I’ve read several articles were someone mentions that people who are really into the clean/organic/raw/vegan movement could be, in fact, suffering from a disorder called Orthorexia.
Is this a “fad” herd behavior thing? People with OCD fixating on “Clean Eating” till they develop an eating disorder? Or just whoosh?
I think the important terms are “unhealthy obsession” and “iron will.” Folks who jump on a fad are not suffering from a mental disorder. Orthorexia nervosa, like anorexia nervosa and other food-based, OCD-related disorders is characterized by obsession to the point of causing significant impairment in the individuals’ lives. The actual number of people who can be clinically diagnosed with *any *disorder of this sort is quite small; the number of vegans/rawfoodies/whatevers is a similarly tiny number.
I wonder how great the overlap is between the two groups?
Just a note about Anorexia Nervosa: I read an interesting article that states that when women with AN look in a mirror and insist they are fat, the have brain activity similar to people experiencing drug-induced hallucinations. So when they say they look fat, they might mean it literally.
Orthorexia, to be diagnosed as such, has to occur in the absence of another disorder of which it is sometimes a symptom, such as schizophrenia or autism.
I had to deal once with a parent who had this, and had her kid on a really rigid diet, and insisted the kid was allergic to all sorts of things, as diagnosed my either their naturopath, or their homeopath. The kid’s behavior was terrible, mainly, I suspect, because she was deprived of so many things. When we’d have a birthday, and the other kids got a cupcake, this kid got a wheat-free, sugar-free biscuit that tasted like cardboard. And every time she came up with a new attention-seeking behavior, he mother would remove another food from her diet. The kid was only three, and didn’t make the connection.
I see in her future learning to very successfully smuggle candy into her room and eat it in secret, and when she gets to high school, she’ll use the same channels to smuggle in drugs.
I’m not sure why you would pick out clean/organic/raw/vegan dieters over other dieters for this purpose. Presumably anybody consciously following a diet to achieve some targetted outcome - whether it be general health, or weight loss, or fitness, or avoiding complicity in unethical farming practices, or ritual religious reasons, or whatever - can become fixated or obsessive, and develop feelings of guilt over lapses, and/or feelings of superiority over others who do not follow the same diet. And presumably a proportion of those might be at risk of being diagnosed with orthorexia. But I don’t see any reason to suggest that clean/organic/raw/vegan dieters are at particular risk of this.
All this assumes that the diagnosis has any clinical validity, as to which I have no opinion. The other possibility, of course, is that the diagnosis is basically woo, in which case the making of the diagnosis may tell us more about the attitudes of the diagnostician to the diet being followed than it does about the diet itself.
(I mention this latter possiblity not to suggest that the diagnosis is woo, but because the possibility does arise, given that orthorexia is not recognised in the DSM-5, and the linked article states that doctors won’t diagnose with this condition.)
The reason that the clean/healthy/vegan dieters are the focus of the orthorexia diagnosis is that they have generally been considered to be doing something healthy for their bodies, and therefore they and the people around them are less likely to recognize problems. There is a good clinical recognition of anorexia – we know that if someone is dieting to lose weight, and has obsessive food-related behaviors that lead to extreme weight loss and mental health problems, they are suffering from a disease that needs treatment. But if someone is obsessive about healthy eating in the same way, even if their diet is no longer nutritionally sound, people, including medical professionals, are more accepting because they are “eating healthy.” Orthorexia was named by a doctor who went down the vegan/clean eating path so far that he became obsessed and realized that he had a problem. He then sought out more information, and found cases of people who had starved to death from obsessive “healthy” eating, but weren’t diagnosed as anorexic because they never had body image issues or tried to lose weight.
Obviously, this is a newly recognized condition that is not yet in the DSM, but it follows an existing pattern that seems well within standard medicine and is not really on the woo spectrum.
Orthorexia is extremely rare and defining it doesn’t mean that people should stay away from clean eating any more than the existence of anorexia means that people shouldn’t try to lose weight. But in my opinion, it’s worthwhile to have terminology to recognize that you don’t have to be obsessed with being thin to have an obsessive eating disorder.
Thanks, SpoilerVirgin. Ignorance fought.
I’d point out, though, that people who pursue diets for weight control or for better nutrition are also “generally considered to be doing something healthy for their bodies”. It could be that, properly considered, anorexia is merely a special case of orthorexia. Both involve a preoccupation with a particular health issue that may afflict the individual to a very slight extent or not at all, coupled with a disregard of the much more significant issue of adequate nutrition.
Anorexics are generally identified because (among other things) they restrict their food intake to a point where they become morbidly underweight. This could happen to an orthorexic, or he could become malnourished in other, perhaps less easily observable, ways so perhaps, yes, orthorexia is less likely to be identified and diagnosed, or this might tend to happen later in the progress of the condition.
I read Dr. Steven Bratman’s book on the subject “Health Food Junkies.” His basic premise is that focusing all your attention on your diet and feeling virtuous when eating right and horrible when eating wrong (even one M&M) is a mental problem.
Some of the stories are funny. One woman complained that when she ate the wrong foods, she got pains in her stomach. When he asked her to explain that, she said “When I eat the wrong things and press real hard on my stomach, it hurts.” Well, duh.