Is Clean Eating Bad For Your Health?

Becoming obsessed with healthy eating can lead to Orthorexia Nervosa, an eating disorder that results in malnutrition.

17:51 02 September 2015

More and more people are now becoming obsessed with healthy eating that could lead to unrecognized eating disorder called orthorexia. The term was coined by Dr Steven Bratman and is defined as the fixation with healthy eating, to the point that it becomes a crippling compulsion.

 

Dubbed as “a disease disguised as virtue”, it is different from other eating disorders where the goal is to drastically lose weight. Ironically, sufferers of this condition are initially motivated to consume only organic, clean food, often to recover from illness.  

One of the most recognized sufferer is Jordan younger, who became a poster girl for health with her New York food blog. The blonde vegan is a firm believer of clean eating and has been sharing her advice on detoxing and juicing. Despite seemingly glowing with health, she was struggling. Her lethargy increased and her periods stopped.

 

She said: “I had developed many fears surrounding food. I was becoming more and more limited in what I was comfortable eating. I even joked about it with friends, calling certain foods, like eggs, ‘fear foods’ because I had stayed away from them for so long. It was easy to hide behind the shield of veganism when I was at a restaurant with friends or even grocery shopping for myself. Anything not clean, oil-free, sugar-free, gluten-free and plant-based I dismissed because it wasn’t within my dietary label.”

 

“The only thing I could control was what I put in my mouth,” she says. “You get a physical high from restriction – I was craving purity. I cut out meat, then dairy. I went vegan, but I wasn’t seeing the miraculous results I’d expected. I switched to a raw food diet, then just fruit. By the end I was only eating organic melon. I was six stone, my teeth were crumbling and my hair was falling out.”

 

Mary George, from the eating disorder charity Beat, said: “Orthorexia is not actually categorised as an eating disorder so we can’t say if cases are on the rise but we do seem to hear more about it nowadays – undoubtedly in some way influenced by the huge focus on healthy diet and lifestyle.”

 

“Orthorexia can bear more resemblance to obsessive compulsive disorder in that it is characterised by a fixation on righteous eating, eating only “pure” foods and trying to avoid contamination by food.”