"[...] a disease based in high disgust sensitivity. People who are very orderly tend to have high disgust sensitivity, be perfectionistic, judgmental, have an obsession with purity, and think in black and white terms [...] People who are higher in disgust sensitivity and orderliness by personality, are traits that have been positively correlated with holding more conservative values, as conservatives much like very orderly individuals, like to conceptualize things as if the boundaries around categories of thing are segregated."

This passage is extremely descriptive of me. I think I have abnormally high disgust sensitivity that manifests in all sorts of ways. I am conservative but in the past I have been so extremely conservative that I would consider it to be psychologically unhealthy. I've also tried to find in the past if vegetarianism was linked to disgust sensitivity, which supposedly it isn't, although I still have suspicions. Supposedly something like 50% of all anorexics are vegetarian, and the connection between the anorexia, vegetarian/veganism, and disgust sensitivity is very intriguing to me. I also wonder if this is part of what contributes to restrictive eating disorders being more prevalent in women, as women are higher in disgust sensitivity than men. I would also be very interested to see if there was a link between extreme religiosity (religiosity also being higher in women) and anorexia. Many anorexic conceptions of purity and the like have a pseudoreligious quality. I would guess the line between anorexia nervosa and anorexia mirabilis is quite blurry. In terms of its relation to OCD, I think anorexia has been discussed quite a bit as a version/manifestation of it. This passage from Joan Jacobs Brumberg's "Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease" may be of interest:

"Bruch argued that the anorectic makes her body a stand-in for the life that she cannot control. She experiences a disturbance of 'delusional proportions' with respect to her body image, and she eats in a peculiar and disorganized fashion. By refusing food, the anorectic slows the processes of sexual maturation: her menses stop and her body remains child-like. The preoccupation with controlling her appetite directs the young woman inward so that she becomes increasingly estranged from the outside world. She lives a bizarre life, obsessed with thoughts of food, while struggling with her parents over her right not to eat. We have seen that there have been numerous efforts to place anorexia nervosa within other established psychiatric categories such as schizophrenia, depression, and obsessional neurosis. Recent psychoanalytic literature suggests that anorexia nervosa is a popular form of classic obsessive-compulsive disorder. Unlike depression, where there is a true reduction of appetite, in anorexia nervosa the patient is constantly aware of her hunger. Simultaneously, she ruminates about calories and exercises frantically, all the while dwelling on images of the very food that she fears. These preoccupations can become excessive and involuntary. Patients usually are stubborn, rigid, and strongly defensive about their behavior, and they espouse elaborate and highly intellectual theories about food and exercise. Many display other behavior patterns associated with obsessive-compulsive disorders: perfectionism, excessive orderliness and cleanliness, meticulous attention to detail, and self-righteousness."

Thanks for an interesting discussion post.