Healthy living Healthy living
Clean and natural – the rise of healthy living
The idea of healthy living is sound. Surely having a longer, happier life with less need for medical treatment should be an easy sell? Yet preservatives in food, chemical ingredients and hidden sugars can make it harder for consumers to make the right choice. Emma-Jane Batey explores the growing importance of food labelling and having access to information about healthy eating.
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et’s face it. The processed food cat is well and truly out of the bag. While it’s safe to say that not everyone has the same level of information or awareness regarding healthy eating – not to mention the ease of purchasing and storing processed and, usually, packaged ambient foods – it’s unlikely that the wider population will go back to cooking from scratch every day. It’s also rare to see special offers on fruits and vegetables when compared with the endless 2-4-1s on packaged convenience foods. Consumers on lower budgets are also the least likely to have access to the tools required to turn cheaper ingredients into healthy, filling meals for their families. Mental health plays a role in healthy eating too, with the self-care motivation needed to cook nourishing
meals sadly quick to go when the black dog strikes. A common argument for adding artificial preservatives to food is that it’s necessary to extend its shelf life, supporting convenience and logistics. The choice appears to be between healthy, natural products with a short lifespan or more artificial products that will last longer. This does not necessarily have to be the case. Surely the goal for cleaner living, for the many not the few, is more complicated than just promoting processed food? There is also the misconception that healthy eating, often referred to on social media as ‘eating clean’, ‘clean eating’, or ‘clean living’ – the hashtags – it is about obsessiveness, manifesting itself in difficulty for the consumer one way or another.
Ingredients Insight /
www.ingredients-insight.com
Mark Agnor/
Shutterstock.com
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