Eating Clean Theory

HectaM

New Member
Hey everyone,

This is kind of a random thought, but I've been rolling around the idea of whether or not eating clean actually matters in regards to body composition.

Lately I've come to the conclusion that, for the most part, eating "clean" vs. "dirty" does not matter when relating it to body composition (BF%, muscle mass.)

What really matters (and I believe from reading other posts, that this is probably the consensus of the board) is your total macronutrient intake. Protein, Carbs, Fat, which equates to calories.

I was thinking... how did the whole eating clean thing start out? Why do people think they need to eat clean to stay lean and to gain/preserve muscle mass?

Here's a possible explanation:

Personally, it's much easier to compute my daily macronutrients when I'm eating clean foods, because clean foods are usually primarily only one of the macronutrients. For example:

Chicken Breast is almost all protein.
Brown Rice is almost all carbohydrates
Potatoes are almost all carbohydrates
Nuts are almost all fat

Basically, most lean meat is all protein, most low-GI foods are mainly all carbohydrates, most "good" fat sources come from sources that are primarily fat.

When coming up with a nutritional plan for the day, it's much easier to fit the pieces together when they are simple like that.

When you eat "dirty" a lot of foods have lots of fat, carbs, and protein in them and fitting those pieces together to come up with the correct macronutrient requirements get much tougher.

For example:

In a "clean" diet, if someone needs 150 grams of protein, it's pretty easy to say that they can eat 6 servings of a 4 oz chicken breast @ 25grams of protein per serving.

Say in the same "clean" diet, the person needs 200 grams of carbohydrates and now they've eaten the 6 servings of chicken breast. The chicken breast does not interfere with their carbohydrate requirements. Basically, they can start from 0 and work up.

Same goes for Fat.

In a "Dirty" diet things get more complicated.

For example:

Someone needs 150 grams of protein a day. This person eats a hamburger from McDonalds, this hamburger (I'm guessing here) has 25grams of protein 15grams of fat and 30 grams of carbohydrates.

This throws off all totals for the day and now this person would need to recalculate their daily requirements for fat, carbs, and protein.

Now if they need 200 grams of carbohydrates they would need to subtract the 30 grams they ate above to figure out what they need to eat next.

This can be done, and it can be done pretty easily on the fly if you have a pretty good understanding of nutrition. But this makes things much more difficult, especially for beginners to plan an entire day out.

Clean diets are like "square" or "even" foods, that fit neatly into one category. This makes planning and calculating easy.

Bulking diets have many confusing foods to calculate that have many different macronutrients in each and create more complex planning to reach goals.

For example: What happens if someone on a "dirty" diet has all of their daily requirements fulfilled for carbohydrates, and fat, but is lacking 25grams of protein.

For many people here we'd just grab a chicken breast, a protein shake, some egg whites, etc. Because all of those are "clean" and easily fit into a block in our diet. Using a "dirty" food in this situation would be much harder...
 
personally i think with all the info out on the net you can justify any conclusion you want.

with the advent of fitday and other nutrition sites i dont really think peoples diet is dictated by the effort or complexity that goes into the macro breakdown. i hit 4000+ cals sometimes when bulking from all kinds of unique restuarants/foods but still entering that info takes 10minutes a day tops. when dieting down and food is more limited and regimented its probably more like 2-3minutes.

i think the answer can and always will rest with the individual. ive seen avg joes eat real dirty and lift their way to 10-15lbs  of lean gains with little or no fat gain. ive also seen avg joes "go clean" for a change and see signif. body comp changes. there is also a lot of quality of life issues that enter into peoples decision as far as eating/tracking habits. for some the idea of eating "dirty" is un-healthy and stressful while others find pre-cooking/packing/tracking clean food to be an uneccesary stress/burden.

and of course there is your starting point genetics. too big of a topic for this thread but suffice it to say this indiv. and unique (and unchangeable) possesion skews your perception as to what you need to grow or cut compared to what others might need to grow or cut.
 
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