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Women aren't the only ones facing deadly eating disorders - grown men and children as young as five are also fighting battles with their reflections

Women aren't the only ones facing deadly eating disorders - grown men and children as young as five are also fighting battles with their reflections

I like cooking, and eating. If you overlook certain domestic tensions – mostly to do with the fact that those around me are enthusiastic about the latter, while avoiding the former like the plague – I’m fairly satisfied with this state of affairs. In fact, I love the whole process. I have a walk-in pantry that you can’t actually walk into any more because it’s so cluttered with tins, jars and packets, many of them quite hard-to-find ingredients that I buy on impulse and then never use. I watch most cookery shows, but not Nigella’s – I don’t care for chocolate, whipped cream or hundreds and thousands, which rules out half of her recipes. And given her figure, I don’t believe she eats anything she cooks.

But plenty of people have a problem with food. A recent conference heard that not only are more people than was previously thought falling ill with eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa, they are falling ill at younger ages. Dr Sloane Madden, from the Children’s Hospital at Westmead, Sydney, found the average age of the 101 children with eating disorders in his study was 11½. The youngest were about five and anorexia was seen in kids as young as eight. At least half the children in a nationwide study, who were all under the age of 13, had what Madden describes as “very severe complications with their starvation – they were unable to maintain a normal heart rate or blood pressure or temperature, to the point that they were at risk of dying”. He says this tallies with the experience at Westmead, where 90 per cent of children admitted for the treatment of eating disorders were in this state on arrival.

It’s amazing to think that children in our society can approach death by starvation without anyone seemingly noticing, or doing very much about it. On the other hand, our attitudes to food and nutrition are so mixed up that perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Anorexia is a ghastly disease, killing an estimated 20 per cent of those it affects, yet it and other eating disorders are quite commonly seen as a joke. When American singer Mariah Carey reportedly remarked she’d like to be thin like people in Africa, “just without the flies and death and stuff”, the story of her insensitivity went around the world.

Yet are we in our daily lives really so much better? Only a few years ago, a respected Australian broadcaster finished a show about eating disorders with the comment “I dream of being anorexic”, which probably elicited knowing sighs around the country but doubtless did not play well in households wondering if their own anorexic teenager would still be alive the next day. Recently, the British media had a field day when the country’s former deputy prime minister, the portly John Prescott, confessed to having been bulimic during his early days in office. The serious papers tried to keep a straight face (The Guardian offered: “Prescott praised for eating disorder confession”) while the tabloids really went to town. “Bulimic John Prescott’s secret Big Mac binges”, shrieked the Daily Mirror, adding: “Bulimic scoffed late-night burgers AFTER huge state banquets”.

Did the appeal of this story flow merely from the fact a politician frequently lampooned as an uncouth bruiser was confessing to an illness, as the paper put it, “usually associated with anxious young women”? I doubt it. Perhaps as with cooking shows, stories like these allow us vicariously to enjoy, and disapprove of, someone’s else’s consumption. The fact that overconsumption can be caricatured as gluttony merely adds to the thrill – The Times story was accompanied by a photo of Prescott wolfing fish and chips in the street with undisguised relish.

In any case, the tendency to equate anorexia and bulimia exclusively with young women is itself another symptom of our problem. Blokes don’t get all fussy with food, do they? Well, yes. Far from being an all-female domain, eating disorders affect one in four males in Australia – that’s a greater percentage than in the US. “Eating disorder” is a broad term, and it could be that some male disorders are the reverse of those that tend to affect women – in other words, boys eating compulsively to bulk up. But men get anorexia, too. A recent medical journal ran a student’s account of his battle with anorexia, which he said “turned my life into a mere existence dominated by exercise (excessive and obsessive), calorie counting and work”. I think I’ll hole up in my pantry with my Nigella books until it’s safe to come out.

Adam Cresswell is The Australian newspaper’s health editor