14 DAY TRIAL // Experts are now saying that people who are terribly picky about their food may in fact be suffering from a previously-unrecognized affliction called selective eating disorder (SED).
Individuals suffering from this condition don't have just a few foods they would never touch, like the rest of us, but rather only a handful that they like. All others are unappealing and these people could never eat them.
This type of eating is very detrimental to people's social lives, as it entails a lot of stress. Some lose their marriages because of things like this, though admittedly no one suspected that SED had something to do with it.
“People who are picky aren't doing this just to be stubborn,” explains Duke University eating researcher Nancy Zucker, who was a member of the team that conducted a new study on the issue.
It could be that those who suffer from SED symptoms exhibit them because their whole eating experience is different than that of normal people. Zucker began researching the condition when people started pouring in at her workplace.
She is also the director of the Duke Center for Eating Disorders, and many people came there looking for a solution to their problem. They began reporting that SED got in the way of their social and personal lives, and also that it made their job difficult.
But the expert had nothing to start her research on, so she set up an online questionnaire where people could register and answer food-related questions. In the first five months of operations, the online tool revealed that more than 7,500 people had fully registered.
About 11,000 began the survey without completing it. This large number of people exhibiting SED-like symptoms puzzled researchers, who weren't expecting to find so many sufferers.
Conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, anorexia and bulimia were all accounted for in the questionnaire, which means that the results point at the existence of a new and separate disease.
The research team is currently planning to conduct a full-scale investigation into the issue next year, in order to tease out some of the most relevant symptoms of the disease, as well as possible avenues for treatment.
As of now, the team could not determine whether people's biology or psychology were responsible for extreme pickiness. A preliminary analysis of the survey conclusions would seem to indicate that either none or both may be responsible.
SED may also be caused by differences in sensory perception, or by other causes, such as for example negative eating experiences during childhood. “We don't all have the same experience when we eat,” Zucker concludes, quoted by LiveScience.