Eating cookies when they're still warm from the oven will make you violently ill. That's why you have to ask Mommy before you take one.

MaryK

When I was 4, I deeply believed that eating ants is healty and even lenthen my life, so I ate "an ant a day" alive from my yard. I still remember the sour taste.

Yuping

I used to believe that the tiny bits of food left in the gravy when you've finished eating were calories. I knew that eating too many calories was a bad thing, so I always made sure I left some.

Nick

When my parents were out and my Sister looked after me, she used to make up a drink from jelly cubes. I used to love this but after I had drunk it she said if I stopped moving it would set in my stomach as a big jelly...so I would keep jiggling about for about an hour.

Ally

When i was young, my Granny, aunts, uncles and of course papa and mama used to tell us that if you didnt finish every bit of rice(we asians here have rice as staple) off your plate, whatever thats left over on it will appear of your future husband/wife's face as pockmarks and pimple. And i figured what its noodles that left over? oh man, wouldnt that be scars that would appear then?! Up till now, i still kinda believe in it.

Skeletony

I used to believe that if you didn't wash apples that you would get poisoned and die. I also thought this is why Adam was kicked out of the garden of Eden. "You know, they should have washed those apples before they ate them."

Anon

I moved to the USA when I was a kid and had to learn english on my own. I didn't understand much about what was going on around me. Lunch time was hell because I was on my own. I knew what a jelly fish was, but I didn't know that 'jelly' by itself meant something. I thought for months that peanut butter and jelly sandwiches served at the school cafeteria were actually peanut butter and jelly fish sandwiches. Needless to say I brought my own lunch on these days.

ricolarno

When I was a kid I was told by my Mom that if I didn't go to bed before 10pm Pumpkins would come after me. I really don't know why she said Pumpkins of all things but it still scared me. I always pictured Pumpkin heads rolling up my driveway and into my front door. It scared me enough so that I always went to bed earlier than 10.

Allie

When I was little, I heard my mother call my belly button a "navel." A few days later, she offered me a navel orange. I was convinced that it was some sort of belly button fruit and from then on I spent hours cleaning out my navel with Q-tips and antiseptic.

Kelly

When I was about 4 or 5, I had (and for some reason loved) a children's book about Louis Pasteur, which had illustrations of rabid dogs with white foam all around their mouths. One day, a family friend served me some blueberry pancakes with blueberries for eyes and a whipped cream smile, and I FLIPPED OUT. I cried softly at the table and when everyone asked me what was wrong, I told them that I couldn't eat my pancakes because they had rabies.

hyperchondriac child

I used to believe that if you inadvertently ate the bones of chicken or fish it would add extra bones to your skeletal structure.

Catwoman=^..^=

When I was in kindergarten, I was "going out" with a boy on my street. We introduced my older sister to his older brother and they started going out. One day when we were playing together, we mixed up a potion that we were convinced would shrink us to the size of legos. We talked all the time about what we would do when we were shrunk, where we would live, what we would eat, how we would swim at the pool and so on. We didn't want to take the potion till we had planned it all out and built our teeny lego houses and cars and things. Before we got to take it, our boyfriends' mom found our concoction in her fridge and threw it away. When I think back now I'm sure that the potion we made would have killed us. I can't remember everything we put in it, but I do remember that windex was one of the ingredients.

Midget

You know those hard round lumps you sometimes find in a chicken nugget? I had heard something when I was about 6 or 7 about breast cancer lumps and thought that since the chicken nugget box said "made with all breast meat" I thought those lumps were breast cancer and if I ate it I would get breast cancer too

Tiffany

I believed until I was 16, that I was allergic to cream.

My mum used to take us to the bakers, and when my sister and I asked for eclairs, she told us we couldn't have it becuase we were allergic to cream.

It was only when I was in my late teens, when I was at my italian friends house, having pasta in a creamy sauce, and I hadn't dropped down dead or had a reaction, that I realised my mum must have lied, so she didn't have to buy us cakes!

She denies it now - reckons I'm making it up!!

Parents, eh!

Sarzi

I used to believe that hotdogs (as morbid as this is) were penises from dead men. I had a horrible fear of eating a hotdog.

Juls

When I was little I had a love of playing with Play-Doh. I learned to read when I was two, so I always knew that it said "Non-Toxic" on the can. I was told by someone, my mom probably, that it meant that if you ate it it wasn't poisonous. I took that to mean that I could eat all I wanted.

kat

I used to love eating peanut butter and honey sandwiches as a kid, so one day my mom told me that I couldn't eat too many of them, because all the sticky foods would block up my insides. I only recently started eating peanut butter and honey sandwiches again... I'm almost 30 years old.

Rob

My brother and sister convinced me that my grandma died from eating too many bananas, I didn't eat any bananas for years.

Stephanie

I used to think that every country had their own cheese and it was named after the country like the way we have American cheese (there would also be English cheese, Canadian cheese, German cheese, Chinese cheese and so forth) and that we could only eat the kind from the country that we are from. I thought it was illegal for us to have Swiss cheese in our market because we didn't have any of the other kinds of cheeses.

Cassaundra

My son once asked my wife what she was doing. She said she was making develed eggs. He asked for one. She said they weren't ready. He said he would wait until she put the devil in them.

Patrick