I know it is ignorant of me, but I’m always surprised when I hear about guys suffering from anorexia. When I first heard about anorexia sometime as a pre-teen, it was pitched to me as a girl disease. So I filed it under “girl probs” and, I suppose, kept forgetting to go in and revise.

But according to this study, anorexia really IS pretty much a girl problem, just one that afflicts a small but significant percentage of males. Anorexia is 10 times more common in girls than guys. While health experts don’t know why there is this gender divide, studies on twins indicate there is likely something girly going on.

Health records of Swedish twins from the years 1935-1958 showed that females were more likely than males to develop the disease, except in one case: when the male’s twin was a girl.

First, another thing for the file: anorexia is NOT a modern disease, even though I somehow thought it started with Karen Carpenter and picked up the pace around the time of my first subscription to Seventeen magazine. Second, bummer, because I didn’t want femaleness to have to take the fall for this.

The researchers say:
"A plausible explanation for this phenomenon is that in pregnancies bearing a female fetus, a substance is produced, probably hormonal, that increases the risk of having anorexia nervosa in adulthood," the authors write. "Because the male half of an opposite-sex twin pair would also be exposed to this substance, it could account for the observed elevated risk in males with female twins. The most likely candidates are sex steroid hormones."

I suppose the good news out of this is that, as many have suspected for a while, anorexia has quite a bit to do with chemicals. I've always had some reservations about claiming, wholesale, that fashion mags are mainly at fault. (Though, from experience, I'll grant the magazines are intimately involved in female self-loathing.)

Any guys out there have experience with anorexia? May I ask, do you have a twin sister?