Orthorexia! Say in the term one more time in your head — OR-THO-RE-XIA! Scary huh? If someone puts “xia” on the end of a word, suddenly, it conjures up images of emaciated teenagers, tearing out and eating the 17 Magazine’s food ads — claiming they’re on high-carb diet.

Seriously, orthorexia is a new popular term for those weird raw foodist and annoying people who go to restaurants and ask the waiter — who, by the way, only earns nine dollars an hour and hasn’t received a fifteen percent tip in the past month, if the salad’s organic, the beef is grass-fed, and is the water free of chlorine and fluoride. The nerve of some of people.

MSNBC and the TODAY show want to raise awareness about the detrimental effects of what boils down to a distrust issue. According to NBC’s resident diet and nutrition editor, Madelyn Fernstrom, this unofficial eating disorder can cause people to spend hours perusing grocery stores, looking at food labels and asking too many questions about the origin of their food.

“The way [orthorexia] differs from other eating disorders like anorexia or bulimia is that an orthorexic focuses on the quality of food,” she told TODAY. “It’s not the calories. It’s not about weight loss. It’s all about how they feel as a virtuous person, as a perfect person. ‘I’m a better person if I restrict.’”

Disregarding the images and reports of starving Third World peoples juxtaposed against an American landscape the obese-related malnutrition — where in the world would these feelings come from?

Contaminated meats and produce dominate the headlines across the Western world coupled with the Food and Drug Administration’s dismal record in regards to food industry regulation, these orthorexics are really making a big deal about nothing all that serious, placing depressive thoughts in their minds and unneeded stress on the cholesterol-free arteries.

With all extra emphasis being placed on eating healthy, organic, and smaller portions, Americans continue to be the risk takers they are, keeping a small amount of pesticides, herbicides, hormones, and bacteria in every meal because we all know how vaccines work — as long as one has a healthy immune system, a little bit poison in one’s system never hurt anyone.

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3 Comments

  1. Excuse me??? :/

  2. This is sarcasm, right?

  3. This article is ridiculous. The FDA works quite well on the whole and American food is far safer than most third world countries or America a hundred years ago. Simply because the FDA’s few mistakes make for eye-grabbing headlines does not establish that the FDA has a dismal record. Vaccines also work very well and herbicides negative impacts upon our society are far outweighed by the benefits they bring via greatly enhanced crop yields.

    Furthermore, the issue with so called orthorexics is not that they are merely concerned with a variety of food issues but that they are obsessing over it to their own detriment and the detriment of their relationships.

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