August, 2025, a thought

You Were Born to Lose

Obesity and its deleterious secondary health effects including Type 2 diabetes, is a ever- expanding health problem in America.  There have been a plethora of diet plans and medical treatments from pills to surgery promoted over the years with very limited long-term results.  

Latest figures show that Health Systems spent 173 billion dollars on obesity-related problems in 2024, and individuals spent 70 billion dollars on weight reduction efforts.  More recently GLP-1 drugs, self-administerd injectables, have beem heavily promoted.  The monthly personal cost ranges from 500 to 1500 dollars.  It’s interesting that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the czar of MAHA, or Make America Healthy Again, who had previously railed against GLP drugs (and the pharmaceutical industry in general) now thinks there’s a role for them and he’s the one who decides where the federal health dollars go.

Kennedy has been pro-natural and pro-organic and, anti-drugs, anti-vaccines, and against the pharmaceutical and chemical industries.  With his bias, I think that now, in the fullness of time, the stage is ripe for the reintroduction of a previously outlawed all-natural, totally organic treatment for obesity that could sharply reduce costs. 

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Tapeworms.

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Tapeworms as a treatment for obesity might be a difficult concept to swallow at first, but the science and logic are irrefutable.  Even folk-wisdom supports it.  I’m sure I’m not the only one who has heard people say, “He’s so thin and yet look at how much he eats.  He must have a tapeworm.”

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Some background information will lend weight to my proposal.  There are three species of giant human tapeworm.  Taenia saginata and Taenia solium, the beef and pork tapeworms respectively, and Diphyllobothrium latum, the fresh water fish tape worm.  Tapeworm cysts are found in the flesh of their respective animal hosts and, when humans eat raw or undercooked beef, pork, or fresh water fish containing cysts, the cysts activate in the small intestine and attach themselves to the wall of the gut.  They mature in several months, reach lengths of 10-30 feet, and live, if untreated, for decades.  It is very important to emphasize that other than removing calories, tapeworms do not harm their human hosts.

These adult worms never invade our bodies, remaining only within our intestines where they absorb a portion of the calories that we eat.  They pass eggs with our feces, which then find their way to the food supply of cattle, pigs or fish, are swallowed by them, and hatch in the animals’ intestines as larvae. (You can use your imagination about this part of their life cycle.)  The larvae penetrate the intestinal wall and travel throughout the animals’ bodies to form cysts in the flesh, lying dormant, awaiting human diners who relish their meat or fresh water fish very rare or raw (think sashimi and steak tartare) thereby continuing the cycle.

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*However, should a human swallow tapeworm eggs rather than cysts, especially of the pork tapeworm, serious problems could result.  The human would take the place of the porcine host and the hatched larvae would penetrate and encyst in muscle, heart, brain, and even eyes, and could cause muscle and heart inflammation, convulsions, blindness, and death.  Considering that human feces are the source of the eggs, swallowing them would involve extremely unsanitary conditions and habits.

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Studies comparing symptoms in people who have worms and those who don’t, find that occasional diarrhea is the only symptom of significance and, if it occurs, does so for only a short time after cyst ingestion.  Other types of complaints are infrequent and indistinguishable between people with and without worms.  

Thus, one advantage of tapeworms over other treatments for weight reduction is that they are free of side effects, except as noted below, and are associated with few, if any, symptoms.  Another huge advantage is that one swallow, or at most a few, of cyst-containing flesh is the entire treatment.  Unlike all medicines, injectables, and dietary supplements, no continuing treatments are needed to maintain weight loss.

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The choice of which worm to use involves aesthetic and religious considerations.  Beef tapeworm segments are active and can breakoff and sometimes exit the anus.  Pork tapeworm segments do not do this, but their use may be precluded because of dietary laws.  Fish tapeworms usually pass tiny eggs rather than visible segments and therefore would likely be the treatment of choice for most people.  However this species does absorb vitamin B-12 and a deficiency of vitamin B-12 called pernicious anemia could occur.  This can be prevented with oral B-12 supplements.

The pork tapeworm is rarely found in the United States and the beef tapeworm is estimated to infect only .03% of cattle in the United States.  On the other hand, the fish tapeworm is regularly found in fresh water fish and was a common human infestation in northern Europe.  The north central states and Alaska are common sites of human infestation in the United States.

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Although tapeworms are technically classified as human parasites, they could more properly be termed symbionts when used for weight reduction, since this situation fulfills the definition of a symbiotic relationship–two dissimilar organisms living together for mutual benefit–a partnership. 

The goal of tapeworm therapy is to enhance weight reduction by harmlessly removing some fat-building calories before they can be absorbed.  This should not be thought of as a stand-alone, primary remedy–each person should still learn to restrict intake and to exercise.  Otherwise, as soon as the intestinal symbionts are removed, a simple matter of swallowing the right pills, the former host will again begin to gain weight.  However, if a person cannot adopt new eating habits, then the weight-reduction symbionts, with their life span of decades, could be left in place. 

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There might also be unforeseen secondary benefits.  People make pets of a great variety of animals. It is not inconceivable that some hosts may begin to feel similarly about their internal companions.  The owner might feel grateful for the help of his or her symbiont.  Although a worm probably cannot feel emotion, it certainly needs its human owner to provide shelter and food.  It is also totally at the mercy of its human host who has the power to terminate its life instantly by merely swallowing pills.  And it certainly would be unique.  No other pet would so intimately share its owner’s life.  It would also be a most convenient companion, requiring no litter box, no special foods, no quarantine when traveling, no boarding kennels, and no walks except as a passenger.

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Thus, tapeworm therapy for obesity will be a can’t-miss, biotechnological innovation in weight control, with the potential to eat into a huge part of this bloated market.  A major advantage of this proposed treatment is that it is most certainly an all-natural, organic product and probably should not require FDA approval since it is not a drug.  Development and production costs would be extremely low compared to the costs of developing a new drug, since the only requirement will be to establish and maintain clean, cyst-bearing schools of fish, or herds of cattle or pigs, as sources for flesh containing symbiont cysts.  Fish would probably be easiest and best source.  Who doesn’t like sashimi?