Health Food Junkies

He asked if I was a musician or an artist.

My answer not only horrified him, but helped us both quickly decide that I was not the person to fill his empty room for rent.

"I like to cook," I answered, quite unprepared for the outrage my hobby would inspire.

His face twisted with disgust as he vividly explained how the wonderful smells wafting from my pots and pans while cooking were all of the vitamins and nutrients being sucked out of the ingredients. He described what was left behind, my homemade creation, as nothing more than "a toxic soup."

"That's why I'm on a raw foods diet," he said proudly, adding that his housemate was into raw foodism as well. He admitted, with clear disapproval, that she had a weakness for cooked pasta, and said my fondness for preparing Italian dishes made me an especially poor candidate for the room.

Even before he began swinging from what appeared to be pull-up bars attached to the ceiling -- insisting that "most people don't play enough" -- I knew our future living together was grim. I had to excuse myself and, regardless of the scarcity of housing, let that one get away.

Author Dr. Steven Bratman, a medical doctor and acupuncturist, confesses that he gave similar speeches to countless friends and family during his years as a macrobiotic, vegan (vegetarian who eats no eggs, dairy or animal products) raw foods follower -- to name just a few of his dietary habits. Others included chewing each morsel of food 50 times and making it a rule never to eat a vegetable more than 15 minutes after picked.

Now, in his new book, "Health Food Junkies: Overcoming the Obsession with Healthful Eating," Bratman creates the term "orthorexia nervosa" as a label for those who push interest in normally healthy foods to dangerous extremes. As one who was also "seduced" by righteous eating but escaped from the damaging addiction, he wants to help others trapped by orthorexia.

"There have always been recommendations regarding the healthiest food to eat, but in recent decades the obsession over healthy eating seems to have escalated out of control. In more and more people it seems to be taking on the characteristics of an eating disorder like anorexia or bulimia," Bratman writes in the introduction to his book. "However, unlike these other eating disorders, orthorexia disguises itself as a virtue."

He acknowledges that all vegetarians and vegans are not obsessive, and that eating low on the food chain can be extremely healthy. Still, Bratman warns against pushing restrictive diets to extremes.

"It's not that I don't support eating healthy food," he says. "It's only that when healthy eating becomes an obsession, it's no longer healthy."

Unlike other addictions and their complicated 12 steps, Bratman offers three stages in his book to recovering from orthorexia -- admitting the problem, understanding the causes and learning to eat without obsession. Basically he urges readers to get a life, not just a menu.

The Vice of Virtue

Doctor Bratman has enough horror stories to compete with any doctor who has worked with junkies trying to get clean. One of his patients, a raw-foodist who limited her diet to only include fruits and vegetables, fainted so frequently from protein deficiency that he decided to hospitalize her. She avoided being admitted to the hospital by vowing to eat protein-rich nuts and legumes, only to crash her car into a storefront and die a few days later.

"She is believed to have fainted while driving," Bratman says.

He tells of another woman, also a strict raw-foodist, who died in a hotel room while hiding out from the friends who were trying to put her in the hospital. Then there's the man who allowed his child to drink just four ounces of water a day so as not to over-hydrate, and created a state of severe dehydration for the boy.