Phone Apps Dialing Up Eating Disorders

MONDAY, Dec. 28 (HealthDay News) — The smartphone applications that help modern-world dwellers find restaurants in Calcutta, calculate the size of a room or even read a bar code may also fuel eating disorders.

In the wrong hands, apps and other instant technology may trigger obsessional behavior by allowing teens and young adults to constantly count calories and monitor their weight and food intake, experts say.


“This has been a concern of ours,” said Dr. Harry Brandt, director of the Center for Eating Disorders at Sheppard Pratt in Towson, Md. “So many high school and college students have iPhone or smartphones or BlackBerries and a wave of applications that, to individuals with eating disorders, can be very detrimental. It’s a combination of obsessionality and perfectionism.”

Also troubling is the possibility that weight loss and calorie-counting apps may push some vulnerable teens and young adults over the edge to anorexia or bulimia.

“Maybe a young woman doesn’t yet have anorexia nervosa but begins to very carefully monitor all the foods she’s eating and her caloric intake and her weight in a very rigorous way on an iPhone application and becomes so fixated on doing this that it becomes a goal to lose more and more to feel successful in that endeavor,” Brandt said.

Other experts, even if they haven’t yet seen an uptick in such app misuse, acknowledged that a troubling trend could be brewing.

“As you start to lose weight, as you become more starved, you can become obsessive about what you’re doing,” said Dr. Sara Forman, director of the outpatient eating disorders program at Children’s Hospital Boston. “Often, once things get going and the more obsessive you get, then the more you’re spurred on and the more inflexible you get.”

Forman said she hadn’t yet noticed the app phenomenon. “That doesn’t mean it’s not happening,” she said. “We are usually a few steps behind [our patients] because there’s so much technology going through us rapid fire.”

Technology-based applications may provide a “smokescreen for people to convince themselves and others that what they’re doing is healthy,” said Dr. Michael Rich, director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Children’s Hospital Boston.

But this new concern has to fit into a larger landscape of the overweight and obese. Two-thirds of Americans currently exceed a healthy body size, and, by some accounts, ever-evolving technology may actually be able to help these people.

“We have an obesity epidemic going on, so it’s important to have some of these things,” Forman said.

A study out of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that children who sent text messages detailing aspects of their exercise and food intake were more likely to stay in the program compared to kids who used conventional paper-and-pencil diaries (the study was not designed to look specifically at weight loss). The text messagers kept better track of their habits than did the diarists.

“Self-monitoring is one of the most important ingredients of the weight control recipe. The problem is that people do not stick to self-monitoring and thus lose track of what they are doing and do not experience weight loss,” said Jennifer Shapiro, lead author of the study and scientific director of Santech, Inc. in La Jolla, Calif. “Unlike paper diaries, text messaging is quick, easy, fun, and their phones are usually with them. Text messaging allows for instant feedback, which is also very important when making behavioral changes.”

Shapiro did the study while an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine.

And there are also efforts afoot to use Palm Pilots and text messaging to aid people with eating disorders, Brandt said.

“There are a lot of conflicting messages right now as a result of two different problems that require two different approaches,” Brandt said. “You probably shouldn’t be rigidly and compulsively monitoring your nutritional intake but should eat a wide variety of foods and not be obsessively calorie counting. The war on obesity says you have to be thinner, and the eating disorder prevention movement says you need to lighten up on yourself a bit.”

More information

The U.S. National Institute of Mental Health has more on eating disorders.

By Amanda Gardner
HealthDay Reporter

SOURCES: Harry Brandt, M.D., director, Center for Eating Disorders, Sheppard Pratt, Towson, Md.; Sara Forman, M.D., director, outpatient eating disorders program, Children’s Hospital Boston; Michael Rich, M.D., director, Center on Media and Child Health, Children’s Hospital Boston; Jennifer R. Shapiro, Ph.D., scientific director, Santech, Inc., La Jolla, Calif.

Last Updated: Dec. 28, 2009

Copyright © 2009 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.

The Dark Side of Vegetarianism

WEDNESDAY, April 1 (HealthDay News) — Despite its proven health benefits, a vegetarian diet might in fact be masking an underlying eating disorder, new research suggests.

The study, in the April issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, found that twice as many teens and nearly double the number of young adults who had been vegetarians
reported having used unhealthy means to control their weight, compared with those who had never been vegetarians. Those means included using diet pills, laxatives and diuretics and inducing vomiting to control weight.

There’s a dark side to vegetarianism, said Dr. David L. Katz, director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine. He had no role in the research.

“Adolescent vegetarians [in the study] were more prone to disordered eating and outright eating disorders,” Katz said. “This is not due to vegetarianism but the other way around: Adolescents struggling to control their diets and weight might opt for vegetarianism among other, less-healthful efforts.”

Vegetarianism, or a mostly plant-based diet, can be recommended to all adolescents, Katz said. “But when adolescents opt for vegetarianism on their own, it is important to find out why because it may signal a cry for help, rather than the pursuit of health,” he said.

Katz said he thinks a balanced vegetarian diet is among the most healthful of dietary patterns, and the study suggests some of the benefits.

“Adolescents practicing vegetarianism were less likely to be overweight than their omnivorous counterparts and, were the measures available, would likely have had better blood pressure and cholesterol, too,” he said. “Eating mostly plants — and even only plants — is good for us, and certainly far better for health than the typical American diet.”

The study’s lead researcher, Ramona Robinson-O’Brien, an assistant professor in the Nutrition Department at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University in St. Joseph, Minn., agreed.

“The majority of adolescents and young adults today would benefit from improvements in dietary intake,” she said. The study found, for instance, that the vegetarians among the participants generally were less likely to be overweight or obese.

“However, current vegetarians may be at increased risk for binge eating, while former vegetarians may be at increased risk for extreme unhealthful weight-control behaviors,” she said. “Clinicians and nutrition professionals providing guidance to young vegetarians might consider the potential benefits associated with a healthful vegetarian diet, [but should] recognize the possibility of increased risk of disordered eating behaviors.”

The researchers collected data on 2,516 teens and young adults who participated in a study called Project EAT-II: Eating Among Teens. They classified participants as current, former or never vegetarians and divided them into two age groups: teens (15 to 18) and young adults (19-23).

Each participant was questioned about binge eating, whether they felt a loss of control of their eating habits and whether they used any extreme weight-control behaviors.

About 21 percent of teens who had been vegetarians said they used unhealthy weight-control behaviors, compared with 10 percent of teens who had never been vegetarians. Among young adults, more former vegetarians (27 percent) had used such measures than current vegetarians (16 percent) or those who’d never been vegetarians (15 percent), the study found.

In addition, among teenagers, binge eating and loss of control over eating habits was reported by 21 percent of current and 16 percent of former vegetarians but only 4 percent of those who’d never followed a vegetarian diet. For young adults, more vegetarians (18 percent) said they engaged in binge eating with loss of control than did former vegetarians (9 percent) and those who were never vegetarians (5 percent), the study found.

Young adult vegetarians were less likely to be overweight or obese than were those who’d never been vegetarians. Among teens, the study found no statistically significant differences in weight.

“When guiding adolescent and young adult vegetarians in proper nutrition and meal planning, it is important to recognize the potential health benefits and risks associated with a vegetarian diet,” Robinson-O’Brien said. “Furthermore, it may be beneficial to investigate an individual’s motives for choosing a vegetarian diet and ask about their current and former vegetarian status when assessing risk for disordered eating behaviors.”

More information

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has more on a healthful diet.

SOURCES: Ramona Robinson-O’Brien, Ph.D., R.D., assistant professor, Nutrition Department, College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University, St. Joseph, Minn.; David L. Katz, M.D., M.P.H., director, Prevention Research Center, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Conn.; April 2009 Journal of the American Dietetic Association

By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter

 Last Updated: April 01, 2009

Copyright © 2009 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.