What Is The Point Of Eating Dirt

Why Do People Eat Dirt?

By Jörg Blech

People in many parts of the world indulge in the curious practice of eating dirt, also known as geophagy. But why they do so has remained something of a mystery. Now a new study aims to show whether loam in the earth can be vital in protecting pregnant women from harm.

The inhabitants of the east African island of Pemba rejoice when one of the young women there starts eating earth -- this unusual food supplement can only mean one thing: that she is expecting a baby.

"The daily portion is about 25 grams of dirt," says Sera Young, who works full-time on research into geophagy, or the practice of eating earth. The 30-year-old anthropologist is soon to transfer from Cornell University to the University of California in Berkeley.

On every continent with the exception of Antarctica, there are people who snack on chalk, loam or marl. But it's only now that Young and her colleagues are gradually beginning to understand what force brings them to do this. Whether people are eating loam from natural sources or buying "healing clay" at the drugstore and eating it, they are clearly following some ancient craving that has been shaped over the course of evolution.

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It is not only humans who indulge in a bit of dirt every now and then -- parrots, cattle, rats, elephants and chimpanzees also partake. Even prehistoric man shared this passion for eating earth -- an archaeological dig in Africa uncovered powdered loam that had clearly been used as marching rations two million years ago. But the question remains: why?

In her field studies on the island of Pemba, which belongs to Tanzania, Young observed that it is mainly pregnant women who experience cravings for earth. "It's like an addiction. There is even a word for it: vileo," she says.

However, the pregnant women do not simply sweep up their earthy meal from the streets. In fact, they go to great lengths to ensure they have the right type of earth. They rake loam from specific springs or collect it from certain places outside their villages. "The dirt cannot be dirty," Young explains.

The choosiness of earth eaters was something that struck German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt 200 years ago when he spent time in what is now Venezuela. The indigenous Ottomac people, he noted, preferred those alluvial layers where "the thickest, finest-feeling earth" was to be found.

The fact that the indigenous people devoured this dirt in "tremendous quantities" and stored it for times of hardship in the form of dried clay balls, led Humboldt to infer that geophagy was used as a makeshift solution in times of food shortages. In fact, people do eat earth particularly often in leaner times, like on Haiti in 2004 when slum dwellers were given flat cakes baked from butter, salt, water and dirt.

However, this hunger hypothesis does not really explain the phenomenon fully -- earth is also on the menu for the well fed. Many researchers, therefore, think that earth works as a natural medicine. Loam, after all, contains magnesium, sodium, calcium, potassium, iron and large amounts of silicates. In cases of severe diarrhea, according to some scientists, a teaspoon of dirt could provide the body with the minerals it has lost.

The British soil researcher Peter Hooda, however, has discovered indications that, on the contrary, loam takes more away from the body than it provides. The scientist and his team came to this surprising conclusion after carrying out a laboratory simulation of the interaction between dirt and the digestive tract. They mixed loam, gastric acid and nutrients, left the resultant muddy mixture at body temperature for long enough to react fully and then analyzed the resultant compound.

A Natural Detox for the Stomach

Their results showed that many nutrients clung on tightly to microscopically small structures in the loam. This led to a significant reduction in available iron, zinc and copper in the mud bath, which is in line with one of Young's observations on Pemba: many loam-lovers were anemic and had conspicuously low levels of iron in their blood.

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In certain circumstances, however, surmises the anthropologist, the leaching effect of the dirt must be an advantage. "Dirt may help to remove poisonous substances from the body." This theory is backed up by something that Young noticed after studying over 2,700 relevant cases in literature on the subject: small children and pregnant women -- people for whom poisoning could be particularly serious -- make particularly frequent use of this natural resource.

Up until now, morning sickness has been seen as an evolutionary mechanism developed to protect the unborn child from harmful substances in food. Could geophagy be an additional strategy?

In an attempt to give more substance to her theory, Young is currently having 30 loamy samples from Pemba, Kyrgyzstan, Indonesia and other areas analyzed by the Macaulay Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland, in order to understand to what extent they have the chemical potential to get rid of toxic foodstuffs.

The analyses could provide scientific proof of what many earth eaters have always said: dirt cleans the stomach.

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Pills to Sharpen Your Mind

By Karen Kaplan and Denise Gellene, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
December 20, 2007
Forget sports doping. The next frontier is brain doping.

As Major League Baseball struggles to rid itself of performance-enhancing drugs, people in a range of other fields are reaching for a variety of prescription pills to enhance what counts most in modern life.

Despite the potential side effects, academics, classical musicians, corporate executives, students and even professional poker players have embraced the drugs to clarify their minds, improve their concentration or control their emotions.

"There isn't any question about it -- they made me a much better player," said Paul Phillips, 35, who credited the attention deficit drug Adderall and the narcolepsy pill Provigil with helping him earn more than $2.3 million as a poker player.

The medicine cabinet of so-called cognitive enhancers also includes Ritalin, commonly given to schoolchildren for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and beta blockers, such as the heart drug Inderal. Researchers have been investigating the drug Aricept, which is normally used to slow the decline of Alzheimer's patients.

The drugs haven't been tested extensively in healthy people, but their physiological effects in the brain are well understood.

They are all just precursors to the blockbuster drug that labs are racing to develop.

"Whatever company comes out with the first memory pill is going to put Viagra to shame," said University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Paul Root Wolpe.

Unlike the anabolic steroids, human growth hormone and blood-oxygen boosters that plague athletic competitions, the brain drugs haven't provoked similar outrage. People who take them say the drugs aren't giving them an unfair advantage but merely allow them to make the most of their hard-earned skills.

In the real world, there are no rules to prevent overachievers from using legally prescribed drugs to operate at peak mental performance. What patient wouldn't want their surgeon to be completely focused during a life-or-death procedure?

"If there were drugs for investment bankers, journalists, teachers and scientists that made them more successful, they would use them too," said Charles E. Yesalis, a doping researcher and emeritus professor at Pennsylvania State University. "Why does anyone think this would be limited to an athlete?"

The growth of the brain drugs bears a striking resemblance to the post-World War I evolution of plastic surgery -- developed to rehabilitate badly disfigured soldiers but later embraced by healthy people who wanted larger breasts and fewer wrinkles.

The use of cognitive-enhancing drugs has been well documented among high school and college students. A 2005 survey of more than 10,000 college students found 4% to 7% of them tried ADHD drugs at least once to remain focused on exams or pull all-nighters. At some colleges, more than one-quarter of students surveyed said they had sampled the pills.

The ubiquitous mental stimulant is coffee, and a morning jolt is sufficient for many. But as scientists were developing drugs to treat serious brain disorders, they found more potent substances.

Sharon Morein-Zamir, a psychologist at Cambridge University who writes about the ethics of brain enhancement, said her interest in the medications was largely academic. But when someone she knew who had been taking Provigil for a neurological condition offered her some pills, Morein-Zamir's curiosity was piqued.

"I knew the literature and wondered what it felt like," she said.

The drug helped her focus as she worked at her computer for hours straight. But she wondered if it was a placebo effect.

"Maybe I would have gotten it done anyway," said Morein-Zamir, who launched an Internet poll Wednesday to ask scientists about their use of brain-enhancing drugs.

Philips, the poker player, started using Adderall after he was diagnosed with ADHD five years ago and later got a prescription for Provigil to further improve his focus. ADHD drugs work by increasing the level of the brain chemical dopamine, which is thought to improve attention. Provigil's mechanism of action is not well understood, but boosting the effect of dopamine is thought to be part of it.

The drugs improved his concentration during high-stakes tournaments, he said, allowing him to better track all the action at his table.

"Poker is the sort of game that a lot of people can play well sporadically, but tournaments are mostly won by people who can play close to their best at all times," he said. "It requires significant mental effort to play in top form for 12 hours a day, five days in a row."

In the world of classical music, beta blockers such as Inderal have become nearly as commonplace as metronomes.

The drugs block adrenaline receptors in the heart and blood vessels, helping to control arrhythmias and high blood pressure. They also block adrenaline receptors in the brain.

"You still have adrenaline flowing in your body, but you don't feel that adrenaline rush so you're not distracted by your own nervousness," said Dr. Bernd F. Remler, a neurologist at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.

That's why Sarah Tuck, a veteran flutist with the San Diego Symphony, takes them to stave off the jitters that musicians refer to as "rubber fingers."

"When your heart is racing and your hands are shaking and you have difficulty breathing, it is difficult to perform," said Tuck, 41, who discovered them when she began performing professionally 15 years ago.

A survey she conducted a decade ago revealed one-quarter of flutists used the pills before some or all of their performances or in high-pressure situations like auditions. She believes use is now more widespread and estimates that three-quarters of musicians she knows use the drugs at least occasionally.

Prescriptions for Inderal and other beta blockers can be readily obtained from physicians. Tuck said some doctors had told her they used the drugs themselves to calm their own nerves before making presentations at medical meetings. Musicians say their drug use is all aboveboard.

"It's not like we're sending our clubhouse attendants to BALCO to get us our Inderal," said double bassist Bruce Ridge, 44, referring to the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative that allegedly provided slugger Barry Bonds and other athletes with performance-enhancing drugs.

But cosmetic neurology, as some call it, has risks. Ritalin, Adderall and other ADHD drugs can cause headaches, insomnia and loss of appetite. Provigil can make users nervous or anxious and bring on headaches, while beta blockers can cause drowsiness, fatigue and wheezing.

One Stanford University study found that low doses of Aricept improved the performance of healthy pilots as they tried to master new skills in a flight stimulator, but the side effects -- dizziness and vomiting -- were less than desirable in a pilot.

No one has conducted thorough studies about how brain-boosting drugs would affect healthy people after weeks or months of use, said Dr. Anjan Chatterjee, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Negative consequences may not be limited to people who popped the pills.

Martha J. Farah, a bioethicist who teaches undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania, said she was beginning to detect resentment toward students who used the drugs from classmates who did not. She has wondered whether improving productivity through artificial means also might undermine the value of hard work.

In an article published today in the journal Nature, Morein-Zamir and University of Cambridge neuroscientist Barbara J. Sahakian say that clear guidelines are needed to decide what's fair. It may be reasonable to ban the drugs in competitive situations, such as taking the SAT. But in other cases, they wrote, people such as airport screeners, air-traffic controllers or combat soldiers might be encouraged to take them.

With a slew of memory enhancers in development, the issues are not academic.

Memory Pharmaceuticals of Montvale, N.J., for example, is eyeing drugs to combat those pesky "senior moments" that are considered a normal part of aging.

"If there were drugs that actually made you smarter, good Lord, I have no doubt that their use would become epidemic," Yesalis said. "Just think what it would do to anybody's career in about any area. There are not too many occupations where it's really good to be dumb."

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Eleven Things Men Should Never Tell Their Wifes

WebMD Feature from "Redbook" Magazine

By Ty Wenger

Redbook Magazine Logo

11 "Don't-Tell-the-Wife" Secrets All Men Keep

I was in the ninth grade when I learned a vital lesson about love. My girlfriend at the time, Amy, was stunningly cute, frighteningly smart and armed with a seemingly endless supply of form-fitting angora sweaters. And me? Let's just say I was an adolescent Chris Robinson to her budding Kate Hudson -- and well aware of my good fortune.

Then one day, as we stood in line for a movie at the mall, Simone Shaw, junior high prom queen, sauntered by. Suddenly Amy turned to me. "Were you looking at her?" she asked. "Do you think she's pretty?"

My mind reeled. Of course I was looking at her! Of course she was pretty! My God, she was Simone Shaw! I paused for a second, then decided to play it straight.

"Well, yeah," I chortled.

Five days later our breakup hit the tabloids (a.k.a. the lunchroom).

There comes a time in every man's life when he discovers the value of hiding the grosser parts of his nature. He starts reciting the sweet nothings you long to hear: "No, honey, I play golf for the exercise." "No, honey, I think you're a great driver." "No, honey, I wasn't looking at that coed washing the car in the rain."

We're not lying, exactly. We're just making things...easier. But Glenn Good, Ph.D., a relationship counselor, disagrees, and maybe he has a point. "These white lies are pretty innocent, but they can turn confusing," he says. "Many women think, If he's lying about himself, is he also lying about something else? Is he having an affair? To establish trust you have to tell the truth about the innocuous stuff."

And so, in the interest of uniting the sexes, we've scoured the country for guys willing to share the private truths they wouldn't normally confess. Some are a bit crass. Some you've always suspected. Some are surprisingly sweet. (Guys don't like to reveal the mushy stuff, either.) But read on, and you may discover that the truth about men isn't all that ugly.
Secret #1: Yes, we fall in lust 10 times a day -- but it doesn't mean we want to leave you

If the oldest question in history is "What's for dinner?" the second oldest is "Were you looking at her?" The answer: Yes -- yes, we were. If you're sure your man doesn't look, it only means he possesses acute peripheral vision.

"When a woman walks by, even if I'm with my girlfriend, my vision picks it up," says Doug LaFlamme, 28, of Laguna Hills, California. "I fight the urge to look, but I just have to. I'm really in trouble if the woman walking by has a low-cut top on."

Granted, we men are well aware that our sizing up the produce doesn't sit well with you, given that we've already gone through the checkout line together. But our passing glances pose no threat.

"It's not that I want to make a move on her," says LaFlamme. "Looking at other women is like a radar that just won't turn off."
Secret #2: We actually do play golf to get away from you

More than 21 million American men play at least one round of golf a year; of those, an astounding 75 percent regularly shoot worse than 90 strokes a round. In other words, they stink. The point is this: "Going golfing" is not really about golf. It's about you, the house, the kids -- and the absence thereof.

"I certainly don't play because I find it relaxing and enjoyable," admits Roland Buckingham, 32, of Lewes, Delaware, whose usual golf score of 105 is a far-from-soothing figure. "As a matter of fact, sometimes by the fourth hole I wish I were back at the house with the kids screaming. But any time I leave the house and don't invite my wife or kids -- whether it's for golf or bowling or picking up roadkill -- I'm just getting away."
Secret #3: We're unnerved by the notion of commitment, even after we've made one to you

This is a dicey one, so first things first: We love you to death. We think you're fantastic. Most of the time we're absolutely thrilled that we've made a lifelong vow of fidelity to you in front of our families, our friends and an expensive videographer.

But most of us didn't spend our formative years thinking, "Gosh, I just can't wait to settle down with a nice girl so we can grow old together." Instead we were obsessed with how many women who resembled Britney Spears we could have sex with before we turned 30. Generally it takes us a few years (or decades) to fully perish that thought.
Secret #4: Earning money makes us feel important

In more than 7.4 million U.S. marriages, the wife earns more than the husband -- almost double the number in 1981. This of course is a terrific development for women in the workplace and warmly embraced by all American men, right? Right?

Yeah, well, that's what we tell you. But we're shallow, competitive egomaniacs. You don't think it gets under our skin if our woman's bringing home more bacon than we are -- and frying it up in a pan?

"My wife and I are both reporters at the same newspaper," says Jeffrey Newton, 33, of Fayetteville, South Carolina. "Five years into our marriage I still check her pay stub to see how much more an hour I make than she does. And because she works harder, she keeps closing the gap."
Secret #5: Though we often protest, we actually enjoy fixing things around the house

I risk being shunned at the local bar if this magazine finds its way there, because few charades are as beloved by guys as this one. To hear us talk, the Bataan Death March beats grouting that bathroom shower. And, as 30-year-old Ed Powers of Chicago admits, it's a shameless lie. "In truth, it's rewarding to tinker with and fix something that, without us, would remain broken forever," he says. Plus we get to use tools.

"The reason we don't share this information," Powers adds, "is that most women don't differentiate between taking out the trash and fixing that broken hinge; to them, both are tasks we need to get done over the weekend, preferably during the Bears game. But we want the use-your-hands, think-about-the-steps-in-the-process, home-repair opportunity, not the repetitive, no-possibility-of-a-compliment, mind-dulling, purely physical task." There. Secret's out.
Secret #6: We like it when you mother us, but we're terrified that you'll become your mother

With apologies to Sigmund Freud, Gloria Steinem -- and my mother-in-law.
Secret #7: Every year we love you more

Sure, we look like adults. We own a few suits. We can probably order wine without giggling. But although we resemble our father when he was our age, we still feel like that 4-year-old clutching his pant leg.

With that much room left on our emotional-growth charts, we sense we've only begun to admire you in the ways we will when we're 40, 50 and -- God forbid -- 60. We can't explain this to you, because it would probably come out sounding like we don't love you now.

"It took at least a year before I really started to appreciate my wife for something other than just great sex; and I didn't discover her mind fully until the third year we were married," says Newton. "But the older and wiser I get, the more I love my wife." Adds J.P. Neal, 32, of Potomac, Maryland: "The for-richer-or-poorer, for-better-or-worse aspects of marriage don't hit you right away. It's only during those rare times when we take stock of our life that it starts to sink in."
Secret #8: We don't really understand what you're talking about

You know how, during the day, you sometimes think about certain deep, complex "issues" in your relationship? Then when you get home, you want to "discuss" these issues? And during these "discussions," your man sits there nodding and saying things like "Sure, I understand," "That makes perfect sense" and "I'll do better next time"?

Well, we don't understand. It doesn't make any sense to us at all. And although we'd like to do better next time, we could only do so if, in fact, we had an idea of what you're talking about.

We do care. Just be aware that the part of our brain that processes this stuff is where we store sports trivia.
Secret #9: We are terrified when you drive

Want to know how to reduce your big, tough guy to a quivering mass of fear? Ask him for the car keys.

"I am scared to death when she drives," says LaFlamme.

"Every time I ride with her, I fully accept that I may die at any moment," says Buckingham.

"My wife has about one 'car panic' story a week -- and it's never her fault. All these horrible things just keep happening -- it must be her bad luck," says Andy Beshuk, 31, of Jefferson City, Missouri.

Even if your man is too diplomatic to tell you, he is terrified that you will turn him into a crash-test dummy.
Secret #10: We'll always wish we were 25 again

Granted, when I was 25 I was working 16-hour days and eating shrimp-flavored Ramen noodles six times a week. But as much as we love being with you now, we will always look back fondly on the malnourished freedom of our misguided youth. "Springsteen concerts, the '91 Mets, the Clinton presidency -- most guys reminisce about the days when life was good, easy and free of responsibility," says Rob Aronson, 41, of Livingston, New Jersey, who's been married for 11 years. "At 25 you can get away with things you just can't get away with at 40."

While it doesn't mean we're leaving you to join a rock band, it does explain why we occasionally come home from Pep Boys with a leather steering-wheel cover and a Born to Run CD.
Secret #11: Give us an inch and we'll give you a lifetime

I was on a trip to Mexico, standing on a beach, waxing my surfboard and admiring the glistening 10-foot waves, when I decided to marry the woman who is now my wife. Sure, this was three years before I got around to popping the question. But that was when I knew.

Why? Because she'd let me go on vacation alone. Hell, she made me go. This is the most important thing a man never told you: If you let us be dumb guys, if you embrace our stupid poker night, if you encourage us to go surfing -- by ourselves -- our silly little hearts, with their manly warts and all, will embrace you forever for it.

And that's the truth.

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New Way of Thinking about Heart Attacks and Death

Consider someone who has just died of a heart attack. His organs are intact, he hasn't lost blood. All that's happened is his heart has stopped beating—the definition of "clinical death"—and his brain has shut down to conserve oxygen. But what has actually died?

As recently as 1993, when Dr. Sherwin Nuland wrote the best seller "How We Die," the conventional answer was that it was his cells that had died. The patient couldn't be revived because the tissues of his brain and heart had suffered irreversible damage from lack of oxygen. This process was understood to begin after just four or five minutes. If the patient doesn't receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation within that time, and if his heart can't be restarted soon thereafter, he is unlikely to recover. That dogma went unquestioned until researchers actually looked at oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope. What they saw amazed them, according to Dr. Lance Becker, an authority on emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "After one hour," he says, "we couldn't see evidence the cells had died. We thought we'd done something wrong." In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later.

But if the cells are still alive, why can't doctors revive someone who has been dead for an hour? Because once the cells have been without oxygen for more than five minutes, they die when their oxygen supply is resumed. It was that "astounding" discovery, Becker says, that led him to his post as the director of Penn's Center for Resuscitation Science, a newly created research institute operating on one of medicine's newest frontiers: treating the dead.

Biologists are still grappling with the implications of this new view of cell death—not passive extinguishment, like a candle flickering out when you cover it with a glass, but an active biochemical event triggered by "reperfusion," the resumption of oxygen supply. The research takes them deep into the machinery of the cell, to the tiny membrane-enclosed structures known as mitochondria where cellular fuel is oxidized to provide energy. Mitochondria control the process known as apoptosis, the programmed death of abnormal cells that is the body's primary defense against cancer. "It looks to us," says Becker, "as if the cellular surveillance mechanism cannot tell the difference between a cancer cell and a cell being reperfused with oxygen. Something throws the switch that makes the cell die."

With this realization came another: that standard emergency-room procedure has it exactly backward. When someone collapses on the street of cardiac arrest, if he's lucky he will receive immediate CPR, maintaining circulation until he can be revived in the hospital. But the rest will have gone 10 or 15 minutes or more without a heartbeat by the time they reach the emergency department. And then what happens? "We give them oxygen," Becker says. "We jolt the heart with the paddles, we pump in epinephrine to force it to beat, so it's taking up more oxygen." Blood-starved heart muscle is suddenly flooded with oxygen, precisely the situation that leads to cell death. Instead, Becker says, we should aim to reduce oxygen uptake, slow metabolism and adjust the blood chemistry for gradual and safe reperfusion.

Researchers are still working out how best to do this. A study at four hospitals, published last year by the University of California, showed a remarkable rate of success in treating sudden cardiac arrest with an approach that involved, among other things, a "cardioplegic" blood infusion to keep the heart in a state of suspended animation. Patients were put on a heart-lung bypass machine to maintain circulation to the brain until the heart could be safely restarted. The study involved just 34 patients, but 80 percent of them were discharged from the hospital alive. In one study of traditional methods, the figure was about 15 percent.

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