Healthy Eating & Eating Disorders - Anorexia, Bulimia, Binging | Episode 36

Anorexia nervosa is the most deadly psychiatric disorder by a huge margin. And if you look statistically at the number of people with eating disorders and that die of eating disorders, it's not far off from the number of people that die from automobile accidents.

Mice and humans can utilize amino acids that are ingested early in the day better than they can utilize amino acids ingested later in the day, in particular, toward muscle hypertrophy and growth or maintenance of muscle.

In fact, anorexia is the most dangerous psychiatric disorder of all—even more than depression. The probability of death for untreated anorexia is very high. And sadly, the prevalence of anorexia is very high.

There are two types of neurons within a particular area of your hypothalamus that are relevant here. There are the so-called POMC neurons (proopiomelanocortin neurons) that tend to act as more of a break on appetite by way of another hormone called melanocyte-stimulating hormone ... When you're getting a lot of sunlight and you're viewing a lot of sunlight, that system is ramped up. This is why appetite is lower in the summer months than it is in the winter months. This is true in animals, and this is true in humans.

Anorexics have a hyper-acuity, a hyper-awareness, of the fat content of foods—almost to the point of being sort of fat content savants. Now, they don't necessarily know that they're doing this ... They start to do this, more or less, reflexively.

If you are interested in maintaining or enhancing muscle tissue volume... you might want to consider eating quality protein and amino acids early in the day.

Anorexia nervosa is extremely common; it's anywhere from 1-2% of women. And the typical onset is in adolescence close to puberty, but it can show up later in life as well.

Men can be anorexic as well, but anorexia nervosa does seem to occur at 10 times the rate in women and young girls than it does in men and young boys.

Nobody, not the government, no nutritionists, no individual, no matter how knowledgeable they are about food and nutrition and food intake, can define the best plan for eating for any one individual.

This is one of the first times in human evolution where we mostly eat out of a desire to consume food, not out of a need for food. Most everybody could go a fairly long period of time just ingesting water and electrolytes. And not that I'm suggesting people do that, but let's face it—we largely eat nowadays because of a desire to eat, not a need to eat.