Last week, Wall Street Journal readers learned something new about Heidi Klum: she’s “de-worming and de-parasiting” for the first time. “Everything I’m getting on my Instagram feed at the moment is about worms and parasites,” she said. “So I’m doing a cleanse… There’s a lot of clove in there. The parasite hates clove. They also hate the seeds from a papaya.”
The craze isn’t exactly new— for a few years now, TikTok has been teeming with “proof” videos of worms allegedly leaving people’s bodies, with #parasitecleanse kits and “Worm Queen” influencers selling herbal blends. But Klum’s endorsement, it seems, has pushed it further into the mainstream.
So, do you actually need to deworm? Infectious-disease specialists and doctors say most healthy people in developed countries don’t. “Parasite cleanses are the latest incarnation of a pseudoscientific health trend… In fact, what they’re really doing is preying upon the gullible,” Thomas Moore, a clinical professor at the University of Kansas, told The Washington Post. In other words: the only thing these products are guaranteed to purge is your wallet.
If you suspect something’s truly off with your gut, skip the papaya seeds and call your GP or a gastroenterologist for a real diagnosis. And now, onto the rest of this week’s reading list.
