Striving For the Perfect Diet Is Making Us Sick
From: Popular Science - 01/12/2015
By: Jen Schwartz

As a growing number of people dramatically retool their diets in the pursuit
of health, some are cutting out half the categories on the food pyramid
altogether. In certain cases, this hyper-controlled eating becomes a
compulsion, and the anxiety of consuming something deemed “bad for you,” like
a piece of cheese, feels paralyzing. The result is a new kind of eating
disorder doctors are calling orthorexia. A recent case study defines it as “a
pathological obsession for biologically pure and healthy nutrition.”
Co-author Thomas Dunn, a psychologist at the University of Northern Colorado,
explains that just as anorexia is driven by a fear of being fat, orthorexia
is driven by a fear of being unhealthy. The former fixates on quantity, the
latter on quality.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.popsci.com/striving-perfect-diet-making-us-sick

Links:
Orthorexia: An Obsession with Eating "Pure"
http://www.eatright.org/Public/content.aspx?id=6442471029

Microthinking About Micronutrients: A Case of Transition from Obsessions
  about Healthy Eating to Near-Fatal “Orthorexia Nervosa” and Proposed
  Diagnostic Criteria 
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0033318214000504