Eating disorder charities are reporting a rise in the number of people suffering from a serious psychological condition characterised by an obsession with healthy eating.
The condition, orthorexia nervosa, affects equal numbers of men and women, but sufferers tend to be aged over 30, middle-class and well-educated.
The condition was named by a Californian doctor, Steven Bratman, in 1997, and is described as a “fixation on righteous eating”. Until a few years ago, there were so few sufferers that doctors usually included them under the catch-all label of “Ednos” – eating disorders not otherwise recognised. Now, experts say, orthorexics take up such a significant proportion of the Ednos group that they should be treated separately.
“I am definitely seeing significantly more orthorexics than just a few years ago,” said Ursula Philpot, chair of the British Dietetic Association’s mental health group. “Other eating disorders focus on quantity of food but orthorexics can be overweight or look normal. They are solely concerned with the quality of the food they put in their bodies, refining and restricting their diets according to their personal understanding of which foods are truly ‘pure’.”
Orthorexics commonly have rigid rules around eating. Refusing to touch sugar, salt, caffeine, alcohol, wheat, gluten, yeast, soya, corn and dairy foods is just the start of their diet restrictions. Any foods that have come into contact with pesticides, herbicides or contain artificial additives are also out.
Quick, we need a vaccine!
The two extremes:
McDonalds and it’s ilk selling crap that can barely described as ‘food’,
and nuts that won’t eat anything that does not meet their high standards.
Personally, I would rather have the population tend towards the orthorexia side than having everybody become a mass of lardbutts addled by a chemical fog in their brain.
Some of us like chemical fogs.
Proof that advertising and marketing works!
Somewhere, an ad agency is having a party.
Agree there are those with a fixation in the food they eat. I don;t dispute the findings at all.
Like to credit some of these ff joints with putting pretty good salad selections on their menu as of late. Big kudos to Pot Belly’s for their salads. Their brand is not in synch with their menu but it’s catchy.
Its good to ban various “foods” from your diet and guage your body’s response. Sugar and Fructose and highly refined foods really are “bad” for you. Salt and Eggs come in and out of fashion every few years.
Try it for a few weeks and then make a decision. I stopped eating high salt or sugar foods and after a month when I went back to try some of my old favorites they became inedible by taste. Canned green beans now have to be washed to remove the salt. Most cookie brands taste more like candy than a wheat or oat product. Has to be less than 25% of the source of calories or I can’t eat it anymore.
Now I add sugar and salt very deliberately.
Balance in all things. Conscious choices with deliberate consequences.
Typical orthorexic: http://tinyurl.com/nurko3
For the most part I have given up eating fast food and have cut sugar out of my diet. Does that mean I have a mental problem?
(sarc)Maybe the government should decide how much and what types of foods each person eats and then we don’t have to worry about any of this.(/sarc)
I recently changed my diet. I get the McDouble instead of the Double chzbgr, and get the fresco version of the bean burrito at Taco Bell.
The fresco stuff is very good, and dinner costs me $2.
#8 Benjamin
For the last 50 or 60 years the government has had more and more influence over how much and what foods we eat, as directed by their corporate overlords. Agribusiness decides what and how much is available and what it costs and manipulates it all through government subsidies and regulations.
while some may poke fun at this they are failing to realize that this obsession, just like other food obsessions, has very little to do with food and more to do with control. And we’re not talking about garden variety (pardon the pun) paying attention to what one eats. The people that have this problem are as obsessive as an anorexic and it can destroy their lives.
My BS Meter went off the when I read this one.
I don’t know who dreams up more ways to scare people, the shrinks or the ad agencies.
“Ask your doctor if whizzo is right for you” – and they don’t even tell you what the f’n symptoms are!
No wonder the doctors have no time to spend with sick people, they’re too busy talking people out of getting prescriptions for whizzo.
#12….a ban on ads for prescription drugs should have been in the health care bill.
#13. Agree 100%.
Michael Bloomberg will tell you what to eat, no worries.
lakelady said, on June 30th, 2010 at 11:07 am
YOU ARE NUTS (pardon the pun). In a country where ad dollars and lobbyists dictate what we are supposed to eat you criticize someone for being cautious about diet. The U.S. government doesn’t allow comprehensive labeling regarding country of origin and whether the food item is genetically modified. Put some thought in this.
Eat whatever the hell you want. And let the fat pigs in the ghetto do the same. Who care?
Really!
Does EVERYBODY have to be a busy-body?
Eat dog shit for all I care.
The only way to avoid modern western degenerative diseases like cancer, heart disease, diabetics, arthritis, and Alzheimers is to avoid the modern processed crap masquerading as food – high fructose corn syrup, vegetable oils, refined flours etc.
Dropping dead or wasting away from an agonizing degenerative or automimmune condition at 65 is not “normal” and hunter-gatherers around the world enjoyed freedom from those diseases until they came into contact with “advanced” Western diets. The few remaining HG populations around the world who have avoided modern foods still enjoy health levels unheard of in the “civilized” world. The Kitavans are a perfect example (http://tinyurl.com/yggnynp)
But there is no money for big pharma and the medical community if people refused to be plied with statins and instead started eating whole natural foods. God forbid you prefer to reach for an apple instead of apple pie. Don’t eat wild salmon! – instead you should be buying prescription omega-3 fish oil like LOVAZA lol. Big Pharma has even bigger balls.
Oh well.. only a mentally insane person would want to live a long healthy life free of dependency on prescription drugs and frequent trips to the doctor.
Alf – I didn’t criticize anyone for being cautious about their diet. There’s a vast difference between reasonable caution and obsession. That is simply the point I was trying to make.
Exercise, eat right, die anyway.