I have already spoken several times about what is now considered to all intents and purposes both an eating disorder and a growing disorder, even in Italy: it is called orthorexia, and we could define it as an orthodoxy of food, or the tendency to be extreme towards food, both in the form of quality (we are convinced that everything is bad, is contaminated or that particular categories of food are to be demonized), and according to the goal of weight loss (we are convinced that food, in the form of calories or specific macronutrients, makes us fat and needs to be controlled in a certain way).

By definition, in fact, orthorexia is an obsession with healthy eating: since under this term we can incorporate personal theories and beliefs, it is difficult today to trace a “unique” identikit of the orthorexic. If once, in fact, those who suffered from orthorexia were a person with scrupulous and obsessive hygiene towards certain foods, and a very limited choice of the same in the daily diet, for fear of contamination or poisoning, business and diffusion of weight loss diets has created other obsessions towards healthy eating, in which at the center of everything is a rigid and obsessive control (or a claim to control) over food. 

Today there may be the vegan orthorexic, the one opposed to gluten, and as I explained earlier, the “dietetic” type orthorexic, who fights with food every day because he sees it only in the form of calories or macronutrients. In short: people obsessed with food are potential victims of orthorexia.