I love Halloween. Since early childhood it has been my favorite holiday. While I’m not fan of haunted houses – I do love a good, creepy story that’ll keep me up at night. To celebrate the holiday, I decided to try and find a fitting fad diet, and as it turns out, I didn’t have to look hard. The tapeworm diet is everything you want in a diet story, it’s gross, it’s from a time in history when science was evolving and it includes controversy.  

Background

Before talking about the diet itself, let’s discuss the horrifying times that are the Victorian Era.  While advancements to science and medicine were happening, there were still few regulations, an unstructured medical system and beauty standards that people would die trying to achieve.  In fact, during this time, it was considered attractive to look like you had consumption (tuberculosis) – pale skin, rosy cheeks, crimson lips and a frail, thin figure.  

This was also the time when medicine was new, so drugs like cocaine and heroin were prescribed by doctors and surgical procedures were still in their infancy. So when it come to medicine, people relied on a unique mix of medicine, home remedies and then the fake medicine sold by con men.

     

What was the diet?

For someone on the diet, they would take pills that contained a tapeworm egg. The egg would then hatch in the person’s intestines and beginning eating the food before the person could ingest it, saving them from the calories. This allowed a person to eat however much they wanted while still losing weight. While this sounds great in theory, it didn’t really work that way. There are also different accounts of how people would remove the tapeworms once they reached their desired weight, but none of them were pleasant and could result in death.

The side effects to tapeworms were also disgusting, painful and potentially deadly. The biggest concern is that the tapeworm would attach outside of the digestive tract, causing organ damage and other health issues. Side effects of this include nausea, stomach pain, fever and diarrhea.

Even if the tapeworm did properly attach itself, side effects are malnutrition, weakness, infection and neurological issues. The ironic part is, for all the suffering and risk, the diet most likely would not even help people lose weight. In fact, weight gain is a potential side effect because the tapeworm makes people so hungry. In 2014, a doctor decided to give himself a tapeworm and he noted that he craved carbohydrates and gained weight.

The Controversy

What’s interesting about this diet is the debate on if it was even real or not. While there are a lot of stories about and what appears to be an advertisement for the pill, people doubt if this diet was actually used by Victorians.

There are a few layers to this controversy. The first issue being that there is no way for anyone to verify now if the pills sold in the Victorian times actually contained live tapeworm eggs or not. As mentioned before, this was a time when advertising increased in popularity and con men were willing to sell anything to make money. For all we know, people believed they were taking tapeworm pills, but they could have easily been fake.

There is also discussion around the advertisement for the pills being fake as well. While the image may look convincing, no one has been able to identify its original source and some of the wording matches exactly to a 1920 advertisement for another type of diet pill. It’s also argued that all the brand name food mentioned in the ad would not have been allowed, because those company’s would not have wanted to be associated with this product.

There is also a lack of documentation from any regulatory source from this time. While this not unsurprising, considering how long ago it was, and the fact that the groundwork for what is now the FDA was founded in 1906 with the Pure Food and Drugs Act. Still, over the decades, rumors in papers would float around about the tapeworm diet pill, but nothing concrete has been evaluated by the FDA.    

In Today’s Culture

Despite this controversy around if the diet was real back then or not, it has found a place in modern times. As mentioned before, in 2014 a doctor gave himself a tapeworm to see what would happen. A year earlier, a woman in Iowa had bought tapeworm pills online to lose weight and this resulted in an official warning the state’s public health department about the dangers of trying this diet.

In 2015, Khloe Kardashian joked about ingesting a tapeworm to lose weight and this resulted in some media coverage. There are also some sketchy parts of the internet that claim to sell tapeworm pills for people who want to lose weight, but these could pills could easily be fake as well.

The legacy of the tapeworm diet appears to live on as people are willing to risk their lives in order to lose weight. The strangeness of the diet along with the controversy surrounding it will continue to fascinate people and fuel online chatter around the diet.

For a fad diet, this one is especially dangerous and not worth the risk of trying.  It does make for a fun Halloween story though and makes you especially grateful to not live in an era where cocaine was given to babies and people thought dying of tuberculosis  was a good look.