t a verified one, and this is part of the problem. Some people take it to mean eating wholefoods – foods which have been processed or refined as little as possible. Others see it as foods produced entirely without pesticides. Some see it as merely ‘home-cooked food’.
Whatever it is, ‘clean eating’ is seen to be a way of eating healthily. And in theory, there’s nothing unhealthy about it when seen in that light: eating organic food made from scratch.
But that’s not the only understood definition. Clean eating is often attached to diets too. Some of these diets claim to aid health and well-being without scientific proof. Ergo, they are pseudoscientific. Nonetheless, they are popularised via social media and acquire millions of followers. It’s then that they have the capacity to become quite dangerous…
Why has ‘clean eating’ made headlines recently? Well, on Thursday night BBC 2 aired ‘Horizon: Clean Eating – The Dirty Truth’. Presented by Dr Giles Yeo, the programme followed Dr Yeo as he investigated claims by clean eating brands – like Ella Mills’ Deliciously Ella (which advocates a plant-based diet), Jasmine and Melissa Hemsley’s Hemsley + Hemsley (which pushes ‘grain-free’) and Natasha Corrett’s Honestly Healthy (which promotes alkaline eating) – that cutting out certain food groups can lead to wellness.
How do they claim this?
In a nutshell, Ella Mills says eating a plant-based diet ‘healed’ her of Postural Tachycardia Syndrome (PoTS). The Hemsley sisters claim avoiding grains ‘helps to maintain a better blood sugar balance… key to… combating obesity and chronic disease’ and that it can also help ‘manage stress’ as ‘eating grains has been linked to depression, anxiety and mood swings’. Natasha Corrett says that eating acid-forming foods (like meat, gluten and dairy) means your body has to work overtime and draw from the minerals in your bones to bring itself back to an alkaline state’, thus ‘your immune system will be depleted because your body uses all its vitamins and minerals to function rather than to fight bacteria and disease,’. Therefore, she surmises, an alkaline diet is the way forward.
In the documentary, Dr Yeo explained how there was no concrete scientific evidence to prove that these ‘clean eating diets’ (or ‘lifestyles’ as they are often called) have a positive effect on our health. Therefore, they can be categorised as pseudoscience.
The trouble is, not many people following these diets will know this.
It’s important to stress straight off that two of these brands do not publicise their ways of eating as ‘clean eating’. Ella Mills said she has never used the term nor liked it (a fact recently disproved by The Mail on Sunday, but we’ll let that slide as Ella was the only one of the three founders to agree to feature on Dr Yeo’s show to argue her case – which she did well). The Hemsley sisters have also distanced themselves from the phrase. Natasha Corrett by contrast, told the Daily Mail in 2015 she was the first person to ‘pioneer clean eating in this country’ – safe to say she has no such qualms about it.
Whether they have openly pushed ‘clean eating’ though, is irrelevant. All three brands are associated with it, and they’ve made money as a result of it too. Only now are a few really speaking out in condemnation of the phrase, but is the damage already done?
What damage might this be? Well, in addition to convincing consumers of the pseudoscience attached to their diets, there is also the problem of the term ‘clean eating’ itself. ‘”Clean” eating’ implies it is the right way to eat because it’s not ‘dirty’. Eating any other way, it’s therefore implied, is unclean or wrong. It’s thus not difficult to imagine that purists eager to eat only the ‘clean foods’ prescribed by their ‘clean eating’ gurus, might become fearful of foods not on the ‘clean food’ list… Undoubtedly, it’s a short road to disordered eating.
Please note, I am not blaming Ella Mills et al for eating disorders. It’s not their fault some people are inclined to take their advice too far or misinterpret the benefits. Nonetheless, the ‘clean eating’ clan have a responsibility to highlight the dangers of taking ‘clean eating’ too far, and to underline that the health benefits of cutting out certain food groups – whilst it might have worked for them, the founders – might not work for everyone (or indeed, anyone) else.
To be fair, some of them have tried to do this. In her inaugural cookbook Deliciously Ella, Ella wrote it was not her intention to ‘encourage feelings of guilt’ around food. ‘You don’t have to eat this way all the time,’ she said – i.e. don’t get too faddy about food, don’t be overly obsessive, don’t follow the Deliciously Ella eating rules to a ‘t’…
However, those warnings appeared in an introduction in which she also claimed that by following her plant-based diet – giving up all meat, dairy, sugar, gluten, anything processed and all chemicals and additives – she ‘felt healed!’ from PoTS. This implies her way of eating has the capacity to cure illness – which in is an alluring idea in itself. She then ended her story by saying that in cutting out all aforementioned food groups she had become ‘honestly happier than I’ve ever been’. She may not have been directly telling readers to embrace veganism (another term she dislikes), but she was selling the idea they might be happier if they did.
Not enough is being done to set fact from speculation.
It’s fantastic that Ella’s diet made her feel better, but as far as I have read, there’s no scientific evidence to prove her dietary changes were responsible for her recovery. In fact, in a recent interview with The Times, she said one of her symptoms recently returned, in spite of still eating her plant-based dishes…
I don’t doubt that what we put into our mouths can affect what’s inside. But when ‘cleaning eating’ brands make claims about what these effects are, they have to make more of a distinction between what they believe to be true, and what is widely recognised by the scientific community to be true. At the moment, it’s all just a bit of blur…
I am a huge advocate of healthy eating, but I am also a great believer in moderation – and that means moderating healthy foods too – for no reason other than sometimes us humans should cut ourselves some slack (not scientifically proven!).
Ultimately what these clean eating diets aim to do is keep us disease-free so we can live longer. This is an admirable goal. Unfortunately though, many of us will get diseases no matter what we eat. And I’d rather live a life of spaghetti Bolognese and Dairy Milk (with yes, daily fruit and veg) over courgetti and sweet potato brownies before that happens, any day. As I stare up at my computer screen – vision blurred by a clash of windows pushing various ‘fake’ claims that ‘clean eating’ advocates have made – that, dear reader, is my honest truth.