As a nice counterbalance to the 20/20 story on orthorexia, CNN’s Sanjay Gupta, M.D., has now taken a look at the raw food diet as well.
Angela Stoke’s story of successful weight loss and energy gain through the raw food lifestyle is encouraging and should help paint a more positive picture of the movement.
Last year Sanjay Gupta did a big piece on life extension and calorie restriction in which he displayed similar equanimity. Further, he willingly submitted to public testing and evaluation of his own diet. Bravo!
Friday’s episode of 20/20, entitled “Orthorexia: Obsessing Over Health Food,” really painted an ugly picture of the so-called health food nut in general, but even more so of the raw food movement, the primary focus of their story.
According to Wikipedia, the term orthorexia was actually coined by the Steven Bratman, the author interviewed in the first segment.
In Part 1, we meet the scarily skinny Johnny Giovanni Righini. Here the distinction is drawn between this diagnosis of orthorexia — not (yet?) officially recognized in the medical and psychological texts — and anorexia. The latter involves a distorted body image. In this case, Johnny knows how he looks and has a website devoted to his recovery from both.
In Part 2, John Stossel, in his admirably blunt fashion, points out to Victoras Kulvinskas, one of the original raw food advocates and author of Surviving Into The 21st Century, among several others, is only eight years older than himself, but looks much older.
My favorite quote is from the second part, “Nobody gets to pick how they die, they only get to pick how they live.” (-Charlotte Andersen, 29-year-old, mother of three) True, true. Indeed, it’s this very reason that many Calorie Restrictors eat as they do, i.e., not so much for life extension as health extension.
It’s hard to say how 20/20’s story will be received by the general public. As always, a lot depends on who the media chooses as spokespeople to represent a given movement, organization, trend, etc.. Perhaps by picking Johnny, they’ve drawn a clear enough contrast, at least based on appearance, that health-conscious individuals will not all soon be confronted (more than they already are?) by friends and family with this show as “proof” of their “illness.”
So, what do you all think? Do you see yourself in these stories? How do family and friends react to your “obsession”? Does Stossel have a point about Kulvinskas’ aged look? Post your comment and let’s chat.
As promised, now that my blog is on a more professional host and I’ve time to come up for air, I’m ready to make my big announcement. I’m really excited about this and put in a lot of sleepless nights and weekends, installing and fighting software, crunching the nutritional numbers, etc..
As you know, there’s a lot of buzz these days about green smoothies. Even Oprah has whipped up a blenderful or two on her show. In fact, she’s currently trying a 21-day vegan challenge! It seems all my dietary modifications started with time-bounded experiments that continued past their fourth-dimensional boxes. Let’s hope it does the same for her and her fans.
My latest personal “challenge” (the quotes because it wasn’t challenging at all) was a couple weeks on a self-designed liquid raw healing protocol. Green smoothies were front and center. While there’s nothing new under the sun, I purposely avoided reading raw food books or searching the web for ideas during this period, in order to at least attempt creating just that.
I expected to emerge with twenty-one new raw blender recipes. Instead, I was having too much fun. With the habit firmly entrenched, I just kept going. Now, a smoothie a day is back in my repertoire. Back? Indeed. Funny thing is, before I went vegan, a yogurt smoothie was my breakfast of choice.
Toss the yogurt and replace with a tossed salad and you’ve got something closer to what I enjoy today. Ultimately, I stopped compiling the recipes at just over 50. After all, I’d told everyone they were on the way. And now, they’re here! Better yet, I set about creating a community forum where members can share their own creations, modifications, and in general just get to know each other.
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