“We like food and we like to eat”. This is the main tenet of Comida’s Magazine. But, what happens when you like to eat, but the object of this desire is not necessarily food? With the help of My Strange Addiction, the following are some of people’s addictions when it comes to eating. And no, this is not about chocolate or the addictive properties found in bags of potato chips. This is something much more unusual.

EATING DIRT
How many people, when they were kids – in either a park or at recess – swallowed sand like there was no tomorrow? The difference between this and our first protagonist is that most people stopped when they reached a certain age. The young Brea, on the other hand, opted to keep doing it and now, at the age of 19, she’s tried every type of sand – even sand bars, which are similar to granola bars. She says that she loves their crunch.

EATING ROCKS
“Waiter, this steak is as hard as a rock, bring me another one”. You could count the number of times that this has happened when dining somewhere less than perfect. For Teresa, this wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, since she loves to eat rocks. This resident of Virginia, in the USA, has been eating rocks for around 22 years. She says that this allows her to taste “the Earth’s flavor”. Her favorite rocks contain seven minerals, and she breaks them into a thousand pieces with a hammer. She then eats them in the same way that people peel and eat sunflower seeds at a soccer stadium. And how are her teeth? Like a rock, one imagines.

EATING HAIR
There’s a big difference between nervously chewing on your hair before an exam and the next case. 22-year-old Haley, from Flint, in the United States, has both a daughter and a compulsive need to pull out her hair and eat it – called trichotillomania. She is going bald, obviously.

EATING FOAM RUBBER
The problem with eating foam rubber is that you run out of pillows at home too soon. Adele eats a cushion a day, so it’s not hard to do the math. Who wants to rest their head on a pillow when they could be eating a big chunk of the foam rubber that it’s made out of? This is what this woman must be thinking. According to her, she’s been doing it since she was a kid. Apparently, she continues to eat foam rubber despite the damage that it’s been doing to her digestive system.

EATING TOILET PAPER
Many of you will have thought about the smell of toilet paper. Some are enticing, others agreeable and others, simply, say nothing at all. But, what about the flavor? 34-year-old Kesha loves eating toilet paper. She always has a roll on her just in case she gets hungry. What’s her favorite place to enjoy what to her is a culinary delicacy? At the movies, where nobody pays any attention to what the person next to them is doing.

EATING CIGARETTE ASHES
“Is this your cigarette? Um, are you going to eat it?” When a relationship gets to this point it might be time to reconsider who you’re dating. Bianca discovered a delicious flavor where few would: in cigarette ashes. The same way that one person might stick their finger in a freshly made sauce, she dips it in ashes and then licks it clean with her tongue – which is black, thanks to her addiction. She has been doing this for four years. The best part of all is that she doesn’t even smoke. She says it’s bad for your health.

EATING GLASS
When Josh begins to chew on a glass, it’s not because he’s eager to finish his champagne. It’s because this young man from Ohio prefers the container to its contents. Eating it, he says, is like chewing a piece of gum. When he doesn’t have glasses on hand, his addiction can be quickly dealt with by breaking and eating a light bulb. At least he admits to having cut his lips from time to time. If kidney stones are painful, I don’t even want to think about what it might be like to have broken glass on your insides.

As you might expect, we at Comida’s Magazine don’t recommend you eat any of these things, because the majority, if not all of them, can be bad for you. It should be pointed out that My Strange Addiction is an entertainment-oriented TV show in the United States, where things can at once be true, false and everything in-between.

Do you have a strange addiction? Tell us about it!