Coined by Dr. Steven Bratman in 1997, orthorexia nervosa refers to the preoccupation with only eating food considered to be healthy. As Amelia Hill writes in The Guardian, “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.”
Coming from the Greek for “correct eating,” orthorexia is characterized by a rigid commitment to only eating foods believed to be “clean,” or “pure.” It involves frequent detoxing, the progressive elimination of entire food groups, and the espousal of such dietary practices as raw foodism—all in the name of an ideal of health. Paradoxically, however, it can lead to such outcomes as anxiety, lethargy, the inability to eat intuitively, and even malnutrition.
Describing the case of food blogger Jordan Younger, Hill notes that, “Her lethargy increased and her periods stopped. She also began to be anxious about her routine, panicking when faced with eating a meal she hadn’t planned, or something that didn’t fit in with her rules.”
Despite ample evidence of the phenomenon, experts disagree as to whether it should be recognized as a separate clinical condition. The DSM-5, which came out in 2013, did not include it. Nor is it recognized by the American Psychiatric Association. Nevertheless, four case reports and another 40 articles on the subject have been published in a variety of peer-reviewed journals as of January 2016. Experts around the world are taking note.
Unlike anorexia and bulimia, those suffering from orthorexia obsess over nutritional quality, not quantity. Whereas the former aim to lose weight, the latter pursue health for its own sake.
Yet the line between orthorexics and merely zealous health-conscious eaters is a hard one to draw.
As Olga Oksman writes for The Guardian, “These days, most of us probably know at least one person who, in an effort to be healthy, has gone on fad diets, cut out entire food groups or subsisted on juice for days at a time.”
Whether or not it will be officially classified, orthorexia seems a particularly twenty-first century condition. The availability of nutritional information online, the power to track our diets using smartphones, and the enticements of social media to visually and textually communicate our lifestyle to others—these elements, perhaps, conspire to make us more conscious of our diets than we otherwise would be. When it comes to eating the “correct” things, maybe we’re all just looking a little too closely.