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Trying to lose weight? Avoid the Tapeworm Diet!

 

Humans may use half of their imagination for weight loss. To be slim, all kinds of brain-opening methods of weight loss are endless, such as taking ribs, freezing diet, cutting stomach, swallowing cotton balls, vomiting… Among the strange weight-loss methods, the Tapeworm Diet is the most dangerous.

However, the mite diet is so simple and rude that it always attracts people who want to take shortcuts. Just take a piece of mites, no need for diet and exercise, and wait for the eggs to hatch in the body. These parasites will start their mission to help the body absorb the hateful nutrients. This completely hits the pain point of human beings who want to lie down and get thin.

So, is it feasible to use mites to lose weight? First, let’s understand how terrible aphids are.

Among all parasites, aphids are a heterogeneous species. As an intestinal parasite, they are mainly known as “big” and longer than the human body. However, they can hide in your body for a few years, but you cannot feel their existence. You will not be told by doctors that there are alien invasions until your headache is unbearable, and you are tortured by nausea, vomiting, and convulsions.

Taenia saginata (beef tapeworm) and Taenia solium (pork tapeworm) are mostly used for weight loss. Eggs or gravid proglottids are passed with feces. Thus, Cattle and pigs became infected by ingesting vegetation contaminated with eggs or gravid proglottids.

life-cycle of pig tapeworms and cattle tapeworms ( courtesy of DPDx)

 

Take the pigs (T. solium) as an example. When the mites enter the pig stomach, the stomach acid protease will digest the outer shell. After the egg shell breaks, the aphid larvae will escape. At this stage, the larvae have six hooks. Therefore, they can easily pass through the stomach wall and reach other parts of the body. In general, the destination of them is striated muscle. But some of them will reach other parts of the body, including the brain, liver, eyes and subcutaneous tissues. Once these mites settle down, it grows into a capsule thatprotects them from the immune system. In this stage, they are called cysticercosis.

If people do not fully heat pork before eating them, these capsules will enter the human body alive. They will be encapsulated by digestive juice and transform into adults that have head segments to adsorb on the human intestinal wall. Aphids use fluff to absorb the gut nutrition for their own needs.

However, what happens next is creepy. Aphids’ neck segments will continue to split and produce more body segments which will gradually mature. Adult tapeworms can shed ten segments one day, and each body section contains tens of thousands of eggs. After growing into sic hooks, these mites will enter various tissues and organs. As a result, the host people will have cysticercosis.

If they invade our skin, it is skin cysticercosis.

It can be said that the cysticercosis that normal humans try to avoid, the extreme dieters are open to this. The locusts are not only consuming calories but also consumes the host himself or herself.

 

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Why peer review is so important?

Every science student should know the importance of peer review that it involves other experts in the same field to check the validity of academic paper and suitability of publication. However, in real life peer review still lacks sufficient attention and that has much impact on the public more than you think!

John Bohannon is a journalist and PH.D. in molecular biology of bacteria. He thinks many publishers pay little attention to peer review and one of many reason is for profit.

In 2013, he made up 304 papers about a biologist Ocorrafoo Cobange at the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara found some anticancer element collected from a lichen. They are unusual because the biologist and the Wassee Institute of Medicine do not exist, and this anticancer element is fake. John submitted 304 papers to 255 open-access journals worldwide and 157 of these papers were accepted. Only 36 papers were reviewed and 16 of them were still accepted after “peer review”. Certainly, John withdrawal these 16 papers before they actually get published. The results of his “experiment” were quite shocking. Based on this outcome, he published a paper on Science revealed many publishers consider profit from publication before subscriptions.

He did another experiment 1 year later. In 2014 he recruited 15 people through facebook to do a 3-week experiment. They aged from 19 to 67 years old, and 5 of them were male and 10 of them were female. John randomly assigned them to 3 groups. One group followed regular diet. One group followed a low-sugar diet and the other group followed a low-sugar diet plus 40 grams of black chocolate. John with his partners measured 18 kinds of health data for 15 people everyday and after 3 weeks they found that 2 groups followed low-carb diet lost 5 pounds of averaged weight. Between the 2 treatment groups, the group ate a bar black  chocolate everyday for 21 days lost their weight faster than the other group and their cholesterol level had decreased.

John and his partners started to write paper after the defective experiment. After some time they finished the paper ” Chocolate with high Cocoa content as a weight-loss accelerator”, which was a well-formed paper. It has proper format, eligible literature review and figures displaying data. They submitted it to 20 publisher and accepted by some of publishers within 24 hours. In 2015, John published this paper on International Archives of Medicine after he paid 600 euros. John did not stop his “experiment” then. He recomposed his paper and made a news manuscript. In a short time, many newspapers companies reprint it and resulting in a widespread across the world.

After a few months, John wrote an article “I Fooled Millions Into Thinking Chocolate Helps Weight Loss. Here’s How.” and explained how bad lacking peer review can impact on everyone’s life.

The paper has been removed from the International Archives of Medicine website but people can still see it online.