Orthorexia, an unrecognized disorder close to anorexia

Spend more than an hour in front of the food aisle to read the composition of each product, and chew 50 times to give the impression of your brain eating more: an obsession with healthy eating develops.

Currently, there is no scientific consensus on orthotics. The two most commonly supported positions are to classify it as either an eating disorder (ED) or an obsessive behavioral disorder.

Orthorexia, which is still the subject of little research, can be detected with a ten-question test developed by Stephen Bratman, an American doctor who gave this name in 1995 to the disorder he himself suffered.

Alexandre Chappé, a French psychologist, sums up, “If a patient distinguishes between healthy and unhealthy foods, if strong or even disproportionate feelings invade him toward unhealthy foods and this has an impact on his daily life, then he probably has osteoporosis.”

He asserts that Orthorexia has “closeness” to anorexia, but there remains a difference between the two: “The osteopath doesn’t want to lose weight,” when the goal of a person with anorexia is.

Dietitian Lawrence Meyer analyzes “People with orthotics value aesthetic body image less, but view their bodies from the perspective of their health.”

More than wanting to be healthy, they “are afraid of being poisoned by pesticides or food, of dying of cancer,” Alexander Chaboye details.

The psychologist asserts that they adopt strict diets, which in themselves do not pose a problem “as long as one does not suffer from it, does not isolate oneself, and health is not affected.”

But according to Lawrence Meyer, people who follow certain diets by excluding certain types of food “may be more likely to develop an eating disorder.”

“Developing very rigid behaviors, as people with orthotics do, leads to social disruption” and can create a “shift” toward harmful obsessive behavior, she adds.

Especially since due to various agro-food scandals, such as the recent contamination of chocolate or pizza by bacteria, “consumer confidence has been severely weakened”.

Dietitian Lawrence Meyer mentions the prevalence of this phenomenon among “athletes, health students, researchers or nutritionists.” However, there are no official figures on how widespread this disorder is in the world.