Association Between Orthorexia and Plant-Based Diets – Understanding the Vicious Cycle

Nowadays, social media and rapidly changing dietary trends encourage people to constantly – often excessively – control their diet, what leads to an increased risk of developing eating disorders, including orthorexia nervosa (ON). At the same time, more and more people cut down or give up consumption of meat and other animal products, adopting different types of plant-based (vegetarian) diets. The following paper aimed to show that ON has several features in common with plant-based diets and that they are closely related on many levels. It remains unclear whether vegetarianism increases the risk of developing ON, or whether the development of ON increases the chances of switching to a plant-based diet. However, based on the available literature, a positive association can be shown between the two. On the one hand, vegetarian diet may be a cover for ON, but on the other, vegetarians, as a group avoiding specific food products, may be wrongly perceived as disordered. Thus, it is important to distinguish ON from the so-called healthy orthorexia (HO), which is a non-pathological interest in healthy eating, to avoid overdiagnosis and stigmatization of people using healthy alternative diets, including plant-based diets.