When Healthy Eating Becomes Unhealthy

I have to give a shout-out to New York Times reporter Abby Ellin for writing What's Eating Our Kids? Fears About 'Bad' Foods. This is such an important subject and one that Abby has tackled well for The New York Times. I attended an Eating Disorders Bootcamp workshop conducted by nutritionist Jessica Setnick, who is wisely quoted at the end of the article, discussing just how damaging it can be for parents to label foods as "good" or "bad," or worse, to disallow certain foods from their children's diets because they apparently carry the label, "bad."

And while I am a huge fan of Nina Planck's book Real Food, and recommend it to people often (though not unless they already have made peace with food), I respectfully disagree with her assertion, "that it’s a 'total cop out' to lay blame on schools and parents for children’s eating disorders [because] the eating disorder comes out of a disordered psyche." That may be very well and true that an eating disorder is part of a larger pyschiatric issue, but the fact remains that there are people all over the world suffering daily from disordered eating that is not viewed as "severe enough" to be labeled "anorexic," "bulimic" or even "orthorexic." For those people to turn on the television, open a magazine, walk into gym class or just sit across the breakfast table from mom or dad and hear foods being described as "good" and "bad," I'm sorry. That affects people, and in my opinion it does so in an extraordinarily unhealthy way.

Sure, some people can hear about "good foods" and "bad foods" and let it slide out of their mental cavity without internalizing one word of it. But most people can't. I can't tell you how many people's obsessions with "healthy eating" that turned very UNhealthy, started when they moved into a community (such as Los Angeles) that was saturated with negative talk around "bad" foods. And that's why we have such an obsession in this country with our foods being functional and healthy. YES, of course I'm in support of healthy eating, and yes, I just savored a delicious bowl of homemade oatmeal with sliced bananas and a glass of milk. And yes, I also savored a delicious chocolate fudge brownie yesterday afternoon at work. But folks, it's true -- healthy eating can turn into a very unhealthy obsession. It's the entire reason I wrote Eat When You're Hungry: to help the kids Abby writes about in her article, and the adults they will become who will want to make peace with food, but won't know how without help.

There's not much more I can say on this topic without writing another book. In the meantime, thank you Abby Ellin for your great article in The New York Times. And thanks to my friend Linzey, for bringing it to my attention during what was a very busy week!

What do you think about this article? I'd love to hear your comments.