When healthy eating goes too far
The new eating disorder orthorexia nervosa os a potentially fatal
obsession with health food
DPA , HAMBURG, GERMANY
Sunday, Sep 11, 2005,Page 19
American Kate Finn wanted to eat only healthy foods. She fasted and ate
whole vegetables and fruits to "cleanse" her body and continually lost
weight. Friends and relatives were shocked as they all believed she was
anorexic.
"In December 2003, I received the sad news that Kate Finn died," US
doctor Steven Bratman wrote. According to his diagnosis, Finn suffered
not from anorexia nervosa or bulimia, but from a new eating disorder
called orthorexia nervosa, an unhealthy compulsion to eat nutritious
foods.
The name is derived from Greek: ortho meaning "correct" and orexis
meaning "appetite."
"She was not afraid of getting fat. She didn't want to be thin. She
simply wanted to eat only nutritious foods," said Bratman, who coined
the term orthorexia nervosa at the end of the 1990s. "It's excellent to
eat healthy, and most of us would do it if we would pay just a little
more attention to what we eat."
"Some people have the opposite problem -- their perception of healthy
food is so extreme that it turns into an obsession," he said.
Bratman says signs that someone is suffering from the illness include
spending three hours or more thinking about food, planning meals more
than three days in advance and placing the nutritional value of food
over the joy of eating.
Experts say the depth of the phenomenon is unknown because the people
who have it do not feel sick, said Andreas Schnebel, a psychologist and
chairman of Germany's eating disorder association.
Schnebel, who is also director of the Munich-based consultancy
ANAD-pathways, said people with the disorder have extremely specific
needs when it comes to what they ingest.
"They eat whole foods, very, very defined organic foods, very specific
salt and vegetables that were picked during a full moon," Schnebel
said. "They also do not drink normal mineral water, rather a special
water, and it must have been open for perhaps days," he said.
Some sufferers are so wrapped up in their nutrition, they gradually
become isolated from their surroundings.
"They take emergency rations along to social events or avoid people who
in their opinion eat unhealthily," the medical Web site www.medizin.de
says. Their willpower makes them feel superior to other people. "They
are like missionaries."
Psychologist Christoph Usbeck of the University of Duesseldorf said it
becomes an illness as soon as a person's quality of life is clearly
affected. Treatment should be sought in cases involving social
isolation, depressive moods and dramatic weight loss.
"The illness has been qualified, but because of the low number of
occurrences and the lack of research, it has not yet been recorded in
the catalogue of psychological illnesses," Usbeck said.
Germans and other Europeans could be less affected by the illness
thanks to their sense of sociability.
A French study showed that Americans eat far fewer relaxing meals than
Europeans, and place a higher-than-average value on having a proper
****tion size, said the researchers working with sociologist Claude
Fischler.
By comparison, people in southern Europe and France associate eating
with family togetherness and social gatherings. For them, it's more
im****tant to have a relaxing comfortable meal than to count calories.
While some people fall victim to the orthorexia nervosa eating
disorder, others are going headlong into organic foods. Sellers of such
wares are registering double-digit growth rates, and the new disciples
of organic food include 20-somethings as well as retired people.
The days when organic eating meant shopping in drab shops with
shriveled-up carrots are over. Nowadays, glimmering new supermarkets
offering organic goods are opening their doors. Many researchers
believe organic foods have reached the mainstream and healthy eating
will become a mass market.
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