Eating disorders are afflicting all ethnic groups

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — For Liza LeGrand, it all started with anorexia in her early 20s, self-starvation that later included episodes of gorging on food and purging. At 5-feet-2, she got down to 70 pounds.

Now 36 and living in Orlando, Fla., LeGrand continues to struggle with her eating disorder. But she says she at least understands it. And she now knows she's not the only minority woman to have such a problem.

LeGrand is Puerto Rican and dealing with what many believe is a "white woman's problem."

The common perception is that eating disorders afflict only white women, especially upper- and middle-class women. While those are the most reported cases, specialists believe all socio-economic and ethnic groups are at risk.

"For so long there was the belief that eating disorders only involved young white women," said Gayle Brooks, a black psychologist specializing in eating disorders at the Renfrew Center in south Florida where LeGrand was treated. "What they saw were exclusively white women with the problem."

Black and Hispanic women were thought to be less likely to develop anorexia and bulimia because more voluptuous physiques are generally considered attractive within their ethnic groups. A study in the Journal of Counseling in Psychology in 2001 found that African-Americans were more accepting of larger body shapes and less concerned with dieting.

Margaret Garner, nutrition director at the University of Alabama's medical center in Tuscaloosa, said this view was expressed frankly in a graduate class in health. In the past 25 years, she has counseled only one black woman with an eating disorder. She asked her class why the number of reported cases among black women was so low.

"An African-American male student readily said that he thought the reason there were no black females with this problem is that black men preferred some meat on the bones of their girlfriends and white men preferred them boney," Garner said.

But Laurie Mintz, an associate professor of counseling psychology at the University of Missouri-Columbia, said adoption of "Western values concerning attractiveness and thinness may increase minority women's risk for the development of eating disorders."

Research over the last decade has found these eating disorders among minority women and lower-income women, she said. Increasingly, anorexia and bulimia may be becoming "an equal opportunity disorder," Mintz said, citing other researchers.