Written by Mike Adams, the "Health Ranger", published at NaturalNews.com, June 29, 2010

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In its never-ending attempt to fabricate "mental disorders" out of every human activity, the psychiatric industry is now pushing the most ridiculous disease they've invented yet: Healthy eating disorder.

This is no joke: If you focus on eating healthy foods, you're "mentally diseased" and probably need some sort of chemical treatment involving powerful psychotropic drugs. The Guardian newspaper reports, "Fixation with healthy eating can be sign of serious psychological disorder" and goes on to claim this "disease" is called orthorexia nervosa -- which is basically just Latin for "nervous about correct eating."

But they can't just called it "nervous healthy eating disorder" because that doesn't sound like they know what they're talking about. So they translate it into Latin where it sounds smart (even though it isn't). That's where most disease names come from: Doctors just describe the symptoms they see with a name like osteoporosis (which means "bones with holes in them").

Getting back to this fabricated "orthorexia" disease, the Guardian goes on to report, "Orthorexics commonly have rigid rules around eating. Refusing to touch sugar, salt, caffeine, alcohol, wheat, gluten, yeast, soya, corn and dairy foods is just the start of their diet restrictions. Any foods that have come into contact with pesticides, herbicides or contain artificial additives are also out."

Wait a second. So attempting to avoid chemicals, dairy, soy and sugar now makes you a mental health patient? Yep. According to these experts. If you actually take special care to avoid pesticides, herbicides and genetically modified ingredients like soy and sugar, there's something wrong with you.

But did you notice that eating junk food is assumed to be "normal?" If you eat processed junk foods laced with synthetic chemicals, that's okay with them. The mental patients are the ones who choose organic, natural foods, apparently.

What is "normal" when it comes to foods?

I told you this was coming. Years ago, I warned NaturalNews readers that an attempt might soon be under way to outlaw broccoli because of its anti-cancer phytonutrients. This mental health assault on health-conscious consumers is part of that agenda. It's an effort to marginalize healthy eaters by declaring them to be mentally unstable and therefore justify carting them off to mental institutions where they will be injected with psychiatric drugs and fed institutional food that's all processed, dead and full of toxic chemicals.

The Guardian even goes to the ridiculous extreme of saying, "The obsession about which foods are "good" and which are "bad" means orthorexics can end up malnourished."

Follow the non-logic on this, if you can: Eating "good" foods will cause malnutrition! Eating bad foods, I suppose, is assumed to provide all the nutrients you need. That's about as crazy a statement on nutrition as I've ever read. No wonder people are so diseased today: The mainstream media is telling them that eating health food is a mental disorder that will cause malnutrition!

Shut up and swallow your Soylent Green

It's just like I reported years ago: You're not supposed to question your food, folks. Sit down, shut up, dig in and chow down. Stop thinking about what you're eating and just do what you're told by the mainstream media and its processed food advertisers. Questioning the health properties of your junk food is a mental disorder, didn't you know? And if you "obsess" over foods (by doing such things as reading the ingredients labels, for example), then you're weird. Maybe even sick.

That's the message they're broadcasting now. Junk food eaters are "normal" and "sane" and "nourished." But health food eaters are diseased, abnormal and malnourished.

But why, you ask, would they attack healthy eaters? People like Dr. Gabriel Cousens can tell you why: Because increased mental and spiritual awareness is only possible while on a diet of living, natural foods.

Eating junk foods keeps you dumbed down and easy to control, you see. It literally messes with your mind, numbing your senses with MSG, aspartame and yeast extract. People who subsist on junk foods are docile and quickly lose the ability to think for themselves. They go along with whatever they're told by the TV or those in apparent positions of authority, never questioning their actions or what's really happening in the world around them.

In contrast to that, people who eat health-enhancing natural foods -- with all the medicinal nutrients still intact -- begin to awaken their minds and spirits. Over time, they begin to question the reality around them and they pursue more enlightened explorations of topics like community, nature, ethics, philosophy and the big picture of things that are happening in the world. They become "aware" and can start to see the very fabric of the Matrix, so to speak.

This, of course, is a huge danger to those who run our consumption-based society because consumption depends on ignorance combined with suggestibility. For people to keep blindly buying foods, medicines, health insurance and consumer goods, they need to have their higher brain functions switched off. Processed junk foods laced with toxic chemicals just happens to achieve that rather nicely. Why do you think dead, processed foods remain the default meals in public schools, hospitals and prisons? It's because dead foods turn off higher levels of awareness and keep people focused on whatever distractions you can feed their brains: Television, violence, fear, sports, sex and so on.

But living as a zombie is, in one way quite "normal" in society today because so many people are doing it. But that doesn't make it normal in my book: The real "normal" is an empowered, healthy, awakened person nourished with living foods and operating as a sovereign citizen in a free world. Eating living foods is like taking the red pill because over time it opens up a whole new perspective on the fabric of reality. It sets you free to think for yourself.

But eating processed junk foods is like taking the blue pill because it keeps you trapped in a fabricated reality where your life experiences are fabricated by consumer product companies who hijack your senses with designer chemicals (like MSG) that fool your brain into thinking you're eating real food.

If you want to be alive, aware and in control of your own life, eat more healthy living foods. But don't expect to be popular with mainstream mental health "experts" or dieticians -- they're all being programmed to consider you to be "crazy" because you don't follow their mainstream diets of dead foods laced with synthetic chemicals.

But you and I know the truth here: We are the normal ones. The junk food eaters are the real mental patients, and the only way to wake them up to the real world is to start feeding them living foods.

Some people are ready to take the red pill, and others aren't. All you can do is show them the door. They must open it themselves.

In the mean time, try to avoid the mental health agents who are trying to label you as having a mental disorder just because you pay attention to what you put in your body. There's nothing wrong with avoiding sugar, soy, MSG, aspartame, HFCS and other toxic chemicals in the food supply. In fact, your very life depends on it.

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"It is a melancholy fact that massive works of the intellect do not spring from the abstract workings of the brain and the imagination; they are deeply rooted in the personality." -Paul Johnson

INFP, 4w5 sx/sp

Calling it a sickness is psychological abuse, and I believe that is a form of psychosis, a behavioral disorder.

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After doing a bit of reading on the subject (I'll post the links below) my opinion is that this article is pretty much the paranoid ramblings of a mental case.

Okay, that was a little harsh, he does raise a good point that the "goalposts" for what qualifies as orthorexia nervosa seem to be set far too wide. But I do think he's taken some things out of context, distorted a couple of things, and missed out some pretty major points. All of which makes this issue look like a bigger deal than it really is.

For one, the article declines to mention that this disorder hasn't been recognised by the medical community at large. It isn't included in the current DSM-IV, and there are currently no plans to include it in the DSM-V either, despite the condition having first been coined/identified (depending on your point of view) back in 1997. One of the main reasons for this is apparently precisely because the goal posts are set too wide, as things stand the conditions for the disorder cover behaviours that medical practitioners actually approve of, because they lead to healthier lifestyles.

Another problem with the article is that it downplays (or even outright ignores) the fact that any habit taken to obsessive extremes can be potentially dangerous. For example, most people would agree that jogging is good for you, yes? It helps to keep you fit and healthy. But what if you jog for 12 hours a day, and you can't sleep at night because you spend all the time you're not jogging thinking about how you should be jogging? Is it healthy then?

The orthorexia nervosa diagnosis is meant to cover obsessional behaviours that severely and negatively impact people's lives (though it doesn't necessarily currently succeed at it). For example, one of the Guardian articles mentions a woman who's weighs only 5 stone, because she's so obsessed with watching what she eats, and who can't stand to have a tub of butter in her fridge because it makes her feel "awful and dirty". Does that sound like healthy behaviour?



Actually, they give them Latin names so that conditions are standardised and because they inherited the Latin from earlier times when they used Latin for pretty much everything (is it "trying to sound smart, even though it's not" when natural historians and biologists give newly discovered creatures Latin names, or is it just common sense to group common things together into the same family?).



Nonsense. Eating healthy can certainly help people think more clearly, but to imply that it's only possible to think clearly when you eat non-"junk" foods, or that people who eat junk foods are somehow "zombiefied" into complacency is quite frankly a load of old claptrap. The reasons for the perceived complacency in many people is far more complex than just what foods we eat (though I freely admit that it does play a part in it).



Did the writer not consider that people might become more aware of the "bigger picture" before they start eating healthily, and that's why they start eating healthily in the first place? Or that people who start buying healthy foods might become more aware of what's going on in the world as a result of having to be more aware of where their food comes from, rather than as a direct result of eating the food itself? Again, there's far more going on than the writer wants to admit.



S'funny, one of the Guardian articles mentions that people considered to have orthorexia nervosa often display a smug, self-satisfied sense of superiority and consider themselves "better" than people who eat "unhealthily".







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Further reading:
Wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthorexia_nervosa
Original Guardian article sited in the article Stars posted: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/ ... g-disorder
Earlier, more in-depth Guardian article on the same subject: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... dwellbeing

_________________
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. - Gerard Manley Hopkins

All mental illness is only a matter of degree. Just like physical illness, healing from mental illness, or at least reducing the symptoms, allows one to live a happier, more fulfilling life.

Everyone washes their hands (or should). Some people wash them frequently. That's fine. Some people feel such a strong need to wash them and to do so with such frequency that it harms their hands and gets in the way of normal relationships. When it gets that bad, it's labled a disorder. It's not the hand washing that is the problem, it's their anxiety and compulsion that is.

Lots of people care about eating healty food (or should). Some people go out of their way and pay extra to get pesticide free, locally grown, vegan, whatever. That's fine. Some people feel such a strong need to eat certain things and avoid others and to do so with such strict rules that their anxiety about breaking their own food rules harms their health and gets in the way of normal relationships. When it gets that bad, it's labled a disorder. It's not eating healty food that is the problem, it's their anxiety and compulsion that is.

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Fiction is just like real life, only truer.

Edit: I just realised that I pretty much reposted DC's post. *high five!*

Go DC: Debunking ridiculous crap so you don't have to!

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~I'll think of a witty comment later, or not. Maybe something to do with clouds?!~

Well if the author is paranoid about the health industry, then there's a good reason for it:



You can tell from the sensationalism of the article and from the name "Health Ranger" that the author is being contradictory and provocative on purpose. He's a man on a mission.

Writers pen "informative" articles (like the one posted on the Guardian) on hot topics not only to sell their paper but to protect and promote the interests of their sponsors. There are medical doctors, and there are spin doctors, and sometimes, they will create issues like this to protect their industry.

One of my advertising management professors spilled the beans on the dirty tricks he and his advertising agency had been using to promote their client's interests back in the 1970's. His ad agency strategised a campaign against popular robot-themed cartoons in order to prep the market for a TV channel's new line-up of kiddie shows. (His client couldn't acquire broadcast rights from any robot-themed cartoon producer.) What did he do? He tapped psychologists and asked his clients to sponsor studies on the effects of robot-themed cartoons. Over the span of one year, they planted articles in newspapers and magazines to convince parents that robot-themed cartoons would make their children display violent behavior, and that this behavior could carry on into adulthood. After one year, the new line-up of cartoons were shown and sure enough, his client won the kiddie market. It was psy-warfare in the truest sense of the word. After establishing the brand identities of the various cartoons, his client came out with branded kiddie merchandise. It was big business back then, and it still is now.

A small dose of paranoia isn't always a bad thing especially when it generates awareness that can protect the public from exploitative industries.

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Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.

_________________
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. - Gerard Manley Hopkins

They're out to get you whether you're paranoid or not.

_________________
Fiction is just like real life, only truer.

argh, they got me! halp.