What is clean eating?
Now that everyone is focused on their health, #cleaneating is impossible to ignore on the internet. The term has been mentioned so often by now that it’s almost starting to lose its meaning. Not that anyone even knows exactly what those two words originally meant. We looked into it for you.
You’ve probably heard the term before. It’s often accompanied by a green salad or a poké bowl, but sometimes also by a thick steak. It’s impossible to make sense of, if you ask me. Yet the answer is surprisingly simple.
Clean eating means eating natural, fresh, seasonal, unprocessed products. The focus is on plant-based food, but limited dairy or meat fits perfectly well into your diet if you’re practising clean eating. The meat should then be in the form of, for example, a steak. So no fatty sausage or hamburger, in which the original meat is barely recognisable anymore.
Fries with mayo?
That’s also what makes this term complicated. When is something natural and unprocessed? Potatoes are a natural, pure product. Totally fine, then. Fries or mashed potatoes, on the other hand? Don’t do it! In both products, you can barely recognise the potato anymore. They have a different form and all sorts of things (especially fat, mmm) have been added. A boiled or baked potato is allowed. And if you make your own mayo at home from eggs, mustard, lemon juice and sunflower oil? Sounds very clean, but even then the products are no longer recognisable. Unfortunately, them’s the breaks.
Fresh products
The most important thing, then, is not to blindly pick products from the supermarket shelf, but to choose only fresh products. Always check the ingredients list too. Pure products often contain no more than five ingredients, and the purest products may even contain just one ingredient. Supermarket bread, for example, often contains as many as fifteen ingredients, even though it should really contain only flour, wheat, yeast and salt. So if you want to eat bread, you’re better off baking your own or getting it from a good baker.
Whole grain
Whole grain is also always better than non-whole grain. With whole-grain products, the bran is still around the grain, which by definition means they are less processed than the white variant, from which the bran has been removed. So, do you want a good start to 2019 and to get started with clean eating? You know what you have to do. Buy only fresh products, stay far away from packets and sachets, and always choose whole grain.
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