This week in Shanghaiist
Henan Province's Qilu Television recently featured 24 year old Wang Chengke (王成科) who claims he has been eating glass since he was six. In the video clip on the right, he starts by smashing a Tsingdao bottle on the ground, then eating it piece by piece. Subsequently he smashes a glass ashtray on the ground, eats it and comments that it doesn't taste too bad at all! Like us, some commenters on 56.com were cynical and expressed their disbelief, what with the recent fake news reports and all, but we googled around a bit, and found that Wang's story has been reported in many other media outlets. In fact a Google search for the search terms 王成科 (his name) and 吃玻璃 ("glass eating") registered 173,000 search results! (Then again, one could always argue that this doesn't come as a surprise considering how much the Chinese media copy from one another!) In this story from Qingdao News, a doctor is quoted as saying that Wang's gastric acid is 5 times stronger than the average person's and estimates that he must have eaten about a tonne of glass by now, while another story on Jiangnan News way back in 2003 tells us that he's even found a talent agent for himself (we hope the freak show makes them both lots of money)! Just plain bizarre, or yet another fake news story? We'll leave it to you to decide for yourself!
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I'm not saying that there's no way he could be eating glass, but strong gastric acid definitely isn't enough to make that possible. You can store extremely strong hydrochloric acid in glass containers, with zero "digestion" of the glass. And I am talking about acid literally hundreds of times stronger than what's in your stomach.
Eating glass has a long tradition in the world of carnival geeks in the good ole USA. Here is a definition of geek from the Urban Dictionary:
The term "geek" originally referred to the carnival performers whose act consisted of biting the heads off chickens and eating glass. Over time it came to be applied to anyone who got paid to do work considered odd or bizarre by mainstream society.
Here's some info about a famous geek from the NFL:
http://www.badfads.com/pages/events/glasseating.html
I would imagine that the biggest problem with eating glass comes during elimination. Kinda gives new impetus to the old adage "always chew your food 100 times..."
I remember seeing an Indian guy on the Guiness World Records TV show back in North America eating glass. He just took bottles and bit pieces off them, as if they were ice cream cones or beef jerky or something. So yeah, I guess it's possible.
not acid. Mucus. Sharp things get coated in a gooey slime during peristalsis, which helps to shield the inside of the intestines.
IS his butthole destroyed?
WOW! He should visit Qingdao if he gets a chance. Ther're lots of bottles for him to chew on.