I just came across the post below by Mike Adams for Natural News. No comment as he has said it all!!!
“In its never-ending attempt to fabricate “mental disorders” out of every human activity, the psychiatric industry is now pushing the most ridiculous disease they’ve invented yet: Healthy eating disorder.
This is no joke: If you focus on eating healthy foods, you’re “mentally diseased” and probably need some sort of chemical treatment involving powerful psychotropic drugs. The Guardiannewspaper reports, “Fixation with healthy eating can be sign of serious psychological disorder” and goes on to claim this “disease” is called orthorexia nervosa — which is basically just Latin for “nervous about correct eating.”
But they can’t just called it “nervous healthy eating disorder” because that doesn’t sound like they know what they’re talking about. So they translate it into Latin where it sounds smart (even though it isn’t). That’s where most disease names come from: Doctors just describe the symptoms they see with a name like osteoporosis (which means “bones with holes in them”).
Getting back to this fabricated “orthorexia” disease, the Guardian goes on to report, “Orthorexics commonly have rigid rules around eating. Refusing to touch sugar, salt, caffeine, alcohol, wheat, gluten, yeast, soya, corn and dairy foods is just the start of their diet restrictions. Any foods that have come into contact with pesticides, herbicides or contain artificial additives are also out.”
Wait a second. So attempting to avoid chemicals, dairy, soy and sugar now makes you a mental health patient? Yep. According to these experts. If you actually take special care to avoid pesticides, herbicides and genetically modified ingredients like soy and sugar, there’s something wrong with you.
But did you notice that eating junk food is assumed to be “normal?” If you eat processed junk foods laced with synthetic chemicals, that’s okay with them. The mental patients are the ones who choose organic, natural foods, apparently…”
Insofar as the real issue is a manifestation of OCD, it makes more sense to focus on the OCD itself. As it turns out, the wikipedia page on this “disease” has a very interesting discussion page associated with it, including this fascinating quotation from Steve Bratman, the physician who first used the term:
“Actually, I don’t claim it’s a disease. I invented the word as a kind of “tease therapy” for my macrobiotic and rawfoodist patients who took their diet too seriously. My book — which mostly no one reads — is rather funny and light and amusing. However, several years after the book went essentially out of print I began to hear about people who were dying from a more extreme form of health food obsession than I even knew existed. This is rare, but awful for the person who’s wasting away and can’t stop it, and who doesn’t have anorexia but rather something related to it. Whether that’s a form of obsessive compulsive disease or a variant of exercise-addiction, I don’t know. I’m not an eating disorders specialist. Sbratman (talk) 23:17, 9 April 2008 (UTC)”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Orthorexia_nervosa
I agree with Meg. It is about fixation and control and “orthorexics” use healthy food as an outlet for their OCD.
Very good point, Meg
The diagnosis, when done properly, is more about having a form of OCD, not the specific foods. There are definitely people who get obsessive to the point where it’s not mentally (or often physically) healthy, even over things that “normal” health-eaters would consider acceptable risk.
It’s definitely a real problem for some people, but not a diagnosis that should be thrown around at anyone just because they eat well — though no doubt it will be by people who have no clue what they’re talking about, just as other diagnoses are.