The Japan Times Online Oct.8の記事からの抜粋です。
Orthorexia: When ‘healthy eating’ ends up making you sick
PARIS -- People, it seems, have never been so afraid of their food -- and, say some experts, an obsession with healthy eating may paradoxically be endangering lives.
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The term “orthorexia nervosa” was coined in the 1990s by the then alternative medicine practitioner Steven Bratman, a San Francisco-based physician.
To be clear, orthorexia is not an interest in healthy eating -- it is when enthusiasm becomes a pathological obsession, which leads to social isolation, psychological disturbance and even physical harm. In other words, as Bratman said in a co-authored book in 2000, it is “a disease disguised as a virtue.”
"Orthorexia" の "ortho" は "orthodox" の "ortho" と関係し、"rexia" は "anorexia" と関係があるようです。つまり、特定の食べ物だけを病的にまで正しい食べ物と信じている人の様です。辞書で確認します。
・Oxford English Dictionary: A medical condition in which the sufferer systematically avoids specific foods in the belief that they are harmful.: The latest eating disorder is known as orthorexia nervosa, an obsessive eating of pure foods in the quest for improved health.
・Word Spy: An extreme desire to eat only healthy food.
Note: This word is based on the more famous (and, so far, more widely recognized) eating disorder, anorexia. The latter combines an-, “without,” and -orexia, “appetite.” Orthorexia modifies this by substituting the prefix ortho-, “correct or proper.” And in the same way that a sufferer of anorexia (also: anorexia nervosa) is called an (or is described as) anorexic, a sufferer of orthorexia (orthorexia nervosa) is an (or is described as) orthorexic. (A synonym for an orthorexic is food-fraidy.) The term was coined by Steven Bratman, and he provides the earliest citation.
植物しか食べないビジタリアンも "orthorexia" の一種の気がします。