Eating disorders are an imminent health issue that has affected more than 30 million Americans. As a mental illness with the highest mortality rate, eating disorder which was previously known only as a “rich, spoiled, white girl’s disease” (Bordo, 266), has influenced Americans without regard to their gender, age, ethnicity or economic status. Sadly, the pervasive nature of this disease is still hardly known by many clinicians. Doctors still often brand eating disorders as a privilege only young white girls can suffer from. 

The first perspective to understand eating disorders were based on racially skewed populations: “most of the initial clinical data came from the treatment of white, middle, and upper-middle-class patients” (Saukko, 66). As people of color were still fighting for equality when eating disorders started to emerge in 1973,  Caucasians who at that time were the only ones who had the money and cultural support to seek treatments became the standard for eating disorders. This racially discriminating factor has caused unfair treatments among  people of color: “Black teenagers are 50% more likely than white teenages to exhibit binging and purging behaviors” (Goeree), yet their concerns of weight concerns were “significantly less likely than white participants to have been asked by a doctor about eating disorder symptoms” (Becker). Discussion of eating disorders, both in medical organization or media, rarely include Blacks, Latinas and Asians. Consider, however, Tenisha Williamson. Tenisha is African American and she suffers from anorexia. She has described her struggles on ‘Colors of Ana,’ a website devoted only to the stories of non-white women struggling with eating and body image problems. Tenisha, who was raised believing that it was a mark of racial superiority that black women are comfortable with larger bodies, feels like a traitor to her race because she does not want a voluptuous body. In the last 25 years, clinicians are seeing more and more ethnic, and racial diversity among their anorexic patients, yet racial discrimination still persists. 

The United States government has  been consistent in its effort to battle eating disorders. Federal funds which include prevention, treatment, and research for eating disorders have increased by $2 million from  FY 2017 to FY 2018. Such funding has allowed the National Institute of Mental health to conduct research to improve the diagnosis and treatment of eating disorders. For instance, since 2015, the institute has helped University of North Carolina Healthcare Research to orchestrate a study which hypothesized “genetic locus on chromosome 12” (Bulik, 12) as the genetic variation causing anorexia nervosa. By focusing on hereditary vulnerabilities which are equally distributed among people suffering from eating disorders, researchers are hopeful to develop effective strategies for early detection.    

However, fundings solely given to research is not enough to combat eating disorders. As Susan Bordo states in her essay Not Just “a White Girl’s Thing,” eating disorder is “a complex, multi layered cultural ‘symptom,’ reflecting problems that are historical as well as contemporary, accelerating in our time because of the confluence of media imagery and the obsession to look perfect” (Bordo, 269). Not only does it have to do with new social expectations of women and its resulting ambivalence toward the lean, athletic body, it also deals with general anxieties about the body as “the source of hungers, needs and physical vulnerabilities not within our control” (Bordo, 270). This concern represents the “contradictions of consumer culture, which continually encourage us to binge on our desires at the same time as it glamorizes self-discipline and scorn far as a symbol of laziness and lack of willpower” (Gard). Eating disorders reflect, too, our post-modern fascination to reshape our bodies in radical ways, creating new selves that are unlimited by our genetic inheritance. The incredible spread of these problems to extraordinarily diverse groups of genetic populations, over a strikingly short period of time, and coincident with the mass globalization of media imagery, strongly suggests that culture is indeed the “smoking gun.” The situation will never change until the culture does. 

References:

Becker, Anne E, et al. “Ethnicity and Differential Access to Care for Eating Disorder Symptoms.” The International Journal of Eating Disorders, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Mar. 2003, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ pubmed/12616587. 

Bordo, Susan. Food and Culture: Not Just “a White Girl’s Thing” Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2009. 

Bulik, Cynthia. Midlife Eating Disorders. Bloomsbury, 2009. 

Gard, MC, and CP Freeman. “The Dismantling of a Myth: a Review of Eating Disorders and Socioeconomic Status.” The International Journal of Eating Disorders, U.S. National Library of Medicine, July 1996, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8807347/. 

Goeree, Jacob K., and Leeat Yariv. “An Experimental Study of Collective Deliberation.” Wiley Online Library, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 4 May 2011, onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.3982/ECTA8852. 

Saukko, Paula. Critical Feminist Approaches to Eating Disorders. London: Routledge    Taylor & Francis Group,  2009.