Orthorexia Nervosa Risk Assessment of Athletes vs Sedentary

Assessment of Recreational and Competitive Athletes’ and Sedentary Individuals’ Orthorexia Nervosa Risk: A Cross-Sectional Questionnaire Study
(Data in Turkish)

Data was gathered online. (March-April 2020)

The questionnaire consisted of two parts: Personal information (demographics, body weight, height, education level, employment status, presence of any chronic diseases, exercising frequency and duration, sports branch, having participated in a national/international sports competition as an athlete in the last year, following any particular diet) and the ORTHO-11 Scale.

ORTHO-11 consists of 11 items, and each item is rated on a Likert scale of 4 points. Individuals are asked to respond using the phrases "always, often, sometimes, never" to represent how much they agreed with those phrases. All items except for item 6 are scored as follows: always 1, often 2, sometimes 3, and never 4. Item 6 is scored reversely. Lower scores indicate a higher risk of orthorexia nervosa.

Individuals from varying levels of physical activity were included in the study, later they were grouped as “sedentary”, “recreationally active” and “competitive athlete” for analysis. The competitive athlete group consisted of participants who took part in a national or international competition in the last year. The sedentary group consisted of participants who declared doing no exercise at all, or exercise only 1-2 days a week, for less than half an hour. All remaining participants were considered recreationally active.