A rare medical condition has left Tempestt Henderson, from Florida, eating up to five bars of soap a week - and washing powder too.
I remember the first time I dipped my fingers into the washing powder,' she said.
'I dabbed the powder onto my tongue and it tasted so sweet, and salty…it just felt so right. I was hooked straight away.'
The nursing student says she knew eating soap was dangerous, but ignored the warning labels on the box in favour of licking the deadly powder daily, from the minute she woke up in the morning.
Soon she had moved onto licking the bubbles of soap in the shower, too, a habit that was getting her through up to five bars of soap a week.
'In the shower, I like to lather up a green bar of soap, and lick the bubbles. And as the soap disintegrates, I pop a tiny amount of the soap into my mouth and suck it. It’s heavenly.
'I love the clean feeling it gives me. Eating soap feels so much cleaner than just washing with it.'
After six months of eating soap, unhappy Tempestt decided to be brave and seek medical advice. She was diagnosed with a rare disorder called PICA, which doctors told her is characterised by an appetite for substances that are largely non-nutritive.
Sufferers have been known to compulsively eat metal, coins, chalk, batteries and even toothbrushes. It can often be caused by a mineral deficiency, which explains why pregnant women often crave eating coal when needing iron.
But in Tempestt’s case doctors believed the condition was bought on by stress.
'Things got really stressful for me when my boyfriend, Jason, split up with me and left for college,' she admitted.
'He told me he was going to college in Kansas to study business. I begged him to give the long distance relationship a go, but he told me it was over. I was devastated.'
When Tempestt herself had to leave for college, hundreds of miles away from her family home in Florida, things took a turn for the worse.
'College was five hours away from my family, and the stress got bigger. With no boyfriend and my family miles away, I got lonely, sad and depressed. I turned to bath soap and laundry detergent and my problem got increasingly worse.'
Dr Barton Blinder, the world’s authority on PICA, says that eating soap in these quantities could seriously affect Tempestt’s health:.
'With soap, the worry is the problems associated with ingesting toxic chemicals, which are typically alkaline but there are other toxic substances in soap.
'These can damage someone's metabolism and cause digestive problems. With soap, you're also concerned about the acid-base balance of the blood.'
But for Tempestt, therapy got to the bottom of her addiction to soap, and the cause of her PICA.
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