Amber Scott wishes she could eat stir fry.

But the University of Dayton law student can’t imagine putting a fork
full of the dish in her mouth.

“I love the smell of it, but it is too complicated,” the New Carlisie
resident said. “I need to know what to expect ahead of time.”

The 30-something’s diet is limited to French fries, cheese pizza with

light sauce, cheese ravioli, apples, bananas, green grapes and
strawberries.

Stir fry and mostly everything else from corn on the cob to lasagna
might as well be dirt.

Hidden disorder
Scott, a single mother to one, suffers from Avoidant Restrictive Food
Intake Disorder (ARFID).

She calls herself an adult picky eater and says the condition, although
rare, is more common than people might think.

“There are a lot of us out there but we all hide it because we think it is
our fault,” Scott said. “I want other people to know they are not alone.”
Scott recently discussed her eating disorder on the ABC’s news
program “20/20” (Scott said the show only focused on French fries
even though producers knew about the few other things she eats).
She’s also appeared on Dr. Phil and TLC’s Freaky Eaters and has
produced a podcast on the subject.
At age 28 she found another person suffering from the same condition
thought to affect thousands of people. She is now a member of Picky
Eating Adult Support, a online group that claims to have 10,000
members.

Not just a phase

Scott’s aversion to most foods started when she was 3 or 4 years old.

Her mom, Paula Scott of Enon, put green beans in front of her little
girl, who refused to eat them.

While she drinks a variety of beverages, for years Amber would only
eat hand-cut, skinless potatoes fried in canola oil.

“We were making French fries three times a day,” Paula Scott
recalled.

The pizza and ravioli came in recent years.

At certain points Amber Scott would only eat certain brands of fries.
She wanted it to be just a phase.

“Doctors told my mother, ‘She’ll get tired of it. Just give her what she
wants’,” Amber Scott recalled. “My whole life I dreamed of waking up
and it would be that day.”

Longing to be like everyone else, Scott said she tried to eat a salad
when she was 20. She became ill as a result.

“I am not afraid of food. I am not afraid it is going to hurt me.

Something prevents me from eating it,” she said. “What is it that tells
you eat that, don’t eat that? Is it going to hurt you to eat dirt? Are you
afraid of the dirt?”

Scott said she worked hard to hide her disorder and avoided activities
as a child that would have her eat away from home. She remembers
being called an anorexic and alienated by classmates after it was
discovered at a cheerleaders’ camp held in Springfield that she was
only eating Doritos and an apple that she brought.

Some former high school classmates still accused her of doing “it” for
the attention.

Scott said she has tried to understand.

“People are going to get upset when they have no explanation or
understanding of something. If someone doesn’t enjoy the same kind
of food you do, it is kind of insulting,” she said. “It is almost like saying
you don’t like their music, ‘What do you mean you don’t like the
Rolling Stones?’”

A mother blamed
Although her daughter was always healthy, Paula Scott said she
worried that Amber was not getting enough

protein and other nutrients. Still, she said she felt she had no other
choice but to give her daughter what she wanted.

Amber Scott said her mother never force fed her and took heat as a
result.

“If we didn’t get her French fries she wouldn’t eat. No matter how long
it was she didn’t eat,” Paul Scott said. “Relatives would say, “If that
was my child, she’d be eating.’ Friends would say, ‘Make her eat
something’.”

Paula Scott’s two sons ate everything put in front of them. While family
members enjoyed a feast, Amber ate only French fries. Thanksgiving
was the worse. “Socially she was set back because of it,” Paula Scott
said. “She kind of felt like an outcast with the family.”
“She would have starved,” Paul Scott said. “I am not going to let my
child starve.”

Power struggle
Rachel Riddiford, a registered and licensed dietitian at Dayton
Children’s Hospital, said a person’s relationship with food can be as
complicated as his or her relationship with other people.

A disorder like the one Scott suffers can occur for reasons ranging
from an association to a painful experience like a stomach ache after
eating to a childhood trauma to hyper-sensitivity to tastes, smell or
texture, she said.

“I get why people can struggle like this. There is hope and there is
support,” said Riddiford, the hospital’s clinical nutrition manager. “So
many people are demoralized by it, but they don’t let anybody know.”
Many of us know at least one picky eater — that person who only eats french
fries, peanut butter crackers, cheese pizza, chicken nuggets or cereal. For many
of us, this person is also 5 years old. But it's very possible for adults to be
especially picky as well. Highly selective food preferences among adults might
have begun in childhood, but while friends went on to learn to enjoy sushi and
kale salads, some found it tough to move beyond the basics.

Picky eating (PE) among adults is a relatively new area of research for
psychologists, and at this point there's no way to say with any certainty where it
comes from, or even if it's worth worrying about. In many adult picky eaters, their
pickiness is pretty benign — they eat only from a limited range of foods with no
physical health or psychosocial problems. But when their eating habits starts to
affect the quality of life for someone or those around them, things get trickier.

For some picky eaters, adults and children alike, behaviors can include not
wanting to try new foods (neophobia), not being able to tolerate different foods
touching on a plate and only eating french fries from a certain restaurant. These
habits can turn into a diagnosable eating disorder like avoidant/restrictive food
intake disorder (ARFID), which was previously known as selective eating
disorder (SED) and is generally accompanied by weight loss (or in children,
inability to gain weight) and nutritional deficiency. And it sometimes even turns
into another eating disorder like anorexia or bulimia. ARFID can also emerge
from problems with low appetite and low food enjoyment, or from fears of
negative consequences associated with eating, like choking or having to go to
the bathroom.

Because the study of picky eating adults (PEAs, as some self-identify) is

relatively new, it's hard to say how common it is, at what point it becomes a
problem, how to diagnose it, and how to treat it — if it needs treating at all. But
it's gotten to a point where a support group called Picky Eating Adult
Support exists for those "with different tastes," according to the organization's
motto. In the video below, PEAS spokesperson Amber Scott speaks out about
her life. (She's also been featured on an episode of "Dr. Phil" and
the "20/20" segment "My Strange Affliction.)
However, picky eating doesn't usually just sneak up on somebody one day —
studies show that most adult picky eaters report experiencing PE in childhood.
Take 57-year-old real estate broker Marla Lopez, who also goes by the French
Fry Lady. According to her PE blog, she has only tasted a handful of foods in her
entire life — most of them the color white. She has never even tasted a
vegetable other than a potato, and after cooking scrambled eggs for her son for
20 years, she finally became inured to the smell of them to the point of being able
to try them in 2012. She will occasionally eat them these days, but only if they're
cooked extremely well done.

Lopez is an outspoken adult picky eater, but the condition is sometimes difficult
to diagnose because not everybody is vocal about their habits — and there isn't a
reliably objective way to measure pickiness, or to parse preference from
affliction.

So how would someone get diagnosed with PE to begin with? Jordan Ellis, a
doctoral student in Clinical Health Psychology at East Carolina University,
studies PE, and has co-written a study that presents a way to measure these
behaviors.

"Most past research has relied on simply asking an individual whether or not they
consider themselves to be a picky eater," says Ellis. "Our new measure, the
Adult Picky Eating Questionnaire (APEQ), looks at multiple aspects of picky-
eating behavior, including rigid food preferences, lack of food variety, meal
disengagement and avoidance, and aversion to bitter and sour tastes. We hope
to start to understand which of these aspects are most related to problems and
which could best be targeted through treatment."

Although treatment might not be necessary for all picky eaters, on the severe end
of the PE spectrum, their eating habits can cause real psychosocial distress:
PEAs experience anxiety around eating situations, they get depressed,
experience obsessive-compulsive symptoms or lower quality of life. At this point,
researchers can't say for sure whether it's the embarrassment around their
limited eating habits that causes psychosocial distress in PE in adults, or the
other way around — but it's possible it goes both ways.

Regardless, no recommended treatment for severe PE or ARFID in adults

currently exists, although some researchers are having some success
using cognitive-behavior therapy and exposure therapy techniques with more
extreme PE and ARFID adults in their clinics. However, no large clinical trials
have been conducted.

"There is a real lack of research in PE adults, but we know not all PE behavior is
pathological — not even close," says Ellis. "We would really like to learn more
about people who truly struggle with these eating difficulties, and learn how to
help improve their psychosocial functioning."