Is healthy eating a disorder? Unless you’re OCD, don’t buy it.

April in September

Do you take special care to eat right?

Do you read nutrition labels to avoid hidden trans fats, harmful additives, and sugar-substitutes? Do you choose organic foods to keep your intake of pesticides and herbicides to a minimum? Do you even go out of your way to purchase free-range meat so you’ll get a maximum of omega-3 fatty acids and a minimum of trace antibiotics and growth hormones?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, don’t be surprised if your doctor breaks the bad news: You have an eating disorder.

Familiar “symptoms”

“I thought this was April Fool’s in August, but these morons are serious (I think) about this ‘serious’ disorder.” I recently received that note from HSI Panelist Allan Spreen, M.D., who came across an article about orthorexia nervosa, described as an obsession with healthy eating.

Afraid you might have a touch of orthorexia? The Guardian article offers a few of the typical characteristics of orthorexia “sufferers”…

* Over the age of 30
* Well educated
* Middle-class
* Concern about quality of food consumed
* Restriction of diet according to understanding of which foods are “pure”
* Rigid rules about which foods are consumed

Hey! That’s me! And here I didn’t even know I was suffering.

Ursula Philpot, chair of the British Dietetic Association’s mental health group, told The Guardian, “I am definitely seeing significantly more orthorexics than just a few years ago.”

That sounds pretty serious, unless you’re aware of one little detail: Just a few years ago there was no such thing as orthorexia nervosa. That’s because it’s a completely made up disorder, which should be called by its true name: obsessive compulsive disorder.

Food just happens to be the obsession.

True believer

In 1997, Steven Bratman, M.D., coined the term orthorexia nervosa to describe a “pathological fixation on eating proper food.”

Three years later, Kelly Brownell, Ph.D., co-director of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders, told WebMD: “We’ve never had anybody come to our clinic with [orthorexia], and I’ve been working in this field for at least 20 years.”

In that article, Dr. Brownell goes one better, calling Dr. Bratman “simply another guy trying to make a buck off the health-conscious public.”

And, yeah, it just so happens Dr. Bratman has a book to sell, titled “Health Food Junkies.” And the subtitle is unintentionally hilarious: “Orthorexia Nervosa: Overcoming the Obsession With Healthful Eating.”

That’s right: Eat your way out of an eating disorder!

Dr. Bratman’s personal story is actually pretty interesting. Back in the 70s he was an organic farmer and staff cook for a large upstate New York commune. But cooking for commune members wasn’t exactly “peace and love.” Far from it. Mealtime was a stress test in which he had to cook to the exacting standards of head-strong vegans, vegetarians, meat-eaters, raw-foodists, macrobiotics, and other dietary sub groups.

Soon, Dr. Bratman developed his own food obsession – “…a phase of extreme dietary purity” – in which he would only eat organic vegetables that had been harvested less than 15 minutes before eating.

Today, Dr. Bratman describes himself as an “alternative medicine” physician, but he says, “I’m no longer the true believer in nutritional medicine I used to be.” Which sounds like a classic case of baby tossed with the bathwater.

I expect that genuine OCD patients who focus their obsessions on food might benefit from Dr. Bratman’s theories. But articles like the one in The Guardian portray healthy eating as a disease. And you can be sure there are doctors willing to treat it with drugs, such as antidepressants used to treat anorexia nervosa.

Dr. Spreen: “This ‘disorder’ may shame and intimidate people out of their new-found interest in improving diet and health. Embarrass them enough and maybe they’ll just drop the whole idea, now that they know it’s pathological!”

Sources:
“Healthy Food Obsession Sparks Rise in new Eating Disorder” Amelia Hill, The Guardian, 8/16/09, guardian.co.uk
“Orthorexia: Good Diets Gone Bad” Jeanie Lerche Davis, WebMD Health News, 11/17/00, webmd.com
“Original Essay on Orthorexia” Steven Bratman, M.D., First published October 1997, orthorexia.com