Healthy eating is something we all strive for—for ourselves and for our children. But taken to the extreme, healthy eating can turn into a disorder. All this pressure to "eat clean" and eliminate so many foods from our diet, like gluten, sugar, dairy, can actually leave some people malnourished.
“People are getting so strict with their health choices that they’re not getting the nutrients that they need,” said David Rakel, director of integrative medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Though you won't find the term "orthorexia nervosa" in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), doctors and dietitians are increasingly recognizing signs of obsessive-compulsive behaviour similar to that of anorexia.
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Researchers in Colorado have published guidelines in the journal Psychosomatics to help clinicians spot the disorder. Among some diets that can be "dangerous" are raw vegan, as well as those that boycott dairy and gluten (except in cases of allergy) because people often fail to supplement lost nutrients.
“There are people who become malnourished, not because they’re restricting how much they eat, it’s what they’re choosing to eat,” said co-author of the article and psychologist and psychology professor at the University of Northern Colorado, Thomas Dunn.
“It’s not that they’re doing it to get thin, they’re doing it to get healthy. It’s just sort of a mind-set where it gets taken to an extreme like what we see with other kinds of mental illness.”
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In order to meet the criteria for orthorexia, someone would have to spend hours a day obsessing about what or where they eat to the extent that it interferes with daily living. It's not the food itself, but the preoccupation and anxiety that gradually turns healthy eating into a form of mental illness.
Orthorexia isn't not always easy to spot as say, anorexia, because it doesn't always lead to extreme weight loss. And because orthorexia isn't an official condition, patients are typically treated for obsessive-compulsive disorder with cognitive behavioral therapy.
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