Prof. Janet Treasure OBE

What is an eating disorder?

Well, an eating disorder is quite a broad term and there are many different forms. They can be undereating or overeating or eating certain sorts of foods, and the definition is increasing all the time at the moment.

How common are eating disorders?

Well, eating disorders are increasing in prevalence. First of all, there are these new definitions of types of eating disorders. So when I started in this field over 40 years ago, we only had anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa only came into the classification in the eighties. But since such times, we've had many different forms of eating disorder, such as binge eating disorder, and a lot of disorders of eating that occur in childhood, such as pico and rumination, an avoidant, restrictive type of eating disorder. Furthermore, there are many different types of eating disorder that perhaps the press enjoy making into different titles such as DI bulimia, which is an eating disorder that's specific for people with Type one diabetes or orthorexia, which is where people only eat certain types of food that they regard as healthy or clean, et cetera. But they haven't been accepted yet in diagnostic criteria.

Why do people have an eating disorder?

Well, there's a lot of work trying to understand the causes of an eating disorder, and what it's happening is that we're finding that it's quite a complicated pattern. There are genetic reasons, so the type of constitution that people have, but also there's interactions with the environment. So them can be traumas or sort of food environments, the body shape and size environments, and also developmental features. So they do tend to occur at around puberty, and so there are vast changes in hormones and body types over that time. So it's a mixture of all of these social, genetic, developmental factors.

What causes an eating disorder?

What are the different types of eating disorders?