*Healthy eating is now a mental disorder

This is not a joke: Mental health "experts" are now claiming that eating
healthy food and avoiding processed junk foods is *a mental disorder*.
People like you and I need "treatment" because we avoid MSG, GM soy,
High-Fructose Corn Syrup and other chemicals in the food supply. I'm not
making this up: This is being pushed in the mainstream media with a new
fictitious disease name to go with it!

(NaturalNews) In its never-ending attempt to fabricate "mental disorders"
out of every human activity, the psychiatric industry is now pushing the
most ridiculous disease they've invented yet: *Healthy eating disorder*.

This is no joke: If you focus on eating healthy foods, you're "mentally
diseased" and probably need some sort of chemical treatment involving
powerful psychotropic drugs. *The Guardian* newspaper reports, "Fixation
with healthy eating can be sign of serious psychological disorder" and goes
on to claim this "disease" is called *orthorexia nervosa* -- which is
basically just Latin for "nervous about correct eating."

But they can't just called it "nervous healthy eating disorder" because that
doesn't sound like they know what they're talking about. So they translate
it into Latin where it sounds smart (even though it isn't). That's where
most disease names come from: Doctors just describe the symptoms they see
with a name like *osteoporosis* (which means "bones with holes in them").

Getting back to this fabricated "orthorexia" disease, *the Guardian* goes on
to report, "Orthorexics commonly have rigid rules around eating. Refusing to
touch sugar, salt, caffeine, alcohol, wheat, gluten, yeast, soya, corn and
dairy foods is just the start of their diet restrictions. Any foods that
have come into contact with pesticides, herbicides or contain artificial
additives are also out."

Wait a second. So attempting to avoid chemicals, dairy, soy and sugar now
makes you *a mental health patient?* Yep. According to these experts. If you
actually take special care to avoid pesticides, herbicides and genetically
modified ingredients like soy and sugar, *there's something wrong with you*.

But did you notice that eating junk food is assumed to be "normal?" If you
eat processed junk foods laced with synthetic chemicals, that's okay with
them. The mental patients are the ones who choose organic, natural foods,
apparently.

What is "normal" when it comes to foods?

I told you this was coming. Years ago, I warned NaturalNews readers that an
attempt might soon be under way *to outlaw broccoli* because of its
anti-cancer phytonutrients. This mental health assault on health-conscious
consumers is part of that agenda. It's an effort to *marginalize healthy
eaters* by declaring them to be mentally unstable and therefore justify
carting them off to mental institutions where they will be injected with
psychiatric drugs and fed institutional food that's all processed, dead and
full of toxic chemicals.

*The Guardian* even goes to the ridiculous extreme of saying, "The obsession
about which foods are "good" and which are "bad" means orthorexics can end
up malnourished."

Follow the non-logic on this, if you can: Eating "good" foods will cause
malnutrition! Eating bad foods, I suppose, is assumed to provide all the
nutrients you need. That's about as crazy a statement on nutrition as I've
ever read. No wonder people are so diseased today: The mainstream media is
telling them that eating health food is a mental disorder that will cause
malnutrition!

Shut up and swallow your Soylent Green

It's just like I reported years ago: You're not supposed to question your
food, folks. Sit down, shut up, dig in and chow down. Stop thinking about
what you're eating and just do what you're told by the mainstream media and
its processed food advertisers. Questioning the health properties of your
junk food is a mental disorder, didn't you know? And if you "obsess" over
foods (by doing such things as reading the ingredients labels, for example),
then you're weird. Maybe even sick.

That's the message they're broadcasting now. Junk food eaters are "normal"
and "sane" and "nourished." But health food eaters are diseased, abnormal
and malnourished.

But why, you ask, would they attack healthy eaters? People like Dr. Gabriel
Cousens can tell you why: Because *increased mental and spiritual awareness
is only possible while on a diet of living, natural foods*.

Eating junk foods keeps you dumbed down and easy to control, you see. It
literally messes with your mind, numbing your senses with MSG, aspartame and
yeast extract. People who subsist on junk foods are docile and quickly lose
the ability to think for themselves. They go along with whatever they're
told by the TV or those in apparent positions of authority, never
questioning their actions or what's really happening in the world around
them.

In contrast to that, people who eat health-enhancing natural foods -- with
all the medicinal nutrients still intact -- begin to awaken their minds and
spirits. Over time, they begin to question the reality around them and they
pursue more enlightened explorations of topics like community, nature,
ethics, philosophy and the big picture of things that are happening in the
world. They become "aware" and can start to see the very fabric of *the
Matrix*, so to speak.

This, of course, is a huge danger to those who run our consumption-based
society because *consumption depends on ignorance* combined with
suggestibility. For people to keep blindly buying foods, medicines, health
insurance and consumer goods, they need to have their higher brain functions
switched off. Processed junk foods laced with toxic chemicals just happens
to achieve that rather nicely. Why do you think dead, processed foods remain
the default meals in public schools, hospitals and prisons? It's because
dead foods turn off higher levels of awareness and keep people focused on
whatever distractions you can feed their brains: Television, violence, fear,
sports, sex and so on.

But living as a zombie is, in one way quite "normal" in society today
because so many people are doing it. But that doesn't make it normal in my
book: The real "normal" is an empowered, healthy, awakened person nourished
with living foods and operating as a sovereign citizen in a free world.
Eating living foods is like taking *the red pill* because over time it opens
up a whole new perspective on the fabric of reality. It sets you free to
think for yourself.

But eating processed junk foods is like taking *the blue pill* because it
keeps you trapped in a fabricated reality where your life experiences are
fabricated by consumer product companies who hijack your senses with
designer chemicals (like MSG) that fool your brain into thinking you're
eating real food.

If you want to be alive, aware and in control of your own life, eat more
healthy living foods. But don't expect to be popular with mainstream mental
health "experts" or dieticians -- they're all being programmed to consider
you to be "crazy" because you don't follow their mainstream diets of dead
foods laced with synthetic chemicals.

But you and I know the truth here: We are the normal ones. The junk food
eaters are the real mental patients, and the only way to wake them up to the
real world is to start feeding them living foods.

Some people are ready to take the red pill, and others aren't. All you can
do is show them the door. They must open it themselves.

In the mean time, try to avoid the mental health agents who are trying to
label you as having a mental disorder just because you pay attention to what
you put in your body. There's nothing wrong with avoiding sugar, soy, MSG,
aspartame, HFCS and other toxic chemicals in the food supply. In fact, your
very life depends on it.

*Sources for this story include:*

*
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/aug/16/orthorexia-mental-health-eating-disorder

corn. it said corn, water, SUGAR! SUGAR!? IN CORN!?

"Health supplements" and the other stuff they push is a multi-billion dollar industry in the US.

Anything taken to extreme is dangerous. I have no doubt there are obsessive eaters just like there are germaphobes.
The OP has totally distorted the issue. No one is saying that eating healthy is a mental illness. Just that some people take it to an extreme.
Yet another case of reading comphrension FAIL around here.

I know someone who, for a couple years, spent most of her time obsessing about food. She was involved in the raw food movement, which had extensive (and as far as I could tell, arbitrary) rules about foods. She couldn't eat anything that had ever been exposed to a certain temperature (I think it was about 170 d. )for example. Why that number? I don't know. And it was the same for all food groups, as if boiling vegetables was the same as baking bread.

She missed family holidays and dinners because she didn't want to be tempted by cooked food.

She spent hundreds of dollars attending monthly seminars on the raw food lifestyle.

She also had 2 kids and a husband who wouldn't eat most of the stuff she fixed, so they ended up eating cereal and snack foods or going out to fast food while she ate her sprouted beans.

She thought she was being healthy. She believed that eating raw food would prevent cancer and that cooking/heating food produced toxins.

There's apparently a whole movement out there promoting this. And it's not just "eat more raw foods"--we'd certainly be better off eating more fresh veggies and fruits--but eat ONLY raw foods. And that requires obsessive work.

In fact we evolved to eat cooked foods, only eating raw food leads to malnutrition and various micro-nutrient deficiencies.

Would you eat live monkey brains?
If someone won't eat live monkey brains, do they have a mental disorder?

:puke:

I've seen in a long time here.

people can take certain diets to an unhealthy and obsessive place. That's very real. Distorting that by saying "eating healthy" is seen as a mental illness really shows that this magazine/group has an agenda.

http://blogs.psychcentral.com/adhd/2010/06/is-there-such-a-thing-as-positive-addiction-dr-glasser-thinks-so-but-do-you/

??

Anything taken to extremes is HARMFUL. ANYTHING.

obsession with healthy eating.

I think the latter is definitely a mental disorder.

i guess until it happens to you or somebody you care abt then you won't accept that fear of food can be a crippling disorder, but young women are starving to death because when you create anxiety and pick every bite of food apart, some vulnerable people are going to respond to that anxiety

it isn't fun hating yrself for every bite of food you put in yr mouth or finding yrself suddenly compelled to vomit because you ate, and it doesn't help when the media is brainwashing people to believe that food is basically a poison...

you can't really travel or even eat out w. others, so you deprive yrself of society, if you are hyper vigilant abt avoiding meat, dairy, soy, sugar, "chemicals" etc. -- taken to extremes, yes, it's an illness that cripples yr life -- if you've never seen an eating disorder in action, instead of claiming eating disorders/anxiety don't exist, why not be grateful for yr healthy mind & body?

some young women are v. much harmed by all the food hysteria out there, some of them die

at the end of the day, anorexia will kill you a lot faster than eating soy will (and i WON'T eat soy)

ANY behavior can be pathological, even good, healthy behaviors. Hand washing is certainly a wholesome behavior, but compulsive hand washing 50 or more times a day, while perhaps even "healthier" than washing two or three times, can create real personal problems. Any obsessive behavior can be problematic.

There is a story in my town, perhaps apocryphal but illustrative nonetheless-- I live in a very liberal northern California coastal enclave-- anyway, the story goes that a homeless person approached some friends to ask for spare change so he could buy food (nearly everyone who lives here for any length of time hears this story from folks who swear it happened to some friend of theirs). The friends didn't have any, or didn't want to give their money away, but they were returning from the grocery store so they offered to share some food instead. The homeless guy thinks about it for a moment, then asks "Is it 100 percent organic and chemical free? Because I can't put that corporate stuff in my body, you know?" In most versions of the story, the hungry dude walks away without eating rather than risk consuming "corporate poison" or some such. That's counter productive behavior unless one's primary purpose is to coddle one's obsessions.

Eating healthy food is NOT mental illness, but obsessing over it to the point of doing oneself harm, or diverting attention from other life issues that need attention, is certainly not adaptive, rational behavior either.

because I'm all organic now. Only REAL food.

Any reason why you opted not to include a link?



Is it because the unlinked site is of dubious veracity?

based on reading something on teh internets. There is nothing even vaguely scientific in this piece. Which leads me to think its an "amateur scientist" speaking.

:rofl:

well stated!
:rofl:

NOT about actual science. There is NO PEER reviewed data here..90% is the OP's totally misinformed opinion. As a scientist I can distinguish between actual scientific fact and unscientific crap..Which is what the OP is.

checking to make sure you turned off the stove and locked the doors is a good idea.
not being able to leave the house because you have to check 100 times is a problem.

and it's ONLY a problem when it starts to cause problems in relationships or normal daily functioning and so on.


same idea here. avoiding msg and hfcs and so on is fine, a good idea, in fact. it's only a problem when it prevents you from socializing with friends because you can't eat out, or bankrupts you because you can't afford to eat to your standards, etc. if it's not causing any such problems, it's not a concern at all.

what the Guardian reported was that "fixation with" healthy eating can be a mental disorder. I don't why it couldn't be. Fixation with anything can become an obsessive behavior.

I agree with you that too many things have been assigned a diagnostic category. I suspect it's being driven by financial and insurance factors, where having a diagnostic category is needed so that benefits can be provided.

However, if you don't give a shit about what you eat and eat processed, poisoned crap, you're mentally healthy.

Where does intelligence and stupidity fit into this new disorder?

Better question, where does agribusiness and pharma fit into this new disorder?

Distortion beyond belief. You should be ashamed to promulgate this bullshit.

Those nut-balls are exactly the types the Guardian article was talking about, so it's not suprising they would be pissed off for being called the pathological Obsessive-Compulsives they are.

No one thinks that healthy eating is a mental illness, any more than it is a mental illness to take healthy precautions against infections, or to lock the door at night. But if you are so afraid of infection that you have to wash your hands every few minutes, and avoid ordinary social contact in case someone gives you germs; or if you can't sleep at night because you have to check fifty times repeatedly whether you have locked the door - then you have a problem. The same may go for people who are obsessively anxious about eating and food. And just as some people become malnourished because of an obsessive fear of weight gain, some may become malnourished because of an obsessive fear of eating the wrong foods.

The recognition of anorexia as a medical problem does not mean that people are recommended to stuff themselves without limit on fattening food; similarly, the existence of people who are obsessively anxious about healthy eating does not mean that anyone is recommending a steady diet of junk food.

And recognition of damaging obsessions and phobias does not necessarily mean giving people 'powerful psychotropic drugs'; such problems can often be effectively treated through cognitive behaviour therapy.

A brilliant post, LeftishBrit, and an excellent series of examples showing why the article is less than candid.

I googled to find out who the author is. It is Mike Adams of Health Ranger. He sets all sorts of dogmatic medical and dietary recommendations. Some of these are perfectly reasonable, like regular exercise, getting enough sleep, and avoiding diet pills and fad diets. However, some are extreme and dangerous:

# Enjoy one hour of full exposure to intense natural sunlight on a near-daily basis with no sunscreen (important for vibrational nutrition and essential for mental health, bone density, vitamin D production, etc.)

But not so good for those with risk factors for skin cancer.


# 'Take absolutely no prescription drugs or pharmaceuticals whatsoever'

So a person with diabetes should not be able to take insulin? A person with pneumonia or meningitis should die rather than take the antibiotics that can cure them?

#No visits to M.D.s or western medical doctors (visit naturopathic physicians only)

Extreme dogma; and cruel dogma to those who truly need modern ('western') medicine - which is not in any case inconsistent with healthy diet. It is a fundamentally reactionary and elitist dogma: reactionary because it demands that people accept only what was medically available to their great-grandparents, and refuse all of the innovations that have contributed to a a massively higher life expectancy. And elitist because it only considers the needs of the relatively healthy, and implies that those who are sick, often as the result of accidental circumstance or congenital conditions, must just follow an iron ideology, and avoid recourse to 'unnatural' help (reminiscent of the religious-right's attitude to stem cell research). Or that they either don't exist, or their problems are their own fault. Very similar to the Tory/Republican attitude to the poor! Poor/sick people just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and exercise personal responsibility; there is no need for 'the medical industry' just as to a right-libertarian there is no need for 'the welfare industry'. For those who depend to any degree on modern medicine, this is the medical equivalent of 'let them eat cake'.

That is just silly. I don't eat as well as I ought to, but I respect those are careful how they eat. I suppose it's possible that some people get a bit paranoid about it, BUT I really don't think that's a major problem in this country.

L

and some of the sickest people out there are extreme food faddists who haunt the aisles of the local health food store but have no idea what to do with the stuff they find there. They tend to limit themselves to just a handful of self approved "healthy" foods and run into some very real trouble.

The article in the OP does a disservice to a lot of healthy eaters out there as well as to the truly sick people who feel some sort of moral imperative around their diets.

like the guys who like to eat "raw foods" who do have a higher incidence of malnutrition.

Hell, I avoid wheat and gluten for valid MEDICAL reasons, and I will have to start popping pills to supplement the B Vitamins in my diet.

That is what they are talking about. And yes like all behaviors it can be taken to the extreme.

(Yes when I go see the doctor for my quarterly visit I need to make a point of talking about supplementation... since I KNOW I am missing some nutrients which bread happens to be thick in... whether it has HCSF or not)

And no, they are not talking of 90% of those who try to eat healthy... having dealt with the medical field, I realize this.

regardless of whether it's a "good fixation" or a "bad fixation".

Personally, I know being OCD certainly fueled my ability (and my older son's) to become and remain vegetarian. He very much WANTED to be a vegetarian, and I wanted very much to support that - but the transition was still difficult at times. And occasionally even now there's that whiff of temptation for whatever reason.

It takes that "obsessive" mindset - I think - to be able to maintain the discipline and focus necessary to READ EVER DAMN LABEL, peruse every damn item on a menu, forego those things you can't or won't have, and stick to it.

Currently younger son and I are on elimination diets (for different reasons) - we were already vegetarian, but had to cut out soy, wheat/gluten, and dairy. You know how freaking hard it is to find something to eat besides just veggies? (Oh and I cut out HFCS seven or eight years ago - when it was still "fringe" :), and I've NEVER allowed aspartame in the house - it's pretty much natural sugar/honey, or nothing. I don't like any of the artificial sweetners - even Stevia is nasty to me.)

The point being is that what they say is probably "true" in the strict sense of the word, but sometimes being a little bit "crazy" is a good thing! As we say in my family, "WEIRD's GOOD!"