Health Food Junkies: Orthorexia Nervosa: Overcoming the Obsession with Healthful Eating [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

"Obsession with healthy diet is an illusion, an eating disorder." I didn't take that statement too seriously, until I got to Dr. Bratman's vivid description of the time he left a great conversation at a party to go savor an avocado he had been ripening and day dreaming about. Then I remembered that I have known people who spent 8-10 hours a day shopping for, preparing, and eating very special diets. Aha!

The disorder is a problem when it causes someone to eat a too restrictive diet. The book considers the most popular ones, and generally advises that it is all right to follow it if you just loosen up.

More serious, the food focus can cut off contact with others. They don't "smell" right because they don't eat what you do. Or they eat offensive foods that you cannot stand to be around. Increasingly, you spend time by yourself instead of with other people. This is often a strategy for dealing with a fear of being with other people.

The most common psychological causes are a desire to have total healthy safety, compulsion for complete control, wanting to conform to the "thinness" social ethic, searching for spirituality through food, food puritanism, and using food to create an identity. That last one is pretty scary. "You are what you eat" is being taken literally.

I was surprised when I took the test to find that I seemed to have this obsession, even though I spend little time thinking about food, eating food, or being rigid about what I eat. This made me wonder how well thought through this disorder really is. But I plan to watch myself in the future, and try to understand if I am overdoing it.

Dr. Bratman argues that food diets have little science behind them. The diets work for some people because of "suggestion" and for others because they have an undiagnosed food allergy or deficiency. As a result, he suggests that you experiment with eating different diets and see if you feel better or worse.

He is particularly negative about the "Eat Right for Your Type" diet, and states that he expects to get slammed for his opposition. Well, I graded him down one star for this, even though he said you could you use if you loosen up on the regimen a bit. The new book "Live Right for Your Type" is full of scientific studies that show predilections for certain diseases and conditions with certain blood types. These studies are also linked to nutrition in various ways. My reaction was that Dr. Bratman should have addressed these studies, unless he was unaware of them. If he was unaware of them, how good are the rest of his conclusions?

In fairness, I would have graded him down one star anyway, because I did not see a scientific basis in the statements for his conclusions. Much of what he was describing could simply be related to something else. His approach seems very qualitative to me. As someone who struggles with this issue himself, he may just be seeing everyone else in the same way. After all carpenters often see all problems as something that can be solved with a hammer.

Whether this condition exists or not, his advice is probably all right. Admit you have a problem. Identify what has caused you to be obsessed in this way (in my case, it was being leaned on by my doctor with dire threats of future ill health). Normally eat a plate or a bowl of a balanced diet, and get seconds on one food only. Go easy on the guilt when you "slip." Eat graciously with your Mother and others you care about, regardless of what is served to you. Relax when you need to make exceptions to your normal diet. Keep your mind off of food. Watch out for hidden agendas sneaking into your eating.

As a physician, friend, or parent, he suggests that you intervene when you see someone dieting past the point of safety, the diet is making the person miserable, the person would like to quit the diet and cannot, a third party is involved creating a diet "cult" experience, or the diet seems to have become an emotional ilness. Use tact, humor and gentleness rather than strong arm tactics because people are touchy about these issues.

May you have all the health, happiness, peace, and prosperity that you would like!

Now, I've been a macrobiotic myself for years and I was not arguing for MacDonalds, just saying that to complement a mostly-vegetarian diet with small amounts of good quality "forbidden" foods is not a "sin".

I was so shocked by the out-of-proportion reaction of this apparently very open friend that I begun questioning my beliefs. And my conclusion was the same as Dr. Bratman: friends, it's all very well to eat healthy food but let's get real, food is food and if we were not so spoiled for choice we would eat whatever was available as our ancestors always did. I'm deeply appreciative of the positive way macrobiotic guidelines have helped me improve my diet but macrobiotic people (me included untill this friend's overzeal shocked me out of it) do tend to become fanatic and semi-religious about food.

Does it seem reasonable to argue that while dairy food is "poisenous" (no matter that being used by humans for millenia) strange (and delicious, but that's not the point) food from Japan is vital for your well-being? Now, does this seem to you to have something to do with Macrobiotics being invented by a Japanese and that dairy food was unknown in Japan before being introduced by us, "barbarians"?

Same applies to fresh fruit: I like fresh fruit and no only do I eat it daily as I eat it raw, the way nature provides us with it. Does this sound a bad habit to you? It would if you were macrobiotic because fresh fruit is too "Yin" in the macrobiotic view and thus creates an inbalance in anyone who eats it.

But are really the philosophical and religious concepts of "Yin" and "Yang" the best tools to choose a lifestyle? Most macrobiotic people I know are coffee addicts and smoke heavily: they tend to think this is OK because caffeine and smoking are considered "Yang".

This is so widespread that I had never thought about it before but clearly you have a psychological problem if you think that an apple or a bit of cheese are worse for your health than coffe and cigarettes.

And this is all that Dr Bratman says: people with these behaviour problems should seek help.

But as most of us can guess from its similarity to anorexia, orthorexia is not
an idealistic dietery theory but rather describes a problem: unhealthy
obsession with healthy diet. "To be perfectly honest, I intended the term
somewhat tongue in cheek, as a kind of sassy way to surprise clients who were
proud of their obsession and make them think twice about it," the author
explains.

Dr. Bratman is a conventionally trained M.D. and an alternative medicine
practitioner who himself spent many years adhering to idealistic, healing
diets such as macrobiotics (a complex diet that involves balancing yin and
yang, but you cook the food) and raw foods theory (never eat cooked foods).
Other sections deal with food allergies, the zone diet, candida, supplements,
tablets and magic substances (super blue-green algae, barley magma, sheep
thyroid, pregnenolone, ciwujia, spirulina, kombucha tea, and royal jelly among
many others). He maintains respect for many of these diets. He also says,
"Food allergy treatment can be a powerful healing approach that at times
appears to reduce symptoms dramatically in practically any illness." He does
not believe alternative medicine is a joke, and has success stories to tell
from his practice.

It's just that he started seeing a lot of people with a fixation on healthy
eating who had lost their perspective and balance. Could the cure be worse
than the disease?

He also says over and over that we should not go to the other extreme and
simply eat junk. "It is certainly not the point of this book to dispute the
value of healthy diet. Proper food choices can clearly reduce the risk of
cancer and heart disease, and may be able to prevent other major illnesses of
middle and later life. This is a well-known and incontestable fact. What I
do want to point out, however, is that there is a dark side to this reality,
an unintended consequence of the emphasis on eating properly. There is more
to life than reducing cancer risk. Too often this holistic perspective is
forgotten by those who emphasize that food is the best medicine."

Just what is this dark side? "One of the primary features of
orthorexia is the feeling that we are better than others because of
our fantastic diet. Since the rest of the world does not adhere to
the God-given laws of healthy eating (as we uniquely understand them),
we can't eat with the rest of the world. Besides, a great deal of our
identity is tied up in diet." And further, "The net effect is social
isolation. The ancient satisfaction of breaking bread with a friend
is denied us; we must either bring our own bread (a concoction of
potato flour, amaranth, and spelt that only an orthorexic could love)
or eat alone. This isolation is a real emotional harm caused by
orthorexia. As my health food guru realized in Chapter 1, 'Rather
than eat my sprouts alone, it would be better for me to share a pizza
with some friends.' A good half or more of the joy of life comes
from relationships; when orthorexia interferes with those
relationships, it causes a real impoverishment of our lives."