food: dangerous food

I was told as a child that I couldn't drink black coffee because it would either 1)stunt my growth or 2)turn me black. Consequently, I always drank coffee with creamer and still do to this day.

I used to have phobia about seafood (shrimp, crabs, etc.) because I thought that they would slither up my face and crawl into one of my orifices. There it would proceed to nest and slowly eat my brain and lay eggs...

I didn't want to taste M&Ms at a birthday party, but my parents made me, and I found out that I liked them. I liked the red and yellow ones, but there were green and black ones too. Green and black were "boy-colors", so they were disgusting, and probably poisonous for girls.

when I was little my uncle told me that if I ate the brown bits in bananas I would get cancer. He also told me to hold my breath when I went under power lines, or I would also get cancer.

I was told my my mom that drinking tea or coffee would make your nose grow crooked. I still don't drink tea to this day... look what happened to Michael Jackson!

my grandmother told me that mulberries were poisonous. i think this was to to keep us from walking under the trees and getting mulberry stains on our shoes and feet.

I used to sneak into the kitchen and eat spoonfuls of sugar at night as a young child until my mum told me that if you did this, sugar worms would grow in your stomach and eat you up. I still make sure I don't put too much sugar in my coffee to this day...

My mother used to tell me that diluted juice was poisinous unless water had been added to it (to stop me drinking it). One night I sneaked to the kitchen to get a drink. I drank the juice without diluting it thinking it had already been diluted. I started screaming for my mother to call an ambulance quickly because I thought I was going to die in a couple of minutes

Every kid in my neighborhood knew for a FACT that if you ate fizzy pop-rocks, and then drank a coke, that your stomach would explode. And of course, everyone also said that it happened to someone at their school.

I used to believe that eating raw cookie dough would give you worms. It wasn't until I had my first child and was baking cookies myself, when I found out the truth. I repeated the tale to him and my mother said I cant believe you are using that one too. Boy did I feel stupid.

I used to think that the white part of an orange rind was poisonous, so I would try to get every bit off before I ate the orange. Imagine my horror the first time I read a recipe that called for grated orange peel!

my friends and i believed that eating peanut butter and mayonnaise together would poison you.
i also believed that the dark colored (burnt) potato chips gave you cancer, and that was what killed my great grandmother.

My mom told me that if I ate raw hotdogs or spoonfuls of sugar, I'd get worms. I believed her until I was 13.

When I was about six or seven years old, my nanny told me that if I took a shower right after eating, my food in my stomach would turn into popcorn and explode! Of course I was skeptical about the exploding bit, but I still never shower after eating!

I was told and continue to tell my kids that if they eat raw cookie dough they will get worms in their stomach.

A friend told me that his mother put turpentine in her baklava pastries(perhaps to keep me from eating them all?) and if I ate 3, the total amount of turpentine would kill me. I wasn't 100% convinced, so I only ate 2 1/2 of them. I still love baklava, but I won't eat 3 in a sitting for caloric reasons.