When asked the obvious question of where in the world we get parasites from, everybody knows the answer–they’re from somewhere else: Africa, South America, India, Mexico, but never from here (insert your Country’s name).
The exception to this is when your country is within Africa or South America, or if you actually live in India or elsewhere in the tropics. In those places it is common knowledge that parasites are in the jungles, in the south, in the rainforest, in the villages, but never in the cities.
In the cities we are safe. If you’re reading this, if you can read, you must be safe. We are all safe. Everyone in the world who is educated is safe from parasites. Only the uneducated, the folk in far-away tree, the villagers, the jungle-dwellers, those people, them, they…they have parasites but not us. Never us.
Except that we all do…
And for the ones that we all undeniably have, everybody knows where we got them from: not washing our hands, right? Wrong. It has absolutely nothing to do with hand washing, as you will see.
So what parasites are we talking about?
The 7 Categories of Parasites
In fact every single person hosts multiple organisms within the 3 major species groups: roundworm, hookworm and fluke. Many people also have a massive tapeworm. And sick people have usually picked up organisms from a 5th species group, the only worm that is microscopic, called filaria. There are many cousins within that group and ironically enough, some of them actually do come from jungles. I say ‘ironically’ because the leading source of jungle parasites in the 1st world, so-called parasite-free diet is ordinary black pepper. The 6th and 7th major categories of parasites, Amoebae and Flagellates, are the best-known and the easiest to find but literally everyone has them, since they’re small enough that your parasites (e.g. your worms) have them too, so there’s not much point in talking about them or for that matter treating them. Your worms (e.g. the first 5 categories) are most probably causing your symptoms, not so much your single-celled protozoans (e.g. categories 6 & 7).
So when we’re talking about the top 10 sources of parasites in your life, we’re talking about where you get metazoans–multi-celled organisms, the worms.
The Top 10 sources of Parasites in your Life
Of all the top 10 lists you’ve ever read, this one has the potential to be the most unsettling because it fully applies to you in what you think of as an educated, hand washed, digitally connected, innocent, parasite-free environment. Without more ado, then:
1. Milk products. This includes milk itself as well as all derivatives of milk: cream, butter, yogurt, ice cream, whipped cream, cheese and cheese products and interestingly, unsuspected, many whey- and milk-based (by dry) protein powders though happily, not chocolate. I say ‘happily’ because as I’m writing this I’m sitting on a plane eating a Belgian milk chocolate bar. But I didn’t trust the airplane cheese platter… Milk has all the parasites a cow has because dairies rarely pasteurize milk above 100*C. Here’s a more detailed write up on this if you’re curious.
2. Vegetable Oil products. This is restricted to uncooked vegetable oil products, as cooking above 100*C kills parasite eggs. You’ll be surprised to learn what nexus of products both contains vegetable oil (canola/corn/soybean/safflower) and is not brought to a boil: all condiments (ketchup, mustard, relish, barbecue sauce, mayonnaise, salad dressing) and many oil-based foods like margarine, fake sliced cheeses and the many hundreds of sauces sold around the world including hot sauce (see below for more on this). Parasite eggs get into these crop oils from the manure spread on the crops; inconceivable trillions of parasite eggs per field, sticking to the crops like burrs on your pant leg, millions of burrs. Because we’re dealing with the microscopic world, these numbers are not an exaggeration. Crop oils aren’t washed upon harvest, they are only blow dried in the processing plant; they are not boiled when the oil is extracted; and the particulate filters are too small to catch 10-40 nanometer eggs. With very few exceptions, all uncooked vegetable oil products are contaminated. Olive oil is generally safe except in cases where the company gets busted for cutting their product with canola oil, which apparently is 80% of the time. Or maybe the olive tree-climbing goats did it…
3. Soy sauce. This gets separate attention from the vegetable oil issue above because although soybeans are also used to make oil, soy sauce itself doesn’t have a significant quantity of oil, so you might think it’s safe. As with soybeans intended for oil, the soybeans used for soy sauce are grown in manure, often pig manure, and not washed. There is some strange idea that the fermentation process kills parasite eggs, and while this is true with alcohol fermentation, it is not true with soy sauce or for that matter fermented tempeh, kombucha or pickles. It is the alcohol that kills parasite eggs and there is not enough alcohol generated in soy fermentation to render the product safe. The companies producing the soy sauce don’t boil it so there it is: parasite eggs, lots of them.
4. Hot sauce. This deserves its own category, as it is such a pervasive issue. Either the peppers are grown in poop, or the oil or corn syrup used in the hot sauce is unboiled. If the vinegar content were high enough, that would kill the parasite eggs as pure vinegar kills parasites, but most hot sauces have too low of a vinegar content to render them safe. In my experience, about 75% of hot sauces test for parasite eggs. This number is drawn from randomly testing about 100 brands over a 5 year period. 1 out of 4 hot sauces is probably fine, but you won’t know which is which unless you muscle test it.
And I don’t mean truth testing your thoughts about it, or holding it against your stomach and seeing if you sway… That’s not muscle testing. I mean actually, correctly holding the bottle inside your electric field and having an experienced muscle tester evaluate your strength response before and after exposure to the stimulus…so scientific muscle testing, not spiritual truth testing which has nothing to do with this…
5A: Luncheon meats. This includes all deli meats (salami, capacola, bologna, kolbassa, smoked ham, smoked beef) as well as pepperoni and beef jerky. I guess I don’t need to add steak tartar to this list do I? Well, fine: steak tartar. You do realize that using the word ‘tartar’ doesn’t render raw meat suddenly safe, right? Raw is raw, whatever language you call it ‘raw’ in. The hope with deli meats is that the smoking process has rendered them safe but in general, a muscle testing analysis of these products confirms that about 90% of them haven’t been smoked hot enough (e.g. above 100*C) to kill the parasite eggs. The guy sitting next to me on the plane is chewing on a big package of beef jerky. It’s probably riddled with cow parasite eggs. It would be awkward if I told him this…
5B: Smoked salmon. The same smoking concern from meat applies to salmon. Every fish in the world has both a fluke and a roundworm, they’re infected at birth from the egg they hatch in, so by definition fish eggs are all contaminated as well. There goes caviar… Fortunately (or unfortunately?) they don’t serve that on the kinds of airlines I fly with… If the fish flesh is brought to a temperature above 100*C it is safe, and most places you can buy smoked salmon from will assure you this is the case. But an accurate (scientific) muscle testing analysis doesn’t lie. If the product provokes a weak neurological response when placed inside your body’s bioelectric field, there’s something in it. This ‘something’ can be confirmed to be parasite eggs by cross-referencing the muscle testing analysis with anti-parasite pills. You probably won’t have your own antiparasite medication muscle testing kit, so take my word for it. Here’s a helpful guideline that I find to be consistently true: If it looks cooked, it was; if it looks raw, it is, regardless of what the person selling it to you says it was.
5C: Sushi. Do I even need to say this? I’ll say it: national health guidelines stipulate that if fish is frozen below -20°C for 7 days or -35°C for 24 hrs, the parasite eggs in the fish’s flesh are killed. This just doesn’t line up with the evidence. A muscle test of sushi frozen to these parameters indicates that the eggs are alive and well. I often travel to Alberta, Canada where the temperature goes down to -45°C in the winter. I have left raw fish outside my hotel overnight during these temperatures and tested it the next day: it still tests for biologically viable eggs after 24 hrs at -45°C, so I’m not sure what the lethal temperature is (I suspect it’s around -85°C) but you can rest assured that your sushi restaurant isn’t doing this. Freezing to those temperatures is prohibitively expensive. And again, if you had mebendazole (roundworm medicine) and praziquantel (flatworm medicine) to test against the fish sample, you’d find they cancelled out the weak muscle testing response, meaning the fish was testing for roundworm, fluke and tapeworm eggs.
A cheerful fact is that fish tapeworms grow to be 60 feet long, so if you had a fish tapeworm, you’d know. The less cheerful fact is that the only reason you would be able to eat raw fish and not pick one up is that you already had some other species of tapeworm that was excreting a bacteria that was preventing this species of hatching. This is an example of how a parasite can help you by protecting you from getting something worse.
So the most likely scenario where you have eaten raw fish and not picked up a tapeworm from it is that you already had a tapeworm from some other source. The same goes for fluke and roundworm, which all fish also carry.
6. Corn Syrup. Contains parasite eggs for the same reason corn and canola oil do – manure in the field and then they didn’t boil the corn syrup. Products sweetened with corn syrup, and then not cooked afterwards include ketchup, marshmallows, fake-maple and other flavoured syrups, cheap ice creams, sweetening in other condiments and interestingly enough, soft drinks (or pop or soda, depending on what you call it where you’re from). The carbonated water kills the parasite eggs, but only after 60 minutes, so if you get a soft drink from a soda fountain at a burger joint, and drink it right away, the corn syrup it is sweetened with is a great source of parasites, which will hatch on contact with your mouth or stomach lining. By contrast, pop that’s been canned or bottled has by definition been that way for more than 60 minutes, so it’s safe, and you can always let your soda-fountain pops sit for an hour before drinking them.
As an aside, this is an argument for drinking carbonated (for more than 60 minutes) water when there are safety concerns with it and when it’s not convenient to boil it. The carbonation would also clear the water of Amoeba and Giardia (see point 11 below).
7. Mother’s Breast milk. In the same way parasite eggs are passed into a cow’s milk, because we are mammals (e.g. female feeds the young with lactate) we are subject to this pattern. Certain species of parasites that the mother hosts will pass their eggs through the milk: tapeworm, roundworm, fluke and hookworm, but interestingly, an analysis of breast milk from different donors who tested for having strongyloides failed to show evidence of filarial roundworm in the breast milk, so there is no evidence that this one (e.g. category 5: Filarial) is passed though breastfeeding. The transmission of the other roundworm and flatworm species however may shed light on why certain medical conditions are considered inherited or genetic. If your mother and you have the same species of tapeworm, excreting the same blend of bad (parasite) bacteria, this might explain why you both have the same skin condition (e.g. bacterial flushing). This also identifies how babies universally test for 2-3 species of parasites as soon as they take their first meal in the new world. I have never tested a baby who didn’t already have parasites. So-called colicky babies have a higher (or more harmful) parasite load than so-called healthy babies, but they’ve all got them. This means we all had them when we were babies as well…and therefore still do.
8. Unusual Sources. Things you might not extrapolate from the above list, which I found out the hard way by reinfecting and needed to re-treat myself for:
i) Jam (because of the corn syrup, which means the jam was not boiled before it was jar-sealed. I can’t even imagine how many preservatives/additives jam would have to have to be able to be jarred without boiling).
ii) Flavoured Chips (powdered cheese, powdered oils, the spices – parasite eggs survive the dehydration process so anything is fair game, though plain chips tend to be fine, so the parasites are clearly coming from an additive after baking/deep frying).
iii) Nuts (manure contamination in the facility or the powdered flavouring if they’re flavoured)
iv) Pasta and Pizza Sauces (again, manure contamination on the tomatoes, or in the oil or syrup if made with syrup, but I don’t see how they can bottle the product without boiling it first. As with jam, this one is a mystery).
v) Flavoured crackers or the powdered flavouring you put on popcorn at a movie theatre.
vi) Any sauce/additive you would get on your cooked food at a restaurant after the food is cooked, such as gravy, which usually isn’t boiled.
vii) Canola Oil brushed onto a cooked steak after it is cooked. Cheap steakhouses do this to make the steak look juicy.
viii) Butter or oil put on top of cooked vegetables at a restaurant after the cooking process is finished.
ix) Horseradish in a bottle or jar. Considering this has such a high vinegar content, it is fascinating to see that parasites eggs can survive in it. But then where are they coming from? Check the ingredients for vegetable oil or some other additive. I suppose the horseradish itself could have come from mud, and been grown in manure.
x) The corn syrup in a children’s gummy bear multi-vitamin. Or for that matter a gummy bear non-vitamin. Other soft candies are also suspect, though hard candies tend to have been boiled.
xi) The corn syrup in cough medicine. Ironically, hookworm in the lungs will cause a cough, and you can get more hookworm from the corn syrup in the cough medicine you take to make your cough go away. This is a recipe for a chronic cough that lasts months, though anything that severe would also involve a fluke…which you could also get from the corn syrup in the cough medicine.
And this all could have come from the farmer getting a good buy on Lama manure. There’s really no way to know what animal you’re getting your parasites from, which is partly I think why the symptoms from these organisms vary so widely, and why modern health patterns are such a mystery to medical researchers. You’d be happy to know your cough was coming from hookworm but a lama hookworm probably hosts different bacteria than a cow hookworm and remember that it is the bacteria from parasites that cause symptoms. This means that there is simply no way to calculate exactly where your parasite came from, or what sub-species of bacteria it is excreting, or how that bacteria is interacting with you, your own bacteria, and the other bacteria from other parasites that you also host. There are an infinity of combinations and the human mind doesn’t do well with infinity… it is much, much simpler to categorize the symptoms, give them a name and assume that’s the end of it. But that particular end is a conceptual dead end, whereas categorizing the parasites into 7 major families as I’m proposing is at least a constructive way to think about them, and more happily, do something about them.
9. The things blamed the most account for the least exposure: Fruits and Vegetables. In 99.5% of cases, washing your fruits and vegetables really does work. So while these are blamed as the primary cause of agricultural parasite transmission, (actually they’re usually only blamed for the bacteria like E. Coli, but anyway…) they are the least likely to be the source. Some exceptions are lettuce and other leafy vegetables we eat raw, mostly because they’re hard to wash and have to be fully submerged in water to cleanse the fibrous leaves; very thin-skinned fruits like figs, where even washing it won’t help because the manure-laden water has absorbed through the skin and can’t be washed out [to date, a fig is the only fruit or vegetable I have ever picked up a parasite from, contrasted with hundreds of cases of reinfection from the more standard milks/oils/syrups/deli meats listed above); and fruits that aren’t washed for cosmetic reasons, like raspberries when the kitchen wants to serve a dessert with raspberries that look pristine, so rather disgustingly, they don’t wash them. But you’re so much more likely to get a parasite from the corn syrup in the chocolate sauce, or the milk/cream cheese/whipped cream in the dessert that worrying about the raspberry is a real misdirect. Fruits and vegetables are rarely the problem.
10. Pepper. Fascinatingly enough, while most of the above products on this list confer the usual parasites that everyone already has (roundworm/hookworm/fluke/tapeworm) for some reason pepper is the leading source of the most dangerous category of parasite you can get: filarial roundworm.
Filarial parasites are the microscopic lymphatic roundworms that can live as easily in the brain and spinal column as in the intestines. They are more often associated with serious neurological conditions and are therefore the worst ones to get. They are also the only species besides pinworm that can auto-populate in your body, so even getting a few will eventually become serious as their colony size grows over time, which is contrasted with the other roundworms (roundworm, whipworm, trichina and hookworm), and with flatworms (fluke and tapeworm) which cannot do this.
It seems that filarial roundworm gets into pepper when the peppercorns are harvested and laid out on the ground to dry. The ground is covered with manure at the beginning of the season and as with the parasite eggs that contaminated vegetable oils, these eggs survive outside for the entire growing season, and are still biologically viable at harvest time. What’s fascinating about pepper being a source of filarial roundworm is that it means whatever animal the pepper growers are using for manure must have an extremely high filarial roundworm burden, which probably makes it a tropical animal, since this parasite is spread by mosquito bites. It should be unsurprising then that tropical countries are where pepper is grown. It turns out it comes mainly from water buffalo.
There are numerous scholarly articles that deal with filarial roundworm infection in water buffalo, and numerous agricultural articles that deal with the use of water buffalo faeces as an effective manure. It appears that for society at large to make this connection, we would need to get a parasite biologist in the room with a farmer and a food manufacturing manager. Then maybe the three of them could put their heads together and figure it out. The one hand could wash the other, so to speak. There! We have finally found where hand washing fits into all of this… So you don’t need to hack through the jungles of South East Asia to get filarial roundworm, or have dirty hands; you just need to reach for the pepper. Bon appetit.
And finally, 2 bonus entries:
11. Bottled Water. You really do get parasites from your bottled water, although I have never found this to be the case with Evian (I hold no financial interest with Evian). The legal reality of bottled water is that in most cases it is subject to much more lenient production requirements than municipal tap water is. In short, it is often cleaner to drink tap water than bottled water. However, the main 2 parasites you get from bottled water are Amoeba and Giardia (categories 6 & 7) and these are the least consequential of all the organisms on the list. Single-celled protozoan parasites like amoeba and giardia are not your problem, it is the metazoan worms that will cause the bulk of your symptoms. Bottled water isn’t worth worrying about.
12. Mosquitoes. These guys are the worst source of parasites going, for two reasons. 1) It’s nearly impossible to avoid being bitten, even hand-washing doesn’t seem to stop them, and 2) They infect you with the same Filarial family mentioned above with the pepper (they are exactly where the water buffalo gets it). Filaria are the worst family of parasites you can get because they both migrate to the spine, causing neurological symptoms, and they auto-populate (increase once inside of you), causing progressive neurological symptoms. It is a myth that you will only get malaria from mosquitoes, you can pick up any one of thousands of sub-species of the filarial family of parasites and they really can make your life a living hell.
Problems in this category are both diagnosis and treatment, since traditional serological tests typically come back as a false negative, and because traditional filarial treatments like ivermectin don’t soak into the spine or cerebrospinal fluid, which is where the organism migrates to within hours of being bitten (this was recently confirmed on my research trip in the Indian tropics). Some good news: there is a way to muscle test the spine for ivermectin to identify whether there is evidence of filarial roundworm, which at least confirms its presence. More importantly, after a number of years I have finally been successful in perfecting a simple means of eliminating these organisms using electromagnetism. Not only is it nice that it’s a medication-free treatment, but it’s also essential that it’s a medication-free treatment since ivermectin doesn’t soak into the spine (e.g. medication generally doesn’t clear out the home base of the colony).
Interestingly enough, parasites in this family are frequently the cause of shingles and eliminating the organism generally brings the shingles to an end.
The Pattern
My flight is over; I’ll finish the rest of this later… For the moment, I hope you noticed a pattern in the above information. Every parasite source comes down to an animal. That’s why there were pictures of animals in each section, and not pictures of the food.
The parasite is in the animal, let’s say a cow or a pig or a lama, and it wants its eggs to spread far and wide. How can this happen most effectively? A tapeworm for example lays 500,000 eggs a day. Flukes and roundworms lay 1-200,000 eggs/day. They can’t hatch in the host or that would kill the host (e.g. 500,000 tapeworms a day hatching in the cow wouldn’t end well for the cow, considering a single the cow tapeworm is 25 feet long…). But they do wash out into nature where they hatch when they reach a new host’s stomach. I think our stomach acid or saliva is actually what activates them to hatch.
So how do they get into you? Some eggs wash into the flesh, some into the milk and some out through the urine and faeces. Flesh is uncooked deli meats, milk is unboiled milk products, and the faeces is manure, which is put on crops used for oils and syrups that are in turn not boiled when manufactured. So the real problem isn’t parasites or animals, the problem is that we’re not cooking things correctly (e.g. above 100°C).
This isn’t complicated; it’s just such a big picture that I don’t know if anyone is seeing the forest for trillions of trees. The Earth, for example, has 3 trillion trees, but have you ever stopped to think of the Earth as one single forest? –It is… The forest for the trees, the pattern for the parasites: pattern is that either parasite eggs are nowhere, like everyone likes to think/hope, or that they are absolutely everywhere, which appears to be the case based on the above information.
The Junk in Junk Food
Sometimes when my flight gets into whatever town I’m flying to, it’s so late that there’s nothing to eat but late-night fast food: junk food. So knowing what I’ve outlined above, what can I eat?
The principle isn’t what to avoid so much as understanding what is cooked and what isn’t.
So fried fish is fine but the tartar sauce isn’t cooked. French fries are safe but the ketchup isn’t cooked. Chicken nuggets are fine but the dipping sauce has corn syrup and canola in it, which isn’t cooked. The bulk of these problems arise from living in a manure-based agricultural system, but that’s not going to change anytime soon, nor should it. We’re trusting that our food has been cooked and getting the parasite on a technicality: our food hasn’t actually been cooked according to the correct definition of that term (e.g. 100°C/212°F for more than about a minute).
This identifies that there is significant room for improvement in the food manufacturing realm. To be clear, this certainly isn’t the farmer’s fault. They can’t be held accountable for how their food is processed after they grow it. And only consumer pressure would motivate manufacturing facilities to start boiling their milks, oils and syrups. To do this, consumers would need to know what is in their products, and your average consumer (presumably, you…) isn’t also a microbiologist. And microbiologists aren’t looking for parasite eggs in their food, so this has simply been overlooked.
You could get parasites from all of the first 4 categories from a single hamburger: (1) roundworms, (2) hookworms, (3) flukes and (4) tapeworm eggs are probably in the ketchup, the sliced cheese and the mayo. If you want a soft drink, that’s extra parasites. If you go healthy and have a salad, the dressing will get you. You could put some pepper on your salad and there’s some filarial roundworm (category 5). As an amateur microbiologist myself, I’ve done microscopic analysis of these things and confirmed beyond a simple muscle testing analysis that there are indeed parasite eggs in the products listed here. Here’s a write up I did on salad dressing and another on tapeworms in cheese.
I wonder how many anti-junk food advocates understood that the reason these foods have such an adverse effect on us is not the salt, not the saturated fat and not the refined carbohydrates, or even the preservatives, but the roundworm, hookworm, fluke and tapeworm eggs in the condiments, sauces, cheeses and soft drinks?
And from a parasite standpoint, organic and vegan are no better. Corn syrup and canola oil are vegan. You have to follow a near-impossibly rigorous diet to avoid everything listed above, and for my part I’m not advising this: it’s easier to eat whatever you want but cook it first. It is only when it’s difficult/impossible to cook something that I suggest avoiding it, just like you would go without rather than eat raw bacon, if those were your two options.
So I ordered a burger with the bun and vegetables, but no sauces, mayo or cheese, and I took my chances with the lettuce. The odds are in my favour.
So why doesn’t everybody get sick?
The seeming contradiction is that if all these products have parasite eggs in them, why doesn’t every person get sick every time they eat every meal? This is actually the most important question to understand:
The only scenario where parasite eggs don’t hatch in you is when you’re already infected with that species, or one of its cousins. If you already have a lung fluke, to put it simply, it will alter the bacterial climate in the lungs so other lung flukes won’t hatch, leaving less competition for itself. If you have dairy/oils/vegetable syrups/deli meats with lung fluke eggs in them, you’re effectively rendered immune by virtue of already hosting that organism in that location. But if the contaminated food also had intestinal fluke eggs, and if you didn’t already host intestinal fluke, those eggs would hatch in your intestines. (For those of you interested in technicalities, there is evidence that parasites excrete bacteria that contain a chemical message that inhibits same-species eggs from hatching in the host.) Then slowly, over time, with decades of exposure to foods from all around the world, you are exposed to every species of parasite there is. Whichever ones are able to hatch in you, do and whichever ones you host then protect you from getting more.
So once you’re full of parasites, you’re full, and that’s your health profile.
Seen from this perspective, we can understand that there is some small benefit to having every species of parasite going: they protect us from getting…every species of parasite going. Once you’re chock-full, you can’t get any more. Stated biologically, once every square inch of your body is full of parasites and/or their bacteria, no more parasites will hatch in you until one day you get exposed to a doozie that your existing ecosystem of parasites doesn’t protect you from.
Then you’ll call it food poisoning, rush to the hospital and think somebody somewhere didn’t wash their hands.
This tug-of war of life against life, your parasites against you and against each other, and the co-development of your immune system with the bacteria from the parasites is the human condition, and creates your health profile, as well as the medical conditions you are likely to suffer from as you age.
If there were a way of calculating it, it would probably be the case that the combination of your parasites and their bacteria and your immune system and your genetics would determine what medical conditions you were likely to develop and suffer from. But this is an almost infinite combination of variables. The good news is that while you can’t change your genetics, you can change (e.g. eliminate) your parasites.
Course of Action
The challenge is that reinfection is such a major likelihood. Until there is a mass-producible, home-based, daily parasite treatment available, only certain people should de-worm.
If you’re perfectly healthy, you should leave well enough alone because getting your parasites out when they aren’t even causing symptoms will merely open the door for new species that you will definitely reinfect with, that in turn might cause symptoms. So it’s better to keep the ones you have, since they appear to be harmless.
But if your existing parasite burden is already causing a chronic symptom, particularly if it puts your life on hold or is life-threatening, then eliminating it is the best way of reestablishing your health balance. You’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Even when you reinfect, which you will, it’s most likely that the new one(s) won’t cause the same symptom you had originally. In most cases, the new ones don’t cause any symptoms at all. Remember that many parasites need to spend years growing before they’re big enough to cause a symptom, so you often have a multi-year grace period after infection, though this doesn’t apply in all cases.
And there is just as much chance that the next species you pick up doesn’t hurt you at all, and instead protects you from getting something worse. Then you’ve had a medical condition reset with no subsequent inconvenience.
This is commonly the experience people have when they are successful in eliminating the organism causing the symptom, though pinpointing exactly which organism this is can have its own complexity.
Best Possible Outcome
One of my intentions in publishing this list is to raise awareness about where parasites come from, since knowledge is power. Another is to have something to forward to the people I consult with when this topic comes up, who want to try to stay parasite-free after a treatment and need to know what foods they should be mindful of.
The key word is mindfulness. I suggest that you be at peace about this. I don’t think it’s valid to stress about what I’ve taught you. Whatever is happening has already happened, and a peaceful mind is the most creative place from which to think about your best course of action.
It is clear from the list above that parasites eggs can survive near-boiling and subzero temperature, submersion in water, soaking in products that contain vinegar, dehydration, living in the mud outside a host for years on end in the baking sun, and most importantly, being labeled ‘tartar’; that multiple species come from every farm animal in our food chain and that our environment is almost completely saturated with them, which obsessive hand washing does nothing to protect you from.
This is why, if you’re sick, it’s recommended to get them out, but if you’re not, it’s best to leave well enough alone.
Post-parasite treatment, you are advised to cook, boil or bake (or in a pinch, microwave) the foods listed above, which would render them safe, though cooking isn’t practical with things like yogurt. You can also avoid, but from the extent of the list you will see that avoidance isn’t an easy prospect.
Some cheerful news to tide you over is that you already have all of the species of parasite are you likely to get, and since your motel rooms are full, you’re probably not going to fit any more new species. Unless you already have a medical condition, this isn’t something you need to be thinking about.