Weight-obsessed girls are eating cotton wool to make themselves full.
The practice was first brought to light by Eddie Murphy's model daughter, Bria, but now a video clip is circulating showing a teenage girl soaking cotton wool in orange juice and eating it as her friend films her.
Earlier this year, 23-year-old Bria Murphy, talked about her experience seeing other models swallowing cotton wool to stay skinny. Models and other fashion insiders have also spoken about the dangerous practice.
The idea behind it is to replace meals or snacks with cotton balls soaked in liquid. In other versions of the diet you eat the cotton balls before meals, and they prevent you from eating too much.
The rationale is that the cotton balls fill you up, preventing you from wanting to eat anything fattening, like real food.
But besides the fact that not eating enough puts you at risk of all kinds of deficiencies and illnesses, eating cotton wool can wreck your digestive tract.
Cotton wool can build up in your intestines forming a trapped mass called a bezoar, which can be life threatening.
Lynn Grefe, president and CEO of the National Eating Disorder Association in the US, said it's a symptom of an eating disorder. "When we talk about something like this we certainly aren't talking about health any more. We're talking about weight and size and certainly something that is potentially very, very dangerous."