How far would you go to lose weight? Would you let a 15-foot tapeworm live in your stomach in order to shed those unwanted pounds? The Tyra Show recently featured two women who would.
Click on the video above to see what a tapeworm looks like.
Chalk it up to shock TV, but it’s true that some people become so desperate when traditional diets fail that they are willing to swallow a parasite to consume their extra calories. While this is arguably one of the most extreme methods of losing weight, it’s actually nothing new. Ads dating back to the late 1800’s feature a woman promoting the “easy to swallow, sanitized” tapeworms in order to lose weight without diet or exercise. Sounds like a magic diet pill — eat whatever you want and still lose weight. Except this is no pill. It’s the same parasite found in undercooked meat and seafood that can make people extremely ill.
In case you’re not totally grossed out yet, here is how the tapeworm diet works: People ingest a tapeworm cyst from a cow (some come from pigs and fish too, but those are considered more dangerous). The tapeworm then grows inside the digestive track absorbing calories from your body, which can result in losing one to two pounds a week. Once the target weight is lost, an antibiotic is taken to get rid of the tapeworm.
Tapeworm sales are banned in the U.S. because they carry substantial health risks. While a sizable portion of ingested calories go to the tapeworm, so do vital nutrients. This can lead to vitamin deficiencies and anemia. Other harmful effects include abdominal pain, bloating, digestive disturbances and intestinal obstruction, according to Joan Salge Blake, a clinical associate professor of nutrition at Boston University. There is also the potential for putting the weight back on once the tapeworm is killed — if it doesn’t kill you first (some strains can be deadly). Plus, some tapeworms can grow to 50 feet, which is just downright disgusting, no matter how you look at it. It’s no wonder that “purposefully consuming tapeworms is not healthy,” according to Blake.
The risks far outweigh the benefits (you can drop one to two pounds a week with diet and exercise). Stick with the tried and true methods of losing weight, and leave the worms out of it.
Source: www.tyrashow.com
You don’t have to go to such lengths. Try a drugless approach to weight loss. www.DruglessDoctor.com.
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