Eating right and feeding your body nutrients are two of the most important ways to live a healthy, happy life-or so we've been told. We are encouraged to "eat our vegetables" and maintain a balanced diet (we all remember the food group pyramid.) Now, a new buzzword is suggesting that if these habits are pushed to a certain level, their effects can do more harm than good.
Experts have recently declared orthorexia nervosa the mental disorder that causes people to obsess over eating nutrient-dense, healthful food. In a culture of over-processed, low quality food coming from corporations with dishonest histories, is this necessarily a bad thing? Is there a major fault in being dedicated to a balanced diet?
This "disorder" can be difficult to diagnose, particularly because eating healthy is not seen as a problem on the surface. A common symptom is a breaking point, when this type of obsessive eating interferes with a person's quality of life. This occurs when portions of the food pyramid are ignored, such as carbohydrates found in bread and pasta, because of fads like "gluten free." Additionally, some levels of this disorder have been known to cause kidney malfunction.
Can you eat too clean?
Feb 22, 2015
For people with orthorexia, eating anything but pure and clean food is not an option. The obsessive compulsion to eat healthy combined with an all-or-nothing attitude creates a habit of not eating foods unless they are entirely clean which, in turn, can result in not eating at all. A cited case explains how a girl had a panic attack in a grocery store because she could not find the 100% pure products she was looking for. Not only is this a mental and physical problem, but a social one as well. People with this disorder are known to avoid social gatherings and family dinners out of fear that they will be pressured into consuming food they have not gotten a chance to deem healthy.
I suppose this desire to eat healthy can be taken a bit too far, as Popular Science and Fast Company, would suggest. The reality is that cheat meals are a mentally healthy way to diet and eat right. They motivate people to reward themselves and maintain their diet with the comfort of knowing they do not have to be perfect. In my opinion, a balanced diet never hurt anyone, and the true threat lies within the toxic, quick-and-easy food system that we live in.