"Is Orthorexia a Real Eating Disorder?"
Orthorexia Nervosa is described as a "fixation on the virtue of food
or unhealthy obsession with healthy eating."
Orthorexia has been styled as a type of "self-righteous eating"
or as "clean eating" by sufferers of the disorder.
Wait, let's take a step back here.
First of all, though this phenomenon
has been described in the scientific literature,
it is not formally recognized as an official psychiatric diagnosis.
Furthermore, orthorexia doesn't even have an accepted definition,
nor validated diagnostic criteria,
and if you can't validly diagnose it or even define it, what good is it?
OK, well, first off, where did this concept even come from?
Not from some scholarly source but from a popular press article called
"Confessions of a Health Food Junkie" in a magazine called Yoga Journal.
Let's explore its scientific legitimacy.
Evidently, it looks like orthorexics obsessively avoid processed foods,
unhealthy fats, and foods containing too much salt or too much sugar.
But wait. By definition we should avoid unhealthy fats, they're unhealthy!
And anything that has too much salt or sugar has too much salt and sugar.
Is someone who's a nonsmoker, obsessively avoiding cigarettes, orthospirexic,
obsessed with "right" breathing?
"In many cases, parents try to strictly limit their children's sugar intake..."
No! Off to the loony bin they go.
Orthorexics make the nutritional value of a meal
more important than the pleasure of eating it.
Uh, but if you didn't just a little, wouldn't you just eat doughnuts all day?
If pleasure trumps health, maybe we should all just start shooting heroin.
One of the proposed criteria is an unusual concern about one's health.
What does that mean?
Do you have a mental illness if you decide
to hold the bacon on your double cheeseburger?
I mean that could be seen as an unusual level of concern
in a standard American diet.
People with orthorexia pay excessive attention to the quality
of consumed food, so much so they'd rather not eat unhealthy food.
I bet they put their seatbelts on, too!
We better reprogram their "unhealthy" healthy thoughts
with cognitive behavioral therapy combined, of course, with drugs:
SSRIs such as Zoloft, Prozac, and Paxil.
Hey, that's what the "experts" recommend.
With regard to psychotropic medication, yeah, SSRIs may help
but you may have to dip into the atypical antipsychotics as well.
Now often there will be a concession like, "Of course, from a clinical
and public health perspective it would not be reasonable to suggest that
individuals who follow a strict healthy diet are endangering their health."
It only reaches clinical significance when health-directed eating
starts causing problems in relationships or impairs an individual's social life.
But like if someone asks their spouse not to smoke around them and the kids,
that health-directed behavior could cause interpersonal distress
in the relationship. Should you just keep quiet?
Or should you yourself keep smoking just to not cause waves
with your smoking spouse?
And social-life-wise, do you have a mental illness if you tell your date
you'd rather not go to the steak house or the smoking lounge?
The problem is when the behavior begins to hinder
a person's ability to take part in everyday society.
Like what if you start bringing food to dinner parties?
Maybe I've just gone to too many potlucks, but bringing a healthy dish
to share doesn't sound like a druggable psychiatric offense to me.
And then, there's Instagram.
Think of the implications social media can have on psychological well-being
of hundreds of thousands of individuals.
Did you know that healthy food posts tend to receive more support from users
than less healthy images,
indicating a positive attitude towards healthy foods and healthy eating?
Soon, everyone might be taking pictures of broccoli.
Quick, get out the straitjackets!
In his decades of medical practice, Dr. Dean Ornish says
he's never seen a case of orthorexia.
"Most people," he says, "have the opposite problem;
they don't care enough about what they eat."