We seem to have forgotten that humans are omnivorous. Around the world and throughout history, people have thrived on diets diverse and extreme enough to shame the fad diet section in any modern bookstore. Populations have flourished on staples like whale blubber, insects, roots, or grains, often with little else. Even in recent centuries of European plenty, generations of aristocracy touched virtually nothing but sugary cakes and alcohol, while peasants across the street survived on rotten vegetables and hard biscuits; yet both experienced similar outcomes. In fact we differ little in this respect from the humble rat, able to live healthy lives on just about anything we can stomach.

Where we break from the rat is in our intelligence (though, as the impressed father of a rat-rearing daughter, I find the difference, in some cases, may not be as marked as we think). We have the conscious ability to analyze the content of our food, to understand its constituents. We know that too little food causes malnutrition and too much makes us fat, and we understand the consequences of both. The benefit of this understanding has driven some of us to seek deeper, and sometimes illusory, targets of super-health that are not merely within the wide margins of healthy eating, but that attempt to constrict those margins to allow only very specific foods in hyper-controlled portions. When taken to the extreme, the compulsion for such restrictive diets can lead to an eating disorder that may actually cause nutritional deficiencies (even as far as starvation and death) or, even more commonly, social isolation and obsessive behavior. This disorder is called orthorexia, from the Greek meaning “appetite for the correct food.” While the anorexic feels compelled to eat ever less in pursuit of an impossible body image, the orthorexic fanatically focuses on certain foods and avoids others, chasing an imagined model of perfect health, sometimes to the point of delusion.

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