Dieting Crazes
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The Diet Pill With a Parasite Inside | Object Histories
In the early 1900s, American mail-order catalogs sold weight-loss pills that were exactly what they sounded like: live tapeworm eggs, swallowed on purpose. The parasite would grow inside the buyer’s gut for months, quietly eating a share of every meal, until it was removed — sometimes by a doctor, sometimes not at all. This is…