When Eating Becomes a Diagnosis: The Medicalisation of Everyday Food Behaviours

Every era redraws the line between the ordinary and the pathological, and few lines have shifted as dramatically in recent decades as the one separating normal eating from eating disorders. In a commentary published in the Journal of Eating Disorders, Jonathan M. Mond of Southern Cross University argues that the field has undergone a profound and largely unexamined transformation: an ever-growing range of eating and weight-control behaviours is now being framed as medical illness, and almost nobody has stopped to ask whether this is doing more good than harm.

The process Mond is describing has a name with a long pedigree in sociology. Medicalisation, a term coined in the early 1970s, refers to the way previously nonmedical aspects of appearance or behaviour become defined and treated as medical problems. The classic examples are familiar: disruptive behaviour in children became attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and combat stress among soldiers became post-traumatic stress disorder. In each case, the relabelling brought real benefits in legitimacy, research funding and access to care, but it also carried costs that took decades to appreciate, from overdiagnosis to the quiet expansion of pharmaceutical markets.

In the eating disorders field, Mond contends, medicalisation has accelerated to a remarkable degree. The number and diversity of conditions recognised as eating disorders in classification schemes, most notably the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, has proliferated dramatically in recent years. Behaviours that once attracted little clinical attention, such as binge eating or what clinicians describe as excessive exercise for weight control, are now increasingly viewed as disorders, diseases or illnesses demanding clinical or public health intervention.

The push has not come from clinicians alone. Mond points to concerted efforts by influential organisations, including the United States National Institute of Mental Health, to portray these conditions as brain-based mental illnesses for which certain forms of intervention, so-called evidence-based treatments, are demanded. This framing, he notes, now predominates not only in academic and public policy literature but also in the popular media, where eating and weight-control behaviours are routinely presented through the language of disease.

What makes this development striking, Mond argues, is how little critical scrutiny it has received. In contrast to the medicalisation of other mental health problems, which has been the subject of sustained sociological analysis for half a century, analysis of the medicalisation of eating and weight-control behaviours has been sporadic and piecemeal. The goal of his commentary is to expose this process to critical examination and to lay out the questions that future research needs to answer.

The technical stakes are considerable. Diagnostic expansion changes who counts as ill, and therefore who receives treatment, who is enrolled in research studies and whose experiences are captured in epidemiological surveys. When the boundaries of a diagnostic category widen, prevalence estimates rise, sometimes steeply, and the population deemed to have or be at risk of having an eating disorder grows larger and more diverse. Mond emphasises that this increasingly large and diverse subgroup is precisely the population whose wellbeing medicalisation is supposed to serve, yet whether it actually does remains an open question.

That question, whether and to what extent medicalisation has been beneficial for people deemed to have or be at risk of having an eating disorder, is the first of the key issues Mond believes future research should address. The benefits of diagnosis are not trivial: a recognised disorder can reduce stigma by reframing behaviour as illness rather than failure of willpower, can open doors to treatment and insurance coverage, and can justify research funding. But the costs are equally real. Wider diagnostic nets can pathologise behaviours that fall within the normal range, can create illness identities where none existed before, and can channel attention and resources toward clinical treatment while neglecting the social and environmental drivers of disordered eating.

The second key question concerns intervention and policy. Mond asks what the implications of increasing medicalisation are for different possible approaches to intervention and for public health policy more generally. The technical distinction here matters. A medicalised framing tends to favour individual clinical treatment, delivered by trained professionals to diagnosed patients, whereas a public health framing might target the population-level factors, from weight stigma to social media environments, that shape eating and weight-control behaviours in the first place. How a problem is defined determines which solutions appear rational, and Mond suggests that the current dominance of the medical model has narrowed the field of what is even considered.

None of this amounts to a rejection of eating disorders as real and serious conditions. Mond’s argument is methodological rather than dismissive: a process as consequential as the medicalisation of eating and weight-control behaviours should be examined with the same rigour that sociologists have applied to ADHD, PTSD and other relabelled conditions. The parallels he draws are instructive. Just as the expansion of ADHD diagnosis prompted decades of debate about where disorder ends and normal variation begins, the proliferation of eating disorder categories invites the same scrutiny of boundaries, benefits and unintended consequences.

The timing of the commentary could hardly be more pointed. As diagnostic categories continue to expand and as brain-based framings gain traction in policy and popular culture, the population deemed ill grows with each revision. Mond’s call is for the field to take stock before the process becomes irreversible, to ask whether the medicalisation of eating and weight-control behaviours has served the people it claims to help, and to consider whether other framings, clinical, sociological or public health, might better capture the complexity of human eating. The answers, he suggests, will shape not just the future of eating disorders research but the broader question of how societies decide which behaviours count as disease.

Subject of Research: Medicalisation of eating and weight-control behaviours

Article Title: Medicalisation of eating and weight-control behaviours: time to take stock?

Article References: Mond, J. M. (2026). Medicalisation of eating and weight-control behaviours: time to take stock?. Journal of Eating Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40337-026-01785-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40337-026-01785-6

Keywords: eating disorders, medicalisation, DSM, mental health, public health, sociology of medicine, diagnosis, weight-control behaviours, eating, weight-control, behaviours, time