Clean eating is the name of a new nutritional trend in which the focus is on foods that are as natural and unprocessed as possible. Finished products, junk food and sugar are avoided as far as possible. These health benefits come from eating clean.
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Was ist Clean Eating?
Clean eating is not a diet, as the focus is neither on rapid weight loss nor on giving up the foods you love. Rather, it’s about increasing the amount of natural and unprocessed foods in your diet and reducing the amount of processed foods, fast food and sweets. Fruit and vegetables play the main role here and are supplemented by whole grains, nuts and seeds. Meat and fish are on the menu once or twice a week at most, while yoghurt and plant-based drinks can be eaten several times a week.
Clean Eating: 3 Benefits
1. Relieving skin problems
Heavily processed products such as frozen pizza, packet soups or cornflakes contain too much sugar , salt and, in some cases, trans fats. All of these substances can fuel inflammation throughout the body and especially in the intestines. This produces enzymes that break down the proteins collagen and elastin – two substances that keep our skin firm and taut. As a result, the complexion deteriorates. In addition, certain skin diseases such as rosacea are fueled by the inflammatory substances such as sugar. Therefore, replace junk food and processed products with healthy, unprocessed foods as often as possible to do something good for your skin.
Clean Eating: 5 Tips for Beginners >>
2. Weight Reduction
Clean eating is also excellent for losing weight, even if this is not necessarily the main focus. Nevertheless, fruit, vegetables and whole grains are in most cases significantly lower in calories than industrially processed products, fast food or microwave ready meals. In addition, due to the high water and fiber content, they fill you up faster and more sustainably. With Clean Eating you can lose weight in a healthy way in the long term.
Important: You don’t have to do without anything completely with clean eating. Because a strict waiver with prohibitions can quickly backfire. It is much more important to gradually increase the proportion of vegetables in your diet and replace processed foods with natural foods.
3. Less inflammation and disease
While excess sugar, trans fat, and saturated animal fat can cause small pockets of inflammation to form in the body, a mostly plant-based diet made up of unprocessed foods can do the opposite. The secondary plant substances contained in fruit and vegetables are responsible for this . For example, according to the latest findings and also according to the German Society for Nutrition (DGE) , flavonoids, phenolic acids or saponins have an antioxidant, antimicrobial, antithrombotic, cholesterol-lowering, blood-sugar-lowering, anti-carcinogenic and immunomodulating effect. The Federal Center for Nutrition (BZfE) therefore assumes that phytochemicals even have a preventive effect on high blood pressure, arteriosclerosis and hypercholesterolemia . Therefore, when it comes to fruit and especially vegetables, the more colorful the better! You benefit from a variety of anti-inflammatory and health-promoting plant substances.
Interesting: The nutritionist and sports doctor Dr. medical Meike Diessner has developed her own clean eating concept and tells us in an interview how it works and what health benefits result from clean eating.
Clean eating: 3 tips to get you started
1. Don’t change everything at once
In contrast to crash diets, clean eating involves a long-term and fundamental change in diet. You can therefore take your time with this change, as some of your eating habits will be turned upside down. Therefore, take it easy and change only one aspect each week: for example, increase the proportion of vegetables in your diet in the first week and then leave out the finished products in the second week. This makes it easier for you to get started with clean eating and increases the likelihood that you will stick with it permanently.
2. Eat your fill of fruits and vegetables
Here, too, the difference to classic weight loss diets becomes clear, because with clean eating the focus is not on doing without, but on what you are allowed to eat and what you should eat from a health point of view. So you can eat your fill of any kind of fruit and veg: Vegetables can play the main role in the main meals and in the evening there are raw vegetables with a delicious quark dip or hummus instead of chips. The same applies to fruit: the more colourful, the better. Eat a variety of foods to get rid of all the different phytochemicalsto benefit. Particularly colorful varieties such as blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, kale, peppers and aubergines, but also products such as tofu or coffee contain larger amounts of health-promoting plant substances. So bring plenty of variety to your clean eating strategy. So it never gets boring in terms of taste!
3. Avoid finished products
This is probably the most important and at the same time one of the most difficult changes. Because in modern supermarkets we are surrounded by ready- made products : Here a packet of soup, there a frozen pizza and there a can of sugared fruit. Even cereals and products aimed specifically at children are often highly processed or contain large amounts of sugar, salt and fat. For example, replace sugared ready-to-eat muesli with your own mixture with oatmeal, flaxseed, nuts, buckwheat and fresh berries. This is not only cheaper and tastier, but also much healthier.
Tip: If you get a little hungry in between, grab your favorite fruit instead of a chocolate bar when clean eating or fill yourself up with a handful of nuts instead of a bread roll. Satisfy late-night chip cravings with colorful raw vegetables and a tzatziki or hummus dip.
