Latest Expert Witness News
Chasing size zero leads women to ‘famine then feast’ eating disorder
The size-zero obsession could be forcing women into extreme diets followed by periods of bingeing on junk food, an expert said yesterday.
Janet Treasure, of the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, said animal studies showed that starvation followed by bingeing on highly palatable foods, such as burgers or chocolate, could alter the way that the brain responds to food.
She said that the fashion industry’s obsession with thinness not only put models at a high risk of developing eating disorders, but inspired imitation among the general public.
“There’s a tendency to break the diet when you see these highly palatable foods,” she said. “That sets it up so you get into a cycle of intermittent naughtiness. It gets you into a momentum – hooked on that sort of cycle.”
Professor Treasure, a specialist on eating disorders, said that the pattern was known as “binge priming”.
In an editorial published in the British Journal of Psychiatry she said that studies on animals, which simulated periods of self-denial followed by exposure to highly palatable foods, led to binge eating and to a susceptibility to addictive behaviours. “If, after a period of food restriction, animals are intermittently exposed to highly palatable food they will significantly overeat.
“This pattern continues when their weight is restored. This tendency to overconsume or ‘binge’ when exposed to highly palatable foods remains several months after the period of binge priming. Translating into the human situation we would predict that binge priming caused by irregular dieting and/or extreme food restriction, interspersed with intermittent consumption of snacks and other highly palatable food, might lead to permanent changes in the reward system.”
If this happened in adolescence, when the brain was more susceptible to rewards, it might lead to persistent eating problems, she said. People exposed to binge priming may also be more prone to substance misuse.
The editorial called for a greater focus on reducing obsessive dieting and poor eating habits among young people. It said: “Although it may take time to change the ‘thin ideal’, we should remember what has been achieved with cigarette smoking.”
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