Videos of an 8-year-old eating are going viral – that’s why

Hannah is an eight-year-old girl from the US. Every day, her mother uploads videos of her trying new dishes on Instagram and YouTube. Either she grimaces and her eyes fill with tears, or she smiles happily. There is rarely a middle ground. The reason for these extreme reactions: Hannah has an avoidant-restrictive eating disorder (ARFID).

With her presence on social media, Hanna’s mother wants to draw attention to eating disorders, which are more common in children than you might think. And she is successful: about half a million people follow the girl on Instagram.

There are certain things that Hanna really likes to eat and calls ‘safe food’. Others are “fear foods”, Hannah is afraid of these foods because she has had bad experiences with them.

She fears the taste, smell, texture, temperature, or appearance of these foods because she associates them with choking, vomiting, or pain – or some combination of them.

The disease is relatively unknown in the general population. This is also evident from Hannah’s comment columns. Under each post it says: “picky eater”, in Swiss German: “Schnäderfräss”.

But ARFID is a serious disease – as Dagmar Pauli, chief physician and deputy director of child and adolescent psychiatry in Zurich, classifies.

Doctors mainly diagnose an avoidant-restrictive eating disorder in children if there is malnutrition despite sufficient food supply. The body mass index is too low for age.

Pauli explains to Watson: “Those affected usually have a disorder in interacting with their caregivers around food. Unlike typical eating disorders such as anorexia, the refusal to eat is not based on a desire to lose weight.

Those affected do not have a distorted body image and are not afraid of gaining weight. Pauli says: “It doesn’t start with a diet. The children don’t realize why they can’t eat well.”

In individual cases, ARFID can be as dangerous as anorexia, but this is rare. The disease usually lasts a long time, but is not as acute as anorexia, and it takes a long time before the child can regain weight.

Pauli cannot say how many children in Switzerland are affected. According to various studies, it can be assumed that approximately 1 percent of adults and 5 percent of children worldwide suffer from it.

Pauli explains that picky eating is characterized by the fact that the child eats selectively, which usually means that he or she likes to eat sweets or a few selected foods, such as spaghetti without sauce, French fries, but hardly any vegetables or fruits.

“Children with simple picky eating are often quite slim, but not really underweight, which is different from ARFID,” says Pauli.

But picky eating can also cause ARFID to develop later or the typical anorexia to develop as children grow older and the desire to become thin arises.

Pauli concludes: “If a child eats fussy, which affects about 20 percent of children, but has a normal weight, you can reassure the parents: they usually grow out of it. Parents should not worry too much and do not force the child to eat more different types of food, otherwise an interaction disorder may develop, which then leads to ARFID – being underweight.