Posted: 4/18/2010 9:53:23 PM EDT
So, I'm watching "Adam 12" on hulu.com as I like to do  and they have this episode where this guy calls the police because his wife is 9 months pregnant and appears to be comatose. The doc at the hospital says she has low hemoglobin from eating red clay, which is practiced by some poor people in the south, who believe it will ease the delivery. I figured that just had to be BS, but then I saw this:
Nevertheless, according to "Dixie's Forgotten People: the South's Poor Whites", by J. Wayne Flynt, geophagy was also quite common among poor whites in the South-eastern United States. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, this was often ridiculed in popular literature.
"Many men believed that eating clay increased sexual prowess, and some females claimed that eating clay helped pregnant women to have an easy delivery."[11] Also, they claimed that clay helped to stimulate the appetite. It seems that red clay and kaolin were preferred. The educated classes generally considered the practice a foul superstition, and tried to discourage it, often unsuccessfully. The author cites a recent survey by Obstetrics-Gynecology Clinic at Duke Medical Center in North Carolina, according to which one quarter of patients were clay-eaters. Edible clay is still available for sale in the American rural South.[12][13] Anyway, they call it Geophagy. Learn something new every day. 
I know, cool story bro.
ETA, in the show the wife lived but the baby boy was stillborn. |
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You do know the kao in kaopectate is for kaolin. Pectate is for pectin. And that is what it originally contained. Clay can be rich in iron which is liberated by stomach acids. Terra cotta clay is gray-green in color before firing, turning orange after firing. This is due to the iron changing oxidation state from +1 and +2 to +3. |
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When I lived in western NC, I used to buy my eat'n clay right next to the boiled peanut stand on the way to the Klan rally....the next morning, on the way to church where I spoke in tounges and danced with rattlers I'd wash the Sunday potluck down with stricknine the head on home to fuck goats and my niece and my daughter and my mom. |
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Quoted:
Still messed up because eating clay shouldn't cause low hgb. Actually, eating things like clay, dirt, or other nonedible substances can apparently be a symptom of low iron, but not a cause. Many of the women who engage in kaolin-specific pica complain of constipation. Some even suffer ruptured colons. Low blood-hemoglobin levels, a sign of anemia, are common, because the ingestion of kaolin inhibits absorption of iron from foods.
http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-2669 TIFWIW. |