Pica: Dirt for Dinner

shape them though. Cool. Yeah, yeah, we we did as well, me and my sister's we there was a faucet behind the house. There's like a concrete slab back there for some reason, and then just dirt, so we would, uh, you know, we'd add some water to the to the dirt, create mud, pack that mud into pie tins and also many pie tins, and then you you leave them out there on the slab, they bake, they dry, they become delicious pies, and that's when you cut a slice and

you eat it, right, you know. I don't know if I ever did, but I was the older of the kids, and it's entirely possible that the my younger siblings ate some of the mud pies. And you know what, that's not probably a surprise to any parent, because all parents know that at some point their kid is going to be chomping on something, some sort of non food item

that they shouldn't be. But it turns out that dirt eating, which is called pikea, which is actually a lot more than dirt eating, is so much more common than anybody has ever really realized, also known as geophagy. If you want to get fancier, that's pretty fancy. So we've talked about the benefits of premastication and regurgitation and other podcasts, so we thought, we know what, why not talk about

dirt eating because it's kind of fascinating stuff. Yeah, Now, from a very broad viewpoint, there's nothing really that weird about it. I mean, there are organisms that eat minerals. The mineral crunching bacteria for instance, um exists. And then just in any diet, I mean, what do you think you're doing when you put salt on something. You're adding

a little mineral to your diet. It's it's not crazy. Um. Likewise, the various medications that we take have some sort of mineral component too, So there's nothing just off the wall nuts about eating dirt, eating minerals, eating essentially rocks. Yeah, and you've probably even witnessed your dog or cat eating something that's a non food item, especially dogs, especially dogs. In fact, you might have even witness phyto chopping down on a chunk of poo before, right, Yeah, especially cat,

this happens. It's called corpor fagia, and it actually means that your dog could have a vitamin deficiency or even a touch of O C D. And this is something we're going to talk about more in humans later. Um, But before we really kind of get into the meat of this or the dirt of it, let's talk a bit about what it is. UM. How it's characterized picka is actually comes from the Latin word for magpie, since the magpie bird will eat just about anything, and it's

been thought of as a physiological eating disorder. And as you have noted, it's also called geo foggia or earth eating. And in humans it's mainly pregnant women and pre adolescent children who exhibit pica eating behavior. And again, when we talk about pica, it's most associated with dirt, but it can be a lot of different things. It can be clay, it can be starch. Yeah, I mean I was looking

at some some reports. We're talking about ice. Uh, pregnant women that experiencing pica, and half of them are eating ice, which is pago foggia, which is different. I mean eating a bunch of ices. You're just drinking a lot of water, except with more crunch, right. Yeah. And some people say that it's a texture thing and it can be a stress thing when it comes time soothing on the tongue and all that. Now with with children, obviously, children, very

young children will try and eat just about anything. That's why you don't give them micro machine to play with. That's why you you limit things in their environment. They can go down their mouth throughout their nose, because it's just part of the testing out their environment. What can I eat, what can I not? What goes fits up my nose, what doesn't quite fit up my nose? Yeah.

But then there's this other little section um that kind of veers off into other territory, and it's more about compulsive eating, and that's where you see very unusual non food items. So we're talking about cigarette ashes, toothpicks, athletic socks, dust balloons, paint chips, hair, and burnt matches. Oh yeah,

the heroines big you do see that. Yeah, And depending on the item that's being eaten pick it could lead to health problems like lead poisoning from the paint chips or constipation from starch or clay in take because everything in moderation. Don't go out and eat just a whole lot of pizza, don't go out and drink in a xominant amount of water. And if you're going to eat gym socks, keep it down there like one or two

pairs tops. All right, let's see that's the problem, right, If you're eating gym socks is probably because you have compulsion to do so something. Yeah, there's it's a psychological disorder at that point. Yeah. So this podcast is really going to talk about two different aspects of pick A. One is more sort of the cultural aspects and the nutritive aspects, and the other is going to be more of the psychological and sort of the compulsion aspect of it. But I did want to mention that pica has been

around for a long time. The first written account of human geophagey comes from Hippocrates more than two thousand years ago, so we've been eating dirt for quite some time. And I've also read accounts, um, and I don't know to what degree they were accurate now that I think about them, but you at least find stories in which individuals are so hungry that to set to satisfy their hunger on

some level, they will eat non food items. And certainly there have been plenty of times where food items have been panned out, like during the Second World War, there were times when they would add uh, say wood shavings, um, sawdust to uh to say flower or something, you know, and it's not really food item, but you can sort of try and make your food stretched a little a little farther. By doing that, you're right in filling up

your belly. Right, So if you eat a bunch of clay, then maybe that can stem off your your hunger for a little while. Um. So let's talk about the cultural aspect of this, because in some cultures, both inside and outside the United States, it really is not uncommon for say, women to consume clay or dirt during pregnancy, and that's where we most associate pica. And it's interesting, I didn't

find any sources that really went into this. But by the mere fact that you see pregnant women engaging in it, I feel like there's a huge amount of sexism in our cultural history with pica because women are the ones that are are eating it, and they're doing so on they're pregnant, and so in many cultures, I mean, you you can easily imagine it being explained away as oh, it's crazy pregnant ladies. Of course they're going to do

crazy things. Um, Whereas as as we're discussing, there are a number of other possibilities at work here beyond just mere madness. Yeah, I mean, sometimes it is an aspect of cultural bonding that that women, pregnant women will eat clay or some other substance because it's what's done in that community, and there's this idea that it could save off symptoms of pregnancy like nausea. And then sometimes it has to do with vitamin deficiencies, which we'll talk about

a little bit more. Uh. Yeah, but certainly you have a culture aspect. It's just one huge part there. If you're if you're in an environment in a culture where it is accepted that the consuming clay or some sort of mineral during this time is beneficial and okay, then obviously you're gonna go for it, whereas in other areas it's going to be basically a taboo. It's just gonna be you know, it's who eats dirt? Yeah, it's kind of like, what what is that cultural norm there? Right? So,

if you're in ken, you are you gonda? Dirt eating is not going to be so weird because it could be used in ceremonial or religious practices. But then half a world away, somebody else is bringing their own cultural bias to it and they're saying, whoa, look at these backwards people in this backwards country eating dirt like moron. But they're just because they have their cultural blinders on,

they don't realize that it is essentially a normal act. Yeah, let me share this historical tidbit with you because I

think it's really interesting. Um. In Psychology Today's Brain Sense column, it's pointed out that clay eating and soil eating were common in the eight hundreds, especially among slaves in the American South, and then in the fifties and sixties, the practice was so popular that clay filled lunch bags were sold at Alabama bus stops for snacks as travelers and Southerners would male bags of hometown clay to their friends and relatives who moved north, and in some reports estimate

that clay eating is a daily practice in over two hundred cultures worldwide. Well, you know, there's something perhaps in a psychological and almost magical thinking level, where like the the earth that you were from, you would want to engage with it like it I mean also reminds me of a Dracula. When Dracula moved um to London from Transylvania, he had his native dirt shipped with him because he needed that dirt to really to be I mean, that

was his home. He had to bring a chunk of his home with And of course we all do that when we travel. We want to bring a piece not the dirt necessarily the grave dirt, but we bring a piece of the place we were with us, you know. Well yeah, and and depending on the area that you're in, you're going to have a different content in terms of minerals and other things that could potentially be helpful to someone.

We'll talk more about that later. Oh yeah, it kind of comes right back around into some of the discussions you hear involving, say, the consumption of local honey to deal with local pathoges. You know, the the idea that that you were essentially a local being and the more you consume locally, the more in tune within with the local ecosystem you're going to be. So this is a

story really about how widespread and common it is. In fact, um, you know, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry decided that pica couldn't be considered abnormal because it was so widespread and because it was associated with cultural practice practices as opposed to uh, you know, some sort of O C D behavior. Now the question becomes, well, what's the deal with eating things that are non nutritive or outside of the cultural norm that don't have anything to

do with cultural practices or religious practices? For instance, like what's the deal with eating something like toilet paper? Um? Where does where does that all fit into this? Because this is under the heading of pica, right, and that the Japanese diet, the Jinnameroni was on. She could eat all these she could eat all the the tissue paper or just paper I think she wanted. But you can

only eat paper. That's right, that's right. Um. So other than in pregnant women, chronic pica or this kind of um, you know, outside of again the cultural norm, pica is most common in people with developmental disabilities, including including autism. This in children, UM and typically the children are between the ages of two and three when this begins to surface. Pica also may surface in children who have had a

brain injury affecting their development. And according to Kids Health, between ten and thirty percent of kids ages one to six years have the eating disorder of pica. And again, this is characterized by persistent and compulsive cravings that last for one month or longer to eat these non food items. So naturally, if you have this compulsion to eat things that are not food, it can reak havoc on your

digestive system. And there's there's actually been an uptick in this, Yeah's a huge one that's studied by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality found that hospitalizations for pica in

a ten year span jumped n That is huge. So what happens that people are hospitalized for a laundry list of problems, including obstruction of the bowel or airways from consuming or choking on stuff like hair, high blood pressure, high levels of sodium salts in the blood, and abnormal liver functions because of consuming huge quantities of something like baking powder. So again, the list of Pika items is.

You know, you'll get some lists than their twenty items long thirty items long, and they range anywhere from like you know, chalk again, hair, you know, chumping, chomping on match sticks or yeah, or people trying to get into the Guinness Book. There. You have a certain subset of people who are always trying to do things like can I pass an entire toy train through my digestive system piece by piece? So they'll take something big, take it up.

I think people have done this with cars before, their ideas. Can I consume a car piece by piece and pass it through my body? Does it come out altogether on the other end, Yeah, it just naturally comes out whole. I don't know how they do it, but I mean maybe it's sort of a sense of power in that. It's like, like you're not so tough, Folkswagen. I can eat you in small pieces, but I can still eat you. I don't know. When I hear at things like that.

I always think that that's one of those things where you feel like you have a measure of control over your life, right, So everything else could be spiling, spiraling out of control, and then you begin to obsess on

this one thing that you can control. So it's sort of interesting and that if you look at um pica and you look at it in the O C D spectrum, very well maybe related to that, especially because they've taken studies of people with pica and they've given them they've given them the S s R eyes the serotonin uptake inhibitors, right, that helps you balance out the serotonin in your brain.

These are largely a class of antidepressants, and they have found that that is really effective for people with pica, helps to curb their behaviors or their compulsions to do this. So there's this idea that it is existing on that that spectrum. All right, we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to press on with with dirt eating, with mineral eating and uh and some of the the the vitamin deficiency elements of this.

All right, we're back, and uh, you know, as we mentioned earlier, eating dirt eating things that are essentially the earth. Are not that crazy when you think about the fact that we put salt in our food. We use various minerals in our cooking and in our medication, So we're doing it. Everyone is doing some of this anyway, perhaps just in a more elegant fashion. Well, I think about

stomach upset, right. Are you familiar with kaopect tape? Yes? Okay, Well, that has something called kalin in it, and kalin is really helpful. It's in clay and it can combat diarrhea because it forms a protective coating in the lining of the intestine and binds bacteria there. So in some parts of Nigeria you see people eating this kaleon night as kind of clay. Yeah, the idea that you're eating this to ramp up the protection in your gut against something

that you just state. You see various animals that do this after they have consumed um a toxic plant or a semi toxic plant, something that if they just ate it by itself, it would just become an increasingly more of a problem with cause diarrhea, etcetera. And uh, I've read some explanations of this where they essentially say that it's it's us refusing to be bossed around by plants,

because plants are ultimately have it figured out. I mean, there are plants that have that grow everywhere now because they have and I hate to personify evolution too much, but or personify plants, but they've essentially figured it out. It's, you know, they know people need potatoes, they know people need uh um, you know, illicit substances that they produce, and it's they kind of they gained the system to

their advantage. So vegetation that has a fruit that is toxic or slightly toxic, toxic uh, they're telling us where we can eat them, when we can eat them, how much we can eat them, and who can eat them. And so the the ability to consume clay um or some other substance uh is essentially our way of saying, actually, I'm going to decide when I'm going to eat you and how much of you I am going to eat, right because I figured out a way you're gaming me, and I've figured out a way to game you so

that I can still get some sort of food resource. Yeah,

that's the whole, the whole evolutionary battle in essence. Now, um Pica is thought to be associated with low levels of iron in some people, um calcium, zinc, and vitamin C, and pica may appear in as many as half of those with iron deficiency and has been reported in about twenty of pregnant women, and a study in France found that among seventy nine patients with iron deficiency anema excuse me anemia reported the regular ingestion of non food items,

while only nine percent of the non amnemic subjects in the control report of this behavior. So already you're seeing here that there's there's a pretty good amount of data that is saying that people are sometimes seeking it out and sometimes not even uh you know, unbenounced themselves right now, because the body is saying we need this, right, we need an intake of this substance or this substance. We need more iron, Go find it and instinctively we know

where iron occurs. Right, And that's when when you think about pica, you tend to think again back to pregnant women or children who there there are cities that show that they do have a low level of these vitamins are and are perhaps seeking it out. Yeah, children are growing, they need some they need more vitamins to to grow. You see that in the animal kingdom as well. For instance, dear during antler growth period, there's a lot of tissue growth going on pretty rapidly, so you'll see them eat

calcium and magnesium rich soils during that time. Yeah. And if you think that that the pregnant women and the children are just sort of, you know, an anomaly or went off, this is really interesting. There's a study that was published in the Quarterly Review for Biology, and again it looked at pica and pregnant women in pre adolescent children and it found that they are also the most

sensitive to parasites and pathogens. So Cornell University researcher Sarah Young, who is also the studies lead author, she put together a database of more than four hundred and eighty cultural accounts of geofagi and the database includes as many details as possible about the circumstance, circumstances under which the dirt

was consumed and by whom. And then they found again that not only was it pregnant women and kids who engaged in the dirt eating, it was far more prevalent in tropical climates because this is where you have many more food born microbes that are that are very abundant and uh, and they find that these two groups of people tended to eat the dirt during a gastro intestinal distress.

So the story that's painted here is that this dirt eating is helping to keep those pathogens and those parasites at bay in those different cultures and protecting against these two groups that are so sensitive to them. And I thought this was interesting young who said in her study, we hope readers agree that it's time to stop regarding

Geoflagi as a bizarre, non adaptive gustatory mistake. So in this realm, you see it not as you know, something that's a compulsion or perhaps part of the O C D spectrum, but more again lining up with what the body is needing or trying to guard it stuff against, or as you say, gaming what's around you, right, gaming

those parasites or pathogens. And as we discussed before, I mean it also comes back to understanding the mind body connection, realizing that our that there's more going on in our bodies, that our bodies not just a magic throne that our brain rides in, but it is part and partial to who we are, and the more we understand about its cravings and its needs and its desires, uh, in terms of in this case in terms of minerals um and

and Clay's and whatnot. The more we understand how we work, and then we know that that this kind of behavior is not something that stands outside of ourselves, but it is a part of the experience. Yeah, and I like this topic too, because you do start to look at it in these very different ways, the cultural aspect way the body and just what it can do in game for itself and how nature can game you as well.

And then of course the psychological element to it um where you see it with kids in autism and so on and so forth. Yeah, now we'd be remiss if we did not mention um some of the dirt aficionados out there, is, particularly in the wine tasting world, that's right. Yes, Now this is a French term, and your French is better than than mine. It is. Actually, I always think I'm not sure if I know that the t E

R R O I R, which of course means earth. Yeah, and this is the idea that someone who really knows their wine, they get a sense of the earth in which the grapes were grown. So it's kind of that Dracula thing. Again, this the earth that the grapes came from that were transformed into this this elegant wine. And there's a sense of that and and certainly, I mean it makes sense to a large point because the the actual components of earth vary from one from one location

to the next. Anyone who's ever engaged in some serious planting of trees, like we're my wife and I are currently having a few fruit trees put in our backyard. Um did a trade with somebody and uh, and when you know, we're learning that, you know, there are certain trees that grow in Georgian soil. And then you have to also think about you know, city levels and whatnot. I mean, there's a lot that goes into dirt. Not all dirt is just dirt. There are many different types.

So so it makes sense. I've also heard merroir mentioned and this is uh the idea that the ocean uh the body of water from which of saltwater from which something is uh is harvested um seafood, that that also plays into its taste, and that it's the it's part of the reason that people are so into different sea salts that you have, you don't just have you can you know, you can go to the grocery store and you can buy just straight up sea salt, but you can also buy a wide variety of sea salts from

various parts of the world. The idea being that the salt the of of that ocean, of that particular corner of the ocean, has a distinctive impact on taste. So the next time you're at a dinner party, I dare you, as you are quaffing your wine to say that the you think the soil came from a low acidity grape grown under the tendrils of the sun, you can say

tendrils of the sun. Tendrils of the sun. Yeah, and uh, perhaps even note that the meat was salted with something from the Pacific Northwest when the winds of the Pacific Northwest. I like it, you do, all right? All right? Well, you know we're kind of pressed for time today, so I'm gonna skip calling the robot over here with its uh,

with its listener mail. We will get back to that, because I know we have a lot of disgusting snail mail, like not not snail mail in the terms that it came in um through the post office, but rather snail mail, and then it's about slugs and snails and gastropods being disgusting. Uh. And I know you want to hear me read it and and gag, So we will get to that. I will real quick mention to address a couple of things that my wife, who is a who's a regular listener,

brought up. Uh. First of all, in a previous episode, I may have sometimes I make these obviously I'm really into certain TV shows. In this episode, I made a thirty Rock reference earlier, and I at least explained it. In a previous episode, I used the term reagan Ing, and I just think I did need to remind everyone that that that I'm not trying. I'm not dragging any

kind of politics into the the episode. But in a particular episode of of thirty rocky conservative character um Jack Donneghie us his reagan ing to describe a day in which everything is going right and he's nailing every task before him. So, in case anybody were wondering what in the heck I was talking about, I did owe you an explanation, and that is the explanation. And then likewise, multitasking Uh. A classic example of multitasking that I did

not bring up is the use of an electric toothbrush. UM. I regularly fight this, uh, this particular temptation, and so does my wife to grab the electric toothbrush, start using it and then do other things like go check email

or do some other morning task while brushing. And if you do that, of course, you end up not really brushing all that well, you're just kind of holding the brush in your mouth, and it's just kind of a an in feed procedure, and likewise you're probably not doing a great job of the other thing either, so and you're gonna get cavities exactly. So it's the cautionary tale

for everyone out there. So if you have some insight on any of these topics, but particularly uh dirt, the consumption of dirt, the tasting of of a of a foreign soil in a in the wine, or perhaps you're a vampire and you'd like to have your your native soil shipped in so you may sleep in it. Everything's open for conversations, so let us know. You can find

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