 Orthorexia nervosa is described as a fixation on the virtue of food or unhealthy obsession with healthy eating. Orthorexia has been styled as a type of self-righteous eating, or as clean eating by sufferers of the disorder. Wait, let's take a step back here. First of all, though this phenomenon has been described in the scientific literature, it is not formally recognized as an official psychiatric diagnosis. Furthermore, orthorexia doesn't even have an accepted definition, nor validated diagnostic criteria. And if you can't validly diagnose it or even define it, what good is it? OK, well, first off, where did this concept even come from? Not from some scholarly source, but from a popular press article called Confessions of a Health Food Junkie, in a magazine called Yoga Journal. Let's explore its scientific legitimacy. Evidently, it looks like orthorexics obsessively avoid processed foods, unhealthy fats, and foods containing too much salt or too much sugar. But wait, by definition we should avoid unhealthy fats. They're unhealthy. And anything that has too much salt or sugar has too much salt and sugar. Is someone who's a non-smoker obsessively avoiding cigarettes ortho-spear-rexic, obsessed with right breathing? In many cases, parents try to strictly limit their children's sugar intake. No, off to the loony bin they go. Orthorexics make the nutritional value of a meal more important than the pleasure of eating it. But if you didn't just a little, wouldn't you just eat donuts all day? I mean, if pleasure trumps health, maybe we should all just start shooting heroin. One of the proposed criteria is an unusual concern about one's health. What does that mean? I mean, do you have a mental illness if you decide to hold the bacon on your double cheeseburger? I mean, that could be seen as an unusual level of concern in a standard American diet. People with orthorexia pay excessive attention to the quality of consumed food, so much so they'd rather not eat unhealthy food. I bet they put their seatbelts on, too. We better reprogram their unhealthy, healthy thoughts with cognitive behavioral therapy, combined, of course, with drugs. SSRIs such as Zoloft, Prozac, and Paxil, hey, that's what the experts recommend. With regard to psychotropic medication, yeah, SSRIs may help, but you may have to dip into the atypical antipsychotics as well. Now, often there'll be a concession, like of course, from a clinical and public health perspective, it would not be reasonable to suggest that individuals who follow a strict healthy diet are endangering their health. It only reaches clinical significance when health-directed eating starts causing problems in relationships or in pairs in individual social life. But, like, if someone asks their spouse not to smoke around them and the kids, that health-directed behavior could cause interpersonal distress in the relationship. Should you just keep quiet? Or should you yourself keep smoking, just to not cause waves with your smoking spouse? And social life-wise, I mean, do you have a mental illness if you tell your date you'd rather not go to the steakhouse or the smoking lounge? The problem is when the behavior begins to hinder a person's ability to take part in everyday society. Like, what if you start bringing food to dinner parties? Maybe I've just gone to too many potlucks, but bringing a healthy dish to share doesn't sound like a druggable psychiatric offense to me. And then there's Instagram. Think of the implications social media can have on psychological well-being of hundreds of thousands of individuals. Did you know that healthy food posts tend to receive more support from users than less healthy images? Indicating a positive attitude towards healthy foods and healthy eating? Soon, everyone might be taking pictures of broccoli. Quick, get out the straight jackets. In his decades of medical practice, Dr. D. Norris says he's never seen a case of orthorexia. Most people, he says, have the opposite problem. They don't care enough about what they eat.