IN DEFENSE OF ORTHOREXIA

Orthorexia is a new term used to describe people who are obsessed with health food and fixated on righteous eating. SEE ARTICLE: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/health/nutrition/26food.html?ref=health What does righteous eating entail? Choosing organic and avoiding things like pesticides, trans fats, and preservatives. According to the article, parents who micromanage their children’s food in this manner, suffer from this condition and pass it along to their children. “The condition … may begin in homes where there is a preoccupation with 'health foods'” - and where parents “moralize about good foods and bad foods”. Parents are increasingly choosing this lifestyle to avoid or manage conditions such as diabetes, hyperactivity, and heart disease.

Funny, but originally, back when food really was food, it didn’t contain things like trans fats, pesticide residue and preservatives. Funnier still is the fact that once upon a time all food was organic. The article implies that there is something wrong with a child who is afraid to eat an oreo because of the trans fats (also implying that there is something wrong with a parent who would make their child worry about such a thing). Should a parent be forced to make bad food choices for their children just so they can fit in? Is the implication that an oreo is actually food? And of course, real food is now termed ‘health food’.

While there is merit in protecting our children from unnecessary worry surrounding their food choices, our nation remains undernourished and overfed – too many calories, not enough nutrition. When the body does not get the actual nutrients that it needs, it rebels and develops chronic conditions and diseases. The human body is designed so that food is what allows a person to live. And as nature would have it, 80% of the immune system is connected to the small intestine – the first place of sorting after food passes through the stomach. Common sense should tell us that our food choices ARE important to our overall health. But the media and lobbyists have done a super job of convincing us that the delicious chemically laden, non-food choices, so prevalent since the industrialization of our food, is actually food. Yes, calories allow us to function, but to thrive we need actual nutrients, which includes all the micro nutrients that are lost in the processing of food. There's no way to know all the synergistic beneficial properties in a whole food, and maintaining the synergistic integrity of a food when it is submitted to the food processing industry becomes difficult, if not impossible.

According to Michael Pollan, in In Defense of Food, “The chronic diseases that now kill most of us (obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer) can be traced directly to the industrialization of our food”. Criticizing parents who must brave the labyrinth of industrialized food to find real food does not solve the problem. Making a new culture where food IS food would lessen the anxiety of these kiddos, and lessen the need for micromanagement by the parents because they would no longer be seen as weird, obsessive or having a ‘health food’ eating disorder. Perhaps, if more people chose to eat actual food, since we DO vote with our food dollars, parents would not have to be so diligent to make sure that their children eat ‘health food’ - and then perhaps there would no longer be a need for a label such as orthorexia.