Dangerous Design

America is a nation that continues to battle with ‘obesity’. We strive to become and remain thin and slender; because that is what society markets to us as beauty; because that is what we have to achieve to fit (literally and figuratively) into society. Though society is gearing to change its symbol of beauty by promoting plus size figures, with companies and products like Curves, Jenny Craig, Slim Fast, and many more, dieting is still a large American cultural trend. However, recently a new regime to aid in weight reduction has emerged and can be considered a dangerous design. The ‘Tapeworm Diet,” is the new method, design to get-thin. Claiming to be an all-natural diet, the tapeworm diet constitutes that the dieter ingest undercooked meat of an animal (most often a cow or something within the same family) that has been laced with the parasite. The parasites will then grow into a tapeworm that will then attach itself to the intestinal track of the consumer and absorb the nutrients from the food that the consumer would later ingest.


Fairly new, the design of the Tapeworm Diet has grown somewhat popular among women who claim to have seen the failings of other dieting methods and designs first hand. Though some people have seen positive results after trialing the diet, the risk factors involved in the use of this method is what makes Tapeworm Dieting a dangerous design. Unintentional, some of the risks of ingesting the tapeworm bacteria consist of abdominal pain, nausea, spontaneous emergence of proglottids (tapeworm /flatworm) from the anal sphincter, mild eosinophilia (parasitic infection), and more.

Though this has been made and marketed into a good business due to the American desire to be thin, this new method of dieting is of dangerous design, because it exposes the user to health risks that may render the ending of a life.

LINKS: diets in review tapeworm diet