The food fixation that is ‘pure’ hell on health
Dangerous obsession with so-called clean eating is growing, writes India Sturgi
BALANCE: Diets that cut out food groups cause deficiencies, say doctors
CARRIE Armstrong’s fixation with “clean” eating began with good intentions. Struck down by a virus eight years ago, she was bed-bound and unable to lift her head off the pillow.
Doctors said there was little more medicine could do.
So, to speed up her natural recovery, she began researching alternative remedies and healthy, body-boosting diets online.
“My first thought was no wonder I had got so sick because I’d been eating badly for years,” says the 35-year-old sports presenter from London.
“I starting reading about the transformative effects of giving up meat and sugar, then carbohydrates and it went from there.”
In her pursuit of “wellness”, Armstrong went vegan, then switched to raw veganism, eschewing all animal-based food products and anything that had even been cooked.
Over 18 months she dropped from 70kg to 41kg and stopped menstruating. She became “completely obsessed” with “detoxing and cleansing” .
“I even went through a phase of only eating organic melon, because it was water-based and I couldn’t see how it would poison me. Every time I cut something out someone else — a nutritionist, well-meaning blogger or someone on a health forum — would tell me I was doing the wrong thing. I was not motivated by weight loss — it was about healing and being pure. You get an adrenaline rush from sticking to it.”
Armstrong’s case is a textbook example of orthorexia nervosa.
The term was coined in 1997 when Dr Steven Bratman wrote of his personal experience of evangelical eating; he wouldn’t eat vegetables picked more than 15 minutes earlier and insisted on chewing every mouthful 50 times. He defined the condition as “a pathological fixation on eating proper food”.
A bit like obsessive compulsive disorder and closely connected to anorexia nervosa, although sufferers are concerned with quality rather than quantity of food, orthorexia has yet to be officially recognised as an eating disorder.
As a result it is hard to quantify the rise in cases in recent years, although experts and charities say it has been marked, encouraged by social media, target marketing and bad science. On Instagram, #orthorexia has almost 70 000 posts, with users swapping clean-eating tips.
Armstrong realised the extent of her orthorexia after moving in with a “glamorous” friend who she idolised.
“She cooked and went to the theatre and did normal things,” says Armstrong. “One day, after I had come back with yet another detox kit, she said to me: ‘What are you doing? That sounds like a waste of a life.’
“It was then that I realised that there was nothing healthy about what I was doing.”
Californian author and wellness blogger Kevin Gianni, 36, whose health and fitness videos have had more than 10 million YouTube views, had orthorexia on and off for almost six years.
He became a raw food vegan after being introduced to the concept by a friend and because he became preoccupied with his family’s history of cancer.
“I ate kale salad, raw nut berries, goji berries, raw chocolate and dehydrated flax crackers. I drank green smoothies, wheatgrass and hemp milk. I was striving for dietary excellence and trying to be the best I could be. It felt great.”
But after 12 months Gianni was struggling to get out of bed before 11am, suffering debilitating cramps and anxiety, and his sex drive plummeted. A blood test with a doctor confirmed he was dangerously low on key hormones.
“I was at rock bottom. I had low cholesterol, vitamin D and B12. My pregnenolone [a hormone relating to energy, memory function, stress and immunity] was in single digits and the same level as you’d find in an 85year-old man.” He was 31 at the time.
But the pull to “eat clean” was hard to resist.
“It is brainwashing. I had created and bought into this belief system that if I ate meat I would eventually die.”
Harley Street sport nutritionist James Collins says diets outlawing whole food groups are causing more deficiencies than he has ever seen before. Context, he says, is essential.
“The core principles of a diet might be good, but if you’re applying them to someone who is training at the gym daily, working a 10-hour day or has two children, energy levels are going to flat-line. The result can be reduced concentration and co-ordination, and irritability and depression.”
It’s good to want to be healthy, but the overriding advice from health professionals is in agreement with Oscar Wilde: “Everything in moderation, including moderation.” — © The Daily Telegraph, London
He wouldn’t eat vegetables that had been picked more than 15 minutes earlier