Does peer pressure cause eating disorders?
When we’re talking about the tip of the iceberg or the top of the pyramid, meaning people with the fully diagnosed eating disorder, it’s increasingly clear that there’s a pretty strong genetic or inherited component to it. That vulnerability is something people can then carry into the culture in which they live, and it’s the culture that expresses that vulnerability. So, culture plays a role, but the culture in and of itself doesn’t cause eating disorders. What happens to the body when a person has an eating disorder? A lot of the psychological features we associate with anorexia nervosa are actually secondary to the malnutrition. People tend to get more obsessive, more anxious, their cognitive functioning often gets a little, you know, people don’t think abstractly, they get more concrete. Medically, their bodies actually start to shut down: their brain shrinks, their bone stop or their body stops developing bone mass, which is a big risk factor for osteoporosis late in life. As one g
