An extreme preoccupation with clean eating is an eating order called orthorexia nervosa. Though less well-known than anorexia nervosa or bulimia — and not as well-documented — a new study review says orthorexia can also have serious emotional and physical consequences.
«Orthorexia is really more than just healthy eating,» said review co-author Jennifer Mills, an associate professor of health at York University in Toronto. «It’s healthy eating taken to the extreme, where it’s starting to cause problems for people in their lives and starting to feel quite out of control.»
The review of published research from around the world on the disorder was recently published in the journal Appetite.
Mills and her colleague Sarah McComb looked at risk factors and links between orthorexia and other mental disorders. Orthorexia, unlike some other eating disorders, is not yet recognized in the standard psychiatric manuals.
Healthy eating to the extreme
No clear line divides healthy eating from orthorexia’s extreme eating.
The foods someone with orthorexia might avoid are the same as those someone with healthy habits might avoid — such as preservatives, anything artificial, salt, sugar, fat, dairy, other animal products, genetically modified foods or those that aren’t organic.
It boils down to whether avoiding foods leads to obsession — excessive time and energy thinking and fretting about what to eat. Some people may eliminate numerous categories of food and eat only a very small number of things. People with orthorexia are typically less concerned about cutting calories than with the perceived quality of their food.
«They often are taking more and more time thinking about the foods they’re needing to purchase, particular foods, that makes it really difficult for them to just live their lives,» said Lauren Smolar, who wasn’t involved with the review. She is director of programs for the nonprofit National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA). «It can result in malnutrition or weight loss in a really difficult and potentially dangerous way.»
A person with orthorexia might be so focused on types of food and how that food is prepared that it becomes impossible to eat anything not made at home.
«It can lead to all kinds of related problems, like isolation, or not being able to eat at other people’s houses or not being able to eat in a restaurant for fear that the food won’t have been prepared in a very pure, clean way,» Mills said. «Those are the kinds of things that might lead someone to feel that it’s taking over their life.»
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