Kris Sollid, senior director of nutrition communications at the International Food Information Council, says that the confusion regarding 'clean eating' is amplified because "there is no standard definition for what clean means, and many consumers are left to determine its meaning for themselves." He goes on to say, "American health authorities have not defined clean – not the US Dietary Guidelines, not the Food and Drug Administration and not the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. And for good reason – because there's no evidence to suggest that 'eating clean' or eating only foods with 'clean labels' is related to health. It's a trend, not a tenet of validated scientific evidence."
Yet the push for clean eating is often boosted through the impact that influencers on social media have on consumer values, even when the popularity of those influencers seems to be based more upon their degree of followers rather than the degrees they earned in school.
Let's clean up some of the confusion and explore a few of these hot, yet misunderstood, terms.
Clean Eating
"Eating that's considered to be 'clean' is often conflated or used as a proxy for a term like 'healthy,” Sollid says. IFIC's Food & Health Surveys have shown that products containing identical nutrition information are viewed differently, depending on other attributes that are attached to them. For example, products carrying identical nutrition labels are perceived to be "healthier" if they have a shorter ingredients list – compared to a longer one.
Historically, IFIC's survey found that consumers looked more often at nutrition facts than ingredient lists when making food purchasing decisions. But since 2016, they've seen this gap narrow, although the number of ingredients doesn't appear to be as important as being able to recognize the ingredients listed on the package.
Although I applaud this approach for some foods – like almond butter that only contains almonds – it doesn't always apply. My favorite bread, for example, contains more than 25 ingredients on its label – and its organic, has whole grains and offers a wealth of other nutrients of value. But it's far from a short list.
