A hot, new diet craze some call crazy

Over the years, we’ve seen the cabbage soup diet, low-fat, no-carb, Atkins, South Beach, Jenny Craig, the Zone, Weight Watchers, the lemonade diet, the cookie diet, and of course the grapefruit diet.  The grapefruit diet requires you to eat a half a grapefruit at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty awful to me.

But there now seems to be a new diet craze that takes the cake. (Pun intended). It’s called the parasitic worm diet. In Hong Kong, women are eating giant intestinal roundworms in order to lose weight. The diet has suddenly become so popular that the nation’s Department of Health had to release a warning on the dangers of doing it.

The exact kind of worms these women are eating are called Ascaris worms. Once women eat them, the worms burrow in their intestine, and eat whatever food comes in. And here are some fun facts for you: Ascaris worms can grow up to 40 centimeters in length and lay up to 200,000 eggs a day inside a person’s intestine.

The worms are making women thinner. The problem is they’re also making them very sick. The worms cause all kinds of problems like abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhea, and malnutrition. Beyond that, they can cause pancreatic duct obstruction and lung invasion which can kill somebody.