Emilie Blichfeldt’s debut 2025 body horror film The Ugly Stepsister features a scene that is particularly perturbing, due to its historical veracity. In it, the film’s main character Elvira eats a tapeworm egg in order to lose weight. The parasite, which inhabits certain animals and can infect a person who eats raw or under-cooked meat, adheres to the intestine and grows by feeding on its host’s meals. We’re talking about a flat, whitish worm that can measure six and a half to 39 feet, depending on whether it comes from a pig or a cow. Of course, what happens next is right out of a horror movie script.
The idea for the scene did not just spring from the mind of the film’s creators. Every so often, the gruesome tapeworm tactic resurfaces on the internet. It harkens back to a series of extreme 19th-century measures supposedly taken to achieve the Victorian era’s feminine beauty ideal, which was basically the heroin chic of the time: dangerously thin bodies with a fragile, almost sickly appearance. In fact, this aesthetic model was inspired on symptoms of tuberculosis: pale skin, shining eyes, rosy cheeks, intense lips and a silhouette so delicate that it smacked of exhaustion.
Such sacrifice would fit neatly into Victorian ideals, as illustrated in S.D. Powers’ The Ugly-Girl Papers, a guide to looking good from the era. Essentially, the book tells that beauty is the province “of women” and that no girl may allow herself “laziness” if she aspires to get married and rise up the social ladder. In the race to Victorian perfection, various toxic practices were documented, such as inhaling ammonia, consuming arsenic and wearing corsets. The “tapeworm diet”, however, has always been surrounded by a thick air of urban legend.
“As horrifying and bizarre as it sounds, this really happened for decades. Women would intentionally swallow tapeworm eggs, allowing them to hatch and feed off the food that they ate so they didn’t gain any weight and then lost some. This was a normal diet solution at the time,” explains the Instagram account Trends of the Times. In actuality, historians question to what point the remedy was really utilized as a slimming diet — or whether the whole premise is a fraud. For example, for years it was said that Maria Callas had voluntarily swallowed the eggs with the intention of dropping pounds, but there was no proof to back the assertion up, and supposedly “vintage” ads announcing the treatment have turned out to be fake. “Historical facts about the use of tapeworm pills seem to be inconsistent and include fake news,” warns a parasitological study authored by Inmaculada Zarzo, J. Francisco Merino-Torres, María Trelis and José M. Soriano, researchers from the University of Valencia and the La Fe University and Polytechnical Hospital. The report pinpoints the birth of the myth as 1912, when The Washington Post published a sensationalist article on the subject, which was subsequently cited in equally fallacious accounts until the American Medical Association discredited the piece in the 1930s. Still, the notion appeared yet again in 1950s accounts of a treatment allegedly recommended to Maria Callas (who did apparently ingest one of the parasites accidentally, by eating raw meat) from a Swiss doctor who allegedly encouraged her to take a tapeworm egg in a glass of champagne. The legend progressively disappeared, until the advent of the internet and social media.
The most unsettling part of this story is not only the possibility that the diet ever existed, but that its logic continues to be regurgitated to this day. Just a few years ago, in an episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, one of the celebrity sisters joked about getting a tapeworm to slim down.
In reality, health officials have banned the distribution of tapeworm eggs, but the myth’s persistence is not coincidental. In a text entitled On Hazardous Pills for Weight Loss and Cysticercosis, researchers María Teresa Galán-Puchades and Mario V. Fuentes, from the parasites and health research group at the University of Valencia, say that tapeworms have been marketed as a weight-loss method “for more than 100 years” and despite their amply documented risks, continue to be advertised to this day.
Not efficient (but extremely dangerous)
“There is no beneficial physiological mechanism behind this practice,” says Mariela Martínez, clinical nutritionist at Ancient + Brave. “The potential weight loss that some people experience was not a therapeutic effect, but rather the consequence of adverse side effects: appetite loss, persistent digestive issues, diarrhea, intestinal inflammation and limited absorption of essential nutrients. In many cases, this resulted in malnutrition, anemia and generalized fatigue.”
Such nutritional deficiencies can lead to serious consequences. “When it comes to the digestive system, the infection can be asymptomatic, but it can also cause symptoms like intermittent diarrhea, gas, abdominal pain, nausea and involuntary loss of weight (which in the case of this ‘trend’, was voluntary, a true attack on the patient’s digestive and nutritional health) due to alterations to the normal digestive process,” says Tania Gil, clinical nutritionist at the Ricart Medical Institute.
“When a tapeworm infection goes untreated, consequences extend beyond the digestive system. In the medium and long term, micronutrient deficiencies, anemia, loss of body mass, muscular weakness and increased vulnerability to infections due to the deterioration of the nutritional state can occur,” warns Martínez. In more serious cases, she adds, particularly those associated with Tenia solium, ingesting eggs “can cause cysticercosis, a serious disease in which larvae migrate outside the intestine and lodge in tissues such as muscles, eyes or the brain. In other words, weight loss could be accompanied by severe and irreversible neurological consequences.”
Experts agree that unfortunately, there is a clear connection between such methods and more commonly accepted tactics for achieving thinness at any cost, though today they take on different shapes. “In our clinical practice, we continue to see a lot of self-pressure and a constant need for a quick fix to our body issues, as if it were urgent to achieve well-being immediately. I see a lot of people who are tired of exerting themselves, but who don’t exactly know how to stop constantly wanting to change their body,” says Martínez.
Rather than an obsession with thinness in itself, what Martínez perceives is “a profound disconnection from the body. Visible results are prioritized over how a person feels, sleeps, digests or responds to their own signs of hunger and satiety in their day-to-day life. And when care stems from these result-oriented demands, it is easy to end up making decisions that do not support long-term health,” she explains.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition
