Celebrities give the best medical advice

Shailene Woodley is quite a gifted young actress. I've enjoyed seeing her in several pictures.  She brings a certain relaxed natural style to whatever part she plays.  She won awards for her performance in "The Descendants," with George Clooney, and I've also seen her in some TV roles.  Shailene has lovely almond-shaped eyes and a great voice and laugh, which along with a witty personality make her a great guest on Letterman.

Now, this is a free country, and we can all believe what we choose to sink our minds into, but Shailene likes to eat clay.  If you ever saw "Raising Arizona," you remember this prison dialogue with Nicolas Cage and his "ear-bending cellmate": 

Ear-Bending Cellmate: ...and when there was no meat, we ate fowl and when there was no fowl, we ate crawdad and when there was no crawdad to be found, we ate sand.
H.I. McDonnough (Cage) : You ate what?
Ear-Bending Cellmate: We ate sand.
[pause]
H.I.: You ate SAND?
Ear-Bending Cellmate: That's right!

In fact, Shailene says that clay is "one of the best things you can put in your body" because it removes heavy metals as it, shall we say, leaves the body.   She says a cab driver told her about this and said that pregnant women in his African home town eat clay.  Of course, medical science has a name for this practice: geophagy (eating of earth). It is a horrible shame that there is insufficient food available in all corners of the earth, leading women to eat clay as a nutrient supplement, but it raises the question of whether a well-to-do young woman in Los Angeles, California, is doing herself any good by emulating the practice - or doing her young admirers any good by recommending it.

Those who know far more about clay than I say that while there are certain minerals in it that might make up for the lack of iron or dairy calcium, there is still not a good reason to make the infield at the local baseball diamond part of your daily food plan.  For one thing, those in the know cannot find proof that clay really removes toxicants from the body.  And we have kidneys and livers to do that job, anyway.  

Add to that the fact that ingesting clay also means those who partake might also be consuming arsenic, lead and other toxicants in that dirtburger.  

So I'll just say "no" to the clay when it's being passed around, but I'm thinking....I put the name Shailene Woodley into the Adele Dazeem Name Generator and got the Travoltafication.  Tell me, if this had been someone by the name "Sophie Wooodsz" talking about chowing down on Dirt du Jour, would we even listen for half a second?

If you'll excuse me, I have to keep my appointment with Dr Jenny McCarthy now.