Review: BBC's Clean Eating's Dirty Secrets

Recently I've been trying my hand at cleaner eating. I've been doing my best to avoid processed food and to fill my plate with food that comes from the Earth as is instead of food labelled "pierce lid several times before microwaving on full power for four minutes", but I'm not quite there yet. The occasional biscuit (or seven), chocolate orange yoghurt or french fry still manage to find their way into my mouth.

Hence cleaner eating. Cleaner than it was, but not exactly clean clean.

I'm still new to the world of clean eating and I'm still trying to get my hands on as much information as I can to inspire and educate me. So when I saw the BBC had brought out a documentary called Clean Eating's Dirty Secrets, you can bet I was all over it. I like to be well-informed!

Unfortunately, this documentary does not seem to share that passion for being well-informed.

According to the BBC, this 34 minute long documentary follows Youtuber, Grace Victory, as she "investigates Britain's latest extreme diet craze", which kind of threw up red flags for me straight away.  After all, if clean eating is eating whole foods in their most natural state without all the artificial colours, additives and chemicals, food that comes from the Earth instead of a lab or a factory, then how is that an extreme diet craze? Surely that's just the natural human diet that we lived on for millions of years before the days of fast food, brominated vegetable oil and GMOs.

But it quickly becomes apparent that the documentary isn't actually about clean eating at all. In fact, throughout the entire programme I struggled to understand what it was about!

Grace says she's investigating "plant-based diets that are dairy free, sugar free, gluten free, meet free, JOY free", but throughout the documentary she jumps from one diet to the next in an almost haphazard way, not explaining their differences and instead sloppily labelling them all as 'clean eating'. Hello! Living a vegan lifestyle is not the same as clean eating. Not all clean eaters are vegan and not all vegans are clean eaters! Nor do gluten or natural sugars have any part to play in whether or not you're a vegan or a clean eater. I'm sure there are sugar free, gluten free clean eating vegans out there (who may or may not have joy in their lives), but these dietary preferences aren't all co-dependent or one of the same thing.

It turns out that what Grace is actually condemning investigating is veganism, which she deems "very middle class" because it's so expensive.

Now, I'm not a vegan myself so correct me if I'm wrong, but a trolley full of vegetables and rice surely can't cost as much as a trolley full of ham, beef and chicken breasts. And, again correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm sure you'll find that the world over it's the poorest people who are living on a plant-based diet while the middle classes are tucking into their sirlion steak with side of peppercorn sauce. Vegetables are not reserved for doctors, lawyers and Jack Will's wearers.

Grace cites and chats with various bloggers and Youtubers throughout the documentary, including Brianna Jackson. Brianna suffered from an eating disorder for five years and, in an interview with Whole Lifestyle, she says, "if I hadn't found raw veganism, I don't think I'd be alive today...whole unprocessed foods really helped me trust food again". But, rather than heralding veganism as the reason for Brianna's recovery like she does, the BBC documentary almost makes out that Brianna's diet and her illness are connected, using her eating disorder story as a segway into a section on orthorexia.

(In case you're not down with the lingo, orthorexia is a medical condition that causes sufferers to avoid certain foods that they consider unhealthy.)

Brianna is a vegan advocate and certainly doesn't consider herself to be orthorexic. Needless to say, Brianna was more than a little upset when she saw the documentary. You can watch her response video here:


It's clear from the get-go that Grace's intention is to condemn and undermine a lifestyle that she blatantly doesn't understand and openly refers to as "a cult". She openly says "I don't want this lifestyle", she wants the diets she tries (for how many days is never really clarified) to fail and she wants to go back to her old, processed, microwavable ways. And that's fine! You do you girlfriend! (I just ate a Milkybar, who am I to judge?) But if you're going to make a documentary exposing the negatives of something, it needs to be researched, well presented...make some fragment of sense!

Overall the documentary is a poor attempt at cramming too many topics (anorexia, orthorexia, veganism, blogger influence, the regulation of the term 'nutritionist', a potato cleanse...whatever that is) into a measly 34 minutes. All these different aspects of what Grace confusedly terms as 'clean eating' are quickly glossed over without any real exploration and then sloppily thrown together into half an hour of misinformed confusion.

Rant over!

Clean Eating's Dirty Secrets is currently available for you to watch (and roll your eyes at as you see fit) on the BBC iPlayer.