Unlike people with anorexia or bulimia, picky eaters don't seem to make food choices based on calorie content. They aren't necessarily skinny or obsessed with looking a certain way. Researchers don't know yet what drives the behavior, but they say textures and smell can account for a picky eater's limited diet. Some will only eat foods with one consistent texture or one taste, leading some medical experts to speculate that picky eaters have some obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Doctors worry that over the long term such eating habits could lead to nutritional deficiencies linked to health concerns, including bone and heart problems.Um.... okay, is it at all possible to have a mild form of this? This description creeps me out. I didn't realize it wasn't normal?
Picky eaters tend to gravitate to certain foods, including blander products that are often white or pale colored, like plain pasta or cheese pizza. For reasons that aren't clear, almost all adult picky eaters like French fries and often chicken fingers, health experts say.
Amber Scott, of Enon, Ohio, has eaten only about 10 different foods since she was 3 years old. She describes foods that don't appeal to her as if they are inedible objects. "You wouldn't put a handful of grass in your mouth and chew it up," says the 29-year-old. "I feel the same way about spaghetti." It isn't as much the flavor as it is the texture and the way her body reacts to a new food, she says. When she tried eating an apricot last fall, her stomach churned. "I really wanted to like it, but my body wouldn't let me," she says.
"Is this not OCD manifested as an eating disorder?"That assumes a lot of things, including, inter alia...
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 11:46 AM on July 6, 2010 [1 favorite]
-Krishnamurti
The line between a disorder and a personality quirk is the point at which the issue negatively affects your quality of life (or that of people who are close to you). If you cope by mostly eating at home that's totally cool. If you're lying to people around you or obsessively fearing for your children's health, that's probably a disorder.
Jordan: For reasons that aren't clear, almost all adult picky eaters like French fries and often chicken fingers, health experts say.Told you guys.
HAHA
That's pretty funny
Because I'm kind of picky about chicken fingers
I don't like the ones with the clear vein of gelatinous fat in the middle
I have a medical condition that prevents me from taking part in social activitiesor
I need to learn skills that well let me stand up for myself and push back when people get all up in my grill about what I'm willing or not willing to eat?I've had this come up in family contexts where someone has prepared an elaborate meal full of stuff I find repulsive, I took a Miss Manners Approved™ gesture of a bite, left the rest, and engaged the table conversation.
Okay, if you want to be a food adventurer, you have to put up with those nights of gut-busting horror, when the new, glorious textures and tastes that have thrilled your mouth come face to face with digestive system wholly at odds with them, and the result is an evening of abdominal pain and diarrhea. Stinky cheese, weird fruit, the world-wide varieties of Let-it-rot-till-it's-edible cuisine... you want in on the magic, you gotta spend the odd night groaning in gut-twisting agony punctuated by wet-crapping yourself senseless*Mmmm... food novelty for food novelty's sake. Sell me on it, Tony! ;-)
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And what she doesn't eat? Pretty much anything else.
I'm no shrink, and we all have our preferences, but I'd say Ms. Hill might be carrying it to the point of neurosis. Just saying.
posted by jonmc at 9:10 AM on July 6, 2010 [1 favorite]