Animal Writings

"[B]ecause rodents don't spontaneously develop eating disorders, experimenters must create 'animal models' of the condition. One such model is the activity-based anorexia (ABA) or semi-starvation-induced hyperactivity (SIH) model, which combines starvation with exercise. Experimenters place rats on a starvation diet and place an activity wheel in their shoebox cage. Perhaps because they are desperate to find food, starved rats show excessive use of the wheel, which accelerates weight loss."

"These studies subject rats to the grinding misery of starvation while frustrating their frenetic efforts to seek and find food. And to what end? Anorexia is a complex syndrome, unique to humans, of primarily psychological origin."

"At Israel's Danek Gertner Institute of Human Genetics, a genetic component of AN was studied in 90 family groups with AN tendencies. Two suspect gene polymorphisms were found to be preferentially transmitted to AN offspring, suggesting a genetic predisposition to development of AN."

"At Yale University's Department of Psychiatry, open-ended self-descriptions were obtained from 15 AN patients, 15 control psychiatric patients, and 48 control non-patients between age 14 and 24. AN patients had a significantly heightened and harsh self-reflectivity and they more openly expressed depression and anxiety in their self-descriptions."