Orthorexia: Obsessing Over Health Food

Sept. 5, 2008— -- It's no surprise that a lot of Americans watch what they eat. Counting calories, nutrients and fat grams is practically a national pastime.

But what happens when people go over the line, and the pursuit of healthy eating actually becomes unhealthy?

For Johnny Righini, a 26-year-old from California, eating a nutritious lunch is a painstaking ritual.

"Sometimes it takes days to prepare meals, because I have to sprout things, ferment things," he said. "I am constantly thinking about what I am gonna have for my next meal."

Charlotte Andersen, a 29-year-old Minnesota mother of three, says she went through the same thing.

"It really turned into a huge problem, and I think that there are a lot of other people out there that have this issue," she said.

Food took over her life. She compulsively catalogued everything she ate.

"I was obsessed with things like macro-nutrient ratios, numbers, charts," she said.

She realized she had a problem when she started paying more attention to food than to her own children.

What Righini and Andersen are struggling with is a kind of an obsessive compulsive disorder focused on health food called "orthorexia." The term was coined by Dr. Steve Bratman, author of the book "Health Food Junkies."

Bratman spent years in the health food movement, but became one of its critics after he realized he had started to become orthorexic.

"I suffered from a psychological obsession with food," he said. "When I was involved with this, it took up way too much of my life experiences when there were other things I could have been doing."

Orthorexia is different from anorexia, Bratman said.

"Anorexics seem to always think they're fat," he said, but "orthorexics know they're thin, but they want to be pure."

For people like Righini and Andersen, orthorexia is "a disease disguised as a virtue," Bratman said, because society approves of health consciousness. Americans spend millions on diet books hawking things like macrobiotics, the Zone, the Blood-type diet. And dieting is OK, up to a point.