Orthorexia Nervosa
Orthorexia, or orthorexia nervosa, is an eating disorder that involves an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating. Unlike other eating disorders, orthorexia mostly revolves around food quality, not quantity. Unlike with anorexia or bulimia, people with orthorexia are rarely focused on losing weight (1).
Cluster Number:
Wiki Number: PW146
Diagnosis: Orthorexia Nervosa
US Patients:
World Patients:
Sex Ratio:
Age Onset:
Brain Area:
Symptoms: obsessive preoccupation with eating healthy food; the quality of food vs. amount of food eaten; more restrictive over time
Progression: may lead to excluding different classes of foods to unhealthy eating and weight “over-control”
Causes: increased viewing of Instagram where “food” is a frequent choice of topics, vs. other electronic messaging platforms
Medications:
Therapies: This is not (yet?) recognized in the 2013 “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual” as a disease.
4 CURRENT ARTICLES
FROM PUBMED
The world-wide medical research
reports chosen for each diagnosis
Clicking each title opens the
PubMed article’s summary-abstract.
- Sinful Foods: Measuring Implicit Associations Between Food Categories and Moral Attributes in Anorexic, Orthorexic, and Healthy Subjectsby Clara Lakritz on June 30, 2022
Recently, neurocognitive studies have shown that food categorization is sensitive to both the properties of the food stimuli (e.g., calorie content) and the individual characteristics of subjects (e.g., BMI, eating disorders) asked to categorize these stimuli. Furthermore, groups of patients with eating disorders (ED) were described as relying more on moral criteria to form food categories than were control subjects. The present studies built on these seminal articles and aimed to determine...
- Orthorexia nervosa and eating disorder behaviors: A systematic review of the literatureby Anna Atchison on June 24, 2022
CONCLUSION: The finding that ON symptoms are related to restraint and weight loss efforts, but not to body dissatisfaction or dysregulated eating suggests that ON may represent a distinct ED.
- Disordered eating and the meat-avoidance spectrum: a systematic review and clinical implicationsby Courtney P McLean on June 21, 2022
CONCLUSION: This systematic review highlights the extent to which vegetarians and vegans have been highly understudied, with limited research suggesting higher levels of orthorexia nervosa behaviours in vegetarians and vegans. Furthermore, our results provide tentative evidence that the factorial validity of commonly used eating disorder scales, such as the EDE-Q, may be poor in vegans.
- Prevalence of Risk for Orthorexia in Athletes Using the ORTO-15 Questionnaire: A Systematic Mini-Reviewby Ana Carolina Paludo on June 1, 2022
The article aims to summarize the literature about the profile of risk of orthorexia in athletes using the ORTO-15 questionnaire. The search was performed at PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, and Sport Discus databases, using the terms "orthorexia" AND "athletes" with the respective entry terms. A multistage process of selection followed the PRISMA 2020 recommendation. A total of 688 articles were identified, and six studies were available for the final process. The prevalence of risk for...