You can assert something that’s true, but it doesn’t mean that you’re going to be believed – evidence helps. That’s the main reason why a group of prominent eating disorder researchers, including UNC Chapel Hill’s Cynthia Bulik, PhD, FAED, released a new document detailing the scientific evidence supporting the Academy for Eating Disorder’s “Nine Truths.”

“I think the term ‘truth’ has become a little bit unstable. A lot of things are being forwarded as truths that are not substantiable. And we really wanted to make sure that we really had a water-tight document,” said Bulik, director of the UNC Center of Excellence for Eating Disorders and the Center for Eating Disorders Innovation at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.

Bulik helped develop the “Nine Truths.” She said “The Science Behind the Academy for Eating Disorders’ Nine Truths About Eating Disorders,” is a collaborative effort by authors from five different countries and six different institutions.

The systematic analysis was published online in the November issue of the journal European Eating Disorders Review.

The “Nine Truths” were released in mid-2015. Bulik and her co-authors started digging into the supportive science behind the truths in December 2015. They finished their analysis this August. Bulik said the depth at which they dug into the truths took some time, and they enlisted others to help them decipher the data.

“We made sure that we had an expert from each of the areas that we were looking be involved,” said Bulik, Distinguished Professor of Eating Disorders in the Department of Psychiatry in the UNC School of Medicine.

Those experts helped break down the “Nine Truths” into “sub-truths” and detail the research underlying each claim. At the end of each section, these sub-truths were assigned a grade based on the strength of the supporting data.

“Our goal was to write it at a level where families can use it, but where physicians, scientists, other health care providers, and mental health care providers can also use it.”

The areas covered in the document vary widely, from how genetics play a role in developing a disorder, to the physical toll an eating disorder can take on the body. Bulik said she’s proudest about expanding upon Truth 5: Eating disorders affect people of all genders, ages, races, ethnicities, body shapes and weights, sexual orientations, and socioeconomic statuses.

“When you say ‘eating disorder’ to most people, what they still conjure up in their head is anorexia nervosa, and usually a white, female adolescent as well,” said Bulik.

Bulik went on to say the stereotype they encounter most often for eating disorders is a very thin person with a sickly appearance.

The document, citing the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, explains why that’s false: “In a sample of over 3,000 adolescents, eating disorders were present in all BMI categories.”

The authors also said, “A review of community studies from 30 countries found no systematic association between ethnicity/race and eating disorder occurrence,” referencing an article from Clinical Epidemiology.

While anorexia nervosa is the most lethal psychiatric disorder, other eating disorders can cause patients and families distress as well, a fact emphasized by the Binge Eating Disorder Association (BEDA). For the first time BEDA co-hosted an annual conference on binge-eating disorder with the National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA) in New York on November 2-4.

Not only is this the first time the two associations have held a joint conference, it’s one of the first times they’ve worked together to broaden the scope of how eating disorders are perceived. Both NEDA and BEDA have endorsed the “Nine Truths” and NEDA Program Director Lauren Smolar said the release of the science behind the truths will only further help their cause.

“The ‘Nine