A Thing That Is Way Less Of A Thing Than It's Made Out To Be

The cotton-ball diet.

As it's being reported, someone out there has decided to go on a diet in which you dip cotton balls in orange juice or lemonade, and then you eat the cotton ball, and the cotton ball makes you feel full so you don't eat as much actual food. This article from CBS Atlanta links a YouTube clip where someone does it and everything.

The rub here is that cotton is of... questionable edibility. There isn't really a hard yes or no on it. Cotton balls are laden with chemicals in order to bleach them. There's a good chance they could just stay in there and gum up your digestive system and pretty soon you have to go into surgery to get the cotton out. So, not a thing you ought to do, if you were stupid enough to consider it.

That, of course, assumes that people are actually doing it in such quantities that it is some sort of 'trend'. Which I'm not seeing. At all.

If you're following the articles I'm seeing, such as this one from Time, you'd think this would be a 'trend' or something. They hauled out the medical experts and everything. But it looks seriously overblown from my perspective. In fact, I'm seeing more video clips from news outlets explaining how dangerous it is than I am seeing of people actually doing it. And the clip CBS Atlanta used is of someone who did it as a dare and only ever ate the one, according to the preview text, and later took the video down. So CBS Atlanta has a dead link on their hands. Many of the others are also dares or people who thought it would be funny.

Other people on YouTube eating cotton balls have lit them on fire first. Which is a parlor trick.

I'm actually having a hard time finding ANY cotton balls actually being eaten for actual dietary purposes. It's all dares and tricks and 'hey watch this' and a couple pets trying to eat them... and news organizations thinking it's all a big fad diet. If they're in there, they're hidden well enough that I certainly wouldn't call it a trend or anything that even threatened to become one.

I'm doing this as a HOBBY. You'd think the people that are being PAID for this would take five minutes to run a YouTube search and at least scan the preview texts.