Binge Eating: Back From the Brink

ByABC News
February 7, 2007, 11:22 AM

Feb. 7, 2007 — -- A study just published in the journal Biological Psychiatry suggests that binge eating is the most common eating disorder in the United States, affecting roughly 3.5 percent of women and 2 percent of men.

Binge eating disorder is defined by the World Health Organization as bouts of uncontrolled eating, well past the point of being full, that occur at least twice a week on average.

The condition is a public health concern because BED is associated with an increased risk of severe obesity -- a body mass index of 40 or above -- as well as the complications associated with it, including diabetes, heart disease, increased cancer risk and stroke.

The new study grabbed national headlines partly because it was novel in providing an overview of population patterns for eating disorders and partly because the findings were something of a surprise.

Anorexia nervosa and bulimia tend to get much more attention than BED, but these eating disorders are considerably less common. Anorexia, while severe enough to be life threatening at times, usually lasts two years or less, while BED lasts eight years on average.

What intrigues me most about BED is how nearly normal it is. Whereas starving oneself, as in anorexia, or inducing vomiting, as in bulimia, is clearly abnormal behavior that most people would not even consider, overeating is another matter. We all do it at times, and on such occasions as Thanksgiving and last weekend's Super Bowl, it is virtually expected.

Nor does binge eating appear to be a uniquely human tendency. Other species may binge far more often than we do. Predators, uncertain when they will make their next kill, tend to gorge themselves after a successful hunt. In an environment of uncertain access to calories, gorging -- a close cousin to bingeing, if not the same thing -- would favor survival.

Many human behaviors and characteristics vary over the expanse of the famous bell curve. The bell curve is a graph to show how traits vary over a range, with most clustering near the middle, or average, for the group, and relatively fewer far above or far below the group average. The shape of the graph looks like a bell.