eating disorders

A friend happens to be a model. She eats well and, apart from being very thin, is in excellent health.  There are people who will stop her on the street and tell her they think she must have an eating disorder to be as thin as she is.  She, like many in her line of work,  is sometimes blamed for body image problems of young women.  

There are a few observations - average weight has been going up for about three decades along with thin young woman imagery.  While some of the models have serious eating problems others, like our friend, are healthy and happen to be thin naturally.  Reasonable questions to ask might be:  "does advertising impact the prevalence of eating disorders? and what is the prevalence of childhood and young obesity?"

While this doesn't get at either of those questions directly, it does look at the prevalence of eating disorders. They are often very dangerous with high mortality, but they are also much less common than obesity.  Both need to be addressed, but so does the thesis that advertising somehow drives one when the other in increasing with the advertising. There may be a more complex coupling, but I've never seen that addressed satisfactorily. 

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An addition - please read Tetyana's comment below and check out the blog for much more information.  It looks like an excellent resource.

 

 

Comments

[Tetyana]

You raise a point that's often glossed by the media: the abundance of images picturing thin models and the relatively low rates of eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. If the hypothesis is that the former leads to the latter, we'd expect to see a drastic increase in these disorders since thin models became popular. But, that doesn't seem to be the case.

I don't know much about obesity, so I am not going to discuss that, except to mention that obesity is not the opposite of eating disorders. Eating disorders, such as anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating disorder are mental disorders. You can be bulimic at any weight (if it is low enough, it becomes the binge-purge subtype of anorexia nervosa) and have binge eating disorder at any weight. The opposite of obesity is underweight, and both can be due to factors that have nothing to do with eating (thyroid problems, medication). There is no opposite to EDs. Anorexia is not the opposite of binge eating disorder or bulimia.

In speaking about anorexia, we have to remember it is not a diet. It is very different from a diet, but, dieting CAN lead to it. How? Anorexia nervosa patients tend to find restricting their intake to be anxiolytic (anxiety-reducing), calming, etc.. Dieting (because it is so common) may lead them to realize that, hey, restricting my intake feels good and reduces my anxiety/depression. Most people don't find restricting anxiolytic, in fact, they struggle to decrease their intake (there are neurobiological hypothesis, supported by data, to explain this, elsewhere in my blog). So, rates of AN are low. But, dieting is a risk factor as it leads to the discovery of the power effects of restriction for these individuals who are ALREADY susceptible to developing the ED.

Cue thin-ideal: more individuals dieting, a larger subset of those predisposed to develop AN diet, and thus, may develop AN. But, very few can restrict their intake for years and decades. A large percentage of patients start bingeing (often during weight gain/recovery), which may lead to purging. And hence, bulimic symptoms. Bulimia seems to be more dependent on environmental factors (ie, a culture that values thinness but yet also has an overabundance of food), which may lead individuals to attempt to restrict their intake, and then, failing to do so, binge and purge.

But, this perspective also misses the anxiolytic effects of bingeing and purging. While not wanting to gain weight is likely a part of it for many, the process of bingeing and purging can be incredibly addictive, and numbingly anxiolytic, which has nothing to do with thin models or body image.

Moreover, there are many individuals with anorexia nervosa that are not fat phobic (ie, they are not afraid of getting fat). Although this is a criterion in the current DSM, there is a lot of evidence to suggest, in my opinion, that the fat-phobic aspect of it may be much more socially constructed (I also wrote about this in some previous entries).

Anyway, this is getting super long. Sorry about that! I tried to address the coupling, but it is hard to do in a few sentences (and without planning my thoughts out).

Cheers,
Tetyana

[Tetyana]

By the way, this is absolutely unrelated to my comment above, but I was just browsing through your posts and I noticed that all of them are sorted in /starstuff/ folder, at least according to the permalinks. (Then I read that you have a particle physics background.)
Anyway, I don't know how you feel about tattoos but I thought maybe you'd appreciate my nerdy tattoo (because most people don't "get it"): http://thestar.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341bf8f353ef0162fd3f3428970d-800wi

(Explanation here: http://thestar.blogs.com/newsnow/2011/12/a-new-book-on-store-shelves-science-ink-tattoos-of-the-science-obsessed-shows-the-often-elegant-always-gorgeous-tatto.html).

Cheers,
T.