Study: Is Vegetarianism a Teen Eating Disorder? (Time magazine article)

[Systematic Chaos]

By John Cloud Tuesday, Apr. 07, 2009
Evans Caglage / Dallas Morning News / Corbis

Being a teenager means experimenting with foolish things like dyeing your hair purple or candy flipping or going door-to-door for a political party. Parents tend to overlook seemingly mild, earnest teen pursuits like joining the Sierra Club, but a new study in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association suggests that another common teen fad, vegetarianism, isn't always healthy. Instead, it seems that a significant number of kids experiment with a vegetarian diet as a way to mask an eating disorder, since it's a socially acceptable way to avoid eating many foods and one that parents tend not to oppose.

The study, led by nutritionist Ramona Robinson-O'Brien, an assistant professor at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University in Minnesota, found that while adolescent and young adult vegetarians were less likely than meat eaters to be overweight and more likely to eat a relatively healthful diet, they were also more likely to binge eat. Although most teens in Robinson-O'Brien's study claimed to embark on vegetarianism to be healthier or to save the environment and the world's animals, the research suggests they may be more interested in losing weight than protecting cattle or swine.

For one thing, many young "vegetarians" continue to eat the white meat of defenseless chickens (25% in the current study) as well as the flesh of those adorable animals known as fish (46%), even when they are butchered and served up raw as sushi. And in a 2001 study in the Journal of Adolescent Health, researchers found that the most common reason teens gave for vegetarianism was to lose weight or keep from gaining it. Adolescent vegetarians are far more likely than other teens to diet or to use extreme and unhealthy measures to control their weight, studies suggest. The reverse is also true: teens with eating disorders are more likely to practice vegetarianism than any other age group.

In a research venture called Project EAT-II: Eating Among Teens, Robinson-O'Brien and her team surveyed 2,516 young Minnesotans, ages 15 to 23. Of the respondents, 108 (or 4.3%) described themselves as currently vegetarian, another 268 (10.8%) said they were former vegetarians and the rest were lifelong meat eaters. The researchers found that in one sense, the vegetarians were healthier: they tended to consume less than 30% of their calories as fat, while non-vegetarians got more than 30% of their calories from fat. Not surprisingly, the vegetarians were also less likely to be overweight (17% were heavy vs. 28% of non-veggies).

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Remainder of article at http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1889742,00.html

They call this journalism?? The tone of the first paragraph was enough to make me want to break something. What do the rest of you think?

[WillParkinson]

1. Beyond stupid

Now you're going to have parents who have teens wondering why their kid might not want to eat meat and constantly harping at them for it.

Not journalism. Well, maybe the yellow variety.

[flvegan]

2. Considering the "study" was titled:

“Adolescent and young adult vegetarianism: Better dietary intake and weight outcomes but increased risk of disordered eating behaviors” sounds a wee bit slanted. The REALLY nice thing is that most published articles discussing it are entitled "The Dark Side of Vegetarianism"

I'd like to see the same criteria followed as was done in this study to almost any omnivorous collective in the same age range. Bet it's just about the same.

"Participants were identified as current (4.3%), former (10.8%), and never (84.9%) vegetarians. Subjects were divided into two cohorts, an adolescent (15-18) group and a young adult (19-23) group. They were questioned about binge eating and whether they felt a loss of control of their eating habits. More extreme weight control behaviors including taking diet pills, inducing vomiting, using laxatives, and using diuretics were also measured."

[livetohike]

3. It's a bit slanted, but I think some teens just cut out meat

and aren't educated to know what they should eat in a healthy vegetarian diet.

Years ago (early 70's), I volunteered at a free clinic and part of the outreach was to provide info on healthy vegetarian diets. There were sample recipes given and basic info on how to combine foods for optimum nutritional effect.

[LeftyMom]

4. I'm really not sure what the point is of studying "vegetarians" who eat meat.

I mean, only half of their sample appear to actually be vegetarians (probably lower than that if you start asking about stuff like broth, gelatin, rennet in cheese, etc.) If you narrowed the sample down to people who were actually vegetarians, you'd likely have a lower incidence. Their current sample probably includes a lot of people who use "vegetarianism" as an excuse not to eat certain things, and would likely use any other credible excuse, but who are not vegetarians.