“You eat dirt from the ground?!”

 

“Isn’t that just rocks? Are you crazy?!”

 

“When did you start eating Play-Doh and how can that be good for you?

 

Consuming earth

For the longest time, it was thought to be a very useless behavior that was frequently condemned by society-at-large. Not only was it assumed to be frivolous, but it was formally diagnosed as an illness thought to be injurious to the person who consumed it.

 

The act was lumped in with other compulsive consumptive behaviors including the ingestion of starch, paint, cigarette butts, or burnt matches. Well, that’s one way to certainly suppress the desire of individuals to consume a natural medicine.

 

Call it a disease!

 

It’s a Different Story Now

Over the last decade, however, the subject matter has received some major tailwind. There are now almost one thousand clinical write-ups discussing the health benefits of clay consumption in humans.

 

There is a myriad of credible scientists, researchers, health-care practitioners, who offer an objective, informative view with insight into what was once a strange custom perceived as an illness. I often read new articles about eating clay, published by well known, mainstream media.

 

I just recently reviewed an objectively written piece in the magazine Scientific American, a stalwart among conventional medical publishers, entitled “Would You Like a Side of Dirt with That?”

 

I am pleased to say that after more than twenty years since the publication of the first edition of The Clay Cure, geophagy (eating clay) is a real, credible practice that is now finding confirmation in the scientific world. After all, the idea of consuming charcoal— not the stuff that you put in your barbecue on the weekend, but a supplement referred to as activated charcoal—has gained mainstream acceptance as a health supplement. This activated charcoal has been processed with steam at a very high temperature, making it extremely porous and thus giving it a large surface area.

 

I Still Wonder…

If everyone in the world were absolutely convinced that eating clay was good for the body, and it could help them in the most extreme physical cases, would everyone take a bite of something that is literally “dirty”?

 

We’re Just Too Clean

Most people in the United States have become too “clean” to even think of eating dirt. In fact, we have developed an aversion to dirt, avoiding it at all costs. Never mind your neighbor who carries around his bottle of hand sanitizer and squirts his hands and other body parts ten times a day after coming into contact with anything he perceives as “dirty.” Our collective germaphobia began approximately one hundred and fifty years ago when Pasteur revealed his “germ theory” of disease.

 

But did you know that in the era before refrigeration, it was common to store food by burying it in the ground? This helped to keep the bad bacteria at bay, and the microbes in the soil helped to preserve the food.

 

One bite from that piece of food stuck in the soil contained some “dirt” which included pollen, soil-based organisms, and other microbes. These were the kinds of healthful, daily microexposures to dirt which occurred before our obsession with hyper cleanliness.

 

So yes…I eat dirt.