How Far Would You Go Just to Lose Weight? Would You Eat Parasitic Worms?

When a diet promises you can eat anything you want and lose weight, well, that's suspicious. When a diet is based on eating parasitic worms, that's just plain creepy. Would you ignore that fact if parasitic worms could really help you achieve your dream weight, regardless of the consequences? Read what's going on with the roundworm craze before you do.

Most people don't get roundworms from diet pills

Websites offering eggs of the intestinal parasite Ascaris as a weight-reduction aid emerged in Hong Kong and have made their way around the world since. Ascaris is better known as the roundworm. A big problem in countries in the tropics that have poor sanitation, a mature roundworm is a pink, cylindrical, slimy inhabitant of the human intestines.

A male roundworm is slender, growing to anywhere from 15 to 30 cm (6 to 12 inches) long, while the female roundworm is fatter, especially before laying eggs, and about 20 to 35 cm (8 to 14 inches) long.
 

Most people don't get roundworms from diet pills

Nearly two billion people worldwide suffer roundworm infections. The roundworm makes itself completely at home in the human body. When its human host gets a fever, for example, it will burrow to the coolest part of the body it can find. Sometimes roundworms wind up in the lungs, or they can be sneezed out the nose (before they reach adult size). This is most likely to occur when their human hosts are allergic to them.

Moreover, each female roundworm can have up to 250,000 babies a day, growing a steady colony right inside your body. These baby roundworms can ball up at the bile duct, causing gallstones. They can block the ducts of the pancreas, interfering with your digestion of proteins, but leaving a lot more protein for them. They can congregate in the appendix, or they can completely block the bowel, killing the worms, and the human who has them.

Ascaris has been found in the lungs, liver, and intestines of its human hosts. Roundworms usually leave the intestines and migrate to the lungs through the liver. Once in the lungs, they cause wheezing and a persistent cough. While they affect the lungs, they do not reproduce, so they cannot be detected in stool samples. Your doctor might just think your symptoms as a really puzzling case of pneumonia.

Roundworm causes no actual weight loss. Worst of all, people who have roundworms don't actually lose weight. The worms themselves add weight to the body. They can deplete the body's iron stores so there is anemia that causes the skin to pale, and they can cause a lump in the throat and vomiting, but because they also cause constipation, their net effect on weight is weight gain.

Tyra's reports on tapeworms, too. The roundworm craze is just latest in various Internet marketing schemes involving the ingestion of parasites to lose weight. In November 2009 American model and TV interviewer Tyra Banks did a special on companies selling tapeworm eggs to desperate dieters.

This diet is absolutely crazy

Tapeworms grow much, much larger than roundworms — think up to 10 meters (30 feet) in length. Surgical operations are sometimes necessary to remove tapeworms, and these operations are a major test of the surgeon's physical strength. Unlike roundworms, tapeworms do not interfere with their human host's digestive process. That's because tapeworms do not even have their own digestive organs. They siphon off the nutrients they need from their hosts, so they can devote all the energy to reproduction (it's not like they have anything else to do in there).

Each tapeworm has both male and female sex organs and can have sex with itself to fertilize hundreds of thousands of eggs to be released with stool. This tells you what you actually eat to get infected with the worm.

Ironically, infection with tapeworms usually doesn't result in weight loss, either. If you are infected with tapeworms, you might not have any symptoms at all. The kind of tapeworm most common in the United States, for example, Taenia solium, is a relatively small worm that might cause a little nausea now and then, but not too often, so it can maintain its food supply. If this is threatened by some other disease you get, however, it forms cysts that can lodge in the human brain.

The kind of tapeworm you might actually see on toilet paper, Taenia saginata, can get stuck in your appendix. This kind of tapeworm is found everywhere in the world except Australia and New Zealand, although it is most common in Africa and South America.

Diphyllobrothium tapeworms that can be encounted in Finland, Poland, western Russia, China, and Canada suck the vitamin B-12 out of digested food. It's not unheard of for them to cause pernicious anemia, but this process takes years.

The super-dangerous Echinococcus tapeworm, typically acquired by eating large fish caught off the shores of western Alaska raw, can migrate to the lungs. This parasitic worm causes a fatal pneumonia, but only after it has lived off its host for five to ten years.

Health consequences and too hard for your doctor to treat

The problem with getting treatment for roundworms and tapeworms in the United States, Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand is that most doctors would simply never think to look for them. Even if a parasitic worm infection is detected, doctors don't know which medications to use to treat these infections.

So what can you do to prevent infections with roundworms and tapeworms?

First of all, don't take diet pills that (supposedly) contain parasites! As an aside, these pills likely don't have live worms in them, but if they're advertised as such, you definitely don't know what they do contain.

And if you have taken diet pills that contain parasites, don't throw them away. Save the pills, in a tightly closed bottle, so you can take them to your doctor for identification in a lab.

The symptoms of roundworm infection don't appear for about two weeks. The young worms first go to the lungs to grow, and then return to the intestines to mate. There will be vague respiratory symptoms during the third to sixth weeks after taking the "diet" pills, and then various kinds of gastrointestinal upset, including the odd combination of vomiting and constipation.

Make sure you wash your hands before you touch food, children, or pets, and do your laundry separately from the rest of the family.  It's especially important not to spread the infection to your children. Roundworms travel directly to children's livers, where they may be trapped, or they may migrate to eyes, lungs, heart, or brain. Even when the worms don't eat the child's developing tissues, an allergic reaction can cause almost as much damage.

Whether it's you or your child who has the infection, get medical treatment right away. There are herbal remedies that actually work, but the pharmaceutical remedies work a great deal faster.