Eating disorders

Vegan Diets and Orthorexia: How Should Activists Respond?

I’ve been pretty much MIA from this blog and most of the internet over the past few months. My husband and I packed up our home, offices, and cats and moved 3000 miles from Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula to the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts in early November. Driving across the country with 5 cats caused me more than a little bit of angst, and a lot of other things fell by the wayside this fall.

I’m only now catching up on vegan news. One story that has been on my mind over […]

By Ginny Messina|2015-12-16T10:32:41-05:00December 16th, 2015|Tags: Eating disorders, Ex-vegans, orthorexia|40 Comments

New Research on Weight Control, Vegetarian Diets and Eating Disorders

A new study on “vegetarian” diets and eating disorders was published in the August 2012 issue of the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.(1) The findings suggest than women with a history of disordered eating are more likely to have been vegetarian for weight control reasons than women who had never had an eating disorder.

As in most studies on this topic, the term vegetarian was poorly defined. Subjects were simply asked “Have you ever considered yourself a type of vegetarian (eg, not eating beef but eating other meat; not eating any meat at all)?” Obviously, many of the […]

By Ginny Messina|2012-08-08T13:09:05-04:00August 8th, 2012|Tags: Eating disorders|7 Comments

Vegetarian Diets and Eating Disorders

A study published in the journal Appetite took a new approach to examining the relationship between vegetarian diet patterns and eating disorders. I just wrote it up for the ADA’s vegetarian nutrition newsletter, and it’s such interesting research, that I wanted to share it here, even though Jack has already blogged about it.

Past research has suggested that young women who follow “vegetarian” diets are more likely to have restrained eating habits, or a tendency toward eating disorders—probably because some women with eating disorders adopt a vegetarian diet as a socially acceptable way of controlling food intake.

But these studies […]