*** Welcome to piglix ***

Orthorexia nervosa


Orthorexia nervosa /ˌɔːrθəˈrɛksiə nɜːrˈvsə/ (also known as orthorexia) is a proposed distinct eating disorder characterized by extreme or excessive preoccupation with eating food believed to be healthy. The term was introduced in 1997 by American physician Steven Bratman, M.D., who suggests that in some susceptible people, dietary restrictions intended to promote health may paradoxically lead to unhealthy consequences, such as social isolation, anxiety, loss of ability to eat in a natural, intuitive manner, reduced interest in the full range of other healthy human activities, and, in rare cases, severe malnutrition or even death.

In 2009, Ursula Philpot, chair of the British Dietetic Association and senior lecturer at Leeds Metropolitan University, described people with orthorexia nervosa to The Guardian as being "solely concerned with the quality of the food they put in their bodies, refining and restricting their diets according to their personal understanding of which foods are truly 'pure'." This differs from other eating disorders, such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa, whereby people focus on the quantity of food eaten.

Orthorexia nervosa is not recognized as an eating disorder by the American Psychiatric Association, and is not mentioned as an official diagnosis in the widely used Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) or any other such authoritative source.


...
Wikipedia

...