Stuff You Should Know - Can You Eat A Tapeworm To Lose Weight?

Episode Date: June 11, 2020

There’s a persistent insistence that you can ingest a tapeworm and as the parasite hijacks a lot of the calories you eat, the pounds will fall right off. In theory this could be true, but it’s also extremely dangerous. And has anyone ever really done it? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, it's Josh and Chuck, your friends, and we are here to tell you about our upcoming book that's coming out this fall, the first ever Stuff You Should Know book, Chuck. That's right, what's the cool, super cool title

we came up with? It's Stuff You Should Know, colon, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. That's right, and it's coming along so great. We're super excited, you guys. The illustrations are amazing, and there's the look of the book.

It's all just, it's exactly what we hoped it would be, and we cannot wait for you to get your hands on it. Yes, we can't, and you don't have to wait, actually. Well, you do have to wait, but you don't have to wait to order. You can go pre-order the book right now, everywhere you get books, and you will eventually get a special gift for pre-ordering,

which we're working on right now. That's right. So check it out soon, coming this fall. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck, Chuck, James, Chuck, and Bryant,

and this is Stuff You Should Know, the super gross, but I love it edition. A big time trigger warning for people. This is about tapeworms. It is disgusting and super creepy and gross, and I knew that you would love it. It's so great. So great.

It's just so grody. We're going all the way, baby. The word perianus comes up at least once, and not in a good way. Oh man, perianus, he was a good guy. He was. Best boss I've ever had. Oh, he was?

Was he the one who made himself everybody's secret Santa every year? That's right. You know old perianus. Yup. Count on him. And he would sign his name, perianus parentheses, sorry. Well, if you don't know what perianus is,

just buckle up, because like you said, Chuck, it's going to be quite a ride, because we are talking about tapeworms, and we're not talking just about tapeworms. We're talking about the idea of taking a tapeworm, ingesting it, and letting it live and grow in your body in the hopes that it will divert enough nutrients and calories away from you,

that you can just eat whatever you want and lose weight at the same time, because you're not getting fatter the tapeworm is. Right, but we're mainly just talking about tapeworms, because, well, I don't want to issue a spoiler this early, so. No, seriously. We'll save that for act three. Okay.

So tapeworms, this is from our old howstuffworks.com website, which is nice to find one of these. It is, a little hidden gem hanging out. This is a grabster article originally. Just hidden in the anus, waiting for us to discover it. That's right, actually it crawled its way out and dropped itself at my feet.

So tapeworms, the very first line of this article is a tapeworm is like something out of a horror movie. And it really is. It is this wormy little ribbon-shaped creature that is a parasite in every sense of the word. They can be very big. They can be as big as 80 feet long, and they can live in a host for up to 30 years.

Yeah, like you could get a tapeworm as a kid, and that thing might be with you through every formative experience you've ever had. And you might actually be sad when it crawls out of your anus and detaches itself from you. That sounds like a Simpsons episode or something. Kind of, yeah, but maybe a little more like Cleveland show.

The good news is, if you don't live in a developing nation, then you probably don't need to worry about a tapeworm, although it can still happen to be sure. But with good hygiene, good hand washing, good livestock practices, and good, just overall fecal and food handling practices, it's not likely to be an issue with you. Yeah, great practice, livestock, great practice, everybody.

Yeah. So if you are in the developing world, there is a good chance that you can get a tapeworm, because in some cases, sanitation is not as great as you would like it to be. And there's more poop hanging around than there should be, or that there could be, considering other modern practices.

And then even beyond that, there is a lot more living among livestock than there are in say like developed urban areas, right? So even in the developed world, if you go outside of the urban areas, and you start running up against pigs and cows and their poop and stuff like that, you can conceivably catch a tapeworm fairly easily,

especially if you're not really big into hand washing. Sure, which you should be if you're around poop from animals or humans or any kind of poop. Yeah, just any time there's even any kind of coincidence of poop in your hands, even possibly, just take 20 seconds, recite the alphabet and wash your hands, because if you don't, you might get some of that fecal material in your mouth,

and aboard that fecal material can be tapeworm eggs, and that is how you get a tapeworm infection one way. In the developed world, you're much more likely to get it from something like eating undercooked meat. Right, I've never even had a pink eye. Oh, really? Never. It's not a pleasant experience, Chuck.

All right, poop eye. Yeah, I got some fecal material in my own eye, a couple of times, I guess. Poop eye the sailor man? Yeah, like I was sniffing my fingers, and I guess I got too close to my eye, and there you go. You got your nose confused with your eyeball, again.

Right, I had a little itch, and I was like, oh no, what have I done? And it was too late. Ew, so tapeworms, like I said, are true parasites. Everything that it needs, it gets from its host. Right, and that's how it lives, man. It is, like you said, a true parasite, and all those things that you're supposed to be getting

from the food you eat, some of it is being diverted to the tapeworm, and they absorb nutrients like gangbusters. They actually don't have a mouth, which is weird, because it looks like they have several mouths, but they actually use those mouths to hang on to your intestines inside, so that they don't get flushed out by the parastolic action that helps move poop and stuff along your intestines.

And instead, the tapeworm is just kind of floating there, absorbing nutrients in the matrix of your gut juices, basically, and they absorb it through their skin, and they're just really good at it, so much so that there's at least one type of tapeworm out there that you can actually get from eating undercooked fish, pike specifically,

that's so good at absorbing B12, it can outcompete you, its host, and you can get a pretty bad vitamin B12 deficiency as a result. So, these tapeworms live in all kinds of host animals, like you could be you or me, it could be, like you said, a fish, which is pretty surprising. Most often, you hear about beef and pigs,

or cow, I guess, is the animal, and pigs, but they, depending on what kind of species it is, it might have a preference for a kind of host, and I guess we should describe the body of this thing. Oh, yeah. Right now, it's pretty gross, it's got a head, I guess you would call it, or the top. No, I'd call it the skullax.

Yeah, it's called the skullax, it's the top of the worm, what we, as humans, might call a head. Yeah, but it looks like an old-timey diving head, diving helmet, you know what I mean? Sort of. It's round, it's got those suckers, so they look like kind of the portholes on the old divey helmet, and those, again, those suckers,

they look like mouths that the thing would eat on, but no, they use it to suck onto the sides of your intestine, but at the top of the head, there are some hooks, like a ring of hooks, that actually latch onto the, like really grip onto the side of your intestinal wall, so that tapeworm, once it gets its hooks and it suckers into your intestinal wall,

it's not going anywhere. You know, we should bring back the term skin diver. Sure, you remember that? Skin diver, yeah, wasn't that like snorkeling? I think snorkeling, or maybe even scuba, is just such an antiquated term, like nobody uses that anymore. No, I know, because it makes no sense now,

and it's possible it never made any sense. Like I could see someone's granddad now, saying, you know, I'm going to get certified to be a skin diver. Right, and then I'm going to get me some pearls. And I'll put all the kids laughing, grandpa, no one's his skin diver. Right, and grandpa was probably saying

a bunch of other stuff nobody says anymore too, you know what I mean? Yeah, I know what you mean. So we're bringing skin diver back. Okay. What was the last thing he said, something about the skull X? I said that once this thing gets its hooks,

and it's suckers into your intestinal wall, it's not going anywhere. Yeah, like a good catchy tune. Yeah, like your tapeworm. So if it wasn't for the skull X, this article points out, you know, the skull X is the problem. If it wasn't for this thing,

that your intestines would just churn it out, and you'd poop it out, no problem. But the skull X is really where the rubber meets the road as far as attaching to your body. And that need to think that parastolic action I was talking about, like it's just a bunch of like quivering muscles that move in a progressive direction

towards your rectum and anus and all of that, that push like poop out through your intestines or push nutrients through where they absorbed. But then it ultimately like pushes the poop out, and that's how the whole thing works. It's just like some quivering muscles in there. And I read Chuck that if you take a stimulant laxative, that that's actually what it does

is it really kind of energizes and makes those muscles contract, which is good on the one hand, cause it really works. But on the other hand, it's bad because your body becomes dependent on those things really quickly. So you don't want to just take those willy nilly. From what I saw, you want to try just about

every other type of laxative there is first, starting with a diet high in insoluble fiber. And then work your way on up to where you're talking to a doctor or a nurse practitioner or something before you're hitting those stimulant laxatives. Yeah, I think the word laxative, it sort of is backward cause it makes it sound like it's relaxing everything.

Right. When in fact it's making everything work harder. It's pretty interesting. It's all upside down and dipsy do. But I tell you what, there's a bunch of signs along the way that say one way. One way everybody. You're going this way whether you like it or not.

Right. So the skull X is like I said, where you're sticking to the intestine. And then below the skull X is the neck. And then the rest of it is, I mean, from the neck down, it's just sort of the same thing. There are all these just individual segments, can be thousands of them, at least hundreds.

Yeah. It's called the strobilla in each segment by its own is known as a proglottid. Yeah. And those are like- Proglottid. When you look at a tapeworm and it just looks like a piece of like segmented tape, those little segments, those proglottids,

I did not know this at all, but they're basically reproductive organs that also contain eggs. And that the ones closest to the head are male sperm sacs. And that as you get further away from the head, those proglottids become female and egg holding. And that under some circumstances with some species of tapeworm,

they can self fertilize and basically reproduce themselves, right? But more often than not, they're just kind of exchanging sperm and eggs with nearby neighbors, who are again, floating around in your intestines, absorbing nutrients and just sperming and egging everywhere inside your gut.

Yeah. And you're just sitting there watching Jeopardy. And it might be 80 feet long and 30 years old. You have no idea what's going on. Like your gut may be infested with tapeworms right now. And you probably, you might not know. Yeah. Isn't that creepy?

It is super creepy, yeah. All right. Let's take a break. I'm gonna go wash my hands again. And we'll talk more about these proglottids right after this. All right. All right.

All right. All right. All right. On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references

to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called

on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, frosted tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander

each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to frosted tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Well now, when you're on the road, driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? Get stuff you should know. Stuff you should know. All right.

Okay, Chuck, so you promised more perglotted talk. Lay it on us. Yeah, so these perglotteds can, like the tapeworm is hardy, but it can also break apart. It'll still be alive, like make no mistake. Like a chameleon's tail, it's no big whoop. If some of these perglotteds break off and they'll just come out of your poop

and you might look at your stool and see these things and say like, wow, I have a tapeworm. Thank goodness I got rid of it, but don't be fooled. There might be a lot of tapeworms still back up in your body. Yeah, because remember, up toward the neck is sperm. Down lower along the body is eggs, and then the lower you get are fertilized eggs. So when those perglotteds break off toward the end

and make their way out in your poop, they're fully fertilized egg sacks, and that's how they enter the environment. It's all part of the life cycle, the perglotteds breaking off and making its way out of your anus. By the way, perglotteds are spectacular in that not only are they segments

filled with fertilized eggs sacks by the time they break off and leave you, they also contain muscles, meaning that they can walk on their own. So these little segments of tapeworm filled with fertilized tapeworm eggs can move and crawl their way out of your butt. So much so that there's something called

discharge of the perglotteds, which is when- It's a great record. Right, when- It was a yes album. Totally, I was gonna say that is so progressive. It's crazy. But when they start marching their way out of your butt,

you have a, there's a crawling sensation. Yeah. Perianus, and that this is one reason why dogs with tapeworms butt scooch. Yes. And also why you might butt scooch too, because you are trying to erase the very anus from your body to get rid of this

crawling sensation for sure. But even if they don't crawl right out of your bottom, they can still make their way out in your poop. And then they crawl away from the poop, because if they crawl away from the poop and say like a pasture, right? Where some human is just pooped. There might be a cow nearby that eats the grass

that this periglotted has broken open and like deposited the eggs into the soil. And when that cow eats those eggs, this life cycle starts all over again. You know what we call that dog scooch in our house? What? The boot scootin' boogie. That's a good one.

Whenever you see the boot scootin' boogie happen in your house, it may not mean a tapeworm, but it's not good. No, Lil Mo does it sometimes, but she does this cute thing where she does a little 180 in one place. She doesn't go like, she doesn't make a line. She stays on the spot and then just kind of does

like the twist. And she eventually bores a hole in the floor and falls through to another dimension. That's right. Yeah, the boot scootin' boogie also could be like anal glands that you're expressing or just a dingleberry that needs taking care of. Bored on a Saturday night.

But it's never something awesome. It's never, you know, $100 bills or just a dog that's like making some cool noise with their butt. Exactly. So this life cycle thing that just kicked off again, we should follow this through one more time, okay? I don't actually even know if we've gone through this, but the thing about tapeworms,

and you kind of touched on it before, is they infest different animals, but the same kind of tapeworm might infest different animals as part of its life cycle, right? Yeah. So like when you just pooped in the cow pasture and that perglottet opened up and deposited the eggs into the soil,

and this cow eating grass ate that soil, those eggs went into that cow and they said, okay, time to turn into our larval stage. And in the cow, they turn into larvae, but the larvae of tapeworms form like a cyst around them. And from what I can gather, the reason that they form the cyst is because they, it prevents them from setting off an immune response.

Because like you were saying, you can have a tapeworm infection and unless it's really bad and you're becoming really malnourished as a result, and it's an adult tapeworm in your gut, you may never know that you had one until the thing just falls out of your bottom one day, or like it's done,

or you start discharging perglottets in your stool. The same thing with cows, like when they become infested with tapeworm larvae in these cysts forms, the cysts burrow their way out of the intestinal wall and then just implant themselves in the cow's muscles, don't seem to really provide any kind of discomfort or problem.

And again, they don't set off an immune response. But the reason that they deposit themselves in their muscles is because somewhere along their evolutionary history, which from what we've seen goes back at least 270 million years, they figured out that the animals eat the muscles of other animals.

And so we come along and we eat the muscles of the cows and those cysts, those larval cysts of tapeworms deposit into our guts and they mature into the adult tapeworm so that the whole life cycle begins again. Yeah, these at the larval stage, what they're trying to do, they're trying to get to the bloodstream.

Right, so like if you eat eggs or whatever, then they'll become those cystic larval and then they go into the bloodstream, right? That's right. Okay. So if you have this, if you have the tapeworm, then you have an infection known as human tenice,

man, I had it. I even spelled it out. Teniasis. Nice. Is that right? I think so, that's how I was gonna say it. And if you have that, like you said, it's not a big deal, it's asymptomatic probably

and you won't even know you've got it. Right. But that can develop into cystocercosis and that is when these things get into your bloodstream and that is not a good thing because the chain reaction that can happen from here is pretty bad. I mean, it can lead to death, it usually doesn't,

but they can be anywhere in your body, they can grow and they can inflame tissue. So if it's putting pressure like near your eyeball, it can cause temporary blindness or permanent blindness. If it's near your brain, that's no good. It can cause brain damage. And in fact, in some countries, they think it's the main cause for adult onset seizure.

Isn't that crazy? Yeah. Yeah, I saw that there's one guy, it's called Neurocysticercosis. And this one doctor says that at least five million cases of adult onset seizures worldwide are from having tapeworm cysts in your brain. So that was the appropriate response, Chuck.

So the thing is like when you eat a tapeworm larva, it becomes an adult tapeworm in your gut. Humans aren't, our bodies aren't set up or they're not in this kind of symbiosis with tapeworm eggs to do the same thing. So if we eat tapeworm eggs accidentally, then those become those cystic larvae. And then that's what travels into our bloodstream

and causes all of these problems. And there's specifically one kind of pig tapeworm that goes through its life cycle from pig to human to pig. And under normal circumstances, if we eat undercooked pork and get those larvae, they're gonna turn into adult tapeworms. But if we eat undercooked pork

and we accidentally eat some eggs from that pork, then that's when that cysticercosis, is that right? Yeah, cysticercosis, it can be a real problem. That you will know, like you were saying that you've got a tapeworm problem pretty quick. Yeah, if they get big, they can block your ducks, your pancreatic ducks, your bile ducks.

They can get in your organs and grow within your organs, which is something that should keep you awake at night. If they get large enough in your organs, that's gonna, like those organs are not gonna be good for very long. They can rupture sometimes. And this is just in the body, not necessarily in the organs,

but if it ruptures in your body, then your body's gonna amount like an immuno response. You're gonna get hives, it's gonna itch, it's gonna swell, and you're just gonna have like this massive allergic reaction. You're gonna be like, what bug bit me? Right, except you won't be able to talk because your throat will have closed.

Perhaps. So Chuck, if you don't want a tapeworm, which hopefully by now you've realized you don't want a tapeworm. Again, in the developed world, it's not that hard to avoid a tapeworm. And in the United States in particular, like the meat packing industry is,

I mean, it's dirty and gross and horrific, but it's actually pretty good at spotting things like tapeworms. So there's a really low chance that you're going to get your hands on meat from an American grocery store that has tapeworm cysts in it, right? Probably not going to get a tapeworm.

But just to be sure, the government has very conscientiously recommended some minimum cooking temperatures for things like whole cuts of meat, like a chop or a steak, right? I think it used to be 160 Fahrenheit. Now they've lowered it to something like 145, which is 63 degrees Celsius.

And here's the key. They say after you're done cooking it to that internal temperature, which you want to meet thermometer, do you have one of those? Sure. I think the best things I've ever bought, Chuck. It really upped my steak game quite a bit.

But the key to a good steak, and apparently to killing tapeworms and other parasites, is to letting your whole cut of meat rest for at least three minutes. I always do five after you cook before you carve it up and start eating. Do you do that? You should do that anyway,

because of the flavor and the juices. It just does something amazing. Like before I started doing that, I was just a schlub. I was a total loser. I had no idea what was going on in the world. Once I started... Would you just take it off the grill

and put it in your mouth? Sure, yeah, basically. I mean, put it on a plate and start eating it, right? Once I started letting meat rest, it was like a whole new world. Yeah, and here's another tip. If you want a really delicious steak,

or I guess pork chop, you get one either. I mean, if you don't have one of these sort of slotted cutting boards for to rest on, you use like a baker's rack or something, because you still maintain that crisp on the outer, that char. If you just let it sit in its juices, that's gonna get all, you know,

it's gonna change the texture. Oh, like a grill pan or something like that? Use that? Yeah, I've got this cutting board that has a... It's basically like a grid instead of being flat. And it has a little, like a grill grate that can lift up and out of it. So it's never sitting,

like not much of the meat is sitting on a board when it's resting. So you don't want it to rest in its juices? No, I wanna keep it crispy. Oh, okay, I didn't know that. I gotta, I'll have to try that, because I always just, basically I just put it on a plate

and throw like some foil loosely over it, or else like a pan cover. You cover it too, huh? Yeah, yeah. I've always read cover. You know it's gonna keep cooking, right? Yeah, yeah, for sure. But I mean, it's not on the flame anymore.

So it's like just kind of, yeah. Yeah, I know. I've never tried it uncovered. Maybe I will. I'll try uncovering and away from the juices and see what happens. You try covering it and leaving it in its juices. I don't even use a meat thermometer.

So I think we have different steak games. You don't, huh? Do you like yours rare? Medium rare? Medium rare, but if I know the thickness and the weight and the temperature, I don't need a meat thermometer. I stopped cooking as many steaks,

so I had to kind of, I had to go back to elementary school again. No, there's no shame in it. I'm not ashamed. I had a chef that I worked for that he just touched his. He's like, you can tell the internal, what the inside looks like just by touching the outside.

Right. And we should tell people, they're probably people who haven't been listening that long and don't know the secret to steak that we've said before, Chuck. But you do not touch your steak, you don't cut it. You cook it, you sear it on one side for a minute and a half, two minutes tops, depending on how thick it is.

Flip it over, do the same thing on the other side. And then you take it off of your oven or your grill or whatever and move it into a convection oven, if you've got one, at about 390 degrees, three minutes to three and a half minutes per side for six to seven minutes total. Let it rest five minutes.

Thank us in the morning. I don't do mine that way either. I like it so we get different steak games. I thought you said you'd tried it that way before and you're like, this is amazing. I do all kinds of ways. Sometimes I do it in a pan and then stick it in the broiler. These days I'm all about the grill again

because I got a grill that can get really, really hot. Oh yeah. Well, that's the key. Like you want to sear in those juices to keep it from escaping. Yeah. Which is another reason a meat thermometer is good if you can't just use your thumb.

You don't have to cut it open to look inside. You just plunge that thing in there and it tells you. I think all this talk of steak has made people forget that we're talking about tapeworms. Oh yeah, perianus tapeworms. So should we, I mean, I guess we should talk a little bit about the symptoms before we come back for the final act

of tapeworms as a weight loss aid. Yeah, agreed. But you might not have, I'm sorry, symptoms at first. You might feel a little weak. You might feel some diarrhea. You might feel dizzy or lose your appetite. You might lose a little weight. You might crave salt, which is an interesting one

because I always crave salt. Yeah, I thought that was interesting too. Or pica in general, like if you crave eating clay or just anything that you is a little weird is a big sign. You saying pica now? Pica. Oh yeah? I think I've always said that, haven't I?

Yeah, you always said pica. This is amazing. It's like starting our podcast all over again after 12 years. It's a refresh. Yeah, pica, that's what I'm going with now. All right, so you will get a, you will deliver a stool sample

if you go to the doctor, if you suspect you have a tapeworm. You want them to ask you for it first. Sure, just don't bring it in a bag unless you happen to see that your poop has worms in it. And then you could bring it in, but you could also just say there were, those were definitely worms in my poop.

And hopefully what happens is, is that you've gone in there quickly enough to where it doesn't end up being a very big deal. And you take a little anti-worm medication, and this thing works by basically kind of paralyzing the parasite so its muscles are permanently contracted. Man, that sounds unpleasant. Yeah, and you know, we were talking about

how that head just latches on. It's not able to latch on. It just comes right on out in your poop. I know it goes, and just falls out basically. And there are plenty of videos on the internet that show tapeworms that have come out of people's anuses. If you want to go see that kind of thing, they can get really, really long.

But that drug chuck that you're talking about, the anti-worming agent, it's the same thing they give dogs, like any animal that's going to have it, worm is going to get the same treatment. But they found, they're pretty sure, this particular one, Niklosimide, this deworming agent is actually also good

for things like treating cancer, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, graft versus host disease, endometriosis, and a bunch of other stuff. Because they're like, it does something to channeling pathways, multiple channeling pathways. And it might be like this wonder drug that's just waiting to be unlocked, isn't that neat? That is super neat.

Niklosimide. Should we take that break? Yeah, man, let's take the break. All right, then we'll get to the big revelation, Relevation? No. Revelation. Yes. Can you use the tapeworm to lose weight?

Right for this. On the podcast, Paydude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the co-classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place

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Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Well now, when you're on the road, driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck?

It's stuff you should know. Stuff you should know. All right. No, you can't and you shouldn't. That's right. So remember Kelly Kapoor tried that, or else she considered taking it. I don't remember, do you?

Oh, that's right. I forgot about that. So, I mean, this has been around for a really long time, this idea that you can eat a tapeworm with some sort of tapeworm cyst, not eggs, because those will turn into cysts and invade your brain, that you can get a tapeworm infection and start to lose weight,

possibly as long as the 19th century, they think, that they're, so here's the thing. Do you remember when we did our episode on flea circuses? Sure. It was really thrilling to me, because even while we were podcasting, I still could not tell for a little while, whether it was a real thing

or just one of the most exquisitely perpetrated hoaxes ever, right, and that it was still working on us. There's this kind of a similar thing, where it's not entirely clear if these old-timey ads are real, people think they typically are, or if they were real, if anybody actually did this, or if it was some sort of farce or hoax or satire,

and if it wasn't satire, how widespread was this? Because it does seem that there were 19th century ads, late 19th century or early 20th century ads, for sterilized tapeworm pills that women could take, they were marketed toward women, to keep their figure trim. Right, of course they were marketed toward women. Right.

Take a tapeworm, ladies. Exactly. There was a singer, an opera singer named Maria Callas, who, and this is almost certainly urban legend, but she lost, I read 80 pounds, I've seen other places, 60 pounds, over a few months in the mid-1950s, so much so that it affected her singing as an opera singer. And we do know that she got a tapeworm

at some point in her life, and we do know that she liked to eat her steak rare, but I think it looks by and large, like it was urban legend, that it got kind of all mixed up together, and people said that Maria Callas lost weight by ingesting tapeworm. Right, right.

Like those two things did happen, she did lose weight, and she did have a tapeworm infection, probably at some point in her life, but that the two were in no way related, but based on this kind of idea that you could take a tapeworm and lose weight, that they became conflated into this urban legend, as you were saying.

And that's like the one that people point to, is like proof that this actually happened, and actually it didn't happen at all like that. Supposedly there is a clinic in Tijuana called Worm Therapy, and supposedly this is the one place in the world where you can go get a tapeworm put into your body to lose weight for about 1300 bucks.

You can get a beef tapeworm, and I've been to Tijuana a few times, I never sought out Worm Therapy, but apparently it existed, or it still exists? It's not clear, so they have a website, I think it's WormTherapy.com or.org, and it's- Is that you to you?

It has, you know, like, you know, contact form fields, it shows a map of where it is, and it isn't Tijuana and all that. There's a phone number, I didn't call the phone number, but it's one of those things like, is it actually real, number one, or is it just a hoax website? If it's not a hoax website,

and it actually is a helmet therapy, because remember in our hookworms episode, we were talking about that theory that losing some kinds of parasitic worms, they think actually harmed our immune system and led to a rise in like Crohn's and stuff like that. Yeah. So there are clinics out there in the world

that use parasitic worms to help autoimmune diseases. So it's possible that WormTherapy does that and that they don't do the beef tapeworm thing, but the urban legend is that they did, at least as recently as 2009, they offered it. It's just not clear whether any of this is true or not. Right, what we do know is true, is that to purposefully do this is not a good idea.

Right. It is not a healthy way to lose weight, and you're not even gonna lose, like it said that you can expect to lose one to two pounds from a tapeworm a week. You can lose that much with a pretty aggressive diet and exercise plan. Yeah, supposedly just cutting 500 calories out

from your diet every day. Every week you could lose a pound. You can look forward to losing a pound. So yeah. Exactly. Taking a tapeworm to do that is not a good idea, especially considering so, because that tapeworm is competing for nutrients from you,

you're gonna end up with a pretty nice little case of malnutrition, if it gets pretty bad. So you're actually going to be, your body's going to talk you into eating more than you normally would, right? So you'll develop even worse eating habits than you did, than you had before the tapeworm infection, so that when you finally get around

to taking a deworming agent, and it gets rid of that tapeworm, when you just keep eating again, you're gonna gain that weight right back, and you're probably gonna gain more weight back because you've developed even worse eating habits from having the tapeworm. And again, all of this is based on the idea

that any of this is even true to begin with, which is totally unclear still at this point. Yes, totally. So that's it. Don't take a tapeworm to lose weight, just exercise and diet, that is it. There's no better diet fad than that. Just exercise and diet, and you will lose weight

and feel healthier and better and sleep better, and have less chronic disease, and just be far better off. That's it. That's right. You got anything else? No. Well, since Chuck said no,

it's time for Listener Mail. This is from a high school student. We love hearing from high school students. This is from Kate. Kate says, hi, guys, I am a junior in high school from Massachusetts, discovered the podcast in September at the start of the school year, and I've loved it ever since.

It definitely makes my morning car rides much more interesting, and it does wonders to decrease my horrible road rage. Nice. I feel you, Kate. Recently, as I was driving to Cape Cod, I was listening to your Spartacus episode. I've been studying Latin since sixth grade,

and this year was my first year taking Ancient Greek, so needless to say, I'm a huge nerd when it comes to Roman history. I couldn't help but to laugh when I heard you both struggling to pronounce the names of the Roman consuls and their important, and other important historical figures. This quarantine has really been tough on me, guys, like it has on everyone, and I really needed that laugh,

so I thought I would write to you as a sort of thank you note. Although your pronunciation may not have been great, the whole episode really did wonders to lighten my mood and make me feel better, even though things are crazy right now. Always know that I have your podcast to listen to when I'm feeling down or just want to smile.

Wishing you health and happiness. That is from Kate in Massachusetts. Thanks a lot, Kate. That was nice of her to say our pronunciation may not have been great. Yeah, what she means is, guys, you were way off. It was terrible. Well, that was very nice, Kate,

and it's nice to hear that we're helping you out there, and thank you for writing in. And if you are like Kate and we're helping you out, we always love hearing that kind of thing, you can send an email to us if you like. Wrap it up, spend it on the bottom, and send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production

of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.