“The clean-eating craze is an eating disorder”

In a decade of running National Health Service clinics treating patients with severe eating disorders, medical doctor and psychiatrist Dr Max Pemberton treated a number of very high profile Instagram food influencers.

Patient confidentially tied his hands at the time, but now he can reveal his frustration that these social media personalities continued to post prodigiously about food, nutrition, recipes and “healthy” diet strategies to their hundreds of thousands of admiring followers, despite privately battling crippling eating disorder issues and having entirely dysfunctional relationships with food.

Dr Pemberton’s front-line experience paints a heart-breaking picture of our current social media world in which unqualified influencers who happen to look the part, or know how to create compelling content, wield enormous power and influence over young, impressionable and insecure people who are primed to absorb ill-advised comments and advice from people in no position to give it.

Trust Me, I’m a (Junior) Doctor by Dr Max Pemberton (£10.99, Hodder) is out now.