Food, Eating & Swallowing · 11 entries
Food, Eating and Swallowing Fears
Vomiting, choking, swallowing and specific foods. Emetophobia is the entry that carries the group: it affects roughly nine per cent of people, it is one of the most treatment-sought specific phobias, and its own literature describes it as an elusive predicament because so little research has been done on it. That combination, high demand and thin evidence, is unusual and it shapes everything filed here.
It also explains the filing. Emetophobia sits with food rather than with blood and injury, because the diagnostic manuals do not count vomiting among the blood-injection-injury codes even though the disgust reaction looks similar. Pseudodysphagia is the other boundary case: it produces a sensation of difficulty swallowing that is real to the person and has no physical cause, so dysphagia has to be excluded before the word can be used at all. A fear of the texture of a food rather than of the food is a sensory fear and files there instead.
In this category
All 11 food, eating and swallowing fears
11 entries
- Extreme Picky EatingBody image disturbance is not a root cause of it. The three routes in are sensory difficulty, fear of what eating causes, and simply no interest in food.
- Fear of AlcoholThe reference books give potophobia three words. The laboratory work on alcohol and fear runs the other way, and found it damps anxiety but not fear.
- Fear of ChokingThe difficulty swallowing is authentic and has no physical cause, which is what the name records. Its documented treatments still include a shock to the fingers.
- Fear of CookingNot cooking means living on pre-prepared food and takeaway, and that diet is associated with hypertension, obesity and diabetes down the line.
- Fear of Fat in FoodLipophobia rises where food is abundant and is absent where it is not. Its citations date the movement to the 1980s and name its corporate casualties.
- Fear of FoodAnorexia is a fear of gaining weight, not of food. The two produce identical plates and identical weight loss, and the treatments point in opposite directions.
- Fear of MushroomsCoined in 1957 to sort cultures into mushroom-loving and mushroom-fearing. A study in Chiapas tested the split and found a bell curve instead.
- Fear of ShellfishThree of the four reasons people avoid shellfish are precaution, religion and allergy. The fullest account of the word is a video game achievement.
- Fear of SwallowingThe reviews call it rare and quote a prevalence of 7 to 9 per cent in the same paragraph. The DSM files it as a phobia and ICD-11 as an eating disorder.
- Fear of VomitingCommon, chronic and described in its own literature as an elusive predicament. It is regularly misdiagnosed as OCD, anorexia, social anxiety or agoraphobia.
- OrthorexiaNamed in 1997 for dietary restriction undertaken for health that produces the opposite. Equal in men and women, and still in neither DSM nor ICD.
Keep going
The other categories
- Social & InterpersonalFears whose object is other people: being judged by them, being among them, or being without them.
- The Body, Illness & DeathDeath, dying, disease, contamination, ageing and the body itself.
- Abstract & ExistentialFailure, the future, change, infinity, being forgotten.
- Places & SituationsEnclosed spaces, crowds, bridges, lifts, tunnels and flight.
Common questions
Questions about food, eating and swallowing fears
What is emetophobia?
The fear of vomiting. It affects roughly nine per cent of people and is described in its own literature as an elusive predicament, because so little research has been done on it relative to how often treatment is sought for it. It is also the phobia most often mistaken for something else.
Is fear of choking the same as difficulty swallowing?
No, and the difference is diagnostic. Pseudodysphagia produces a sensation of difficulty swallowing that is real to the person and has no physical cause, so genuine dysphagia has to be excluded before the term can be used. One is a fear; the other is a physical finding.
Why is fear of vomiting not filed with blood and needles?
Because the diagnostic manuals do not count vomiting among the blood-injection-injury codes, even though the disgust involved looks similar. Emetophobia sits in the residual other type in DSM-5-TR, which is the heading the manual keeps for fears that are real and common and belong to none of the four named types.
What is the fear of food called?
Cibophobia for food in general, mageirocophobia for cooking, mycophobia for mushrooms, ostraconophobia for shellfish. Most of these are labelled coined or documented here: they appear in dictionaries and lists, and the clinical literature works instead with avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder, which is named in the manual.