Here’s the story. In 1995, for the first time in Fiji, the chief permitted televisions in the villages. At which time the viewers were bombarded with programs like Beverly Hills 90210, Seinfeld, and Xena the Warrior Princess. And ads for Power Riders and Slim Fast.

As the television channels multiplied, so did Fijian eating disorders.

In three short years, the percentage of girls who vomited to control their weight rose from none to 11 percent. In addition, almost a third of the 65 teenage girls studied wanted to diet, vomit or exercise excessively because they suddenly hated their beautiful and brown Fijian bodies.

The majority, 83 percent of the girls, blamed their change in attitude on the media.

“Now we are feeling, we feel that it is bad to have this huge body,” said one 16-year-old Fijian, who cannot be identified because of confidentiality issues.

She’s telling us something and we should listen. What?

Culture shapes eating disorders in individuals. We know this every time we see a billboard of a thin model, an ad for a diet product, or a TV show such as “American Idol” that dismisses anyone who falls short of idyllic. We are taught that to be valuable, we have to look, act and be a perfect clone of American society’s ideal: a skeletally thin runway model, tall, young and light-skinned.

This is a sick image. And the US, the culture that right now dominates the globe, is selling sickness. Other countries are buying it and getting infected themselves.

Where did the image come from? Who conjured up this hideous germ?

Digging down a little, we might gain some answers by tracking the rise and fall of eating disorders through history.

Culture, like a person, has an identity, and that culture can experience identify crisis during major transitions. In Lying in Weight, I argue that eating disorders in individuals emerge at times of life transitions. Why can’t this happen in a culture, too? In fact, it does.

For example, the concept of willful vomiting predates the Sphinx. Egyptians believed that monthly purges would clean out toxins. Romans engineered special rooms for gluttons to throw up in--called vomitoriums-- so that partygoers could continue to eat. In fact, in their halcyon days, both Greeks and Romans glorified the practice of bulimia, a symbol of prosperity. These cultures were celebrating gluttony, and in so doing, acquired a disease. Bulimia, literally 'ox hunger' refers to a ravenous appetite.

But excess caused these cultures to eventually implode. When fed too much, citizens become unable to self-regulate. Excess, in part, led to the downfall of the Roman Empire. And excess is one pole of the eating disorder spectrum.

At the other extreme, a culture that glorifies deprivation also breeds eating disorders. Take the Catholic Church in medieval times. In his book, Holy Anorexia, Rudolph Bell writes that of most of the women canonized in Italy in medieval times had some form of eating disorder. The icon was Catherine of Sienna, who in a convent starved herself and slept on a stone floor in the cold, until she died from malnutrition. She was canonized by the Catholic Church.

Talk about values.

The medieval cultural message was that the body was repugnant, spirit was glorious. At the same time, women living in this era had few opportunities other than domestic work and/or contemplation. The value then was that supreme asceticism gains one power.

Think today. Is this deprivation value so different from that of celebrities whose images say: supreme asceticism through dieting (starvation) earns you millions of dollars and a wealth of power?

And women do want power in the world. All over the world. But in so many cultures that power is limited. Some women do not even have the choice of whom to marry or when to have sex. Not even control over their own bodies. And so the only power is what they put in their mouths and allow to come out.

Eating disorders. A global epidemic.

Think about it. The global epidemic is simply mirroring what we are seeing at home in the US. An epidemic of eating disorders emerged in the late 1970s, after English psychiatrist Gerald Russell in London described the first patient with “bulimia nervosa.” (Russell, G. (1979) Bulimia Nervosa: an ominous variant of anorexia nervosa. Psychological Medicine. 9: 429-448.)

Soon after, bulimia exploded alongside fitness doyenne Jane Fonda, who appeared on our VCRs twisting and bouncing. At the same time, Americans were enjoying unprecedented prosperity, as Wall Street took off and “greed was good.”

One theory is that the corresponding surge of eating disorders in the US during the 1980s was a reaction by women to all that prosperity. Women were duped into believing that they had access. They dressed liked men in power suits and thought they could be men. But women weren’t men, and women realized that they often were denied the same access to power as men. And what happened next is best summed up by eating disorders counselor Kim Chernin in her book, The Hungry Self. The present epidemic of eating disorders,” she wrote, “must be understood as a profound developmental crisis in a generation of women still deeply confused about what it means to be a woman in the modern world.”

Looking at the World Wide ED, “developmental crisis” applies to any woman anywhere who wants a voice in her society but cannot find one. Eating disorders flare up in societies making transformations toward western-style development-- societies experiencing growing pains.

Developing cultures, unrooted, are like teenagers trying to figure it out and looking to peers, in the US, for answers. “I want to be like Xena so that I can protect myself by getting all those manly skills,” says one Fijian girl. “When I come across some kind of different, difficult situations, I can just use them in order to defend myself.”

Wow. Xena as a role model of how to make it in Fiji. It’s no wonder we are seeing a global epidemic of eating disorders, anorexia, bulimia and binge eating disorder. Tragically, it is likely to continue and grow until we find a balance of power, between men and women and also the values of material wealth and asceticism.

In future Truth in Numbers blog entries, I’ll further explore the global epidemic and cover issues simmering in our own kitchens.