Print Friendly and PDF  Eating Dirt can be ‘Good for the Belly’
Says Study  Anthony Gucciardi June 7th, 2011 Updated 01/29/2012
at 2:21 am Pin It  June 6, 2011  plantsdirt 210x131 Eating Dirt
can be Good for the Belly Says StudyMost of us never considered
eating the mud pies we made as kids, but for many people all
over the world, dining on dirt is nothing out of the ordinary.
Now an extensive meta-analysis forthcoming in the June issue
of The Quarterly Review of Biology helps explain why.   The
first written account of human geophagy comes from Hippocrates
more than 2,000 years ago, says Sera Young, a researcher at
Cornell University and the study’s lead author. Since then, the
eating of earth has been reported on every inhabited continent
and in almost every country.  Despite its ubiquity, scientists
up to now have been unable to definitively explain why people
crave earth. Several hypotheses had been considered plausible.
Some researchers think geophagy is simply a consequence of food
shortage. In other wo