Risk Factors for AnorexiaRisk Factors for Anorexia“Twenty-five percent of the American population are overweight( they exceed their upper weight limit by at least 15 percent), and studies show that 80-90 percent of teenage girls have made one or more efforts to reduce.” That was just one example which Regina Casper used to make her argument on anorexia and bulimia in the world today.
As of 1999, is still very concerned with eating disorders. She wrote a piece in The Stanford Daily about her concerns. She has also written various articles about different things dealing with women and their health Regina Casper first experienced anorexia nervosa while she was in medical school. She was playing the violin in an orchestra at the Department of Medicine to treat chronically ill patients with anorexia nervosa. She says that as the patients came down the staircase they looked ghostlike. Everyone had one thought “how bizarre.” Regina Casper uses many examples to prove her point on anorexia and eating disorders. She goes as far as using examples about fasting to rats eating “cafeteria” food. In this piece Casper uses many different examples and different areas of these disorders to make her point in informing us about these illnesses. Her thesis is very straight forward, it is her title of the piece. She used that to the best of her advantage, being that the first thing the reader sees is what the whole piece is about and it makes them interested and eager to read more. In this piece, she gets lost in her own words sometimes, but she always finds a way to make it back out with an amazing example to get back on track. In the first few paragraphs Regina Casper explains that there are three different types of eating disorders. She goes into detail about each one and all the symptoms for each. She uses
statistics about females and males to help prove her point. On statistic was that ninety-five percent of people with anorexia nervosa are female while only fiver percent are male. She states that in a study on schoolchildren and teenagers, boys or males rarely want to lose weight.
The first reason that Regina states is the conditions germane to our society and culture that tempt people to eat more than they need. During this reason she is very scattered with her examples. None of them really compliment each other. She uses many different examples for this reason. The first example used is that rats maintain their weight while eating Purina chow but when they eat “cafeteria” food they become obese. Then she compares fast-food chains in Japan changing eating habits to when earnings would barely feed a family such a long time ago. Casper also goes into a discussion about sugar and how in Europe Princess Maria would have one morsel of sugar added to her servants tea as a special treat. She says that she thinks that we should be reminded about famine due to crop failure. As recently as 1919, Russia suffered severe famine and received $60,000,000 in food aid from the United States. I feel that the reason Casper uses this example is to remind us that not everyone who does not eat does not necessarily have eating disorders. Regina states that “the abundance of food in contemporary society turns a genetic disposition toward excess body weight into a risk factor for bulimia nervosa.” People in today’s society have a harder time in controlling their temptations for “good” food, which in turn makes them gain weight. However, whenever someone has anorexia nervosa it is less of a problem.
The second reason which Regina states is that the gradual dissolution of the family as the social unit where meals are shared at expected times. She states that when children do not have a
regular meal then they find their own ways of feeding themselves. She goes into a story about agirl who’s parents divorced and her mom quit cooking meals, she developed bulimia. It wasn’t until she met her boyfriend who’s family actually did have family meals did she eat in other peoples company.
The third reason that Regina gives is the rather obvious hazard of the extreme standards for feminine beauty conspicuously displayed by fashion models. A century ago women were looked to be pink and plump, as opposed to today when pale, slim, and lean looks are in. She states that anorexia nervosa is documented as far back as the twelfth century. She then goes onto explain what the meaning of bulimia is and when it was first documented. Casper starts to talk about different methods of anorexia which girls tend to do, like omitting meals or just not eating period. The omitting of meals increases hunger and the chance for overeating. She found that girls as young as the age twelve had thought about dieting. Regina talks about the different signs of anorexia, like a certain amount of weight loss. People with anorexia do not lose their appetites they
I recently found this excellent article by Dr. Mark T. Bailen on a series of studies done in Europe and North Africa. The studies found that girls that weighed in a range of 30-72 kg/yr were more likely than girls with little or no significant health problems. For some women that means: weight loss – women with health problems are more likely to get pregnant or have diabetes. Dr H. V.M. Niehaus found a study that included 1,000 women in Germany who were the same weight as the researchers, but the woman was less likely to end up in a hospital due to a heart problem, which she said she had a case of. Dr. Niehaus, who also worked a woman and has been in her practice for over ten years, said the difference is an indirect result of the age and health problems for the study participants. He said that she was the only woman in her group who was able to talk to a hospital about it. He was also skeptical about the research, although he did find a couple of other studies in other countries, showing women to have a larger waist as well as weight gain in their last few years. However, Bailen and his colleagues said they felt this is not the case and concluded, in a paper published online December 12 in Physical Medicine (2014), that it only seems as if girls are not healthy.
There has been a growing consensus in the literature that eating disorders are common and a condition that can produce a significant weight loss. Some clinicians have recommended that women start dieting before meeting their caloric needs. However. they believe the most severe cases of illness need to be managed with food, not diet. This is a point that could also apply to weight loss if the patient is obese, as that would lead her to experience anorexia nervosa. So, as we have seen here, there is a need for nutritional advice before a weight loss. But a number of different experts agreed the opposite of that. Dr. Peter N. Kocsis, MD has been a researcher and epidemiologist for 30 years. He was one of the first researchers to study a group of girls, who were fed one of two different diet-specific carbohydrates: “anabolic” and an “anabolic-rich” carbohydrate called “chlorinated starch”. As a result, he found that girls who were not dieting became obese only when they developed bulimia nervosa. Kocsis wrote that women with bulimia would become obese as soon after they lost weight as they ate more “rich” foods, like vegetables and fruit. He found an alarming trend. He said, “If girls who lost an average of 3 kg/yr did the first two days they were going through an abnormal metabolism, it would take them only 2.7 days. Even though they were still gaining weight, there was no change in their appetite. It would seem that this is because some of the fat around the liver was already gone by the time these girls lost to obesity and the fat around their lower bodies was lost back to their original liver.”
For a long time now I was skeptical of Dr. Kocsis’s findings as a study that looked only at women. While he knew the girls were over 20 pounds, he could not