PhD student wins Early Career Top Paper Abstract

Courtney McLean

PhD student Courtney McLean from the Department of Neuroscience has been awarded an Academy of Eating Disorders Early Career Top Abstract Award for her paper ‘Disordered Eating and the Meat-Avoidance Spectrum: A Systematic Review and Clinical Implications’.

This research looked to examine the association between eating disorders and vegetarian and vegan diets. It has long been thought that vegetarianism and veganism may be related to an increased risk of disordered eating due to the cognitive effort required to adhere to a restricted diet. 

In a systematic review of 48 studies, Courtney and her co-authors Associate Professor Gemma Sharp and Professor Jayashri Kulkarni found no consensus as to whether vegetarianism or veganism is associated with higher levels of disordered eating. 

The authors note that additional research is very much needed to unpack the broad range of conflicting findings highlighted within the systematic review. The research notes a number of methodological concerns within the literature, such as extremely small sample sizes and combining vegetarian and vegan groups together which could potentially mask true associations between each group. 

The review did however show that vegetarianism and veganism appear to be associated with greater orthorexia nervosa pathology, a newly coined type of eating disorder not formally diagnosable but characterised by a fixation on eating ‘healthy’ and ‘pure’ foods. 

“Future research must focus on conducting longitudinal research to track the unique eating behaviours and attitudes of vegetarians and vegans over time,” Courtney said. “For example, it would be useful to explore the impact of length, onset, and scope of dietary adherence to begin to be able to establish a potential causal or bidirectional relationship between these groups. This will, in turn, guide evidence-based treatment approaches for these growing dietary minorities.”

Courtney accepted the Top Abstract Award at the Academy for Eating Disorders international conference in Washington DC, where she also presented her PhD research findings. 

"It was an absolute delight to attend and present at this conference - the first international conference of my PhD! I had the opportunity to present each of the three research projects related to my PhD. These projects progressively build upon the findings of each other so attendees had the opportunity to follow my research right from its inception.” 

“It was also wonderful to hear from the wide range of international speakers at the conference. There are many areas within the eating disorder field that continue to be under researched, but to see attendees from across many professional backgrounds come together with a vision of a world without eating disorders was inspiring. I particularly enjoyed the focused inclusion of lived experience voices who were integrated into each segment of the conference."

Part of the Department of Neuroscience’s Sharp Group, Courtney’s PhD broadly seeks to explore the efficacy of eating disorder tools in measuring eating pathology in vegetarian and vegan groups. As part of this, she is developing a novel eating disorder screening tool to identify eating disorder symptoms in individuals following a vegetarian and vegan diet. This tool will be the first of its kind to specifically target this growing dietary group, which will be co-designed with diverse participant groups, including lived eating disorder voices, dieticians, and psychologists.