Anorexia In Chinese Adolescents

My article was about Anorexia in Chinese adolescents. In this article there were many studies conducted to see what teenagers in China and Japan thought of their body image and what a body is supposed to look like. Anorexia used to be known as a "culture-bound" syndrome when in non-Western populations. Now they believe that because some of the countries are becoming more westernized, so are the eating disorders. There was one community study done in Hong Kong that asked adolescent girls which was more important, a good personality or physical appearance. 67 percent said physical appearance, while 7 percent said a good personality.

In the main study they conducted they ended up finding 18 adolescents who did have Anorexia. Two were excluded because they were Caucasian. There were fifteen females and one male. The age of onset for most of the subjects was between 13 and 17 years old and they were all 10-15% below their expected weight. All of those facts match what we learned in class as the symptoms and statistics. When it comes to the subtypes of anorexia these children used both methods. All of them had used strict dieting, three used self-induced vomiting, one used herbal tea as a laxative, and three admitted to binge eating. Many of them also used excessive exercise to lose weight.

Many of the causes for Anorexia that we learned in class were also presented in this article. Family relationships had a large influence on these young people. There were reports of intense competition between siblings and parents, overprotective mothers, and abusive families. Besides family relationships I think there were many psychological factors. Fear of becoming fat was present in over 80% of the children who were interviewed. They were dissatisfied with their body shape, giving them a reason in their minds to diet. This is very similar to Western cultures.

The main idea I got from this article is Eating Disorders are