Opinion: Clean eating is a scam

You’ve seen it before on your social media feeds: influencers holding up different foods and explaining how they are secretly killing you. They count how many ingredients they can’t pronounce, call it “processed” about five times and without fail, end with the only solution: buy their overpriced online course or click on an affiliate link to purchase replacements. 

 

Before influencers were slapping pieces of meat and hard-boiled eggs onto wooden boards, clean eating was known as a better alternative to ’90s and 2000s diet culture. Now, instead of obsessively counting calories or cutting out carbs, those looking to eat healthier can focus on making home-cooked meals in order to eat less ultra-processed foods. 

 

But today, clean eating has fallen into the same pitfalls that plagued the obsessive diet culture it was meant to replace. While low-carb, fat-free weight-loss programs were once the rage, getting rid of that “stubborn belly fat” now means guzzling raw milk and avoiding additives of any kind. The same Western beauty standard of thinness prevails in the clean eating space, and much of its content centers around unscientific claims used to sell products. At its worst, clean eating has pushed people into orthorexia, a serious mental health condition marked by a fixation on eating healthy.

 

The main principles of clean eating, which include detoxing, cleansing and consuming minimal-ingredient alternatives, are not rooted in scientific research. You don’t need to buy expensive juices to detox your body — your liver and kidneys remove toxins just fine on their own. You can still enjoy eating gummy bears or Skittles on occasion. Despite what U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants you to think, no well-controlled studies prove that Food and Drug Administration-approved artificial food dyes cause cognitive problems in children. 

 

It’s rarely food scientists or registered dietitians who fearmonger viewers about ingredients you can’t pronounce and processed foods, but rather TikTok influencers with little to no credentials preaching overcorrected diets. In reality, consumers shouldn’t be immediately alarmed by ingredients that look unfamiliar — they are often just the scientific word for simple compounds that have multiple uses. 

 

Additionally, almost all the food you buy at the grocery store is processed. From baby carrots to broccoli florets, any agricultural product whose fundamental nature has been changed is labeled as processed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. If influencers had nutrition degrees or did any real research, perhaps they would use the proper terminology for the products doctors encourage limiting: ultra-processed foods. But wellness vloggers trying to sell supplements and substitutes care less about getting the language right and more about making a profit from views and sponsorships.

 

The issue with clean eating also lies in how it assigns moral value to food. The notion of clean foods implies that dirty foods exist, and consumers become clean people or dirty people depending on their diet. Not everybody can access foods deemed clean: Labor and economic inequalities, along with food deserts — neighborhoods in the country with limited access to affordable, nutritious food — disproportionately affect low-income populations. Scroll through the #cleaneating tag on Instagram to find almost exclusively wealthy, white creators showing off their physiques and equating seed oils to poison. 

 

While eating lots of veggies and focusing on wellness was once associated with a hippie leftist agenda, this diet is now championed by right-wing creators feeding the “Make America Healthy Again” movement. They make podcast episodes vilifying seed oils in baby formula and promoting unpasteurized milk consumption — despite a scientific consensus that pasteurization is both safe and efficient in stopping the spread of infectious diseases. 

 

Right-wing creators pull viewers in with tidbits of truthful information or relatable content surrounding health and wellness, but quickly devolve into nutritional conspiracies, demonizing individuals with chronic diseases and labeling real science as liberal propaganda. This doesn’t come out of nowhere because, like most influencers, right-wing creators are also profit-hungry and get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to push people down a right-wing pipeline.

 

Given that the United States has the lowest life expectancy among large, wealthy countries, the Trump administration should tackle the health issues of our country — but politics conspiring against the food industry don’t allow for productive change. Instead of introducing legislation that would make health care, child care and other services more affordable for all Americans, MAGA Republicans have to make up problems that only they can fix. So, they latched onto clean eating repackaged as MAHA, then paid right-wing influencers to market it.

 

Now, as the Trump administration slashes SNAP benefits and spreads misinformation about neurological issues, our government’s public health agencies tout clean eating as the only solution. RFK Jr. celebrates every time an ultra-processed food company promises to swap out color additives, yet plans to encourage Americans to eat more saturated fat — unsurprising for the leader of a movement that made industry influence over dietary guidelines a major part of its narrative.

 

Instead of doing anything to regulate food corporations or meaningfully improve the food supply, the government rallies around useless ingredient swaps. Every MAHA win is a distraction. It’s much easier to call social safety programs “radical communism” and link non-existent studies than to actually implement evidence-based public policies that make Americans healthier. 

 

There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting to make healthier food choices. In the United States especially, people are consuming an excess of ultra-processed foods, which provide little to no nutritional value and have been linked to several chronic health conditions. However, this isn’t a result of grocery stores poisoning the nation, but rather a social and political climate that only knows how to take health to the extreme. The best advice is simple: Make small healthy choices that don’t drain your bank account and practice moderation. If anyone who isn’t your licensed doctor or dietician tells you to cut out entire food groups or implement drastic dietary regimens, they’re probably doing more harm than good.