Too concerned with health? The medicalization of "healthy" nutrition

People’s food and eating habits are increasingly being driven by social forces producing anxiety. Health promotional discourses frequently appear as the focal point in media, emphasizing how food affects one’s health. Much attention has been placed on the problems of modern industrial food production, including the use of recent biotechnologies, such as the addition of genetically modified organisms in food, and how such practices might affect health. Consequently, individuals are placed with the burden to make the correct dietary choices to promote health. However, mental health practitioners in Europe have identified a new eating disorder resulting from an excessive concern of healthy eating tentatively labelled Orthorexia Nervosa. This research, consisting of structured and semi-structured interviews with mental health and nutritional practitioners and lay informants in Norway attempts to distinguish if and how dietary practices that aim for optimal health are being constructed as an eating disorder by the mental health community in Norway. This research finds that though mental health practitioners are careful to not diagnose their patients under the label of Orthorexia Nervosa, certain aspects of concern with healthy diets are being categorised and treated as an eating disorder akin to Anorexia Nervosa.