Doctors speak out on ‘Worm Queen' cleanse trend even Heidi Klum has tried
Speaking to The Wall Street Journal, Klum said that while she doesn't follow a specific diet, she was 'doing a worm cleanse and parasite cleanse' with her husband, Tom Kaulitz.
'Apparently, we all have parasites and worms,' she said. 'Everything I'm getting on my Instagram feed at the moment is about worms and parasites.'
When asked to further elaborate, Klum said she was just now starting the cleanse and that it was a months-long process. 'There are pills [to get rid of them], they have all of these herbs,' Klum said. 'There's a lot of clove in there. The parasite hates clove. They also hate the seeds from a papaya.'
'I heard that you're supposed to do this once a year, and I've never done it,' she said of the cleanse. 'So I feel like I'm really behind. I don't know what the heck is going to come out.'
Klum did not say whether she has been formally diagnosed with a parasite or similar infection requiring treatment. But as she told The Wall Street Journal, the discourse on parasites and worms has certainly picked up in recent years.
Kim Rogers is just one of the many influencers who have either promoted parasite and worm cleanse products or created their own. The self-proclaimed 'Worm Queen' went viral for documenting a parasite cleanse, and now sells her own treatments under RogersHood Apothecary, which she co-founded in December 2021.
She invented the ParaFy Kit, consisting of 'high-quality, hand made herbal tinctures aimed at detoxing unwanted parasites, worms, candida, heavy metals & toxins while also promoting well-being,' according to the RogersHood Apothecary website. The $100 30-day cleanse promotes 'potential benefits,' while also clearly stating the products have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.
That poses the question: Are these cleanses necessary without a confirmed parasite or worms diagnosis? Multiple doctors have weighed in.
For starters, a parasite was defined by former Baltimore health commissioner Dr. Leana Wen as 'organisms that live on or inside a host and feed off it to survive.' Speaking to CNN, Wen distinguished parasites from parasitic worms, which are 'a type of internal parasite that live most frequently in the gastrointestinal tract.' Parasitic worms can infect someone who consumes water, food, or soil contaminated with worm eggs or larvae.
There are multiple common parasitic worms that can affect humans and cause infection. Some, like ascariasis caused by a roundworm, can render an infected person asymptomatic. Others, however, such as pinworm infections, can cause symptoms including diarrhea, vomiting, stomach pain, and nausea.
'Not all people have parasites and worms as part of their normal microbiome,' gastroenterologist Dr. David Purow told the New York Post.
'There are no clear, proven benefits to these cleanses,' he continued. 'It is unlikely that we will ever see someone fund a study to see if these natural herbs and byproducts can be proven to be effective.'
Purow did, however, note that some of these treatments could potentially be beneficial. But until research is done, these supplements, herbs, and oils remain unregulated and not FDA approved.
'Hearing that someone is advocating a 'worm and parasite cleanse' is alarming because it is a medically unfounded practice that could potentially be harmful,' infectious disease expert Choukri Ben Mamoun, PhD, told MedPage Today.
Mamoun also refuted Klum's claim that we all have worms and parasites, saying there is "no credible medical evidence that the average person harbors hidden parasites that require cleansing."
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I'm Christopher Labos, and this is Medscape's On Second Thought . Bonjour, tout le monde! Now, meat doesn't seem like it should be a complex topic to study, but it is. Many people around the world eat animals, but we don't all eat the same animals. For example, this is a cow, often used to make hamburger and steak. And this is Tobi, God's perfect angel who gets a more elaborate birthday party than I do each year. He is my son, and I would throw myself in front of a moving car for him. By necessity, when we do medical research on meat, we are lumping together a whole lot of a different human behavior, with people eating different types of animals based on where they live. There's no real alternative, and frankly, you can't let the perfect become the enemy of the good. Most credible research will at least separate out red meat from white meat. But most people don't really know what the difference is. If you thought pork was white meat, you're wrong. 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It's basically zero and a heck of a lot lower than the breast cancer risk. Clearly, you should take the drug if you have ER-positive breast cancer. So, this is the problem. IARC is saying how certain they are that something is dangerous, but not how dangerous something is. Conclusive data will land a substance into Group 1: carcinogenic. Strong but not conclusive data goes into Group 2a: probably carcinogenic. If there's only some evidence, contradictory evidence, or maybe just animal data, you get sorted into Group 2b: possibly carcinogenic. And Group 3 is used when there's not much data to work off of. Generally, their system works okay. They put tobacco, asbestos, and gamma radiation in Group 1, which makes sense. But then also put stuff like birth control pills, estrogen, and tamoxifen in Group 1. Sure, there is a small increased risk of breast cancer with birth control pills if you have a family history, but it's a pretty small risk and frankly negligible for the general population — plus, it's largely outweighed by the decrease in ovarian cancer risk that comes with using birth control pills. But IARC isn't doing that type of nuanced calculation. They say, 'Estrogen causes breast cancer. The pill has estrogen. The link is proven. The pill goes into Group 1.' So, it was IARC that reviewed all the data about processed red meat and declared it a Group 1 carcinogen. Fun fact: Unprocessed red meat was only put in Group 2A because the data was less solid. For anybody grilling a steak right now, this doesn't apply to you. But not everybody agreed with IARC. The Nutritional Recommendations (NutriRECS) Consortium was a group of researchers who also reviewed the data on red meat and came to a completely different conclusion. Their analysis was motivated by two things: 1) the funding they received from the beef industry (this is why we can't have nice things), and 2) they dismissed much of the research because it comes from observational cohorts, not randomized controlled trials. In food science, randomized controlled trials are hard to conduct, because telling people what to eat is often met with "make me." Regardless, the NutriRECS Consortium conclusion was, 'Keep eating meat, as the data is uncertain because most of it is observational.' This conclusion is a bit reductionist to me, because we have a lot of observational data pointing toward health risks associated with processed red meat, and I have a hard time believing all the stuff added to processed red meat is doing us any favors. But let's take the IARC assessment at face value. They are convinced by the hazard or the hasard. But what's the risk? The cancer risk is most clear cut for colon cancer, which is pretty logical. Your lifetime risk of colon cancer is about 4%, assuming you're of general risk with no family history or genetic risk factors. It's actually 4.2% for males and 4.0% for females, according to the 2022 Cancer Statistics from the American Cancer Society. But let's say 4% for everyone — just for simplicity. The IARC report estimated that eating an extra 50 g of processed meat per day, every day, increased your risk of colorectal cancer by 18%. Take 4%, multiply it by 1.18, and you get 4.72%. So, let's say 5% if we're rounding. All this to say, if you eat hot dogs every day of your life, your risk of getting colon cancer goes up by 1 percentage point on the absolute scale. Now, on first instinct you might say, "Pfff, that's nothing. Pass the bratwurst." But 1% on the absolute scale is not trivial. That's thousands of cases per year. Millions of cases over the course of your lifetime in a country of 300 million people. It has some important public health implications. Is the risk high enough for us to stop killing and eating Bambi's mother? Hard to say. It's not negligible, but it's not astronomical either. And there are economic and environmental factors to keep in mind — issues that are often forgotten when we talk about medicine. I will stress one point, though. The IARC estimates of 1% absolute risk increase are about daily consumption of processed meat. You don't need to eat jerky every day of your life. For Medscape, I'm Dr Christopher Labos… with Tobi.
