Eating and Weight Disorders - Studies on Anorexia, Bulimia and Obesity | 2021
Vegan diet and orthorexia
Abstract
– in no case the papers published by EAWD were intended to stigmatize minority groups, including vegans; – the psychometric tests are used to screen people potentially affected by pathological eating problems, they do not make a diagnosis. It is only later that the medical examination distinguishes the individual who is overwhelmed by eating problems—and therefore sick—from the individual who pays more attention to food than others although being healthy; – the problems raised for some items are not exclusive to vegans, but also present in other populations not affected by eating disorders (e.g., people with diabetes, with religious beliefs, with specific phobias, with strict rules regarding food who do not easily tolerate the different choices of others); – we agree that orthorexia nervosa scores proposed in the literature have limits that need to be corrected and that the proper definition of orthorexia needs further investigation. At the moment an orthorexia nervosa task force (made up of over 30 researchers who have studied this phenomenon in recent years, all over the world) is working to find a consensus on a definition and on shared diagnostic criteria; – the Dusseldorf Orthorexia Scale (DOS) has been developed with the help of vegan individuals and the feedback received did indeed cover some of the aspects that the Dr. Koeder criticizes. However, in agreement with the vegan individuals, the items were not rewritten, since it is not possible to create a scale that covers each and every individual’s interpretation of the phrases and even better tools will always give false positives; – the DOS is meant to be independent from the diet an individual follows, that is why it does not contain any statements on the specific food that is eaten; – it may be true that vegans do have higher scores on the DOS, but they are far from exceeding the cut-off point for orthorexic eating behavior; even the cut-off-point indicative of a risk for orthorexic eating behavior is not exceeded [1]; – the distinction mentioned by the author between “healthy vegans” and “ethical vegans” seems very academic and difficult to define at least from a nutritional point of view. In fact while anorexic individuals seem to interpret the term healthy in terms of low in calorie content , vegan individuals seem to be likely to interpret the word healthy as vegan ; – it is always difficult to define what is normal. However there is no doubt that vegans do not have a “typical” or “common” eating behavior (at least until now), giving the concept of normality a statistical meaning: their behavior is located in one of the distribution queues of the general eating behavior of the population. In any case, being part of a minority does not imply a negative judgment at all: even a genius is part of a minority! – we agree that vegans represent an archipelago of different eating habits in which finding a minimum common denominator is objectively complicated; – we agree that atypical and unhealthy are not synonymous, but it is equally true that quite a few studies have emphasized the risk of nutritional deficiencies in subjects who follow a vegan diet. This is confirmed by the recommendations made by many (including vegan associations) to use nutritional supplements and to avoid a vegan diet in particular in children and older adults; – it is a fact that vegan psychological characteristics attracted the attention of researchers (111 papers cited * Lorenzo M. Donini [email protected]