Food restriction and anorexia nervosa from the perspective of evolutionary theories
Various disciplines have developed an interest in anorexia nervosa during the last decades and have presented different models to explain it. The biopsychosocial model, currently prevailing, allows to understand how this issue takes place on a proximal level. However, one question remains: is there a biological function to this disorder? This is the enigma that researchers adopting an evolutionary perspective have tried to solve. Several hypotheses have been formulated and those will be reviewed and criticized in the context of this paper. An alternative hypothesis will then be presented, the intrasexual competition for rank hypothesis, aiming to increase the explanatory value of the proposed models. It will be argued that self-starvation and disorders resulting from this behavior are by-products of the intensified competition existing between women in modern Western culture. While it would once have been adaptive for them to compete with other women in order to match the physical and psychological traits deemed desirable in their culture, this mechanism would have become out of control in a society who glorifies thinness and whose beauty criteria are unrealistic, if not unattainable. The evolutionary perspective, although sometimes disregarded, has the merit of bringing an innovative viewpoint that stimulates theoretical thinking at a different but complementary level of analysis compared to what the conventional approaches propose.