November 20, 2009

Skip the food, pass the cutlery

Filed under: Health,Science,Weird by Orangemaster @ 11:22 am
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If you can stomach it, have a look at x-rays showing a whole bunch of cutlery eaten by 52-year-old Margaret Daalman, a Dutch woman with an eating disorder called pica (I think it’s pica; oddly no one mentions it), which is an urge to eat non-food items. She ate 78 different items of cutlery and went to the hospital in Rotterdam with stomach pain. Although this happened some 30 years ago, the x-rays were apparently published for the first time this week in a Dutch medical magazine.

One of the most famous entertainers with pica (or just plain bonkers) was Michael Lotito aka Monsieur Mangetout (‘Mr Eat-it All’), a Frenchman who holds the Guinness Book of World Records for eating undigestables.

He apparently had the ability to consume 900 g of metal a day. Since 1966, he had consumed 18 bicycles, 15 shopping carts, seven television sets, six chandeliers, two beds, a pair of skis, a computer, and a Cessna light aircraft. He died of natural causes in 2007.

(Links: presurfer, knurps.nl)

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