conscientious vs orthorexic

[Ioanna]

i just read an article that defined several subtypes of orthorexia from those eat paleo, eat raw, eat low carb, eat low fat, and on and on.

now granted we all validate each other here, where do you draw the line??  for example, i believe i eat the way i do not out of fear or religion but because my body works teh way i want it to that way. the author of the article above would label me. wtf??

[PaleoPhil]

The below quote is from my personal journal on 9/16/09 (and there's some more of it here that I posted in 2010: http://www.rawpaleodietforum.com/hot-topics/insulin-spikes-do-not-cause-insulin-resistance/msg40667/#msg40667). I had intended to post it at the time, but lost interest.

Orthorexia is defined as an unhealthy obsession with eating "healthy" and was directed mainly at extremely low-fat, vegetarian/vegan, and raw vegetarian/vegan diets (raw diets then were actually considered synonymous with vegetarian/vegan and still often are). It was greeted largely with skepticism as another made-up illness. Kelly Brownell, PhD, co-director of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders said at the time: "We've never had anybody come to our clinic with [orthorexia], and I've been working in this field for at least 20 years" ("Orthorexia: Good Diets Gone Bad Or Nonexistent Disease?" http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/anorexia-nervosa/news/20001117/orthorexia-good-diets-gone-bad).

These days it seems to be garnering increasing popularity, probably because of its usefulness as an insult that can be used to discredit people, and because it can be used by the food industry to defend the eating of "unhealthy" but very profitable foods, and by people in the "mainstream" healthcare industry who may view alternative medicine, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary/Paleolithic nutrition, or nutritional therapies as competitive threats or dangers to public health. It's still aimed mainly at plant-heavy, organic, raw, macrobiotic, etc. diets, but more recently I've also seen the charge directed at new targets like Paleo or ZC dieters. It's only a matter of time before nearly every diet group throws it at nearly every other diet group in the bitter diet wars.

The use of orthorexia as a criticism or insult directed at every dietary approach other than the most conventional appears to continue to increase, unsurprisingly, despite the fact that it is a speculation invented by Steven Bratman, M.D. that is not an accepted medical term or phenomenon and has yet to be studied, AFAIK. It was based on Bratman's mistaken assumption that vegetarian and vegan diets, even extreme ones, are very healthy, which we know is incorrect. Because of his assumption that these dietas are healthy, when his vegetarian/vegan patients' health deteriorated, he assumed there must have been a reason other than the diets themselves, such as an unhealthy obsession that somehow turned a "healthy" diet paradoxically into something unhealthy (instead of seeing it as an unwise commitment to unhealthy diets). He was particularly impacted by the death of a raw vegan patient of his. No shock to raw Paleo dieters, but very shocking to most people who have been brainwashed by plant-only = healthy dogma.

It's a popular term with angry and critical bloggers and forum posters who in most cases are not worth arguing with and there's little reason for feeling insulted if someone uses this term to attack your WOE, as nowadays it's directed at nearly everyone, as I expected.

Rather than inventing some additional layer of complexity like the orthorexia hypothesis, Occam's razor suggests that the more likely explanation for Bratman's patients' deterioration was that raw vegan diets tend to be unhealthy in the longer run.

Instead of "The Vice of Virtue," raw vegan diets are really "The Vice of Vice." They are not virtuous or healthy. http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/08.02.01/eating1-0131.html

One of Bratman's patients, "a raw-foodist who limited her diet to only include fruits and vegetables, fainted so frequently from protein deficiency that he decided to hospitalize her." (ibid) Why would a diet that produces protein deficiency be considered healthy?

Bratman himself doesn't even appear to take orthorexia seriously as a medical condition:

"Bratman hasn't done clinical tests or studies, but insists he isn't trying to create a medical disorder that would belittle the serious problems involved with other eating disorders. "I invented the word orthorexia as a tease. I don't really believe it's as bad as anorexia, but the word has shock value to get people to reexamine their values...." (ibid)

Nonetheless, lots of folks have irresponsibly run with the term, adding more fuel to the fires of Internet flame wars and giving more imagined cause for families to worry and pressure and criticize anyone who adopts any dietary habits that are unconventional in any way.

[cherimoya_kid]

I listen to facts, not fads. Raw paleo is the most tested diet in the world. It's all our ancestors ate, for hundreds of millions of years, prior to the invention of cooking.

[eveheart]

Orthorexia is defined as an unhealthy obsession with eating "healthy" ...

I snipped part of PP's post because it contains my definition of orthorexia: an unhealthy obsession with eating "healthy." Eating is a physical activity, obsessing is a mental activity; therefore, orthorexia refers to a state of mind, not a type of diet.

I have met people who I would call orthorectic. I include people who sit down to eat accompanied by a discussion about why they are eating the particular foods in their meal, or those who weigh and measure their foods with scientific precision and say things like, "I feel so bloated, I ate an extra green bean today."

In general, I reserve the mental diagnoses for those whose illness interferes with their social relationships, sleep patterns, physical health, and work. RPD interferes with nothing in and of itself, whereas an food-obsessed person can make any diet the object of an obsession.

[LePatron7]

I might qualify for this definition, but it doesn't mean anything to me. I think it's a good thing.

I drink steam distilled water. Use a shower head that filters my shower water better than most people's filters for drinking water. All my supplements are SCD legal. I follow 2 very strict diets (SCD and raw paleo), which eliminate basically 95% of foods I can eat at restaurants. My water bottles are BPA free. I use "more natural" hair care products that supplement shops sell. Fluoride free tooth paste.

[PaleoPhil]

Dr. Bratman's original description of the term orthorexia did indeed refer to a type of diet--truly healthy diets (based on Bratman's view of what is healthy, ie plant-based). I wonder if I unintentionally misled with the quotes around "healthy". By the quotes I meant diets that are healthy by Bratman's conception of truly healthy, not diets that he recognized as unhealthy and only "healthy" in his patients' minds or any and all diets. Thanks for highlighting that, Eveheart. Here is Bratman's definition:

"Orthorexia nervosa, as I originally defined it, indicates an unhealthy obsession with eating healthy food." http://www.orthorexia.com

His original concept has been at times misread and distorted, as it filters through the Internet, from an obsession with a truly healthy diet into something used to describe people who a critic thinks are obsessed with a diet that the target dieters think is healthy but is not really (at least, not according to the critic).

Bratman's invention of the term and concept was based on an incorrect assumption--that diets free of animal foods are healthy. Here's another quote directly from his site: "One can have an unhealthy obsession with something that is otherwise healthy." Animal-free diets are NOT otherwise healthy for most people, particularly not in the long run, regardless of one's state of mind. Because he and many other physicians and "experts" are not warning people that the plant-only = healthy assumption is incorrect, which he and many others are apparently unaware of themselves, people are suffering and some are even dying.

Bratman wrote "I never intended the expression to apply to anything other than extreme cases of over-focus, particularly where the person themselves would rather lighten up and stop thinking about it so much." If that were the only way people used it--only about their own self-acknowledged issues--it might have been constructive. Yet the way it has most commonly come to be used on the Internet is the way I expected, as a weapon to criticize, psychoanalyze or even ridicule other people who eat differently than we do, often total strangers whose "state of mind" we cannot possibly fully know. It seems to be causing more harm than good. Sometimes even the best of intentions can have unintended negative consequences.

[svrn]

I hate the word orthorexia, such a dumb label.

and i think every raw paleo dieter knows that it will affect their social life.