SPIRALISED!

Ella rewrites her clean-eating history

AS DELICIOUSLY Ella, she inspired the ‘clean-eating’ fad that has become a source of culinary controversy.

Now Ella Mills is going to great lengths to distance herself from the movement that has become linked with dubious diets – including rewriting her own history.

First, she appeared on a BBC Horizon documentary last week, where she conceded the ‘clean’ idea had become ‘too complicated’. And when interviewed on Radio 4’s Today programme on Friday, the food writer insisted: ‘There’s a slight irony to the whole thing, having never described myself as “clean”.’

But The Mail on Sunday discovered she has used the word ‘clean’ on her successful blog. When we contacted her to point it out, she hastily rewrote passages to lose the now-contentious word as thoroughly as she has removed sugar and dairy from her recipes.

On one internet post she had written: ‘For me, one of the hardest things about adopting a totally clean, healthy diet was finding the right snacks to eat.’

The passage now reads: ‘For me one of the hardest things about adopting changing the way I ate was finding the right snacks to eat.’

In another post, she removed a sentence which discussed how she managed ‘snacking with a totally clean lifestyle’.

In her first book, Mrs Mills, 25, credited a vegan diet with helping her live with a debilitating illness at college. It became a bestseller and helped popularise spiralisers – kitchen gadgets that shred vegetables such as courgettes to make a spaghetti substitute. But she has distanced herself from recent negative connotations of ‘clean eating’. Her new book, Deliciously Ella With Friends, instead advocates meals based on ‘natural eating’ – without using processed foods.

Last night Mrs Mills said: ‘When I started my blog, I used the term “clean eating” which I took to mean natural and unprocessed foods. As the term has continued to be used, I have distanced myself from it as I felt the meaning has changed and has been overused to package negative fads, which I do not support.’

She added: ‘I am removing the word “clean” from posts to ensure no relation to the new meaning of the word and what it has come to represent.’