Tape Worm Diets: It Gives You Brain Worms

A woman sits at a dressing table. Her corset is tight. Her waist is tiny. Her face is pale. On the table in front of her is a little jar with a single white pill in it. The promise is simple. Get thin. No diet, no exercise, no effort. All she has to do is swallow.

But of course, it could never be that simple. Because inside that jar was not a pill … but a parasite. Within a couple of weeks, she would start having headaches … then came the seizures. A month after that she would be dead.

This is the consequence of the tapeworm diet. Chasing desperation and the body of their dreams, people make a decision that will cause them unbelievable suffering, and possibly, even death. It’s a dangerous fad that has had a vice-grip on the zeitgeist for generations, tempting regular people and celebrities alike to risk it all for the chance of attaining that perfect physique.

So, where the heck did this utterly grotesque idea come from? Why can it be so hazardous to your health? And probably the most important question of all… does it work?

British supermodel Kate Moss once said in 2004 that “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” Let’s see about that one, shall we?

A Parasite’s Promise

So, what are tapeworms? And why on God’s green earth would someone ever want to willingly put one in their bodies?

Well, a tapeworm is a kind of flatworm, a parasite that lives inside the human intestine. You get them mainly by eating raw or uncooked meat containing tapeworm eggs or larvae. There’s beef tapeworm – AKA Taenia saginata – pork tapeworm, which goes by Taenia solium, and even some freshwater fish variants as well. Sadly, there isn’t a vegetarian option though so all of you lettuce munchers will miss out on the incredible “benefits” that these creatures have to offer.

They can exist all over the world, but they tend to be most prevalent in places where food hygiene regulations are more “food hygiene suggestions,” as well as in subsistence farming communities in developing nations as well.

These delightful little critters tend to hatch inside the intestines, at which point they absorb the nutrients from the food that we eat, giving them a steady supply of sustenance that allows them to grow meters long. I’m so sorry if you are eating spaghetti right now.

They also have both male and female sexual organs so they can reproduce entirely on their own. Large ones can lay hundreds of thousands of eggs per day. You then poop the eggs out, and they go off to find their way into another host. Ah the circle of life… How beautiful.

But here’s the thing, despite the utterly disgusting prospect of having a flatworm parasite inside you that’s longer than a car, these worms over the years have actually become in demand.

Because tapeworms live inside the intestines and share some of our food with us, for over a century they have been proposed by subsections of society as weight-loss agents. You eat the food, then the worm eats the food, and it’s like you never ate the food… or something.

So where did this mythical fad diet really begin?

Well, that’s not actually super easy to pin down.

The idea of tapeworm diets probably first entered the wider cultural zeitgeist in the late 19th century. It was the Victorian era, and beauty standards at the time were – to put it nicely… “uncompromising.” The Victorian ideal, especially for middle and upper-class women, placed enormous value on restraint, delicacy, tiny waists, and a kind of carefully managed fragility. It’s hardly a stretch to suggest that people today would believe a story about desperate Victorian women swallowing parasites to stay thin.

People will point to the harsh standards at the time, the cruelty, and of course media like this advertisement allegedly created in 1898. It reads:

“No diet, no baths, no exercise! FAT, the ENEMY that is shortening your life BANISHED! How? With sanitised TAPE WORMS.”

I mean … you’d be a fool not to, right?

There’s other, later cultural myths relating to tapeworm diets assisting with weight loss too. In 1912, The Washington Post published unverified information about tapeworm vendors sending pills to people.

But the most widely circulated story is actually the newest one, and it comes from the finest of fine arts. The opera.

Maria Anna Cecilia Sofia Kalogeropoúlou, known as Maria Callas, was an American-born Greek soprano – the singing kind, not the TV kind. Born in 1923 she was only around 28 years old when she went from weighing 92 kilograms (just over 200 pounds) to 65.3 kilos or around 143 pounds in just 18 months – between late 1951 and 1954. Audiences were astonished at what they saw as a total metamorphosis (no she did not turn into a human-bug creature) she had lost basically a third of her bodyweight in a very short space of time.

And the 1950s being the 1950s, people were desperate to know her secret. Maria received many letters from women begging her to reveal what she knew, and clinics and companies offered astronomical sums for an exclusive patent on “the Callas formula.”

Rumours began to circulate that it was all thanks to the help of a very different kind of human-bug creature. The story goes that Callas swallowed a pill containing an embryonic beef tapeworm, and her transformation was so famous that it became nicknamed “the Maria Callas diet,” “the tapeworm diet,” and “the Hollywood tapeworm diet.”

So, there you have it, tapeworm pill vendors, old adverts, and one of the stars of yesteryear all proving that the tapeworm diet was just a widespread thing back in the day… right?

Well, no, not really.

Decoding the Shadows

In our modern, enlightened era, we like to think that the Victorians were stupid because they painted their faces with lead, let their children play with arsenic, and injected asbestos into their eyeballs or something. But the reality is that we might be the stupid ones, because even back then, the idea of the tapeworm diet was largely debunked as a myth – and yet with all of our scientific advancements, our greater access to education, and deliberate focus on public health, tapeworm diets are still a thing in the modern day.

“But what about all that evidence?” you might say. Carefully curated to suit a pre-existing narrative I’m afraid.

Let’s start with the poster. Whilst it does look exactly like the sort of thing you would expect to see from an 1898 health supplement advert, it was later exposed as being a forgery. The fonts are anachronistic – they didn’t come around until much later – and the poster itself was on show at The House on the Rock in Wisconsin, a place known for its fake exhibits and dubious connections with reality as a point of artistic merit. Back in 2015, the poster was even described as a fun “vintage inspired” exhibit.

So, no dice there.

The 1912 story is believed to be fake as well. Whilst we would NEEEEEEVER expect news publications to lie to the people today… The reality is, the Washington Post’s story on tapeworm pill vendors was totally unverified. It might have happened, but it wasn’t proven, and that certainly doesn’t make it a widespread cultural phenomenon.

The story goes that a woman from Peoria, Illinois, bought this diet pill and sent it to her husband to analyse it, and he found the head of a tapeworm inside. But the story was denied at the time by then-Surgeon General Rupert Blue when nobody could track down the people involved or the analysis the husband produced in the Hygienic Laboratory of Washington. Even back then you couldn’t just go around analysing random pills without keeping some kind of record of it, and the lack of evidence seriously dents the story’s credibility.

The Surgeon General described it as a neat story, but that’s all it was. Even the laboratory director himself said that it was the wildest story he had heard of for some time.

There was another story around the same time that a woman had bought a liquid-filled capsule with a tapeworm inside for $300 dollars, but that turned out to be a fictional humour column written by Mabel Herbert Urner. The doctor who supposedly prescribed the tapeworm pill was called “Dr. Phake” – I mean come on. The myth was even formally debunked by the American Medical Association back in the 1930s because it was just so obviously nonsense.

And then there’s Maria Callas. No matter what some fancy medical association with their doctors and their facts tell you, she had a tapeworm and lost all that weight; she’s surely direct proof that these diets are just the “best kept secrets that the wellness industry doesn’t want you to know.”

But her story needs a little bit more unpacking, because that’s absolutely true. It’s documented extensively that she had a tapeworm, and that she had a transformational weight loss that was very public at the same time. However, it’s not quite case closed.

Maintaining an ideal weight had become more of an obsession for Callas by the early 50s when she allegedly voluntarily ingested a tapeworm egg. Her sentiment on it was even reflected in a letter from back in July of 1949, written to another soprano called Maria Caniglia. It was clear that Callas wasn’t the only one who wanted herself to lose weight, there was influence on her from other people too like the Milanese dressmaker Biki.

Then, there’s some conflicting information. Maria herself appears to have linked her dramatic weight loss at least in part to the tapeworm, and her sister seems to have indicated that the tapeworm was even ingested voluntarily. But other sources were revealed in 2014 in the form of Callas’ personal chef Elena Pozzan as well as stories from her husband.

Because she was so invested in ensuring her weight loss, their stories suggested that Maria undertook a pretty strong crash diet to lose a lot of weight quickly – hardly an overly strange idea for the time. It was a high-protein diet consisting of meats, great quantities of unseasoned vegetables, a little water, wine, and no carbs. Overwhelmingly this is more likely to have led to Callas’ rapid weight loss than the parasite ever could.

And part of the protein of this crash diet? Steak tartare, otherwise known as uncooked beef, which is exactly where tiny tapeworm larvae tend to reside. Callas’ chef mentioned that both of them had gotten tapeworms multiple times from eating the raw unclean meat. And when you learn this, you can start to put the picture together a bit more clearly. Callas did lose a lot of weight, yes. She had a tapeworm, yes. But the two were mostly unrelated, and it’s far more likely that Callas’ focus on her strict diet did more than a tapeworm could have ever hoped to have done. People just connected the two because they’re vaguely gastro-intestinally-related phenomena and owing to the mythic reputation that tapeworms have as weight loss assistants. Remember correlation is not causation. If I eat ice cream, and then a seagull shits on me, that doesn’t mean it shat on me because I was eating ice cream.

Right. So, to state it clearly: tapeworms are complete nonsense and doctors don’t recommend it. In fact, it could even be deadly.

And yet…

The myth hasn’t died. If anything – just like a tapeworm in your small intestine – its popularity has only managed to grow with time. It seems to now be a fad all over the world – even if in small pockets – with genuine believers, the curious, and the gullible all sucked in to the idea, and wasting their money on something that’s not just ineffective, but highly dangerous.

The myth has largely re-emerged as a result of the cursed social media misinformation-laden wellness hellscape that we now live in. There have been rumours in the past that model Claudia Schiffer allegedly used a tapeworm for weight loss. Social media has buzzed with fake news over a falsified case report stating that a mother admitted to giving tapeworms to her teenage daughter before a beauty pageant. Even people with a lot of influence over mainstream culture like Khloé Kardashian once indicated an interest in buying a tapeworm online to lose weight.

You know what? I take it back. Maybe today’s beauty expectations aren’t that different from the Victorian era after all.

Today you have people all across the internet and indeed the world discussing the so-called “natural benefits” of the tapeworm diet. In healthcare sceptic and alternative medicine communities, such ideas can be pretty enticing over putting what they perceive as poison into their own bodies. People have gone as far as to look up the “treatment” online and eventually buy tapeworm weight loss pills from Mexico and other countries where standards for this sort of thing aren’t as stringent.

In 2013 a woman from Iowa tried it, having to go to the hospital afterwards because she got second thoughts. When there, doctors were able to reveal that she had indeed swallowed a beef tapeworm egg. Publications have reported prices of up to $1500 dollars for the controversial treatment.

And here is your reminder that a fool and their money are soon parted.

But a fool in this case could be parted with their life as well.

Because doing this is not merely pseudo-scientific garbage, it’s also incredibly dangerous and unhealthy.

The Horror

Right, so if for some unholy reason someone has convinced themselves that swallowing a parasite is a good idea, what should they expect?

Well, risk, for one.

When you buy suspicious parasites over the internet for their so-called “health benefits,” a person has no idea what they actually contain, and as we’ll get to shortly that can have catastrophic implications for one’s health.

And to be absolutely clear once again: tapeworms do not work, at least not to any even remotely significant extent.

The logic on the surface seems to make some scientific sense to those who don’t know any better. The idea is that after you’ve eaten and are actively digesting your food, the tapeworm absorbs some of those nutrients and calories for you without any effort on your end. But there’s the thing, to create meaningful weight loss by calorie theft alone, one or even two tapeworms would need to siphon off tens or even hundreds of calories a day, every day for months. There is simply no good evidence that an ordinary tapeworm infection does that. More likely, the infected individual is losing weight because the tapeworm infestation is making them sick, and thus, it makes them want to eat less. But any illness can do that, and the best part is THEY DON’T REQUIRE FUCKING PARASITES.

There are modern, peer-reviewed scientific papers out there that will tell you that tapeworms categorically do not cause significant weight loss. And they proved it. British Doctor Michael Mosely performed an experiment on himself by swallowing three tapeworm eggs. He also swallowed a tiny camera several weeks later and identified three live tapeworms living in his intestines. He then kept the tapeworms for several weeks. He gained one kilogram.

The man himself said: “So, anyone who is thinking of popping parasites as a weight-loss device should think twice.”

There you have it. An adult intestinal tapeworm is not consuming enough of your energy intake to reliably offset normal eating, and in some cases it might actually increase your appetite. For it to even be in the realms of possibility you would need far more tapeworms than the average infection typically has, and then you’d have much bigger problems.

So, if not weight loss, what happens to a person who voluntarily or otherwise ingests a tapeworm?

If you’re somewhat fortunate, nothing. Genuinely. Most human tapeworm infections are mild or asymptomatic, and typical infections involve only one or two adult worms. As gross as it is, you might not even notice. Dr. Mosely didn’t feel any different during his experiment for example. But he did give a word of warning: “Some people get better, some get worse, it appears. And we never seem to hear from the people who get worse.”

Remember, you have to get lucky.

Because if you’re unlucky, you’re in for a world of unimaginable body horror, much closer to the writings of Kafka than the end of a runway.

Let’s start with beef. When you first ingest a beef tapeworm egg, those eggs go down into your gut and hatch into larvae, which then grow into full adult worms within about two months. From there, it depends on what kind of tapeworms that a person may have caught. Some patients can think that they’re ordering one kind of tapeworm and end up with another, which have radically different effects on people.

A beef tapeworm for example mainly produces gastro-intestinal symptoms. We’re talking abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, anaemia, headache, muscle aches, unnatural cravings, and in some cases even eating disorders like anorexia. You can also get appendicitis and pancreatitis when sections of the tapeworm break off and get lodged in these organs as well as things like vitamin deficiencies too. The wonders of “natural” weight loss everyone. Even Maria Callas had to have an appendectomy back in the day.

The problem with beef tapeworms is that they can grow to some absolutely horrifying lengths, we’re talking all the way up to 25 METRES. That’s longer than the average bowling lane, curled up inside of your internal organs. And that thought should be enough to ensure quite a significant amount of mental distress, even if the tapeworm itself isn’t causing any physical symptoms.

But what about if it’s not a beef tapeworm? What happens when it’s… pork?

Well then, it gets much, much worse.

You see, a pork tapeworm is designed to have two hosts – pigs and humans. The lifecycle usually works like this: pigs eat the worm eggs (usually in human waste), then the larvae hatch in the stomach of the pig before migrating out of its intestinal walls and embedding themselves elsewhere in the pig’s tissue in the form of cysts. Then a human eats the infected pork, the adolescent worm grows in the intestines, lays eggs, and the cycle begins again.

But there’s one tiiiiiiiny little problem.

Humans and pigs are anatomically pretty similar. Seriously, pigs are great human stand-ins for people in terms of organ size, tissue behaviour, physiology, skin structure, metabolism, and surgical anatomy. This gives them extremely practical applications for humans in terms of surgical training, wound and trauma research, testing medical devices, developing medications, and producing treatments such as pig-derived heart valves.

This is incredibly useful of course, but it does come with a downside. Humans are compatible enough that what affects pigs in some cases can also affect us as well.

This is one of those cases.

Now don’t panic, you’re not going to have tapeworms burrowing out of your stomach 10 minutes after eating a bacon sandwich. When ingested via the meat you usually just end up with a classic tapeworm – which whilst disgusting and can make you ill – isn’t life threatening.

Of course, if you swallow a pork tapeworm egg directly instead of through the meat – say as a fad diet measure for example – well then, the body horror begins. The eggs can treat the human body like a pig’s and when they reach the gut and hatch into larvae. As larvae they then burrow through your intestinal walls before travelling inside the bloodstream, meaning these tiny worms can then form cysts anywhere in the body. And we mean anywhere. This is called cysticercosis.

Beginning with the most benign first, they can end up under your skin as usually painless nodules or lesions. These lumps can be a little unsightly or concerning but they’re pretty harmless in most places like inside muscles as well. Your big problem is when they start embedding themselves in other organs.

In the lungs and liver, other species of tapeworms can cause hydatid disease, causing massive cysts to grow in the lungs and liver. This can cause abdominal pain, blocked bile ducts, jaundice, coughing, chest pain, coughing blood, collapsed lungs, respiratory distress, and infection just to name a few. Some cysts that grow to this size can even rupture within the chest or abdominal cavity, which can then cause allergic reactions or even death. Thankfully Echinococcus tapeworms – the ones that cause this – aren’t as common in people and mainly affect dogs, foxes, rodents, and sheep. But it does happen.

Tapeworms can affect the human heart as well, which is quite important for doing that whole “living” thing. Tapeworm cysts here, including pork tapeworm cysts, can cause abnormal heart rhythms, inflammation, conduction problems, and very rarely … even heart failure.

But to be honest, that is nothing in comparison to what happens when pork tapeworm cysts affect the spinal cord, because that’s connected to your brain and eyes. This is called neurocysticercosis, and it will. Fuck. You. Up.

Cysts can float in the eyes causing blurry or disturbed vision. They can also embed themselves internally behind the eye’s structure which can cause swelling, infection, detachment of the retina, or even total blindness. In the spinal cord it gets even worse. It can cause headaches, seizures, convulsions, confusion, periods of unconsciousness, memory loss, and fluid build-up around the brain that can cause all kinds of neurological problems from the swelling, inflammation, and pressure.

Pork tapeworm cysts can absolutely devastate rural communities where pigs and humans live in close proximity to one another, causing up to 30% of all cases of epilepsy too. In the highest risk communities that number can be as high as 70%. This is far from just getting a bad tummy ache over some dodgy steak tartare, this is life threatening stuff.

And this is the key issue of the tapeworm diet: when you swallow that “pill” you expose yourself to the chance of developing all of these symptoms and likely more. Most people will have no way of knowing what is in the pill they’re taking, or even what kind of specific tapeworm egg it is. This even happened back in 2018 when a 20-year-old female resident of Beijing intended to consume beef tapeworm egg for weight loss. Instead, she ended up ingesting pork tapeworm eggs, and she soon developed symptoms of both cysticercosis and neurocysticercosis. She went to the doctor’s for the development of a dull headache, but soon she’d start falling unconscious, not remembering where she had been for hours beforehand, and all other kinds of scary symptoms that probably made her feel like she had a brain tumour.

On examination they also found lesions on her torso, head, neck, face, tongue, and in several regions of her brain. She was fortunate enough to get quick treatment and made a full recovery, but many don’t have access to adequate healthcare, and so their tapeworm infestation could prove fatal in those cases.

The key issue is ultimately the cysts could end up anywhere, causing any number of complications to your health. Thankfully, only the adult tapeworms can grow to their full multi-metre size inside the gut. So no, you don’t get a five-metre tapeworm unspooling through your skull, but you can end up with effectively baby worms and cysts in your brain, which I’m not sure is more comforting.

The other scary thing from all of this is that there’s potentially a long period between even ingesting the tapeworm egg and getting symptoms. They can appear months or even years after initial infection. Usually this is because the cysts do finally start to die – but when they do that, they calcify into harder nodules and can swell up, causing irritation.

And in your brain, that’s never going to end well. Tapeworm infestations are pretty long, they can last several years inside of their hosts, and the eggs can survive for months out in the environment, just waiting for some animal to pick them up and start the whole cycle from scratch.

Thankfully tapeworm parasites are treatable with medications that can starve and suffocate the worms inside you, and then your body will naturally expel them with time. So, they’re not 100% fatal, in some cases they’re not even all that dangerous, which unfortunately only adds to the temptation for those desperate enough to see if fake Victorian fad diets work in the modern day. But if you get that coinflip wrong, you’re putting yourself at incredible levels of risk that just surely aren’t worth it for something that – we would like to reiterate – categorically DOES NOT help you lose weight. And without proper access to the right treatment at the right time, you could just straight up die.

I think I’ll just not eat the slice of cake next time.

The craziest thing about the tapeworm diet is that it was kind of a meme that became reality. It was Victorian enough to feel true, disgusting enough to be memorable, and medically plausible enough to persist for more than a century. That makes it perfect for our current era of five-second attention spans and a world where being right matters less than just being the loudest voice in the room.

And thus, amongst the modern deluge of internet wellness sludge that we are served up on the daily by grifters looking to make a quick buck, the tapeworm diet has effectively been reborn. You combine that with the same health-conscious, organic, rustic, “reject modernity, embrace tradition” kind of thinking that suburban mothers with no medical training use to justify not vaccinating their kids, and you can see how it’s taken off again. So, whether it’s sought after by opera starlets or courted by Kardashians, it seems to be an ever-recurring myth that we will likely see pop up in 100 years from now too, just like it did over 100 years ago.

And as long as there are people desperate, stupid, or gullible enough to believe it, people are going to continue to get sick.

Doctors have long-developed a classification of diets based on their potential for harm. The tapeworm diet is thus classified as a “non-food based hazardous diet” which attempts to produce rapid weight loss of more than one kilogram per week, requires no effort from the dieter, and are done without medical or dietary supervision or follow-up. They also often seem “too good to be true,” and that’s because they are. Crucially you have to remember just because something is called a diet, doesn’t mean it works, and in this case it’s more likely to do more harm than good, if it does anything at all.

So be curious, but also sceptical. Because the body keeps a score, and there are always trade-offs. Fail to think logically and you might be the one with a tapeworm longer than a school bus inside you feasting on your partially-digested macaroni.

It just goes to show that in life – and certainly when it comes to weight loss – there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Key Takeaways

• The tapeworm diet is a dangerous myth that persists despite being debunked for over a century, with historical evidence like the 1898 poster and 1912 news story proven fake.
• Maria Callas’s dramatic weight loss was likely caused by a strict crash diet, not the tapeworm she accidentally acquired from eating raw beef; correlation was mistaken for causation.
• Scientific evidence shows tapeworms do not cause significant weight loss—one doctor who infected himself with three tapeworms actually gained one kilogram during the experiment.
• Swallowing tapeworm eggs poses severe health risks including cysticercosis and neurocysticercosis, where larvae form cysts in organs, eyes, spinal cord, and brain, potentially causing seizures, blindness, or death.
• Social media and wellness misinformation have revived this hazardous fad, with people purchasing unregulated parasite pills online, unaware of which species they contain or the catastrophic consequences they risk.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a tapeworm and how do people typically get infected?

A tapeworm is a kind of flatworm, a parasite that lives inside the human intestine. You get them mainly by eating raw or uncooked meat containing tapeworm eggs or larvae. There’s beef tapeworm (Taenia saginata), pork tapeworm (Taenia solium), and even some freshwater fish variants.

Where did the tapeworm diet myth originate?

The idea of tapeworm diets probably first entered the wider cultural zeitgeist in the late 19th century during the Victorian era, when beauty standards placed enormous value on restraint, delicacy, tiny waists, and carefully managed fragility. However, the commonly cited evidence—including an 1898 advertisement, a 1912 Washington Post story, and Maria Callas’s weight loss—has been largely debunked as myth or misrepresentation.

Was the famous 1898 tapeworm diet advertisement real?

No, the poster was later exposed as a forgery. The fonts are anachronistic—they didn’t come around until much later—and the poster itself was on show at The House on the Rock in Wisconsin, a place known for its fake exhibits and dubious connections with reality. Back in 2015, the poster was even described as a fun ‘vintage inspired’ exhibit.

Did Maria Callas really use a tapeworm to lose weight?

While Maria Callas did have a tapeworm and did experience dramatic weight loss, the two were mostly unrelated. Her personal chef Elena Pozzan and stories from her husband revealed that Callas undertook a strict crash diet—high-protein, consisting of meats, great quantities of unseasoned vegetables, a little water, wine, and no carbs—which is far more likely to have caused her rapid weight loss. She also ate steak tartare (uncooked beef), which is where tapeworm larvae tend to reside, explaining how she got tapeworms accidentally rather than intentionally for weight loss.

Do tapeworms actually cause significant weight loss?

No. There is simply no good evidence that an ordinary tapeworm infection causes meaningful weight loss by calorie theft alone. British Doctor Michael Mosely performed an experiment on himself by swallowing three tapeworm eggs and keeping them for several weeks—he gained one kilogram. Modern, peer-reviewed scientific papers categorically show that tapeworms do not cause significant weight loss. Any weight loss in infected individuals is more likely due to the tapeworm making them sick and reducing their appetite.

What are the dangers of intentionally ingesting tapeworm eggs for weight loss?

The dangers are severe and potentially life-threatening. When you buy suspicious parasites over the internet, you have no idea what they actually contain. You could end up with pork tapeworm eggs instead of beef tapeworm eggs, leading to cysticercosis—where larvae burrow through intestinal walls, travel in the bloodstream, and form cysts anywhere in the body including the brain (neurocysticercosis), eyes, heart, lungs, and liver.

This can cause seizures, blindness, heart problems, respiratory distress, and even death. In 2018, a 20-year-old woman in Beijing intended to consume beef tapeworm eggs but ingested pork tapeworm eggs instead, developing cysts on her torso, head, neck, face, tongue, and in several regions of her brain.

What is neurocysticercosis and why is it so dangerous?

Neurocysticercosis occurs when pork tapeworm cysts affect the spinal cord and brain. Cysts can float in the eyes causing blurry or disturbed vision, or embed behind the eye’s structure causing swelling, infection, retinal detachment, or total blindness. In the spinal cord and brain, it can cause headaches, seizures, convulsions, confusion, periods of unconsciousness, memory loss, and fluid build-up around the brain causing neurological problems from swelling, inflammation, and pressure. Pork tapeworm cysts can cause up to 30% of all cases of epilepsy, and in highest-risk communities that number can be as high as 70%.

How has social media contributed to the resurgence of the tapeworm diet myth?

The myth has largely re-emerged as a result of the social media misinformation-laden wellness landscape. There have been rumors that model Claudia Schiffer allegedly used a tapeworm for weight loss, fake news about a falsified case report stating a mother gave tapeworms to her teenage daughter before a beauty pageant, and even Khloé Kardashian once indicated interest in buying a tapeworm online. People in healthcare skeptic and alternative medicine communities find such ideas enticing, and some have bought tapeworm weight loss pills from Mexico and other countries where standards aren’t as stringent.

What happened in the 2013 Iowa tapeworm diet case?

In 2013, a woman from Iowa tried the tapeworm diet and had to go to the hospital afterwards because she got second thoughts. When there, doctors were able to reveal that she had indeed swallowed a beef tapeworm egg. Publications have reported prices of up to $1,500 for the controversial treatment.

How do doctors classify the tapeworm diet?

Doctors classify the tapeworm diet as a ‘non-food based hazardous diet,’ which attempts to produce rapid weight loss of more than one kilogram per week, requires no effort from the dieter, and is done without medical or dietary supervision or follow-up. These diets often seem ‘too good to be true,’ and that’s because they are.

Sources

• Original Into the Shadows video: Tape Worm Diets: It Gives You Brain Worms
• Hero image source by Seasider53 / openverse, by.

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