It's been taken up by supermodels and discussed in chat rooms, on YouTube and by Eddie Murphy's daughter, Bria Murphy, and experts are now warning that the cotton ball diet fad is extremely dangerous, ABC News.
The diet involves dipping up to five cotton balls in juice, lemonade or smoothies and eating them in one sitting, a means to trick the body into feeling full.
"They dip it in the orange juice and then they eat the cotton balls to help them feel full, because the cotton's not doing anything. It's just dissolving. And it makes you think you're full, but you're not," Bria Murphy said in an interview with "Good Morning America," describing things she had seen behind-the-scenes in the fashion world and possibly while filming season 13 of "America's Next Top Model."
"Nothing good can come of this. Absolutely nothing," Brandi Koskie, managing editor of the website Diets in Review, told ABC News.
Koskie, who has been tracking diet trends for over nine years, points out that most cotton balls are made of bleached, polyester fibers full of chemicals, not cotton. "Your clothing is also made of polyester, so swallowing a synthetic cotton ball is like dipping your T-shirt in orange juice and eating it," she added. Koskie has found a disturbing number of YouTube videos made by girls between the ages of nine and 16 demonstrating how to partake in the diet.
"When we talk about something like this we certainly aren't talking about health anymore," she said. "We're talking about weight and size and certainly something that is potentially very, very dangerous."
Since cotton balls are full of dangerous chemicals, Dr. Ovidio Bermudez, the chief medical officer at the Eating Recovery Center in Denver, compares ingesting them to eating cloth, buttons or even coins. Eating enough of them may cause an obstruction of the intestinal tract, known as a bezoar, a trapped mass that could prove life-threatening.
"The most common causes of bezoars are swallowing indigestible matter like hair or too much vegetable fiber. Cotton balls could certainly create similar problems," Bermudez said to ABC News.
According to Karmyn Eddy, co-director of the eating disorders clinical and research program at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, eating cotton balls may be a symptom of pica, or the craving to eat an inedible food due to the lack of a particular nutrient, and believes that the cotton ball diet can take the form of an eating disorder.
"I've had patients in my practice eat things like paper and clay for the same reason - they're trying to distract themselves from hunger and prevent weight gain," she told ABC News. "It's certainly a misguided practice, and I find it alarming for young girls to be doing this who don't have the information to understand what they are doing to their bodies."
