pica

Is there a difference between those kind of things? Absolutely.

Pica is a behavioral medical

condition.

where the dog persistently chews on and ingests non-food items.

You may notice shortness of breath just walking up the stairs.

Or you may have symptoms that we call PICA, which is where you get the craving of eating ice.

or paper.

The dangerous thing about just looking at ferritin face as a symptom or diagnosis of a low iron is if for individuals who are brown or black, as I am, you may not quite notice those features and then you are into this false reassurance that, oh, I don't have low iron, I don't have pale skin, when actually you probably do have low iron and you do need to get checked out.

Exploring eating disorders.

We will now look at four types of eating disorders: pica, anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating or gluttony.

Pica.

Here, the person eats items not normally eaten as food, for example, hair, soap, dirt, then wooden pencils, et cetera.

Since these items cannot be digested, over time they accumulate in the person's stomach, causing excessive pain.

Natalie then got in touch, which was lovely, and after hearing more about her journey, we chatted, and I invited her onto the podcast to share her perspective and experience.

And Natalie is a mum to four-year-old Freddie, who's autistic, non-speaking, and has PICA, which is a condition that means he may eat non-food items.

She's spoken really openly about her concerns, understandably, for his safety, the difficulties she's found finding an appropriate school placement, which I know lots of people are experiencing at the moment, and the impacts that the delays with the SEND system can have on families.

And today we're gonna talk about Freddie, family life, navigating support, and the realities behind the headlines.

So it's not just the-

Yeah

... communication, but the, the danger around, him not being aware of danger, PICA, um, climbing and running, running off as well.

Yeah.

So a lot of my work focuses on avoidant restrictive food intake disorder, which although kind of recognized in 2013, uh, there still remains a lack of research and clinical understanding.

And I've also done work on PICA, so individuals who eat non-food items, and again, a condition where there's been very little research.

And I guess before we get into the details of what ARFID is, what PICA is, how did you get into this area of research?

So a lot of my research focuses on the overlap between eating disorders and neurodiversity.

I was, um, working on a research study focused on autism, um, but eating kept coming up in the interviews and when I met families and, you know, none of our assessments at that time were assessing eating behavior or eating disorders.