Eating clay has been a common practice for centuries, all over the world. But it has experienced a recent resurgence among wellness enthusiasts in the US, who claim that it “detoxifies” the body from the inside out. To put this strange trend to the test, I tried eating bentonite clay for a few days to see if I felt any difference.
Bentonite clay is easy to find in health stores, but it’s most often used for the skin and hair, not for eating. Bentonite clay makes for the ultimate face mask; it has this way of cleansing your skin so deeply that it almost hurts. It’s also useful for the hair and scalp for the same reason. Clay has a binding effect, so it binds to all the impurities on your skin and hair and carries them away.
I’ve been using clay on my face and skin for years now. But I’d never, until now, considered putting it into my mouth. It’s gray powder from the earth, aka basically dirt, and eating dirt is… bad for you? I mean, one would assume.
But the practice is now a health trend in the US. It reached a peak in 2014 when actress Shailene Woodley proudly advocated clay eating in an interview. She called clay “one of the best things you can put in your body.” Other celebs, like Zoë Kravitz, have followed suit.
Proponents of eating clay claim that it cleanses the body, improves digestion, and balances gut bacteria. They also say that it has an alkalizing effect and something about a negative charge??
Here’s what Shailene wrote on Into the Gloss:
“So, I’ve discovered that clay is great for you because your body doesn’t absorb it, and it apparently provides a negative charge, so it bonds to negative isotopes. And, this is crazy: it also helps clean heavy metals out of your body. My friend starting eating it and the next day she called me and said, ‘Dude, my [redacted] smells like metal.’ She was really worried, but we did some research together and everything said that when you first start eating clay, your bowel movements, pee, and even you, yourself, will smell like metal.”
OK then!
Clay eating is controversial among health professionals, who don’t usually recommend the practice. There’s not a lot of scientific evidence to back up its benefits, and there are some potential risks. More on that below.
But I love a nice wacky health/food experiment, and I don’t exactly eat the healthiest of diets (I ate pizza for dinner all week), so there are probably some ~toxins~ to be removed from my body.
I tried eating bentonite clay for three days to see if it had any positive effects. It was, um, interesting! I’ll probably never do it again, but I can totally see why other people use it.
Is Clay Good For You?
Clay eating — also known by its scientific name, geophagy — became a hot trend after Shailene’s endorsement. Zoë Kravitz reportedly used it to lose weight for a role.
But geophagy has been a common practice in many native cultures, from sub-Saharan Africa to the Andes, for hundreds of years. It’s especially common for pregnant women.
“This is a practice in some indigenous cultures, and I think that probably came about because they did not have access to certain nutrients in their diet, like calcium from dairy, or iron, and there are some minerals in dirt or clay,” gastroenterologist Dr. Roshini Raj told Today.
Women in the modern US typically get plenty of minerals from the rest of their diet, making clay eating unnecessary. But people like Shailene are eating clay these days for other reasons. They say that it removes toxins from the body and improves digestive health, among other health benefits. There may be some scientific basis for these uses.
“It is possible that the binding effect of clay would cause it to absorb toxins,” nutrition expert Dr. David L. Katz told ABC News.
Also, at least one type of clay, white kaolin clay, contains the same antacid compounds that are used in Rolaids, Maalox, and other medicines for stomach upset. One study showed that another type, bentonite clay, can improve symptoms of digestive conditions like irritable bowel syndrome.
However, health professionals don’t often endorse this practice. There are certain risks associated with eating clay, mainly that it can contain trace amounts of arsenic, lead, and other toxicants that naturally occur in soil. That whole metal-removing thing, too, may do more harm than good, because certain metals are necessary for the body (like iron).
“There could conceivably be benefits, but there could certainly be harms — and a favorable benefit/harm ratio has not been established to justify recommending this,” Dr. Katz told HuffPost.
Nonetheless, people in the wellness community continue to eat clay on the regular. I love using bentonite clay on my face and hair, but my stomach health leaves much to be desired.
So I decided to give clay eating a try.
What Type of Clay to Eat
The two most popular types of clay to eat in the US are bentonite clay and kaolin clay.
I opted to eat bentonite clay. I have a giant jar of bentonite clay in my closet, as I always do, because I use it for my skin and hair. It’s a popular brand called Aztec Secret Indian Healing Clay, which some people use for eating. But the jar very clearly says FOR EXTERNAL USE ONLY. In all caps and everything.
I like to follow instructions, so I went online and bought a package of “food-grade” bentonite clay instead. It was pricier than the Aztec brand, and I can’t help but assume that all bentonite clay is pretty much the same — none of it is really intended for internal use — but the food-grade level made me feel better about eating it, so…
In the southern United States, eating clay is also a common practice, and vendors sell locally mined clay from Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Again, it’s not marketed for internal use, but some people use it that way.
How to Eat Clay
Now I’m no expert, but here’s what I gleaned from my research. To eat clay, you should mix it with water and then drink it. A quick Google search advised me to eat 1/2 teaspoon to 1 teaspoon per day. I went with 1 teaspoon.
Interestingly enough, I could not really get the clay to mix completely with the water. It was clumpy and looked gross.
Did I use too much water? Not enough? I have no idea; I was just winging it!
So I just worked with what I had.
The Experiment
The moment of truth arrived. It was time to take a sip of the clay water. The gray dirt water.
I was nervous, because I assumed that the taste would be horrific. Suddenly I felt like I had probably used too much water. I couldn’t possibly drink ALL THAT GRAY WATER.
But folks, in a true demonstration of bravery, I sucked it up and took a sip anyway.
It was… not as bad as I expected. It tastes like dirt, yes. Like maybe really old and bland dirt from a cave. Like if you bottled some water that had been running through a cave, picking up all the old dirt from the walls?
It’s definitely not tasty, but it’s not bad in the way that I expected, either.
I did find myself reluctant to drink ALL that clay water. The more sips I took, the more I hated the taste. Over the course of the day, I kept procrastinating drinking it, and the clay kept separating from the water and settling on the bottom of the jar.
At the end of the day, I did not succeed in my goal. I drank only about half of the water in the jar.
But since I put 1 teaspoon of clay and drank half, that’s like eating 1/2 teaspoon of clay, which is within the range of Google’s recommendation. I’ll call that a success!
I won’t walk you through the next two days that I continued this experiment, because they went exactly the same. I made clay water, failed to drink all of it because ew, but did drink about 1/2 teaspoon of bentonite clay each day.
The Results
I did not notice any major positive effects from eating clay for a few days. My s*** definitely did not smell like metal, at all, and I didn’t feel suddenly ~cleaner~ or healthier. I did feel somewhat refreshed every time I chugged some, but I will attribute that to the water.
I will say, though, that I was PMS-ing and, again, have been eating pizza for dinner all week, so my stomach would normally be a mess, but it wasn’t. I haven’t had a single stomachache all week. Could the bentonite clay be the reason? Quite possibly!
That leads me to conclude that eating clay could definitely be useful as a digestive aid and stomach remedy. But maybe not all that useful for general ~cleansing~ or detoxifying purposes (don’t come for me, Shailene!). I will probably never eat clay again, because I just can’t get used to the taste. But if I did, I’d use it like a medicine, not like an everyday dietary supplement.
That pretty much lines up with my interpretation of the evidence on clay eating (but I am not a scientist, and there is no real consensus on this).
There are no known negative side effects to eating clay, as long as you don’t binge on it. If you’re interested, there’s no harm in giving it a try.
Also, there are capsules of bentonite clay available, so if the idea of drinking clay water grosses you out, definitely go that route.
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