Ever swallow a tapeworm?!
Question:
Ever swallow a tapeworm?
im doing a research paper on swallowing tapeworms, haha i know its gross. but have you ever swallowed a tapeworm to lose weight? wanna tell me how you got it out? ha tell me your stories =)
Answers:
Being the biggest and among the most well known of the parasites, tapeworms have a certain mythology built up around them. One method for curing tapeworms is still told to me by university students as the way "Grandma and Grandad" use to treat worms : stick a biscuit (or a lump of meat) up the anus each day for a week. Then on the 8th day, stop doing it. When the tapeworm comes out looking for its biscuit, grab it an pull it out. Naturally this is a joke - tapeworms wouldn't recognise a biscuit and lack the gullet to digest one anyway.
Another legend which regularly makes the rounds is "The Hollywood Tapeworm Diet", whereby young starlets and supermodels are allegedly intentionally infecting themselves with large tapeworms in an effort to lose weight. While this comes under the category of "anything can happen in Hollywood", Jan Brundvand, Urban Folklorist extraordinaire had classified it as a bona fide urban legend. Another variation mentions the doctor who purposefully infects himself with a tapeworm to stop himself from getting food poisoning while travelling through India. Plenty of the locals have tapeworms and food poisoning concurrently to make this tale reliable
As for the dietary benefits of tapeworms, large parasites like the beef tapeworm and Ascaris certainly do compete for us for nutrients. However, like any method of starvation, they tend to rob us of micronutrients (like vitamins) before they get to the stuff we don't really need.
Signs of infection with large tapeworms (especially with the broad fish tapeworm, Diphyllobothrium latum) include conditions associated with vitamin B12 deficiency (eg. megaloblastic anaemia). Just to make matters worse, one of the symptoms of have a large lump of tapeworm protein in one's guts is to generate an immune response and the resultant ascites - a collection of fluid in the abdomen resulting in a pot belly - not exactly the look that the dieters are looking for.