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When Healthy Eating Goes Bad

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Treating your body like a temple seems to be the new religion and it has a lot of devotees. But can healthy eating go too far?

Most of you reading this will know the scenario… You go to dinner with a friend and she justifies her meal of ‘diet food’ to the fact that she has suddenly developed an allergy or food intolerance or has just plain banned certain food products from her diet and is now a raw foodist, vegan or fruitarian. Welcome to the new mid-upper class obsession with dietary purity, otherwise known as orthorexia.

Orthorexia which in literal Latin means ‘correct appetite’ is a term coined by Steven Bratman, a Colorado MD, to denote an eating disorder characterized by excessive focus on eating healthy foods.

This is not to say that food allergies do not exist, but isn’t it a little odd that food allergies seem to have suddenly become so commonplace? ‘Food allergy’ or cover-up for orthorexia? These days with a strong media focus on health, it’s easy for an average woman to become a self-taught expert on nutrition. We’ve read all the studies on why sugar and processed carbohydrates should be banned, we know that wheat and gluten can be difficult to digest, caffeine must not be consumed, and dairy and fat have no justified or nutritional reason to be in our diet. The problem is, when you take all of that out of your diet what are you left with? It seems a lot of women are simply using their health fanatic approach to eating or an assumed ‘food allergy’ as a means to diet towards extreme thin-ness.

But the problem goes further than our own diets. If a group of friends around a dinner table can be convinced, it seems many parents are passing on this food obsession to their children – I have heard a GP express his concern that children are coming to them over illness caused by malnutrition due to their parents trying to not feed them any ‘bad’ foods. However, this may be a losing battle - according to recent US research, restricting children's access to snacks may actually encourage them to adopt an unhealthy diet. The research, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition suggests that restricting access to sugary and fatty foods may in have the opposite effect to that intended in the long-term and cause binge eating.

So what’s causing this new food obsession?
There are plentiful opportunities to educate ourselves on what we should and shouldn’t be eating, but not only are we getting more and more educated we are also getting more and more confused by the mixed media messages. Is an egg a day really ok? The jury seems to be out. Then there’s the recent flipping of the food triangle which after years of quaffing bread, rice and pasta declared that we should not eat them so often after all. But we can’t blame the food triangle, because it at least offers a balanced approach to eating.

Many new diets – made popular as rapid weight loss plans or having a celebrity following have become household names and make dietary restrictions acceptable. The Atkins diet for example made “I don’t eat carbs” a perfectly natural coin of phrase. In fact the willpower associated with these restrictions are often admired – especially in female circles, where it’s not uncommon for “You’re soo good!” to be used in admiration of someone who avoids sugar or carbs. And unlike other food disorders such as anorexia or bulimia, orthorexia is not only publically acceptable but is often admired. I have been at dinner parties where the wheat and gluten free lady has managed to convince a table of people that they really ought to try out her way of eating. There’s now a sense of status associated with food restriction and for orthorexics that sense of ‘saintliness’ comes from disciplined devotion to their food regime and a sense of spiritual self-control that they refuse to relinquish by ‘ordinary eating’.

What defines an orthorexic?
The personality traits of an orthorexic are often very similar to those of an anorexic – the food obsessives often tend to be perfectionists that are afraid to take risks, and are extremely self-critical.

If you are thinking this is not a problem for you and that your eating habits just do right by your body, you may need to consider what you are doing to your mind. Like anorexia or bulimia, sufferers of orthorexia obsess about food in an unhealthy way. Typically orthorexia is an obsessive compulsive disorder – for the sufferer it is about being ‘in control’. Your body may well be your temple, but your mental health may be suffering.

Symptoms of dietary obsession include:

Do you feel holier than thou for the way you eat and look down on others who are not as strict?
Do you avoid foods you once loved because they no longer fit your health category?
Has socialising become difficult due to your dietary restraints?
Do you feel disgust and self-loathing when you stray from your diet?
Do you spend hours each day thinking about healthy food and planning menus?
Do you relish the feeling of being ‘in control’ when you eat the healthy foods you plan to?

Of course healthy eating is something that we should all aim for, but like everything in life, even health can be addictive and therefore dangerous. Surely life should allow room for spontaneity and fun? Orthorexics know only to well how difficult it is to socialise with their eating habits and how hard it is to buy food that reaches their expectations of preparation and cooking. Life is best enjoyed when we are maintain a balance of health and when we allow ourselves to indulge.

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Comments (1)

yeah... but
Written by Theresa Sinclair, on 16-02-2011 16:31
I agree with what you're saying. It's true, I've seen it before when people use an "allergy" to cover up for a more serious problem.
But I just want to point out that everyone who avoids certain foods isn't hiding something. Some of us have serious medical reasons.
For example: coeliac disease. I've got that. If I eat gluten in any form my body attacks itself, it's not nice to live with and I'll have to avoid gluten (aka, not even eat malt vinegar or unidentified curry) for the rest of my life. I'm not gloating, I wish I could break my diet and eat a pie sometimes - but I can't. :(

Next time you write an article dissing people with allergies/intolerances please remind everyone that serious conditions need to be treated with extreme respect.

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