by Mary Pettengill
An eating disorder occurs when an individual manipulates his or her eating habits to drastically change the appearance of the body, usually to fit the social norm or socially idealized body type of their culture. In America we usually associate these concepts with anorexia and bulimia where the goal is to lose weight and keep that weight off. However, this only occurs in Western Nations and predominantly among causasian populations in these nations. These diseases did not exist in the Eastern World until American and European advertisement began influencing Asian and Middle Eastern cultures, and even still the actual numbers of those suffering are extremely small compared to the number in Western Nations.
America is home to 24 of the 70 million individual with eating disorders worldwide, a huge number when you consider that this is over a third of the world’s sufferers of such diseases. Of the individuals struggling with anorexia and bulimia in the United States, they are predominately white. In 1985 there were only five cases of bulimia in African Americans, showing a huge cultural split. Numbers take a leap in Asian minorities living in Western cultures where in the same year there were seven girls found suffering of bulimia and one with anorexia.
More recently, as Japan has had huge economic growth and is being more and more influenced by the Western World, the numbers of those suffering from eating disorders have grown rapidly. Second in the world to America and Europe in eating disorder statistics in Japan are the world’s highest, but still in 1986 only 1312 individuals were found with eating disorders, and in surrounding counties they are still less than ten. These numbers alone speak a lot for Western culture and for the countries that Western culture continues to influence with economic growth and advertising.
It also becomes obvious that the internet and social media has a lot of influence on eating disorders, where people are constantly being bombarded with advertisements and pictures of other people. Countries in the East with out a large Internet presence clearly would not have this issue because it simply does not exist. While numbers continue to increase in the Middle East and China as Western globalization continues to expand these countries still have very small numbers they still continue to be almost insignificant compared to numbers in America, Europe, and now Japan because of the pressure Western advertisement continues to put on individuals. The most vulnerable group in all three of these nations are girls and women fifteen to twenty-four years of age.
It is not clear whether or not other Eastern World Nations that have not been so heavily touched by Eastern culture have eating disorders of a different manner, where perhaps instead of starving themselves they do otherwise, but it is very clear that diseases such as bulimia and anorexia are Western social diseases caused by our culture and effecting primarily our Caucasian population.
Mary Pettengill is majoring in studio arts-metals at East Carolina University.