Trend analysis methodologies and applications

¶ … Orthorexia -- another sign of America's national eating disorder

Too much of anything is no good,' is a familiar phrase often applied to overeating, meaning that just because something is good does not mean that over-indulgence is pleasurable or beneficial to human health. However, according to some psychologists, even too much of 'healthy eating' or a preoccupation with 'eating healthy' can also be 'no good.' According to Abby Ellin in "What's eating our kids," a February 26, 2009 article published in The New York Times, doctors and therapists find themselves increasingly worried about overly health-conscious children. One doctor recalled the example of an eight-year-old worried about sodium, getting enough vitamins -- and getting fat. But unlike the parents of patients with eating preoccupations like anorexia and bulimia, parents of overly health-obsessed children tend to be proud of their child's vigilance. They encourage their children to read labels, monitor what the child eats at birthday and school parties, and believe that conditions like hyperactivity, diabetes and heart disease, can be controlled by the family diet, as well as obesity. The parents may feel a sense of superiority about their parenting choices and child's attitude towards food. Or some mother may still be wrestling with 'food issues' or former eating disorders.

Like older adolescents with full-blown eating disorders, these food-anxious children experience intense anxiety, particularly in social situations where food is involved. "I have lots of children or adolescent clients or young adults who complain about how their parents micromanage their eating based on their own health standards and beliefs," said one therapist specializing in eating disorders (Ellin 2009, p. 1). She noted her eating disordered patients are getting younger and younger, and are aided and abetted in their behavior by their parents or at least one of their parents, often the mother.

If the parents bring their children to an eating disorder therapist at all, it is only after the child's behavior has grown so extreme and entrenched they can no longer ignore it, such as in the case of one girl who manifested full-blown bulimia. "It's almost a fear of dying, a fear of illness, like a delusional view of foods in general...I see kids whose parents have hypnotized them. I have 5-year-olds that speak like 40-year-olds. They can't eat an Oreo cookie without being concerned about trans-fats" marveled one therapist (Ellin 2009, p.1). With another patient, who was terrified and tormented because she hated brown rice, the therapist "discussed that when the family went out, it would be O.K. To get white rice," but when the girl confronted her mother according to her therapist's instructions, the mother was furious and said "don't you know white rice is just like sugar?" (Ellin 2009, p.2). She immediately withdrew the child from therapy

Therapists have begun to call this preoccupation with healthy eating "orthorexia" or "righteous eating" However, many eating disordered therapists say that this diagnosis, which is not an official diagnosis according to medical literature, unlike anorexia nervosa, bulimia, and binge eating disorder, is merely another form of anorexia, a way for patients to avoid eating to lose weight. "I don't think the symptoms are significantly different enough from bulimia or anorexia that it deserves a special diagnostic category...It's an obsessive-compulsive problem. The object of the obsession is less relevant than the fact that they are engaging in obsessive behavior," said one such therapist with a shrug (Ellin 2009, p.1). She said that culture had little to do with the psychological problem and that healthy eating was seen by the patient as merely a way to lose weight, or an obsession fixated on a different aspect of food, beyond its caloric content.

It is true that many orthorexic patients, young and old, lose weight, and sometimes extreme amounts of weight. However, not all patients are fixated primarily on weight loss, or on the fat or caloric content of foods. The youth of the patients, and the fact that boys and girls manifest the illness in more equal numbers also suggests that orthorexia and anorexia might not be synonymous, even if there may be a great deal of overlap between the two disorder. What does seem clear, from analyzing the lives of patients who are anorexic and bulimic, is that there is a strong tendency for such patients to come from homes where aggressively healthy eating is promoted as part of the family culture.