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A new disease
Orthorexia nervosa is a pathological obsession with eating healthy food. While anorexia nervosa and bulimia are eating disorders that center on how much food a person eats, the basis of this new disease is the quality of food. Since when has wanting to eat quality, healthy food been considered a disorder? Well, ever since it became an obsession. The problem is that people start off just wanting to follow a healthy diet and end up eliminating essential nutrients from it and punishing themselves with strict fasts for straying from their straight and narrow.

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So orthorexics exclude meat to the point of shunning food cooked in pots that have been in contact with it, for instance. They also snub fat, vegetables that cause flatulence, canned and processed foods, dairy products and eggs (because of the animal fat), sugar, flour and artificial substances, caffeine and even tap water.

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So what do they eat? These people end up limiting themselves to a strict diet based on organic products grown ecologically, either raw or boiled, and fruit and vegetables guaranteed not to have been sprayed with chemicals, fungicides, pesticides or herbicides. Plus they are hooked on vitamins and bottled water.

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They tend to be people who lead happy lives, don�t appear to have problems and hold jobs with a certain level of responsibility. This translates into a fad, a kind of snobbishness in which people try to show they are better than others, that they feed their children better and have more money because they buy products of higher quality. Indeed, the disorder may stem from a search for superiority by people thinking things like I�m in the know and you�re not, or I can control myself and you cannot or I take care of myself and you don�t.

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When a person is obsessive-compulsive, rigid and strict, they are always trying to outdo themselves. Their lives lack spontaneity. It is all control, achievement, triumph and improvement. This fits the profile of Dr. Steven Bratman, who coined the term orthorexia nervosa and suffered from it. He spent 25 years living on a commune in upstate New York. He served as an organic farmer and cook there, and during all that time only ate freshly picked vegetables and chewed 50 times before swallowing. He wrote a book called Health Food Junkies (Broadway Books) to denounce the disease, identify its causes and fight against it.

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Treatment and prevention
The disorder is new and there is not really a specific treatment for it. It like the early days of anorexia, which was seen not as a disorder but a virtue, and drew admiration from others. No one would dare think the person with the disorder is sick. These days lots of healthy food is sold and many people who eat healthy are secretly trying to lose weight. A correct treatment of orthorexia requires a thorough psychological and nutritional study of the individual to see if there are imbalances in either area. Psychologists and nutritionists know it is a disease of obsession and that this obsessive search stems from some internal dissatisfaction. If you need help and live in Spain, contact the Asociaci�n para la Prevenci�n y Tratamiento de los Trastornos de la Conducta Alimentaria (APTAB, the email address is [email protected]). And remember that although you don�t live to eat, you do need to eat a bit of everything in order to survive. Your daily diet should be 20% fat, 60-65% carbohydrate and 15-20% protein.

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