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NEDA TOOLKIT for Educators Impact of eating disorders on cognitive ability and functioning in school Eating disorders can profoundly affect a child’s ability to learn. Understanding some of the ways an eating disorder can affect cognitive function may help educators to recognize that a student may be at risk for an eating disorder. Listed below are key ways that an eating disorder can affect a child’s cognitive functioning because of poor nutrition. A child’s cognitive function will also be affected by the mental disorders that often coexist with an eating disorder, which may include anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. A review of the research on the impact of under-nutrition found that unhealthy dietary patterns: • Can have detrimental effects on cognitive development in children • Has a negative impact on student behavior and school performance • Makes students feel irritable, may cause nausea, headache, and makes students feel fatigued and have lack of energy • Individuals who are actively dieting have a reduced ability to concentrate and focus, and do less well at listening to and processing information • Negatively affects students’ task performance • Leads to deficiencies in specific nutrients, such as iron, which has an immediate effect on students’ memory and ability to concentrate • Causes people to focus on the details at the expense of the big picture, which may affect a student’s ability to synthesize information and understand broader concepts • Increases perfectionism and obsession with good grades • Can increase anxiety and depression, which further amplifies the negative effects of unhealthy dietary patterns • Can make students become less active and more apathetic, withdrawn, and engaged in fewer social interactions • Can impair the immune system and make students more vulnerable to illnesses • Increased absenteeism in affected students because of the above impairments Despite malnourishment, the perfectionist attitude of those who suffer from anorexia and bulimia may compel them to maintain a high level of academic performance. Thus a student with a life-threatening eating disorder may continue to earn all A’s, despite being acutely ill. For individuals with eating disorders, functioning can be asymmetrical; some areas, such as schoolwork, may be less affected, while others, such as health and social functioning, are affected greatly. Academic performance is not a good measure of an eating disorder’s severity. In addition to the effects described above, preoccupation with food often dominates the life of a student with an eating disorder. According to Dan W. Reiff and Kathleen Kim Lampson Reiff in Eating Disorders: Nutrition Therapy in the Recovery Process, individuals with eating disorders self-report an overwhelming preoccupation with food: “In our clinical practice we surveyed over 1,000 people with clinically diagnosed eating disorders. We found that people with anorexia nervosa report 90 to 100 percent of their waking time is spent thinking about food, weight and hunger; an additional amount of time is spent dreaming of food or having sleep disturbed by hunger. People with bulimia nervosa report spending about 70 to 90 percent of their total conscious time thinking about food and weight-related issues. In addition, people with disordered eating may spend about 20 to 65 percent of their waking hours thinking about food. By comparison, women with normal eating habits will probably spend about 10 to 15 percent of waking time thinking about food, weight, and hunger.” Page  | 15