People, it seems, have never been so afraid of their food — and, some experts have said, an obsession with healthy eating might paradoxically be endangering lives.
Frenchwoman Sabrina Debusquat, 29, recounts how, over 18 months, she became a vegetarian, then a vegan — eschewing eggs, dairy products and even honey — before becoming a “raw foodist” who avoided all cooked foods, and ultimately decided to eat just fruit.
It was only when her deeply worried boyfriend found clumps of her hair in the bathroom sink and confronted her with the evidence that she realized that she was on a downward path.
“I thought I held the truth to food and health, which would allow me to live as long as possible,” Debusquat said. “I wanted to get to some kind of pure state. In the end my body overruled my mind.”
For some specialists, the problem is a modern eating disorder called orthorexia nervosa.
Someone who has orthorexia is “imprisoned by a range of rules which they impose on themselves,” University of Toulouse-Jean Jaures intercultural psychology professor Patrick Denoux said.
These very strict self-enforced laws isolate the individual from social food gatherings and, in extreme cases, can also endanger health.
The term orthorexia nervosa was coined in the 1990s by the then-alternative medicine practitioner Steven Bratman, a San Francisco-based physician.
To be clear, orthorexia is not an interest in healthy eating — it is when enthusiasm becomes a pathological obsession, which leads to social isolation, psychological disturbance and even physical harm.
In other words, as Bratman said in a coauthored book in 2000, it is “a disease disguised as a virtue.”
However, as is often the case in disorders that might have complex psychological causes, there is a strong debate as to whether the condition really exists.
The term is trending in Western societies, prompting some experts to wonder whether it is being fanned by “cyberchondria” — self-diagnosis on the Internet.
Orthorexia is not part of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders created by mental health professionals in the US that is also widely used as a benchmark elsewhere.
“The term orthorexia was proposed as a commonly used term, but it is not medically recognized,” said Pierre Dechelotte, head of nutrition at Rouen University Hospital in northern France and head of a research unit investigating the link between the brain and the intestines in food behavior.
Alain Perroud, a psychiatrist who has worked in France and Switzerland over the course of a 30-year career, said orthorexia “is much closer to a phobia” than to a food disorder.
As with other phobias, the problem might be tackled by cognitive behavioral therapy — talking about incorrect or excessive beliefs, dealing with anxiety-provoking situations and using relaxation techniques and other methods to tackle anxiety, he said.
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