Eating healthy and quality food is important for our health, but if the choice of food becomes a fixation, it can ruin it. In fact, the obsession for healthy food is not to be confused with being informed or careful about the choice of what to put in your plate – explains Dr. Barbara Mingardi, psychotherapist at Humanitas Gavazzeni. – It is instead a disorder called orthorexia, which leads to an excessive distrust of all food with the idea that a lack of control over the foods that you ingest could damage your health. Those who suffer from this disorder pay too much attention to the choice, but also to the origin of the food, the method of cultivation or breeding, as well as preparation. This way, food becomes the main concern of the day, resulting into a pathological issue which affects social and emotional relationships. It may happen, for example, that you can no longer accept an invitation for dinner because you do not trust what you can eat. Along with the obsessive disorder, the danger today comes from the fact that many notions are conveyed by the Internet and some food convictions may not be supported by real medical-scientific studies, but based on a hearsay read on social media or on some forums. For this reason, the advice is to go to a doctor who is specialist in eating disorders with the aim to scale back the concept of “healthy diet”.
