When I was in 6, I learned that a classmate at school was allergic to some food or another (peanuts, I think) but I didn't know what an allergy was. I asked and was told that "if you're allergic to something it means you can't eat that food."

Well, I HATED stewed squash, so I told everyone that I was allergic to squash because I thought that was what "allergic" meant. People were horrified when they found out that my parents made me eat my squash even though I was"allergic to it." Now I like stewed squash and eat it with no ill effects.

Anon

This is not my finest moment, but when I was 9, my best friend and I told her little sister that the seeds inside a banana were actually eggs from a banana spider. She was only 6 at the time and completely believed us. She didn't eat bananas for 3 years. Totally cruel!

Lemmy

Dessert gelatin called Jello in the US was a nice treat that my mom would make my sister and me. I loved Jello except for the green Jello cause my sister told me that it was alive and that when tried to eat it it would scream and try to eat me back. I would cry and run from the table. Then I found out years later that she did this cause she wanted my dessert.

Beth

When I was a child I was warned never to drink hot drinks through a straw. The warning seemed so dire that I thought the straw somehow turned hot drinks into poison and if I drank them that way I would die.

Caroline

I was told that darth vader sounded the way he did because he got a nut stuck in his throat whilst eating it.

I wouldn't touch nuts for years after being told that.

Max

between the ages of 8-11 I was told by my uncle (who is only 3 years older than me) that the powdery stuff at the bottom of cereal boxes was rat poison. It was there so the mice and rats wouldnt get in the cereal boxes at night and eat our breakfast. For the longest time, even into adult hood after I knew better, I couldnt get myself to go any farther than 3/4 of the way into a box of cereal for fear some of the powder would get into my bowl...

kim

I have no idea where I got this from, but I remember thinking that the little red berries that grew on some trees were highly toxic, so much in fact that I used to hold my breath and run under the trees - in case I accidentally inhaled one. Oh yeah - my mates also told me that it took you 7 years to digest chewing gum - I swallowed it anyway, and still do :-P

Emma B

When I was young and my mom would be cooking a dinner consisting of pork chops I would ask what's for dinner and of course she'd say pork chops. But one time before she took them out of the package i read the label, it said Pork Loin Chops. I misconstrued the middle word to be Lion (like the beast in africa). I thought hmmm i guess mom wont tell me this meat is from a lion because me and my brothers (younger than i) would never eat such a thing. I thought this for a really long time and whenever mom would say we're having pork chops I'd kinda wink like i knew the inside secret that we couldn't let the younger ones know about.

Bill

I used to believe that the white part of a watermelon rind was very poisonous. The red could be eaten only so far and the white must be avoided. With a mother that would not allow food to be wasted, nibbling close to the white part, as required by her, was nerve wracking.

watermelon worrier

I used to believe that if you ate eggs for breakfast everyday you'd get pregnant...

Anon

When I was little, my parents told me that if I ate berries, I would go in an ambulance. So whenever I heard an ambulance, I thought someone had eaten berries.

Anon

When I was younger I heard about you might get salmonella if you eat eggs raw. I didn't know what it was and spent a lot of time wondering why would you get salmonella in egg since there isn't any salmon in it.

navci

when I was in preschool our class had a st patricks day party and all the food was dyed green. someone told me that if I drank the green milk I'd turn into a leprechaun. Being the feisty lil rebel I was, I drank it anyways. A while later I started to think about the leprechaun thing and looked in the mirror. I noticed my ears were unusually pointy and became convinced they were right: I was a leprechaun!!!! It took me years to realize that my ears had been pointed forever, and it wasn't the symptoms of my descent into leprechaun-ness.

lucky charms

It is well known that tarantulas live in the end of bananas. When you open up the banana you have to discard the first 1/2 inch and the last half inch for obvious reasons of safety and non-ingestion of tarantulas

Richard Osborne

My mother told me if I ate chocolate before breakfast I would get worms. I believed this until I was about 10.

Laura

You could suffocate if you ate a bannana before you went to bed. Here's why. One night when I was about 5, I went to get the last bannana just before I went to bed. My older sister intercepted me. She told me that if you had a bannana before you went to bed, you could suffocate in your sleep. I believed her. I was also told that if I eat before I went swimming, I could die, so this made sense. I didn't eat bannanas at night for years. She ended up eating that bannana to "protect" me. The saddest thing is that she did the same thing to me a couple of months later with the last pickle.

Ed

This is actually my dad's childhood belief.

Every day, after dinner, HIS dad would go and get some hardtack, which is an unleavened bread-thing that was believed to help digestion. No-one understood why Alan (aka, my Dad) would FREAK OUT and beg his father not to eat the stuff.

It was because, almost every night on the radio, he would hear about someone dying of a heart attack, but he heard it as "dead, at age 66. Cause of death is reported as hardtack."

Beth

The color , texture , and scent of canned peas were awful to me and I believed that eating them too many times would turn you into a poisonous ,sad fish . I was miserable because my mom always made me eat them and I thought I was slowly changing , but the only thing saving me was the antidote which were fresh corn and carrots.

Ghostibelle

I used to believe that Big Macs were a strictly "male" food, and if a woman were to eat one, then the first time, she'd turn into a gigantic, obese, cursing "butch lady" with a cigarette permanently attached to her lips (like the Phone Sex lady on Beavis and Butt-Head, lol), and the second time she ate a Big Mac, she'd turn into a man altogether. Also, I believed that it was against the law for children to eat the "adult" meals at McDonald's, and vice versa--except for teenagers, who were so "old" that they were practically grown-ups anyway, at least in my young mind. ;)

Emily

Once when I was little I was at a restaraunt with my family and I was eating chicken. I picked up the chicken with my fork and saw the fork poking out of the other side of the food. Scared, I yelled "Theres a needle in my chicken!" My mom laughed and said "No, Its just your fork!"

xoxo