TikTok users are proving they’ll stop at nothing to find unexpected hacks that work for them.
One user, @moongl4de, said she saw in a recent viral post that eating papaya seeds can allegedly help your body get rid of intestinal parasites. Suspecting she may have a parasite herself, she says she decided to try it out.
“I just really have something to tell you guys,” she said in a video. “You might have seen on TikTok, like, videos saying, eat papaya seeds, they’ll get rid of parasites…so that’s what I did.”
She also explained that she blended the seeds with beets, carrots and a whole lot of garlic before downing the mixture.
“Anyway, I made it, I drank it … and yeah, something came out,” she added.
According to follow-up videos, she’s OK now, and her doctor confirmed that she did, in fact, have a parasite. She also explained that she had eaten undercooked meat and been “in bodies of water” — two high-risk behaviors for infection with parasites — prior to experiencing any symptoms.
On the other hand, a few weeks earlier, TikTok user @ramenasaidwow attempted the health hack and had a very different experience.
“That tasted like dry erase marker and it was absolutely disgusting,” she said while eating the seeds. Ultimately, she said she ate half of a papaya’s worth.
In the comments of her video, she warned users not to try this at home.
“Since it’s now been almost 24 hours, check with your doctor first and don’t do what I just did,” she said.
She also claimed to have later passed a parasite, though she did not have it confirmed by her doctor.
According to Healthline, papaya seeds aren’t inherently dangerous. In fact, they’re actually highly nutritious! But that still doesn’t mean you should try this parasite-removal health hack for yourself though — especially without consulting a doctor first.
“This has not been shown to be effective outside of a clinical trial setting,” infectious disease expert Dr. Amesh A. Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Health.com.
He explained that though data suggests certain foods can kill parasites, there’s actually no definitive data that suggests anyone should alter their diet to make it anti-parasitic.
It’s also highly uncommon for people in the United States to develop intestinal parasites. Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist and professor at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, told Health.com.
“Doctors in the US are not taking care of patients who have intestinal parasites unless those are people who recently came from the developing world,” he explained, calling the papaya seed hack “a treatment in search of an illness which doesn’t exist.”
“I would not endorse this,” he concluded.
There’s also no way to know, “as a lay person,” if you have passed a parasite, Dr. Schaffner said. Most are too small to see.
Eating too many papaya seeds could upset your stomach, as it did for @ramenasaidwow. The side effects are likely not worth the risk for a “cure” that is not guaranteed to work.
If you’re concerned about intestinal parasites, you should consult your doctor, because they are best treated with prescription anti-worm medication.
So, who’s ready for lunch?
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