[ale] OT: Orthoexia Nervosa (Was: Anybody sick today?)

[Ronald Chmara]

Hm. Looks like Orthorexia Nervosa is not without a strong internet 
presence, as a thread on the aspartame hoax just finished up on another 
list that I read, just in time to see it here.

On Dec 30, 2003, at 1:26 PM, rhiannen wrote:
> Diets: The mini-rant. [Full rant reserved for more health related 
> sites.]
>
> Point: The far vast majority of doctors have less than 4 hours TOTAL 
> of diet,
> nutrition and any related courses. It simply just isn't taught in 
> Western
> medicine as a major factor.

For most acute medical problems, it's simply not a major factor. A 
dietary change won't rectify, say, a GSW or MVA casualty. Doctors who 
chose to specialize in diet-related fields will get much more training, 
and last I checked, the required organic chemistry courses lasted a bit 
longer than 4 hours... *shrug*.

> Point: Whether or not you believe in evolution, our closest living 
> relations are
> the primates. Their diet consists mainly of raw leaves, fruits, nuts, 
> roots, and
> grasses supplemented with small amounts of raw animal protein from 
> termites and
> scavenged carcases.

And they have much less capable brains, and totally different lives. I 
like how protein contributes to my brain matter and activity, but hey, 
who am I to judge if someone wants to dumb down, and sit around being 
fat and happy? (mmmm.... beeeer....) ;-)

>  They drink plain old water - a lot of it. Unchlorinated,
> unfluorinated water. Hmmm...

Not fluorinated? Rotting teeth are certainly yummy! And that raw 
unchlorinated water primates get from streams, packed with lovely 
parasitic micro-organisms, and fecal runoff, yum yum!

> Point: The modern American diet consists of fast and convenient 
> "foods" (and I
> use that term *very* loosely) which contain chemical additives and 
> 'supplements'
> our bodies have no concept of how to handle.

... along with tons of naturally occurring chemical compounds that also 
have a negative effect, or no effect, on our bodies and health. Of 
course, if our diet when consuming "wild" foods was a totally 
beneficial diet, we never would have needed to develop a liver, or 
kidneys. Food, in pretty much all of it's forms, is packed with things 
our bodies don't like, or need. Same as it ever was. *shrug*.

> The human body has NOT evolved any way of
> handling overly processed, nutrient stripped white sugar, white flour, 
> white fat
> (partially hydrogenated soybean oils, etc.) and it hasn't figured out 
> what to do
> with the man-made base chemicals we throw back on the over processed 
> stuff.

Hm. And here I thought that we weren't starving to death, but instead 
(at least in the US), we were overweight because our bodies knew how to 
absorb the basic sugars, and were doing quite well at it...

I guess I was wrong, and because our bodies haven't "evolved" to digest 
purified starches and sugars, we must be suffering from immense hunger 
and malnutrition caused by a lack of calories. :-)

> Point: A lot of "additives" are put back in as weak attemptes to 
> replace much
> needed nutrients stripped during processing. Without them, our body 
> simply can't
> adequately digest or utilize the gunk we like to pretend is food. 
> However, the
> additives are in bare chemical forms w/o the supportive naturally 
> occuring
> enzymes, etc. and therefore basically worthless.

As compared to enzymes that are not bare chemicals? Interesting idea. 
Is this anything like foods that aren't made of chemicals, or water 
that isn't made of, oh, a chemical like H20? (Chemicals are 
value-neutral)

> Point: Additional man-made substances such as aspartame are known by 
> the
> manufacturers and the FDA to be highly toxic and very dangerous, but 
> are not
> only still in many "healthy" diet products, but are being added to 
> more and more
> each week. (Yes, I can dig up the articles and research to back that 
> up. Easily
> enough done via Google as well.)

I can "prove" that the Nazi holocaust "didn't happen" via google. That 
doesn't make it true. Here:
http://www.snopes.com/toxins/aspartame.asp

Last thing I heard out of the FDA this week on shutting down a 
dangerous chemical was a "natural" chemical compound, sold mostly in 
"health food" stores, as Ephedra.

> Point: Anything ingested that the body can't digest is either an 
> irritant or a
> toxin depending on if the body can remove it or not. This includes 
> medications,
> whether OTC or prescribed. (I'll spare you my pharmaceutical rant this 
> time.)

Celery is evil then? Anything with plant cellulose is an irritant or a 
toxin? So, most green vegetables are bad? Interesting thought. I think 
I'll disagree.

> Point: Over 100 years ago, cancer was so rare as to create great 
> comment.

"Consumption", on the other hand, was, much, much, more common in older 
people. Guess why.

> Point: The largest filter your body has is the liver. If you can't 
> remember
> highschool anatomy and biology, do some Googling on it - absolutely
> mind-boggling everything the liver handles. As a bare minimum, 
> consider it a
> filter, like a water filter. If you keeping running mud through, 
> eventually it
> clogs up. In the human body, the mud is all the extra additives and 
> man-made
> 'supplements.'

If the liver was only needed to filter "extra additives and man-made 
'supplements'", we wouldn't have needed it until now.

Since most complex animals have livers, I think it's safe to assume 
that livers have been needed for a long, long, time before the advent 
of modern human foodstuffs. As long as we've been eating, we've needed 
to filter. It didn't matter if the foods were processed, engineered, or 
pulled fresh off of wild trees, the food still had "mud". Some regimen 
types will have more mud than others. I personally prefer to "refine" 
and "process" out a fair bit of that mud before eating.

> Point: THE best diet is one which closely follows our primate 
> cousins'. No, you
> don't have to go poke termite mounds for your protein, but the closer 
> to fresh,
> raw, organic you can eat, the healthier AND the easier for your system 
> to
> digest.

We're not as similar as we once were. We lack their ability to process 
rough cellulose, for example, and health wise, we've tended to avoid 
their levels of food poisoning because we got this totally whacky idea 
to cook things (which also allows us to digest more foods, and thus 
live longer at a sustained pitch of activity).

> Point: High protein is not as healthy for us as many Atkins types 
> would like us
> to believe. Our ancestory are mostly plant eating omnivores, not 
> carnivores. We
> are closer relatives to bears than the big cats, closest to the apes 
> and chimps,
> and our digestive systems are vastly different from the big cats. 
> Basically, our
> bodies have not evolved to handle large daily intakes of meat.

We're certainly not sharks or whales. Yes, consuming a fourth of our 
body weight per day, in meat, would be kind of rough on us. Atkins 
eaters aren't consuming 25 lbs of meat a day, though. (The point of the 
initiation diet is replacing high-starch dietary habits with foods that 
burn or are removed quicker.)

Most primates need about 10% of their daily diet in dry protein, or 
about 1-2 high-protein dishes per day. We also (homo sapiens) need a 
lot more B-complex vitamins, which is why so many vegans need B-complex 
supplements (or lots of B-complex foods) to maintain their health.

> Point: ANY diet that severely limits grains, roots, vegetables, and/or 
> fruits is
> NOT a healthy diet - no matter how much weight is lost.

Not a healthy life-long diet, no. But long-term obesity is much harder 
on the body than temporary protein overload, so removing obesity, and 
then balancing a diet, is probably much healthier than continuing to be 
obese while eating a balanced diet.

Anyways, there's a lot of healthy debate about healthy eating. A great 
deal of it, sadly, seems to be misinformed (if well intentioned) and 
laden with odd variant meanings of buzzwords like "chemicals", 
"toxins", "natural" and "organic".

I think I'll go have a toxin laden, 100% chemical, artificially 
fertilized (but it's organic!) romaine lettuce sandwich.

-Bop