Chema Díaz, health psychologist: “Obsessing over healthy eating can be a problem: it affects your daily life”

Readers know that extremes are rarely beneficial and that virtue, as Aristotle said, lies in the middle ground between two flawed limits – one of excess and the other of deficiency. Food reflects that idea perfectly. Turning healthy eating into a fanatical doctrine completely destroys the principle that eating should involve balance and common sense, and it can push people toward disorders such as orthorexia, a pathological obsession with consuming food considered healthy, pure or clean.

That is the conclusion reached by María Merino, host of the podcast Comiendo con María, and her latest guest, Chema Díaz, a clinical psychologist and dietitian specializing in eating disorders. Merino raised the issue directly: “Do you think real fooding has been one of the triggering, predisposing and perpetuating factors behind orthorexia?” Díaz agreed emphatically.

“It’s a real fear of being exposed to a food”

“I do think it has played a role,” he said, adding that “many studies suggest this obsession with healthy eating is not unique to Spain, but has existed in other cultures as well.” He then broke the issue down simply: “I always say the same thing. Food is not only there to nourish us. If I base my entire diet solely on nourishing myself in the purest and cleanest way possible, then I have a problem with food. And I need help because it’s affecting my daily life.”

Merino, who also works in nutrition and psychology, expanded on the point. “I treat patients with orthorexia. And it’s literally a fear of eating an ultra-processed food because it has so much sugar, so much fat and is considered so bad, while everyone says lettuce is healthy and everything else is unhealthy,” she explained.

She described it as “a popular idea that one thing is acceptable and another isn’t.” While acknowledging there is some truth behind those distinctions, she insisted the real issue is what those messages do to people’s thinking. “That idea creates such fear in the person that they cannot expose themselves to that food. In the end, I refer them to psychology because this is a real fear of exposure to that food, since the person genuinely believes it will make them sick.”

When food becomes linked to fear

Díaz praised the reflection, adding that some people “even think you are poisoning them.” He stressed that treatment requires both psychology and nutrition working together. “They have to go hand in hand. In many of these cases psychology needs to guide the process much more because, inevitably, we are talking about mental health and it affects many areas of life,” he said.

According to the psychologist, the fact that something contains sugar “has been proven not to be poison, nor does it necessarily have to be addictive, because people also talk about food addiction.” He then condensed the experts’ shared conclusion into a single sentence: “In the end, we place so many negative labels on food that it creates rejection.”

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