Why the fashion for restricted diets has been around longer than we might think
People talk about orthorexia, an eating disorder that takes the form of an obsession with healthy food, as if it were a new thing – or, at least, an illness that has broken cover recently, encouraged by those who spend their days posting pictures of their fantastical beet- and cashew-based diets on Instagram. But as Laura Shapiro reveals in her new book, What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food that Tells Their Stories, the condition has been with us for decades – sometimes in plain sight. It was back in 1959 that Helen Gurley Brown, future editor of Cosmopolitan and bestselling author of Sex and the Single Girl, first walked into the Los Angeles health-food store on whose shelves she saw the (terrifying) future.
Gurley Brown was then feeling rather glum: David Brown, her movie executive boyfriend, was refusing to marry her, and she had just finished an assignment at the Miss Universe Pageant at Long Beach, which had done her ego no good at all (all those younger, prettier girls). Needing a pick-me-up, she swung by a place she’d heard people raving about, Lindberg Nutrition, and by the time she left, she was a convert: to vitamin supplements, to soy-flour pancakes and to the Serenity Cocktail, which comprised, among other things, pineapple chunks, calcium lactate, vanilla, powdered milk and brewer’s yeast.
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