Just for fun, here's an ad from an old newspaper around 1910.

Ewwww... people actually bought and swallowed tape worms to be thin??!! I had no idea!!! How nasty!

That is REALLY gross. I wonder if they could feel them once they swallowed them!

I think that my Mom told me about this a long time ago. She believed that Elizabeth Taylor tried it.

My biology teacher in 9th grade told me that someone in the 70s placed an ad in the back of a beauty magazine for a diet pill that guaranteed to let you eat all you want and still lose weight, much like the claims in this ad.

Turns out, the capsule merely contained a section of tapeworm. The woman who purchased the pill from the ad sued the company because she ended up looking emaciated, found out she had a tapeworm, and ended up having to have a large section of her intestine removed.

My biology teacher has since been proven to tell her share of tall tales, but this one sounds like it COULD have some truth to it...

That nasty thing is, people do this today. Blech

I wonder if they also dragged their butts along the carpeting in those days like dogs do when they have worms?

I've heard that people really use to do that. Don't know how truthful it is?

I am pretty sure my aunt did this when she was a teenager (in the late 1960's or early 1970's). She grew accustomed to eating whatever she wanted and losing weight...so when she had to have the worm removed (don't know how that happened) she kept eating like she had been and gained all the weight back and then some. She is now about 350 llbs at 5'2".

no I think I will stick to thisandandand less of thisand thisand thisand skip the tape worm all together lol

Oh man....I have a severe worm phobia as it is, and that just made it worse.

Sanitized, jar-packed, and easy to swallow! LOL

Don't know if this is true but if it is YUCK! I totally feel like you do, Aphil.

This is interesting... it's not necessarily true OR FALSE!

http://www.snopes.com/horrors/vanities/tapeworm.asp