Geophagia is the official term for craving and eating dirt, including earth, soil, or clay. Eating dirt may relieve gastrointestinal pain for some people, but it can also cause health problems such as ...

Geophagia has been around for centuries. In the 18th century, Roman physicians reported on the effects of eating dirt. Scholars have studied the act of eating dirt in contemporary urban South Africa.

In the fall of 2009 a group of biology students at Tufts University sat down together and ate some dirt. They ground up small clay tablets and swallowed the powder to find out, firsthand, what clay ...

Geophagia, the practice of eating dirt, has existed all over the world throughout history. People who have pica, an eating disorder in which they crave and eat nonfood items, often consume dirt. Some ...

Research suggests that consuming soil may have more health implications than one might expect. Trevor Stokes sieves through the reasons why people include dirt in their diet. At Calabash, a West ...

sorts - hooked on dirt, not drugs. "There was something in the dirt that would just keep me coming back to it," the 49-year-old says of her former craving. At about age 30, Shorter became hooked on ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

Fifty-seven samples of soils commonly ingested in South Africa, Swaziland, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and Togo were analyzed for the concentrations of arsenic (As), cadmium (Cd), cobalt (Co), ...

A case report published in Annals of Internal Medicine: Clinical Cases describes the medical complications of a 36-year-old woman with kidney failure whose escalating compulsion to consume clay led to ...