Researcher: A common vegan diet is a smokescreen to hide eating disorders

Numerous studies Show an association between a vegetarian diet and eating disorders.

Green food itself isn’t a problem, but a plant-based diet for people with eating disorders can work as a socially acceptable way to limit the foods you eat and the amount you get.

Anna Bardoni Kohn is Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. she’s done One of the most famous studies On the relationship between a vegetarian diet and eating disorders.

She wanted to find out if it was really common to eat whole greens among people with eating disorders and check what they mention about the reasons for their food choices. In the study, young women with eating disorders were compared with a control group consisting of healthy women of the same age.

It turns out that 52 percent of those with eating disorders eat a whole plant. In the control group, the number was only 12 percent.

Veganism evolved as a smokescreen.

As researchers begin to delve into the reasons for food choices, the trend becomes more clear. Up to 68 percent of the young women who developed eating disorders in Anna Bardoni’s Cohn study believed that their vegetarianisms were directly linked to disease and that they eat vegetables to keep calorie intake low.

In people who have eating disorders who are vegetarians, vegans are generally developed as a smokescreen to be able to keep the eating disorder at bay and hide it, she says.

camouflage They have an eating disorder

Bardone Cone, who is himself a vegetarian, asserts that a vegan diet is no worse or less nutritious than the omnivores they put out for themselves. Assays of the nutritional content of various plant-based diets show that they are nutritionally inadequate, both for adults and for adolescents. However, herbivores must eat larger and balanced amounts to get what the body needs.

But Anna Bardoni-Kohn believes that people with eating disorders often state that they are vegetarians in order to control their diet. By calling yourself a vegetarian, you are avoiding eating food that is required by the rest of the family or different social contexts. Instead, you can control your calorie intake and opt out, without you noticing too much and thus camouflaging your eating disorder.

“Ask why”

Anna Bardoni-Conn believes that a vegan diet has many benefits, among other things, for the environment and health, but she thinks it’s okay to dare ask questions about the motivation behind when a teen suddenly becomes a vegetarian.

Ask why and why now, she says. I think it’s good to have a discussion about what motivates him and what’s behind it.

The documentary series “Eating Disorder” consists of three episodes released once a week. sIts on SVT Play.