A pair of articles have drawn some interest in various online haunts:
First, the Wall Street Journal had this story a couple of weeks ago about classifying adult picky eating behavior as a variant of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and adding it to the DSM-IV as a clinical diagnosis.
Now this week there is an article in Time Magazine that looks at research which asks whether or not picky eating is an early indicator of autism
So, clearly we’re not talking about your average childhood aversions to food or even those adults (and you know who you are) who won’t eat mushrooms or tomatoes, or something. The people in the WSJ article have full-blown eating disorders that rival the severity of anorexia and bulimia because they restrict their diets to very limited numbers of foods, often based on irrational reasons. Meanwhile, the British researchers observed that children who developed autism often had more limited ranges of preferred foods, but it’s more of a symptom in the vein of some of the other sensory issues that affect autistics than a dysfunctional behavior. Nevertheless, given the link between autism and OCDs, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that eating behaviors would be a common element.
