It is a serious eating disorder, manifesting as an obsession with consuming only foods that are healthy, pure and perfect.

Orthorexia

....because it's right to say that we should eat more vegetables, less refined sugar and less meat.&nbsp;

Clean eating is not entirely false

From 2009 to 2014, the number of Americans who actively avoided gluten, despite not suffering from coeliac disease, more than tripled.&nbsp;It also became fashionable to drink non-dairy milk, ranging from oat milk to almond milk.&nbsp;

#eatclean trend consequences

Clean eating is about eating nothing but “whole” or “unprocessed” foods. It has quickly become more of a belief system, which propagates the idea that the way most people eat is not simply fattening, but impure.

"Pure" food

“Clean eating” established itself as a challenge to mainstream ways of eating. It's perhaps best seen as a dream of purity in a toxic world. Powered by social media, it has been more absolutist in its claims and more popular in its reach than any previous school of modern nutrition advice.

Clean eating and its rise in popularity

Clean eating shows few signs of dying and one possible explanation is offered by Hadley Freeman, who identified clean eating as part of a post-truth culture, whose adherents are impervious, or even hostile, to facts and experts. It’s impossible to avoid the trend altogether because it changed the foods available to all of us, and the way they are spoken of.&nbsp;

Clean eating and post-truth

Clean eating has been attacked by critics as being a form of body fascism. Others have pointed out that, as a method of healthy eating, it’s founded on bad science: for example,&nbsp;the coconut oil beloved as a panacea by clean eaters actually has no known offsetting favorable effects, and consuming it could result in higher LDL cholesterol.

Clean eating backlash

The long read: The oh-so-Instagrammable food movement has been thoroughly debunked - but it shows no signs of going away. The real question is why we were so desperate to believe it