sunglasses wrote:PICA is more common in children with developmental disabilities.
It's so common in autism that it doesn't merit an actual diagnosis unless you're going to hurt yourself by it. Given that I ate hair and hair risks forming trichobeozars, you could make the argument that I was risking hurting myself. But given that I really only ate the
roots of my head hairs (I did eat my eyebrows, eyelashes, and nose hairs in full), I'm not sure that risk was ever really there.
Cpt._Funkotron wrote:The "Land Before TIme" movies led me to believe it was fine and normal to eat leaves straight off the tree branch when I was in kindergarten. I was quickly and firmly disabused of that notion when the kinder-minders found out that I as encouraging other kids to do it as well.
As a kid I would eat pretty any plant that I knew to be edible that wasn't a "vegetable." Indian cucumber root, shamrocks/wood sorrel leaves, red clover flowers, and eastern hemlock needles were all things I consumed with regularity. I also ate sassafras and black birch bark despite not liking the taste, because they were edible. However Queen Anne's lace roots were wild "carrots" and my father made salad out of dandelion greens, so both of those things stayed off my menu (actually, I tried QAL one time and it tasted awful, more so than sassafras or birch bark). Since I only ate plants I
knew to be edible (and not vegetables) I don't count this as eating non-food items, though. I think as a little kid I ate marigold flowers though, which are edible but I didn't know.
jbobsully11 wrote:I remember eating
onion grass as a kid, and I've been told that I used to eat wet dog food when I was really little until the dog barked at me one day, but I don't think I ate in any other non-food items. My sister ate a lot of crayons.
I mean, dog food is food, even if
cultural norms say humans are not supposed to eat it. I once ate parrot pellets in an attempt to get my Senegal on a pelleted diet. And I think onion grass is edible too. Though Tess pointed out that leather is also technically digestible, and I suspect some of the other things I ate may be as well.