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Bye, Wellness Witches. Deliciously Ella is finally being called out for her clean eating hypocrisy
There’s no such thing as unclean food. There never has been
Cast your mind back to 2015, the birth of the Nutribullet, courgetti bolognese becoming a thing and sweet potato being used as toast. Tesco grew a sizeable free-from section and almonds suddenly grew udders so they could be milked.
Unless you were really clued up, 2015 marked the beginning of the clean-eating era, the days when people began to fear gluten like it was Voldemort and live off plants.
Bloggers, calling themselves nutritionists, came out in their thousands to tell us that wellness is everything and it comes from our guts. We were sold books, talks, recipes, anything that would teach us which foods were good, bad and ugly and which ones would cure us from illnesses.
Until they got called out and were compelled to backtrack on ever being associated with clean eating. Yesterday on Radio 4 (and continuing with her no-more-clean eating PR push in The Times and her show Horizon Clean Eating) Deliciously Ella did just that – and people were not here for it.
To her credit, Ella is a vision of success, she literally sits on the throne of plant based diets. To those unfamiliar to Deliciously Ella, she is to clean-eating what Brian Cox is to physics, she’s the veggie version of what Zoella is to the make-up world. She’s made millions off her “clean eating” ethos, telling people to basically avoid white rice like the plague.
In 2012, Ella started her blog to share recipes and her vision of wellness, preaching that she was cured of her disease, PoTS, because she ate well. She claimed that cutting out the gut-murdering protein gluten as well as dairy, you are a healthier being. And on the same note, refined foods scored a big fat zero, so by Ella’s advice, rice, flour and sugar are off the cards too.
Fast forward five years of raking it in by means of a lot of sweet potato and her undeniably huge following, and Ella appears on the Radio 4 Today Programme to talk clean eating. But it’s a different story today. Clean eating has turned dirty, so she’s taking back everything she’s said. What once seemed like a girl gang of angels floating around in yoga pants to answer our every bloating worry is a bit of a joke – because it turns out they’re a load of hypocrites.
They’ve undergone a makeover, the newly branded #wellnesswitches are disassociating themselves from wellness, and like bickering 7-year-olds, their “I never said that” rhetoric is beginning to sound like a horrifically boring record stuck on repeat.
Speaking today, Ella told the Today Programme: “There’s a whole irony where I have never described myself as clean, to then become the queen of clean, it’s a little bit frustrating.
“I am not a huge fan of the word ‘clean’ because of the obvious implications of meaning not dirty.”
She continued to say that she doesn’t advocate anyone going gluten free, but her own words above and in The Telegraph in 2015, don’t match this at all: “I cut gluten from my diet just over three years ago, and it was one of the best decisions I’ve made – I feel so good for it”.
It’s not just Ella Mills we should be calling out for hypocrisy because the Hemsley sisters are at it too. If you’ve never heard of Hemsley + Hemsley of courgetti fame, these sisters aren’t far off Ella’s success, with multiple books, Selfridges restaurants and their own TV show. Their focus is “meals that are gluten, grain and refined sugar free alternatives to daily staples” as well as “teaching the importance of gut health” … also without any form of health qualification.
But they too retracted from this clean, everything-free ethos. Jasmine Hemsley said: “It is a media-coined term. We have never, ever used the phrase ‘clean eating’.”
Their clean little secret is out and they’re flapping about it. See, the truth with these wellness witches, clean-eaters, food bloggers – whatever you want to label them – is that they make A LOT of money out of what they do in suspecting we will fall for their claims, so publishers love them. And when you already come from a lot of money, naturally the quest for more money is a lot simpler in terms of promotion.
They have no qualifications, their claims don’t match up and finally we’re catching onto them. It’s a pity kale can’t cure immaturity because these people, who fostered the toxic idea that some foods and ways of eating are “dirty” to hordes of impressionable young girls, really need to grow up and take the criticisms.
No one likes a hypocrite.