THE XX FILES: "Orthorexia" a growing problem

 Jessica Alba's baby daughter allegedly eats a sugar-free, organic diet.

Uma Thurman and Donna Karan reportedly subscribe to the raw lifestyle, eating uncooked and unprocessed vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds.

And in one of many celebrity attempts at "detoxification," Oprah Winfrey completed the Quantum Wellness cleanse, a three-week program that bans sugar, alcohol, caffeine, gluten and animal products from the diet.

Though the examples are numerous and the list of avoided foods endless, the logic behind these rigid diets is all the same: to be healthier.

To some in the medical field, an extreme form of this good intention is a growing cause for concern.

Coined by Dr. Steven Bratman, the term "orthorexia" is a condition in which people become intensely preoccupied with eating healthy foods. In his book, "Health Food Junkies," he explains the etymology of this new word: "ortho-" means "upright" or "correct," while "orexis" means "appetite." Therefore, orthorexics are obsessed with proper eating.

Bratman is the first person to not only define and bring attention to the practice but also to advocate its classification as an eating disorder.  (Currently, it is not considered a clinical diagnosis.)

Others disagree, arguing that extreme worries about healthy eating are a symptom of eating disorders, not eating disorders in themselves.

Nonetheless, the fact is clear: specialists acknowledge that individuals – some as young as eight years old in the case of Greye Dunn, who was overly concerned with his sodium intake – are indeed harboring strong anxieties about what, in their minds, they should and should not consume.

And regardless of the definite medical status of orthorexia, Dr. Bratman's push to categorize it as an eating disorder undoubtedly brings attention to disordered eating and eating disorders not otherwise specified (EDNOS), acknowledges their subtleties and points to Americans' unhealthy relationship with food overall.

In America, as in many other countries, the conversation centers on formal eating disorders like anorexia nervosa and bulimia – established, recognizable conditions with straight-out-of-the-textbook patterns of behavior. Meet all of the specific diagnostic criteria – such as, in the case of anorexia, having a body weight less than 85 percent of what is considered normal for your height and age and, for women, missing three consecutive periods – and you have the condition.

But disordered eating and EDNOS, though related to formal eating disorders, are broader – in the sense that they have less specific guidelines for diagnosis – and can exist without immediately raising red flags.

They include a spectrum of abnormal eating habits – routine dieting, restricting "bad" foods, not wanting to eat in front of certain people, lying about food consumption or feeling guilty about eating.

By extension, some of these behaviors – the characteristically orthorexic ones like cutting calories, avoiding packaged foods or forgoing meat – could reasonably be understood as practices of the healthiest eaters and could thus evade proper treatment.

Although Bratman's claim that orthorexia is an eating disorder is subject to assessment by the medical community, there should be no dispute that his argument brings attention to the often-overlooked details of unhealthy eating habits. Glaring physical symptoms – the drastic weight loss of anorexia or the binge-purge cycle of bulimia – are not the surest indicators of a problem; in fact, disordered eating, at its core, stems from disordered ideas and perceptions about food – ingrained and intangible factors that can prove very difficult to recognize or later change.

In a larger sense, orthorexia marks a drastic change in the way Americans relate to food. To counteract our national problem of overweight, we have gone to the opposite extreme.

We condemn whole food groups and deny ourselves the pleasures of freshly toasted bread and steaming bowls of rice.

For days at a time, we follow the "master cleanse" program, subsisting on a gag-inducing cocktail of water, maple syrup, lemon juice and cayenne pepper. In reality, we don't need to cleanse or detoxify anything from our bodies. But if Beyoncé tried it, then why shouldn't we, too?

We eat organic, convinced we are doing our bodies best, even though American regulations for organic foods are loose to a point where they mean next to nothing – not to mention that organic foods have no proven health benefits.

We need a middle ground built on common sense, not hokey, unproven claims from the tabloids.

Whether an eating disorder, an EDNOS or a form of disordered eating, the thought process – the fixation on healthy eating – behind orthorexia is real and presents a real problem. Abstemiousness in dieting is just as damaging as overindulgence. Our healthier future lies somewhere in the middle of those extremes.