And if they discovered a young child with a “severe” vitamin D deficiency wouldn’t they want to start treating that right away and not wait around to see if he went for the fish oil?
Another aspect of being BS. It was a study conducted in a Canadian orphanage in the 1930s (@solost posts a pretty thorough debunking of it further up, though it did happen, we have no data from the experiment, only the authors description of what happened). Would the modern assumption that everyone involved had enough calories in their diet and choosing the high-sugar option was the “wrong” one, hold?
My parents were raised in immediate post-war Britain, and they still gave out sugar (or the more scientific sounding “glucose”) pills to treat illness (something that lasted to my childhood 40 years later). Not for as a placebo (though I’m sure there was an element of that by the time I was exposed to it), but because it was a reasonable chance that a sick child wasn’t getting enough calories to fight the infection successfully.
An iron airplane?
But she was never tested, you don’t even know if she was low on potassium, and so it’s all unfalsifiable.
Being that bananas have many times the amount of potassium of celery, it seems a reach.
The whole point of this thread is do people just naturally eat what their bodies need? All we have are anecdotes, but there are plenty more anecdotes that counteract those anecdotes.
Good sources of iron include mussels, liver, sardines, beef and airplanes - which also are an excellent source of aluminium and composites. Last time I checked, airplanes contained significant steel.
I have heard of a number of (somewhat older) kids whose ideal diets were largely composed of nuggets, cheesed macaroni, hot dogs, sugary snacks and peanut butter. I hope the next iteration of this study includes these foods. 
I think I must have a bacon deficiency.
Here’s another link to the story. I knew it happened in an orphanage, but not that it allegedly lasted for 4 1/2 years! It doesn’t help that according to this link, none of the original charts, etc. are extant.
I’m guessing that the child who allegedly drank cod liver oil had rickets, and gave that up when their bones strengthened.
I don’t know if she was or wasn’t, but she died in 2017.
I’m not sure I follow. I’m not implying that she thought she might be low on potassium so she went to the kitchen, found celery, said, “This will help!” etc. Rather, she ate some one day and kept going back for more. She couldn’t figure out why she kept craving it after she’d already eaten bowls of it. So she asked the doctor.
And we didn’t always have bananas, especially during a cold winter but I don’t remember in this particular instance.
You mentioned pregnancy cravings earlier…not sure if you thought she was pregnant when this happened, but she wasn’t.
Sure. The doctor might have looked at her chart, realized what medication she was taking, and if it lowered potassium, he connected the dots. I don’t know if they have to do a blood test for potassium deficiency. She told him any other symptoms she was experiencing, I guess, and since he was an experienced medical doctor I assume he knew what he was talking about.
Even though it seemed to work, there’s also the potential for placebo effect of course.
Some people really don’t have sweet tooths: I have a friend who doesn’t. The only sweet things she likes are Coca-Cola - for the flavor, not the sugar - and vanilla ice cream, in a once a year kind of way. She eats lots of veggies but almost never fruit unless she is using Li hung mui powder on it. No interest in chocolate, candy or baked goods. I guess if you tested a toddler with her preferences they’d naturally go for the veggies and meat options.
No child would ever willingly consume castor oil if there was any other food around. Has anyone here ever smelt that stuff? There’s a reason Mary Poppins gave it with a spoonful of sugar, but TBH I’m not sure that’d make it go down much more easily.
Yes; cravings can indicate a deficiency in some vital vitamin or mineral, but it’s not necessarily a logical one.
I craved ice when I was pregnant, and once I was prescribed iron, the desire receded. It still comes up pretty frequently - the more I crave ice, the lower in iron I tend to be. It’s a known symptom of iron deficiency.
But ice doesn’t contain iron. The body is just trying to get something it isn’t getting, especially if your diet is healthy enough that it should be providing enough iron, really, but something’s stopping it from being used by your body efficiently, eg pregnancy, endometriosis, rheumatoid arthritis. (I currently have the latter two so know about those).
Maybe lobotomyboy’s mother told her doctor she was craving celery and he was wise enough to know that cravings often mean a deficiency in something, and it turned out to be potassium.
Or maybe it turned up in a regular blood test and that coincided with the pregnancy progressing and the craving going.
If anything is going on, it’s learned behavior, which happens at a subconscious level. Eat the celery, feel better, lizard brain wants more celery. The downside is that this can happen with things that are bad for you, like caffeine and sugar
The same mechanism might explain cod liver boy. He almost certainly got dosed before the study, and muscle pain is one of the symptoms of rickets. So he may have had a learned response and when given free access to the code liver oil, managed to get enough to reverse the course of the disease.
What this doesn’t explain is why iron stopped the craving for ice and potassium stopped the craving for celery.
Our child is almost 3 and, if let alone, he would eat only bread. We try a montessori approach in which we offer a (limited) amount of options and he is free to decide what to eat or not to eat and in what amount, but if there is bread around he would preferably eat only that and ignore anything else. I speculate that he is some kind of mutant that can synthesize all other nutrients from gluten and carbs.
Once I realized my mother was going to make me consume iron supplement drops, the desire to chew on my collar points receded 
My granddaughter is nearly 3 and the kid loves veggies, especially green beans and “teeny tiny trees” (broccoli.) My daughter made an effort to minimize candies and pastries and emphasize fruits and veggies, and so far, that seems to be what the kid prefers. Not that she turns her nose up at ice cream or cupcakes, but she’ll happily accept a snack of oranges or berries.
So, anecdotally, I think it’s more of a learned behavior. Similarly, when I was a kid, sweets were a reward, and the notion of self-reward when I had my own money to spend led to a life-long battle with my weight. Even at my advanced age, knowing better and actually liking many fruits and veggies, I still will take chocolate, even if I don’t really crave it. I’m sure there’s something twisted in my head…
Wow! One aspect of this that changes my opinion of the researcher completely:
Davis convinced unmarried teenage mothers and widows who could no longer support their families to place their infants in what amounted to an eating-experiment orphanage set up in Chicago.
WTF! I realize running medical experiments on children in a orphanage would be unacceptable now but was the norm back then, but that seems another level of messed up. Convincing mothers to put their kids in a orphanage just to do your dumb experiment (which you then fail to publish any of the data for anyway). That’s awful, even by the standards of 1930s science.
Is castor oil any worst tasting then aspirin, because there have been a lot of kids chowing down on a whole bottle of aspirin and needing their stomachs pumped. .
Childrens orange flavored aspirin, methinks.
Aspirin is, of course, no longer recommended for children due to rare side effects.
Putting kids in an orphanage to feed them raw beef is pretty messed up. But is hardly the only ethical issue of September 1939, when the CMAJ published this interesting but highly flawed shyte show.
FWIW, the synopsis by McKenna claimed the toddlers were fed “their choice of ice cream, spinach and many other foods” for a month in whatever quantities they wanted. These do not seem to be the foods offered. And after 4 years of feeding, one is no longer a toddler.
I wouldn’t necessarily expect accurate reportage for an anecdote. The fact the study even exists is both interesting, surprising and disturbing. The paucity of data suggests the study was poorly done and even given its questionable ethics the conclusions seem forced.