Nigella Lawson has warned that healthy eating fads could be disguising eating disorders.
Speaking to a group of catering students at a college in Toronto, the cook and author claimed that people had become “a bit extreme” with their eating habits, adding that “we live in an age of fads."
“A lot of so-called healthy eating is a cover-up for an eating disorder and I think people persecute themselves to what they do eat and what they don’t eat,” she said.
The TV star added that there is a lot of “mumbo jumbo” spoken with regards to diets today.
She went on to describe how friends of hers will deny themselves of particular foods, such as chocolate, only to binge on them later.
The How To Be A Domestic Goddess author continued to explain that cutting out whole food groups “doesn’t seem to make sense”.
“You should eat a bit of everything,” she said, claiming that what is considered “healthy” is subject to change as diet trends come and go.
Her comments follow similar sentiments made in 2015, when Lawson heavily criticised the rise of “clean eating”, arguing that the term propagated an attachment of shame to certain foods which some people might perceive as “dirty”.
Speaking at a Jewish community centre’s Speaker Series in London, she said: “People are using certain diets as a way to hide an eating disorder or a great sense of unhappiness with their own body.”
"There is a way in which food is used to either self-congratulate - you're a better person because you're eating like that - or to self-persecute, because you'll not allow yourself to eat what you want."
