Tape Worm Diets: It Gives You Brain Worms

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]A woman sits at a dressing table, corset tight, waist tiny, face pale. On the table in front of her is a little jar with a single white pill in it. And the promise is real 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 wasn't a pill but a parasite. Within a couple of weeks, she would start having headaches and then came the seizures. A month after that, she would be dead. This is the consequence of the tapeworm diet.

[00:00:31]Chasing desperation in the body of their dreams, people will 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 the quote, "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels." So, let's see about that, shall we? So, what are tapeworms and why on God's green earth would someone ever willingly want to put one in the body?

[00:01:11]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, also known as Taenia saginata, pork tapeworm, which goes by Taenia solium, and even some freshwater fish variants as well. Sadly, there isn't a vegetarian option, so all of you lettuce munchers will miss out on the incredible benefits, 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. These lively little critters stand attached inside the intestines, at which point they absorb nutrients from the food that we eat, giving them a steady supply of sustenance that allows them to grow meters long. So, sorry if you're eating some spaghetti right now.

[00:02:00]Hopefully, it's vegetarian. 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. The circle of life. Isn't it 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've 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 like that. So, where did this mythical fad diet really begin? Well, that's actually not very 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 of 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.

[00:03:12]People will point to the harsh standards of the time, the cruelty, and of course, media like this advertisement allegedly created in 1898. It reads, quoting, "No diet, no baths, no exercise. Fat, the enemy that is shortening your life, banished. How? With sanitized tapeworms." I mean, you'd be a fool not to, right? And there are other later cultural myths relating to tapeworm diets assisting with weight loss, too. In 1912, the Washington Post published unverified information about tapeworm vendors selling pills to people. But, the most widely circulated story is actually the newest one, and it came from the finest of fine arts, the opera. Maria Anna Cecilia Sophia Logoropoulou, I hope, known as Maria Callas, fortunately, was an American-born Greek soprano, the singing kind, not the diva kind. Born in 1923, she was only around 28 years old when she went from weighing 92 kg, just over 200 lb, to 65.3 kilos, or around 143 lb, 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 creature. She had lost basically a third of her body weight in a very short space of time. And the 1950s being the 1950s, people were desperate to know her secret. Don't know if it's any different today, to be honest. 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. Rumors 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?

[00:05:08]Well, no, not really.

[00:05:11]Now, you're going to have to allow us to delve into a bit of crossover episode here with Decoding the Unknown, another channel, lady. For fun, let's call it Decoding the Shadows, or whatever.

[00:05:19]First, we'll show you why this diet has really been more of a myth all along, and then, why that seemed to change 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 be saying. Well, carefully curated to suit a pre-existing narrative, I'm afraid. Let's start with the poster. While 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 a forgery. The fonts are anachronistic.

[00:06:09]They didn't come around till much later.

[00:06:10]And the poster itself was on show at the House on the Rock in Wisconsin, a place known for its fake 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, uh yeah, no dice there. The 1912 story is believed to be fake as well. While we would never expect news publications to lie to the people today, the reality is the Washington Post story on the 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 analyze it, and he found the head of a tapeworm inside. But, the story was denied at the time by then Surgeon General Rupert Blue. And 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 analyzing 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 ever seen at the time.

[00:07:19]There was another story around the same time that a woman had bought a liquid-filled capsule with a tapeworm inside for $300. But, that turned out to be a fictional humor column written by Mabel Herbert Erner. The doctor who supposedly prescribed the tapeworm pill was called Dr. Fake.

[00:07:34]P H A K A, but 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. Did it really even need debunking? I mean, doctor fake. 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 know about. But her story does need 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 all at the same time.

[00:08:13]However, it's not quite case closed. Maintaining an ideal weight had become more of an obsession for Callas by the early 1950s when she allegedly voluntarily ingested a tapeworm egg. Her sentiment on it was even reflected in a letter from July of 1949 written to another soprano called Maria Caniglia. It was clear that Callas wasn't the only one who wanted her to lose weight. There was influence on her from other people too like the Milanese dressmaker Biki. Then there was 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 came to light in 2014 in the form of Callas's personal chef Elena Pozzan as well as accounts from her husband.

[00:08:56]Because she was so invested in ensuring her weight loss, their stories suggested that Maria undertook a pretty strict 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, no carbs. Overwhelmingly, this is more likely to have led to Callas's rapid weight loss than the parasite ever could. And part of the protein of this crash diet was steak tartare otherwise known as uncooked beef which is exactly where tiny tapeworm larvae tend to reside. Callas's 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 a strict diet did more than a tapeworm could ever have hoped to do. People just connected the two because they're vaguely gastrointestinally related phenomena owing to the mythic reputation that tapeworms have as weight loss assistants. Remember, correlation ain't causation. If I eat ice cream and then a seagull shits on me, that doesn't mean that it shits on me because I was eating ice cream, obviously. So, to state it clearly, tapeworms are complete nonsense and doctors don't recommend them. 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 into the idea, wasting their money on something that's not just ineffective, but also highly dangerous. The myth has largely reemerged as a result of cursed social media misinformation. There have been rumors 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 Khloe Kardashian once indicated an interest in buying a tapeworm online to lose weight. You know what?

[00:11:00]I'll 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 health care skeptic 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 buy tapeworm weight loss pills from Mexico and other countries where standards for this sort of thing just aren't as stringent or apparently existent. In 2013, a woman from Iowa tried it and had to go to the hospital afterwards because she had second thoughts. Doctors there were able to confirm that she indeed had swallowed a beef tapeworm egg. Publications have reported prices of up to $1,500 for the controversial treatment. Treatment. And here's your reminder that a fool and their money are soon parted. But a fool, in this case, could well be parted with their life as well because doing this is not merely pseudo-scientific garbage.

[00:11:58]It's also incredibly dangerous and incredibly unhealthy. So, let's break that down, shall we? Right. So, if for some unholy reason someone has convinced themselves that swallowing a parasite is a good idea, well, what should they expect? [music] 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 anything. The idea is that after you've eaten and you're actively [music] digesting your food, the tapeworm absorbs some of those nutrients and calories for you without any effort on your end. But, here's the thing. To create meaningful weight loss by calorie theft alone, one or even two tapeworms [music] 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 making them want to eat less. But, any illness can do that. [music] And the best part is, they don't require you to eat a parasite. 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 Mosley performed an experiment on himself by swallowing three tapeworm eggs. He then swallowed a tiny camera several weeks later and identified three live tapeworms living in his intestines. He kept the tapeworms for several weeks. He gained a kilo. The man himself said, quote, "So, anyone who is thinking of popping parasites as a weight loss device should think twice."

[00:13:39]Legend, but what the Michael? Is he the guy who died?

[00:13:43]Was he the guy who died on a hike?

[00:13:45]Michael I vaguely recognize the name.

[00:13:47]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, uh you would need far more tapeworms than the average [music] infection typically has, and then you would have much bigger problems. So, if not weight loss, what happens to a person who voluntarily or otherwise ingests a tapeworm? Now, if you're somewhat fortunate, nothing. Genuinely, most human tapeworm infections are mild or asymptomatic, and typically infections only involve one or two adult worms. As gross as it is, you might not even notice. Dr. Mosley didn't feel any different during his experiment, for example. But, he did give a word of warning, quoting again here, "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 are 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, shall we?

[00:14:49]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 2 months. From there, it depends on what kind of tapeworm a person may have caught. Some patients can think they're getting one kind of tapeworm and end up with another, which can have radically different effects. A beef tapeworm, for example, mainly produces gastrointestinal symptoms. We're talking abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, anemia, headache, muscle aches, and natural cravings, and in some cases even eating disorders like anorexia. Bit of a handful of symptoms there, isn't it? You can also get appendicitis and pancreatitis when sections of the tapeworm break off and get lodged in those organs, as well as vitamin deficiencies on top of that. The wonders of natural weight loss, everybody. 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. Jesus Christ, we're talking up to 25 m, which is longer than a bowling lane. That's all curled up inside your organs. And that thought alone should be enough to cause quite significant mental distress, even if the tapeworm itself isn't producing any physical symptoms.

[00:15:53]What about if it's not a beef tapeworm?

[00:15:55]What happens when it's pork? Well, it gets much worse, I'll tell you that. You see, a pork tapeworm is designed to have few hosts, pigs and humans. Obviously, the life cycle usually works like this. Pigs eat the worm eggs, usually in human waste, lovely, 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 [music] that a human eats. The infected pork, the adolescent grows in the intestines, lays eggs, and the cycle begins again.

[00:16:25]But there's a tiny little problem there.

[00:16:27]Humans and pigs anatomically pretty similar. I mean, seriously, pigs are great human stand-ins in terms of organ size, tissue behavior, 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. Pork pigs. This is incredibly useful, of course, but it does come with a downside. Humans are compatible enough that what affects pigs can, in some cases, also affect us. And unfortunately, 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 capable of making you well, isn't life-threatening. Of course, if you swallow a pork tapeworm egg directly instead of through the meat, say as a fat diet measure or something, 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, those larvae burrow through your intestinal walls and travel through the bloodstream. That means these tiny worms can form cysts anywhere in your body and we mean anywhere. And this is called cysticercosis.

[00:17:39]Me, man, I don't like learning about this. Beginning with the most benign, they can end up under your skin as usually painless nodules or lesions.

[00:17:47]These lumps can be a little unsightly or concerning, but they're pretty harmless in most places including inside muscles.

[00:17:52]Your big problem is when they start embedding themselves in your other organs. In the lungs and liver, other species of tapeworms can cause hydatid disease producing massive cysts in those organs. This can cause abdominal pain, blocked bile ducts, jaundice, coughing, chest pain, coughing blood, collapsed lungs, respiratory distress, and infection. And that is not all of them, that's just a few we chose. Some cysts that grow to the size can even rupture within the chest or abdominal cavity, which can cause allergic reactions or even death. I just watched that Prometheus movie last night.

[00:18:24]Hell.

[00:18:24]Thankfully, echinococcosis tapeworms, the ones that cause this, aren't as common in people and they mainly affect dogs, foxes, rodents, and sheep. And never have I been more glad that I'm not a dog, a fox, a rodent, or a sheep. But it also does happen. Tapeworms can affect the human heart as well, which is quite important for doing that whole living thing. Tapeworm cysts there 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 well, that's connected to your brain and eyes. This is called neurocysticercosis and it will, quite simply, you right up. Cysts can float in your eyes causing blurry or disturbed vision.

[00:19:09]They can also embed themselves internally behind the eye structure, which can cause swelling, infection, detachment of the retina, or even total blindness. In the spinal cord, it gets even worse because of course it does. It could cause headaches, seizures, convulsion, confusion, periods of unconsciousness, memory loss, and fluid buildup around the brain leading to all kinds of neurological problems from the swelling, inflammation, and pressure.

[00:19:34]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. In the highest risk communities, that number could be as high as 70%. This is far from just getting a bad tummy ache from some dodgy steak tartare. This is some life-threatening And this is the key issue with 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 eggs for weight loss. Instead, she ended up ingesting pork tapeworm eggs, and she soon developed symptoms of both cysticercosis and neurocysticercosis.

[00:20:21]She went to the doctor for the development of a dull headache, but soon started falling unconscious, not remembering where she'd been for hours beforehand, and all other kinds of scary symptoms that probably made her feel like she had a brain tumor. On examination, they also found lesions on her torso, head, neck, face, >> [music] >> tongue, and in several regions of her brain. She was fortunate enough to get a quick treatment and made a full recovery, but many don't have access to adequate health care, and so their tapeworm infestation could prove fatal.

[00:20:47]The key issue is ultimately that the cysts [music] could end up anywhere, causing any number of complications to your health. Thankfully, only the adult tapeworm can grow to their full multi-meter size inside the gut. So, no, you don't get a 5-meter tapeworm unschooling through your skull, but you can end up with effectively baby worms and cysts in your brain, which is not comforting at all, is it? The other scary thing is that there's potentially a long period between ingesting the tapeworm egg and getting the symptoms.

[00:21:13]They could appear months or even years after initial infection, usually because the cysts finally start to die, and when they do, they calcify into harder nodules and can swell up, causing irritation. And in your brain, that's never going to end well. Tapeworm infestations can last several years inside 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 over 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 might work in the modern day. But if you get that coin flip wrong, you're putting yourself at incredible levels of risk that surely isn't worth it for something that, we would like to reiterate, categorically does not help you lose weight. Jesus Christ, have these people not heard of Ozempic? And without proper access to the right treatment at the right time, you could just straight-up die. Maybe next time, just don't eat the slice of cake. 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 5-second attention spans and a world where being right matters less than just being the loudest. And thus, amongst the modern deluge of internet wellness sludge that we're 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 used to justify not vaccinating their kids, and you can see how it's taken off again, can't you? So, whether it's sought after by Oprah starlits or courted by Kardashians, it seems to be an ever-recurring myth that we will likely see pop up in 100 years from now just like we did 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 the potential for harm. The tapeworm diet is classified as a quote non-food based hazardous diet. One that attempts to produce rapid weight loss of more than 1 kilo per week, requires no effort from the dieter, and is done without medical or dietary supervision or follow-up.

[00:23:32]These diets also seem too good to be true, and that's because they are.

[00:23:36]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 harm than good if it does anything at all. So be curious, but also skeptical 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.

[00:24:01]Thank you for watching.

[00:24:03]That was disgusting.