There’s been rumors and claims going back quite a long time of people consuming tapeworm eggs specifically to lose weight. But Snopes says it’s likely untrue and relegates it pretty much to legend.
Although, I might be inclined to try it if it’s been developed to the point of FDA approval. Who wouldn’t want to lose weight without having to really do anything special besides playing host to an easily evictable parasite?
I wouldn’t, TYVM. Ick. Not to mention, what happens when you evict said parasite, and then continue to eat in the manner you were eating before you evicted it? Here comes all that weight again.
Keep your tapeworms healthy, kids!
Gibson would love to write a couple paragraphs, I’m sure.
It’s called a yo-yo diet, and is a cornerstone of our civilization.
Have they sequenced the tissue? What did patient zero look like (guessing a grey wolf)?
I don’t remember the specifics, I am fairly sure they did sequence it. It is too much of a medical curiosity for them not to. What I was reading was more about transmission in contemporary canines, there wasn’t a lot about the origins.
Probably, I won’t retrace my original online reading about it. I might follow up on it again, but I need to psych myself up for it, seeing as how much cancer sucks and all.
Here’s something interesting I found through my local library’s academic database search:
doi:10.1111/j.1558-5646.2009.00724.x
Origins and Evolution of a Transmissible Cancer
Shareable link to the PDF from my google drive
Public libraries are a great resource to get at freaking really expensive academic papers for free.
ETA:
The paper says that while the tumor itself has existed for over 6000 years, possibly going all the way back to the time of the dog’s first domestication, the Latest Common Ancestor for the tumor samples they took only goes back a few hundred years, according to the genomic analysis.
Ah that makes sense. I kept thinking, “What happened 12k years ago that didn’t happen before or since?”
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