Orthorexia

When “healthy” eating becomes unhealthy.

There may be reasons to be a vegan, but health is not among them.

[Update late morning]

Both Anne Hathaway and Bill Clinton have given up on their vegan diets:

Hathaway recently confessed that eating endless meals of tofu and garbanzo beans seemed to be sapping her energy. She told the Insider that when she was filming Interstellar, the action-packed scenes overwhelmed her.

Seeking a solution, Hathaway decided to try feasting on fish and shifting to a low-carb diet. The decision to push away those plant-based platters and experiment with an animal protein-powered plan came in the middle of filming a water scene, which required that she suit up in a heavy garment.

“I fell off so hard…. So you imagine what that’s like — what it’s like running through water and then you wear a 40-pound suit on top of it, so for me it was intense. I was facing my life, I don’t know how many days in a row of, like, garbanzo beans on a plate.”

And with an apology to PETA, Hathaway says that she doesn’t plan to return to her vegan lifestyle. She even dug into a plate of eggs and sausage during a recent Harper’s Bazaar interview. Anne noted that the difference between eating a vegan diet and consuming animal protein was notable overnight.

“I just didn’t feel good or healthy,” Hathaway recalled of her vegan days.

You don’t say.

10 thoughts on “Orthorexia”

  1. I did the low-carb diets. While they do provide a lot of energy and you naturally get to a healthy weight more easily the high protein diets place a lot of load on the kidneys and I got joint pain after a couple of years on it. After going back to a balanced diet the joint pain went away. I think it is ludicrous to think that paleolithic people did not consume carbs. Paleolithic people ate whatever they could get their hands on and pine nuts and other nuts plus some edible roots like the precursors of carrots were one of the sources of nutrition and calories in their diet.

    Of all food fads around I think the best one is probably the people with the raw foodie fetish. i.e. you shouldn’t each anything that you cannot eat raw. A lot of the things you can only digest cooked have toxins in them which are broken down during the cooking process but quite often the cooking process is either incomplete or they merely break down into less harmful but not harmless compounds.

    As for vegan diets I managed to last a whole two days when doing one. The sheer lack of energy and sleep disorders I got from that crummy diet were enough to get me off it forever. While it is possible to diminish some of the side effects by careful diet management you will always need animal supplements.

    I think the best policy is to eat what you feel like eating at the moment with moderation. Our own body knows best what it needs.

    1. Paleo or low-carb are not supposed to be high protein; they are adequate protein. The number I’ve seen tossed around is roughly 30% of total calories; the rest from fat and non-grain, non-sugary carbs (a little fruit is ok, just remember that modern fruits are way sweeter than what our ancestors ate 5,000 years ago.

      Read Taubes and Attia if you want more.

        1. I know its anedoctal but I was talking from my own personal experience. I had lower back pain on the sides and I could even smell the meat in the urine in the morning. I did drink a lot of water to compensate darker urine than usual but the increased water will also increase calcium deposits i.e. kidney stones. It is not something that will happen overnight. The symptoms only show up after a couple of months and it probably depends on the composition of the water you usually drink.

  2. This thread seems to have quite quickly left the orthorexia theme to zero in on pro-con for extreme paleo.
    I’ll let Tim Blair explain the vegan dangers:
    This isn’t an original observation, but you never, ever see an unhappy butcher. Staff at vegetarian or vegan joints, on the other hand, usually seem sad. Or too happy, in a creepy, medicated kind of way. These views are now supported by research:
    Australian vegetarians might be healthier than meat-eaters but they are unhappier and more prone to mental health disorders, new research suggests …
    Dr. John Lang, who developed the wellness index for preventive healthcare company Alere, says the adoption of a vegetarian diet can sometimes follow the onset of mental disorders.
    Makes sense.
    http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/vegetarianism_is_a_sign/

  3. “He requested something called wheat germ . . . organic honey and “Tiger’s Milk” . . . substances that some years ago were felt to contain life-preserving properties.”

    “You mean there was no deep fat? No steak, or cream pies, or hot fudge?”

    “Those were thought to be unhealthy, precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.”

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