Doubt surrounding the food industry has led to the rise of various diets—vegetarian, vegan, raw food—as people search for what they believe to be the most balanced and healthy way to eat. However, these practices can escalate into an unhealthy obsession, known as orthorexia.
Patrick Denoux, a professor of cultural psychology, told Agence France-Presse, “Eating fruit only if picked less than a minute ago, eating tiny meals accompanied by supplements… the obsession with healthy eating, or what is called orthorexia, is a prison of self-imposed rules.” He estimates that 2 to 3 percent of people in France follow this pattern. The term “orthorexia,” derived from ancient Greek meaning “correct appetite,” first emerged in the United States in the 1990s.
Denoux notes, “We are witnessing a cultural shift in eating habits that causes us to question the food we consume, largely due to the growing distance between the producer and the consumer. This distance gives control over food quality to far-removed institutions, especially following major food crises.” After the “shock” of the mad cow disease outbreak in the early 1990s, and then the horsemeat scandal of 2013, “fear of what we eat has reached an all-time high,” says Pascale Hébel of the Research Center for the Study and Monitoring of Living Conditions (CREDOC). She adds, “The disconnect from rural life has contributed to this anxiety, which is particularly visible among the upper classes.”
Sabrina Debusquat, who fell into this healthy eating obsession for a year and a half, recalls, “I used to think I had discovered the ultimate truth about healthy eating that could help me live longer.”
She later wrote a book on the topic, titled Métro, boulot… Bonheur! (“Commute, Work… Happiness!”).
The 29-year-old French woman’s obsession started after developing an allergy to certain cosmetic products. Her internet searches led her to a flood of conflicting websites and studies about nutrition. “All that information made me extremely anxious. It was an extreme reaction to extremely unhealthy food,” she explains.
‘Better to Go Blind Than Eat Meat’
Denoux identifies three dominant dietary models: the traditional “grandmother’s” way, the industrial “filling” model, and the healthy “food-as-medicine” model.
He argues, “Orthorexia fails to reconcile these approaches and oversimplifies things by clinging only to the healthy model.”
Over a year and a half, Debusquat went from being a regular vegetarian to a strict vegan (avoiding all animal proteins), and then to eating only raw fruits and vegetables. “I wanted to reach a kind of purity,” she says. Her hair started falling out, but she wasn’t alarmed. It was only her partner’s visible concern that made her realize she had gone too far. “My body had taken control over my mind,” she admits. That moment prompted her to seek recovery, and she began taking vitamin B12—a nutrient produced by bacteria found in the stomachs of ruminants or sea creatures, and essential for red blood cell production.
According to dietician Dr. Sophie Ortega, one of her patients was so deficient in B12 that she was starting to lose her vision. “She was an extremely strict vegan and refused to take the vitamin because it came from animals,” Ortega says. “It was like she preferred going blind over betraying her ethical commitment to animals.”
Practicing for over 21 years, Ortega observes that many of her patients today are lost.
“Shopping at the supermarket has become a real dilemma when trying to maintain a balanced diet. Foods are now being marketed as if they were medicine.”
Still, she emphasizes that “a proper diet should include both plant-based and animal-based foods,” which allows for both spontaneity and pleasure.
