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Comment by ddxxdd | Hacker News Reader

Questions I had after reading the article:

1. Is there any reason why these researchers are focusing on an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating, instead of an unhealthy obsession with [x: x ∈ anything], or just unhealthy obsessions in general?

2. Are there enough people with this disorder to classify it as a disorder?

3. Why are "Lacto-vegetarians" at the highest risk? What is it about drinking milk that makes people want to be extremely healthy?

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Answers I received after reading the link to the University Press Release:

1. It's basically a disorder for people whom are relapsing from a previous eating disorder. Although it's gender-neutral for some reason.

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You could classify lots of things as 'unhealthy obsessions' but then you'd just have a group of disorders, it wouldn't help you treat them. Clearly even two kinds of obsessive eating patterns are different enough to warrant different analysis. For example, there are a great many more practical ways you can act on ON than AN, and being health-obsessed might have less social stigma so the patterns leading to it might be harder to pick out as problems. If you want to treat these people on their terms and in ways that make sense, you have to drill down and deconstruct the specific phenomena.

There is a place for general obsession research, of course, but examining why people congregate around this one is obviously helpful to that goal anyway. What exactly about healthy eating makes it attractive to obsessive tendencies? The commonalities and differences compared to AN are surely going to be valuable.

We programmers like to abstract over things, but tons of good work in science involves just having a go at at one thing until it is better understood.

I think the answer you got is correct: this is what a lot of people who are semi-recovered from an eating disorder wind up with. That aspect is what distinguishes it from other obsessions.

Interestingly, eating disorders and chronic semi-starvation lead to rigid, OCD-like behaviors. For me it was rituals around walking and movement - they have faded away during eating disorder recovery.

Is there any reason the astronomers choose to focus on Wolf-Rayet star evolution and not stars in general?

Science starts with data. If you want to prove a general theory, you show that it fits the simply-collected facts. You don't cook your experiment to prove your pet hypothesis.

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