Browsing the internet, we find articles and recipes about clean eating, which, beyond health, promise almost a moral redemption.
Detox diets, juice cleanses, açai bowls, gluten-free diets... all these trends defend a supposed way of eating called clean eating. Clean eating advocates for the exclusive consumption of foods whose origin and production processes are known, prohibiting industrialized, processed, or other types of foods.
Those less familiar might think that eating unprocessed foods must be healthier. However, in this space, we have pointed out that industrialization does not always equate to less healthy foods. The ideal of knowing the origin of everything we consume seems very difficult in a globalized world and is also one of the most common fears since humans began classifying what is edible and what is not. Nevertheless, the ideals of clean eating carry a social weight that goes beyond health, which in our era has become an ideal to achieve in order to be morally superior.
The practice of juice cleanses and attempting to detoxify with fasting days or smoothies are notions that stem more from pseudoscience than from true scientific findings. The same applies to alkaline diets, which assume that our body's pH is altered. So, if these are pseudoscientific, why are they so successful and receive so much media attention?
Clean eating and the wellness industry have become so corporatized that access to meditation courses, ayahuasca cleanses, açai bowls, and pantries filled with organic foods are luxuries not available to everyone. Immediately, the famous wellness culture becomes a privilege for those who can afford it. And evidently, being able to afford it provides status to those who have access. This corporatization of wellness culture has transformed the way we perceive our achievements and even our moral quality based on what we eat.
Someone who has control over their impulses, who decides, for example, to fast for three days or do a juice cleanse for a week, invariably tests their control over hunger. Today, this control bestows a kind of moral superiority, as if controlling physiological needs (since everyone must eat) makes that person a better human being. Oprah Winfrey is, for many, a role model of female success, a woman who survived poverty, racism, and gender inequality to become one of the most powerful people in the world. Oprah has declared that the most significant achievement in her life was losing 30 kg of weight. In this way, thinness as a synonym for wellness is not only a signifier of success, but also a deeper commitment to supposed self-empowerment. Sadly, this is the wellness culture we live in today.
Fortunately, among scholars of these phenomena, critical voices are emerging that warn about the negative consequences of investing everything in wellness, the corporatism it provokes, and above all, the normalization of hunger and pseudoscientific arguments for adopting fasting practices as a lifestyle. The culture of wellness and clean eating gives us the false promise of feeling like omnipotent gods capable of controlling even the smallest processes in our bodies, when no science or medicine has yet found the perfect body.
Originally published in El Economista
— This article was originally published in Spanish by Liliana Martínez Lomelí. Translation generated with AI from the original text.