Do you have Orthorexia? Why wanting a healthy diet is now a disease

You may think that you’re doing yourself and your family a wonderful service by only keeping healthy foods in the house, explaining all things flax seed to them and talking about colon cleansing, but all your hard work and healthily zealous behavior may actually have a negative impact on yourself and your children in the long run according to Steven Bratman. You - and they - may have fallen victim to Orthorexia.

What is Orthorexia? One website explains:

Orthorexia is defined as an obsession with “healthy or righteous eating”. The phrase was first created in 1997 by California doctor Steven Bratman, and refers to people who create severely limited diets in the name of healthy eating. It often begins with someone’s simple and genuine desire to live a healthy lifestyle. The person may choose to stop eating red meat, but eventually cuts out all meat; then all processed foods, and will eventually eat only specific foods that are prepared in very specific ways….The limited diet also puts people at risk of being undernourished, which could cause them to binge, and later purge out of guilt – paving the way for bulimia. The character traits of people with anorexia and orthorexia are very similar as well (perfectionism, overly self-critical, etc.), which is also cause for concern.

Further according to Bratman, these behaviors and the obsessive thinking he believes accompany them are extreme even though there is more and more reason to be concerned about our food.

For many, It is challenging to live in a society where we are given conflicting and often frightening information about our food sources almost on a daily basis. Antibiotics in chickens, E.coli in beef, plastic containers leaching toxins, etc. With all this fear, Bratman asks, how does one avoid getting orthorexia or more importantly, pass it on to our children?

For him, apparently, this is a more critical question than how can we ensure that we and our children eat healthily.

There is something gravely wrong with this picture.

While Steven Bratman, MD may bill himself on his own website, QuackWatch.com, as a “nationally-known consultant on alternative medicine” he is, in fact, a leading spokesman for mainstream allopathy, and a denigrator of all things medically alternative. He is in fact as much an “expert on alternative medicine” as a pig-sticker in a pork abattoir is a veterinarian.

Mr. Bratman’s (I have a difficult time according him the title of “doctor”) concept of Orthorexia is ridiculous, but totally keeping in line with allopathy’s self-assumed right to pathologize any otherwise normal, healthy, survival-oriented and life-sustaining practice, viewpoint or orientation; in other words, the notion of “if you do not agree with me, you’re sick.”

This is – precisely – the kind of mindset which allowed physicians not too many years ago to call homosexual people, ambitious women or self-respecting black people “sick,” “confused” and “paranoid.”

This is about as bad as junk science can get. A questionnaire intended to determine the presence of Orthorexia (or Orthorexia nervosa as some are beginning to call the “syndrome”) includes the following questions (an affirmative answer is suggestive of “pathology”). And let me preface this list by saying, emphatically, this is not a joke.

Do you plan tomorrow's food today?

Do you care more about the virtue of what you eat than the pleasure you receive from eating it?

Have you found that as the quality of your diet has increased, the quality of your life has correspondingly diminished?

Do you feel an increased sense of self-esteem when you are eating healthy food?

When eating the way you are supposed to, do you feel a peaceful sense of total control?

Answer yes to one or more of the above, and you could be an Orthorexia sufferer. As they used to say in the old Honda automobile commercials, “you can't make this stuff up!”

Sorry, Mr. Bratman: you’re characterization of concern with diet and the espousal of optimal eating habits as “sickness” carries about as much water as the concept of “drapetomania.”

Drapetomania was – according to the medical thinking of the mid-nineteenth century – a mental disorder affecting African-American slaves whose chief symptom was running away from their masters.

Serious problem, that drapetomania. Something should really have been done about it.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------William A. Courson, BVS (Ayur), D.Ayur.,
Instructor & Dean for Institutional Development,
Sai Ayurvedic College of Miami
Tel/Fax (toll free): 866-884-7635
http://www.wiziq.com/william-courson896810
www.saiayurvediccollege.com

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