Big Food Propaganda Machine Labeling the Health-Conscious As Mentally Ill
Thursday, June 16th, 2011
By Ben Fuchs
GCN Live.com
If you’re really serious about eating correctly, you’re flirting with mental illness. At least that’s what a California M.D., Dr. Steven Bratman, wants you to believe. He’s come up with my new favorite medical diagnosis, Orthorexia Nervosa, which he defines as “an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating”.
According to an article published in the UK paper The Observer, symptoms of this obsession with health include “refusing to touch sugar, salt, caffeine, alcohol, wheat, gluten, yeast, soya, corn and dairy foods (and) any foods that have come into contact with pesticides, herbicides or contain artificial additives.” The August 2009 article describes those afflicted as “tending to be aged over 30, middle-class and well-educated” and “solely concerned with the quality of the food they put in their bodies.” And, according to the doctor, for orthorexics, “the act of eating pure food begins to carry pseudo-spiritual connotations”.
Alex Jones has been warning us about how food is being used as a tool of domination and how almost everyone is part of this “chemical attack.”
Now, in fairness to Dr. Bratman, who is the originator of the term, O.N. is a diagnosis that should be reserved for patients who are obsessive about their concern for eating correctly. Unfortunately, obsession, much like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder; therefore, standardizing an official diagnosis is slippery slope. Even more troubling is that diagnosing a mental disorder paves the way for pharmacological intervention. This however, may not be such a simple matter for prescribers as orthorexics might find the fix to be more problematic than the fixation.
As Dr. Bratman insightfully notes, treatment will be tricky because orthorexics “will consider drugs…to be ‘impure’ and unnatural.” Hmmm…doesn’t sound all that crazy to me!
Maybe next time we’ll talk about my other favorite medical diagnosis: Oppositional Defiance Disorder. This is defined as “disobedient, hostile and defiant behavior toward authority figures”. A tip o’ the nib to all you Infowarriors out there!
