“[Western society] is still a man’s world, in which girls are taught from an early age to be both self-critical and painfully self-conscious. Every day we experience an avalanche of messages telling us that specific women are too fat [or] too thin.”

—Joan Smith, Independent on Sunday, March 21, 1999

“Several twin studies suggest that . . . family susceptibility [to eating disorders] is largely hereditary.”

—Harvard Mental Health Letter, October 1997

Fiji, a small island in the South Pacific that has only had electrical power for fifteen years, was almost completely isolated from Western culture until 1998, when the country’s one television station began broadcasting Hollywood- produced programs such as “Seinfeld,” “ER,” and “Melrose Place.” Soon afterward, teenage girls on the island—whose traditional culture values large figures over thin ones—began developing behaviors associated with disordered...