Micah Stanley
The online platform Instagram spits out more than 50 million posts under the hashtag eatclean, and almost 40 million under cleaneating.
You can see mostly muscular people or artistically draped food in bowls. Clean eating is more than just a diet trend, for many it’s an ideology. “Do not record anything that could harm you,” is the motto. “Harmful” is everything that is industrially processed, such as household sugar, white flour and products with artificial additives. Regional organic vegetables and fruit, legumes, quinoa, vegetable oils and sugar from coconut blossoms and milk from almonds are at the top of the menu. Critics see the nutrition movement as pseudoscience. The division of food into good and bad can also take extreme forms. A wholesome diet with vegetables and fruit, vegetable oils and little sugar is also recommended by the German Society for Nutrition. However, if the desire for “clean” food leads to the categorical exclusion of important foods, clean eating can also quickly become unhealthy.
