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Orthorexia: An Obsession With Healthy Food “Orthorexia is an obsession with eating healthy food — to such an extent that the person may restrict their diet very severely and limit their functioning, such as not socializing in situations where there is ‘unhealthy’ food,” says Sheela Raja, PhD, an assistant professor and clinical psychologist in the Colleges of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. There has been no research into eating disorder statistics to know how widespread orthorexia is, but in general the idea of “good” and “bad” foods is relatively common in people with eating disorders. The advent of so many fad diets hasn’t helped matters either. No carbs, only raw food, macrobiotics — diets with such strict food rules can certainly lead to confusion about what really is healthy and what isn’t, and in turn can contribute to orthorexia. Warning signs can range from negative feelings about “impure” foods to trouble dealing with stress. Avoiding social situations or bringing your own food to restaurants or get-togethers can be another red flag, as can insisting that good health is totally dependent on the quality of the food you eat. It can also be more common in people who have obsessive or black-and-white thinking that a food is either all good or all bad. Orthorexia is not an official psychiatric diagnosis, given that the symptoms overlap significantly with diagnoses of other eating disorders. “No classic treatment plan is available, but I work with people to normalize food and take away magical thinking about the ‘right/perfect’ foods,” says Esther Kane, MSW, a registered clinical counselor in private practice in Courtenay, British Columbia, Canada, and author of It’s Not About the Food: A Woman’s Guide to Making Peace with Food and Our Bodies. Nutritional education and finding other ways to deal with stress and negative moods are important steps. Raja, for example, suggests participating in an activity unrelated to eating, such as going for a walk or taking a bath, when feeling stressed. Focusing on moderation is also key, as is emphasizing the idea that no food should be excluded from the diet.

It’s no wonder, then, that the young cheerleaders found the increasingly prevalent condition of gluten sensitivities the perfect cover for what turned out to be very real cases of anorexia. By the end of the school year, two out of the three girls were in treatment for eating disorders and the third was taken out of school by her parents.

Julie Dorfman, director of Nutrition at Philadelphia’s Renfrew Center, the country’s first residential facility for the treatment of women with eating disorders, is not surprised. “With the eating disordered population, I’d say that 110% of them are using intolerances or food ‘problems’ as a means to avoid eating these foods in a socially acceptable way. Gluten just happens to be the fad right now.”

Stacey Rosenfeld, Ph.D, a psychologist who specializes in eating disorders is in the camp of those who believe that using medical or pseudo-medical reasons for restrictive diets is often a cover-up for disordered eating.  “Nobody wants to be called out on an eating disorder or obsessive eating,” she says, “so anything they can do to hide it, they will.”

The “mental illness” paradigm—an insidious cancer:  I find it interesting to turn the “medical model” language of “mental illness” back onto itself and consider this entire “mental illness” paradigm as acting like an insidious cancer (the difference in my use of the term “cancer” here being that I’m readily acknowledging that this is just a metaphor). Cancer is essentially what occurs when a cell of an organism “forgets” its role as a member of a larger whole and turns against the organism, becoming consumed only with its own reproduction. Using this metaphor, we can say the “mental illness” paradigm fosters this turning one part of a whole against itself. We see this taking place interpersonally between members of our society as we develop ever increasing fear of those labelled “mentally ill,” and we see this taking place intrapersonally as we develop ever increasing fear and suspicion of our own “unusual” or “extreme” subjective experiences. We see signs of this cancer spreading throughout nearly every branch of contemporary Western society—our schools and education systems, our media, our government policies, our way of trying to make sense of ourselves and others’ experiences and behavior, and of course our health care systems. We also notice that this type of cancer thrives particularly well on a diet of greed, fear and ignorance—greed (enormous financial incentive to many in the pharmaceutical and mental health industries), fear (especially our fear of uncertainty, preferring an understanding that is clear although flawed to having to make some peace with mystery and the unknown), and ignorance (just think of the daily bombardment by massive amounts of misinformation coming at us from almost every angle).

But the main reason that 9/11 didn’t become a source of jobs, or of ideas for revitalizing the economy, was that the country wasn’t thinking about its own weaknesses. President George W. Bush defined his era in terms of war, and the public largely saw it the same way. September 11th was a tragedy that, in the years that followed, tragically consumed the nation’s attention.The attacks were supposed to have signalled one of the great transformations in the country’s history. Bush talked about ridding the world of evil, columnists wrote of “World War Three,” and almost all Americans felt that, in their private lives and in the national life, nothing would ever be the same. But the decade that followed did not live up to expectations. In most of the ways that mattered, 9/11 changed nothing.

The Second World War brought a truce in the American class war that had raged throughout the thirties, and it unified a bitterly divided country. By the time of the Japanese surrender, the Great Depression was over and America had been transformed. This isn’t to deny that there were fierce arguments, at the time and ever since, about the causes and goals of both the Civil War and the Second World War. But 1861 and 1941 each created a common national narrative (which happened to be the victors’ narrative): both wars were about the country’s survival and the expansion of the freedoms on which it was founded. Nothing like this consensus has formed around September 11th. On the interstate south of Mount Airy, there’s a recruiting billboard with the famous image of marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima, and the slogan “For Our Nation. For Us All.” In recent years, “For Us All” has been a fantasy. Indeed, the decade since the attacks has destroyed the very possibility of a common national narrative in this country.

“We are at war against terror.” Those were fateful words. Defining the enemy by its tactic was a strange conceptual diversion that immediately made the focus too narrow (what about the ideology behind the terror?) and too broad (were we at war with all terrorists and their supporters everywhere?). The President could have said, “We are at war against Al Qaeda,” but he didn’t. Instead, he escalated his rhetoric, in an attempt to overpower any ambiguities. Freedom was at war with fear, he told the country, and he would not rest until the final victory. In short, the new world of 2001 looked very much like the bygone worlds of 1861 and 1941. The President took inspiration from a painting, in the White House Treaty Room, depicting Lincoln on board a steamship with Generals Grant and Sherman: it reminded Bush of Lincoln’s “clarity of purpose.” The size of the undertaking seemed to give Bush a new comfort. His entire sense of the job came to depend on being a war President.

Like many marketers, General Mills and other food companies are rewriting the rules for reaching children in the Internet age. These companies, often selling sugar cereals and junk food, are using multimedia games, online quizzes and cellphone apps to build deep ties with young consumers. And children like Lesly are sharing their messages through e-mail and social networks, effectively acting as marketers.

When these tactics revolve around food, and blur the line between advertising and entertainment, they are a source of intensifying concern for nutrition experts and children’s advocates — and are attracting scrutiny from regulators. The Federal Trade Commission has undertaken a study of food marketing to children, due out this summer, while the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity has said one reason so many children are overweight is the way junk food is marketed.

Critics say the ads, from major companies like Unilever and Post Foods, let marketers engage children in a way they cannot on television, where rules limit commercial time during children’s programming. With hundreds of thousands of visits monthly to many of these sites, the ads are becoming part of children’s daily digital journeys, often flying under the radar of parents and policy makers, the critics argue.