Health Food Fanatic

In pretty much every family or group of friends, there's this person. The one who's obsessed with healthy, nutritious, clean eating. If they're not dieting or counting calories, they're checking the nutrition labels on everything they buy. Sugar, cholesterol, chemicals, sodium, basically anything processed is the tool of the devil. They're often vegetarians, too, citing the unhealthy qualities of meat (especially red meat).

And half the time, they'll try to impose their way of living on other people. They'll scold someone for touching a cookie or a burger, asking if they want to die of a heart attack or diabetes. If they're also the eco-conscious type, they'll rant about how many animals died to make a certain meat dish. They extol the virtues of brown rice and whole grain pasta and whole wheat bread, claiming anything white is unhealthy and will possibly kill you (or worse, make you gain weight).

This trope is based in real life, where some people really are obsessive about their diet and clean eating to the point where it runs their lives.

Examples of this trope:

Fan Works

• Certain Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan fics portray Alan and Anne as health food nuts who eat low-salt corn chips, whole grain bagels, and salads while lecturing their brother Stanley, who eats their school's sugar and cholesterol-laden meals and snacks on candy.
  • One of the author's Scooby-Doo fics also has Shaggy eating gluten-free oatmeal cookies, even though the only diet change the character's ever had was giving up meat due to his voice actor's vegetarianism.

Literature

• Dawn in The Baby Sitters Club is a prime example. Not only is she a vegetarian, she won't touch candy or cake or cookies. Jessi even mentions once that Dawn would consider eating fast food inhumane torture. When Dawn occasionally does indulge in sweets she makes a big deal of rinsing her mouth afterwards. Thankfully for her, Claudia keeps things like wheat crackers and fruit on hand for both her and Stacey, who has diabetes and can't eat candy.
• Catherine Anderson: 
  • Quincy Harrigan starts out as one in the Coulter-Harrigan series, even going so far as to smack his father's hand when he reaches for fried chicken and forcefully redirect his reach for red potatoes instead of potato salad. His own book Perfect Timing forces him to rethink this mindset, first to accommodate the dietary needs of his time-traveler love interest Ceara, then when he realizes he misses things like pastrami sandwiches and beer.
  • Molly Wells in Sweet Nothings. She's obsessed with reading nutrition labels and is a vegetarian, and in the first weeks of her job as a cook for Jake Coulter's ranch she fixes low-cal health foods for the men there, including brown rice and sandwiches with fat-free cheese and refusing to cook the fatty, cholesterol-laden dishes they love so much. A lot of this is due to her own insecurity about her weight, though. She does eventually relent and start making what they like and learns to relax about her own calorie counting just a bit, though she remains a vegetarian throughout the rest of the story.
• Ramona Quimby's mother is said not to approve of junk foods in certain books, but this could be due to the family's financial struggles and things like soda, chips, and cookies being unnecessary expenses. She never objects to the girls eating junk food when they're at friends' houses or at school.
• Maggie's aunts in Behind The Attic Wall are pathological about this. They ban Maggie from eating sweets, warm her milk because it's better for her that way, have a rule about how many servings of vegetables she must eat every day, and fill candy dishes at a party with radishes and artichoke hearts.

Live-Action TV

• Danny Tanner has shades of this on Full House. While he doesn't ban his kids from sweets, he often serves carrot and celery sticks as after-school snacks. Michelle's friend Aaron even gripes about this once.
  • Joey tries to become this in an early episode to improve his cholesterol, only to cave and order a burger and fries after just a few days.
• Subverted with Jill on Home Improvement, who just wants her three growing boys to eat something other than junk food.
• Blossom's father Nick once had a friend who was this trope. Said friend dropped dead of a heart attack while jogging, according to Nick, who then told Blossom that "sometimes you should just go for the cheeseburger."

Western Animation

• Didi Pickles on Rugrats can be like this sometimes. In the first episode she makes a carrot cake for Tommy's first birthday party, and in another episode her shopping list includes a cereal called Corrugated Bran Puffs.
• Marge Simpson deals with a Mommy and Me group who thinks like this. They scold her harshly for serving the children store-bought snack cakes and chocolate milk, causing Marge to go on an organic food kick and knock herself out making zucchini-carrot cupcakes for the next gathering. When the mothers find out she used a nonstick pan, they ostracize her again and Marge goes "screw this" to the whole clean eating plan and gets into Homer's stash of fattening snacks. As she and Homer indulge together, she says that from now on they'll only make the kids eat healthy.
  • Averted with Lisa, who is a strict vegetarian to the point of ranting about the evils of meat, but will still happily eat cupcakes, ice cream, and french fries.

Real Life

• In real life, extreme health food fixation is known as Orthorexia Nervosa and is classified as an eating disorder.
  • Some parents are so obsessed with healthy eating that it rubs off on their children. One particular boy is afraid of junk food thanks to the way he was raised, and his mother is proud of this fact. The rest of the article discusses how this isn't a good thing.
• Some people who have to eat healthy because of digestive issues will develop a self-righteous sour grapes attitude, reasoning that people who eat things like cake and restaurant food are eating "fake" food and that only they know the value of real, wholesome meals.