As soon as people became wealthy enough not to have to spend every waking hour
of their day working, cleaning, hunting, or cooking, they had enough
time to look in the mirror and decide what they didn't like about themselves.
And so for hundreds, if not thousands of years, people, and let's
be honest, mainly women, who have forever been held to unthinkably high standards
of beauty, have done whatever they could to their bodies to achieve their society's
idea of perfection. From the truly horrific and crippling foot binding practices in Imperial
China to modern day plastic surgery, people have been searching for ways to achieve
their body goals. Victorian England. The initial setting for today's story was possibly
one of the craziest times in history when it came to the number of diet
fads and body morphing practices. So what better place to dive in and see
where the stories take us. These are the bizarre but true stories from history
that in some way involved food. I'm Nick Charlie Key, and this is
the fantastic history of food. One of today's sponsors is Athletic Greens. So
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Alexa for the startup rad dot eo skill as well. The Victorian era in
England dominated most of the eighteen hundreds and is notorious amongst historians for their truly
bizarre standards of beauty. For some reason, the uppercrust Society woman decided that
true beauty meant looking like you were suffering from a life threatening disease tuberculosis to
be exact, or consumption as they called it. Then what this meant in
practice is that women would shy away from sunlight, as well as powdering their
faces in order to get that truly pale skin look with slightly dilated eyes,
rosy cheeks, crimson lips, and a frame so skinny as to struggle to
hold itself aloft. In order to achieve some of these looks, women would
do irreversible damage to themselves and their health by drinking ammonia or bathing in arsenic
which at the time they already knew was poisonous. Figure crushing corsets were pulled
so tightly that breathing became difficult, all in the name of achieving that so
called perfect sixteen inch waistline. In today's society, thankfully, these practices have
mostly fallen by the waysiders. Both standards of beauty have changed along with the
woman's fight against the pressures of modern in society to look, act, or
speak in a certain way. But as always, one particular practice has somehow
weathered the storm and clung on through the sands of time. It has even
been mentioned by one of the Kardashians as an option to speed up her weight
loss, as well as featuring on more diet blogs than I care to mention.
And that is the literally stomach churning idea of the tapeworm diet. In
theory, it sounds relatively harmless and rather simple. In fact, all you
do is swallow a pull capsule with a freeze dried tapeworm egg inside. The
warmth of your insides allows the egg to thaw and attach itself to you before
hatching into a terrifying tapeworm. Once the parasite is alive and growing inside of
the host, it begins eating part of whatever it's human eats. The theory
goes that the so called dieter can then eat whatever they want and still lose
weight as the tape woem chomps a portion of everything that comes past it.
Now, to Victorian ladies, this sounded like the Holy Grail, the best
of both worlds, to be exact. One of the most popular pieces of
women's literature in these times was a beauty guide penned by a woman named S.
D. Powers. It was ironically called The Ugly girl papers and was
an illustrated guide to becoming more beautiful. In fact, the guide's overarching principle
stated that it is a woman's business to be beautiful. Beauty, especially in
Victorian England, with its myriad of fads, took a lot of time and
effort, and, according to the guide, could not and should not forego
the tediousness of beauty regimes should she so desire to find a husban. It's
not hard to see now why women were prepared to do almost anything to achieve
the ideals of their times. Any concerns about health or any discomfort felt from
the tapeworm were simply chalked up to the fact that beauty is pain and sacrifices
needed to be made. But one of the ultimate sacrifices to be made was,
once the woman's desired weight had been reached, how do we get the
tapeworm out again? And this is where things get interesting. Now that the
tapeworm was no longer necessary, they would approach doctors to help them retrieve the
unwanted parasite. In Victorian England, you would often be faced with two options,
neither of which were one hundred percent effective, but ones that were incredibly
different in their methodology. Firstly, and most simply, patients were often given
special medicinal pills to hopefully kill off the tapeworm and allow it to be flushed
out of their system. Like I said, it wasn't always effective, and
in fact wasn't even close. It was very hit or miss, and more
often than not it missed. Then there was option too, which was a
whole lot more invasive and a whole lot more dangerous to the human host.
Victorian doctors employed the invention of a doctor Myers of Sheffield, who surmised that
because tapeworms loved food so much, the patient should therefore starve themselves for a
few days and in turn also starve the tapeworm. Once the tapeworm was desperate
enough for some food, doctor Myers's invention would be used. The invention in
question was a cylinder filled with food attached to a long string. The cylinder
would be inserted via the mouth, and, if all went well, swallowed
down into the digestive tract. The smell of the food would alert the tapeworm
and it would attempt to eat whatever it could inside the cylinder. The cylinder
would then be pulled back up the digestive tract, luring the tapeworm up and
up until it was visible to the doctor, whereby it could be grabbed and
slowly wound out of the patient. At this point, it's worth noting that
adult tapeworms can grow to be as long as twenty five meters or eighty feet
long. The pulling out process was not a quick thing, and, as
I'm sure you can imagine, an incredibly uncomfortable procedure for the patient. There's
also one other thing that made this method particularly daunting for patients, and that
is due to the size of the cylinder the patients needed to swallow. Many
of them unfortunately ended up choking to death on the cylinder before the tapeworm could
even be successfully removed. Now, some folk medicine cures hilariously state that one
should simply hold a glass of milk at both ends of your top and bottom
openings and wait for the tape worm to come out for a drink. In
nineteen twelve, reports of t tapeworm consumption began to appear in the United States.
In this case, it happened unwillingly to a wealthy woman who had sent
away for a miracle diet pill, only to realize after consumption that they contain
tapeworm eggs. There are also stories of horse racing jockeys famous for needing to
be as small and light as possible, ingesting tapeworms to maintain their optimal racetrack
weights. Tapeworms generally only cause minor discomfort and sufferers, and nowadays can be
easily treated. However, in some cases, when they grow to excessive sizes
and aren't treated for a prolonged period of time, they have been known to
cause meningitis, epilepsy, and even dementia. This is in stark contrast to
a nineteen twenties newspaper advert cheerfully selling the tapeworm diet as a solution, which
read tapeworms no danger, no diet, no exercise. Now, the tapeworm
diet wasn't alone in being a crazy diet fad from recent history, but it
certainly was the weirdest and by far the grossest of them all. One of
the other popular diet crazes this time in the early twentieth century was known as
Fletcherism. A man named Horace Fletcher suffered for years from indigestion and obesity and
decided to come up with a unique method to combat both of these afflictions.
Generally, the main concept behind this fad actually makes a lot of sense.
Essentially, it was calling for mindful eating, to slow down during a meal
and really consider each and every mouthful. There was one mechanical requirement for it
to work, though, and that was that Fletcherism required you to chew each
and every mouthful at least thirty two times before swallowing. People of the times
denounced him as a quack and accused him of promoting constipation rather than weight loss.
In reality, however, there is some scientific backing for his method of
eating. Even if it can be overwhelmingly tedious, it helps prevent overeating in
a very simple biological way. Inside of our small intestine is a group of
cells that react to food by releasing a hormone called p YY. This hormone
acts as a hungus apressant and helps to give you that feeling of being full
after a big meal. Fletcherism helps this process in two ways. The release
of the pyy hormone can often take a while to kick in, and that
full feeling can present too late if you're an overly fast eater. The mindful,
slow chewing method of Fletcherism helps your body to release that hormone in time
to stop you eating more than necessary. The second way that it helps is
that the hormone is released even quicker because the overabundance of chewing has helped to
break the food down more quickly, meaning it triggers the p YY receptor is
faster than less chewed food. Now we are all too aware of them to
day, but one of the very first diet influences in history was the infamous
Romantic poet Lord Byron. He advocated for truly bizarre vinegar diet, whereby he
would drink undiluted vinegar multiple times a day, but not only that, he
would also soak his food in it before eating it. This, apparently and
unsurprisingly, was said to be the cause of, at the time his very
in vogue appearance. He was famously known to have been incredibly pale and slim,
bordering on gangley As a physique, what most people took to be the
epitome of health and fashion, more than likely was illness and malnutrition. The
annoying thing about all of this is, though, in recent studies, it
has been shown that small amounts of diluted vinegar, and specifically apple cider vinegar
does in fact have a rather large impact on the amount of sugar one consumes
from starchy foods like bread when taken before eating another. Bonker's diet idea first
appeared in Venice. In fifteen fifty eight, a merchant there by the name
of Luigi Cornaro published a book titled The Art of Living Long. He was
apparently a convert from a life of utter excess into a man who severely restricted
his diet. After suffering from exhaustion and illness for a few years, he
decided he would institute an almost militant regime when it came to his food consumption.
He decided he would only consume three hundred and forty grams of food per
day, consisting of any combination of bread, egg, yolks, meat,
or soup, in order to still have some enjoyment in his life. He
did allow himself half a bottle of wine per day as well. After mastering
this restrictive diet, he apparently took things to even greater heights by allowing himself
one single egg per day and nothing more. And who can argue with him
when he is said to have lived to the ripe old age of one hundred
and two. Finally, we come to one of the weirdest of them all,
but one which boasts a rather famous adherent, the King himself, Elvis
Presley Others. Diet first surface in the nineteen sixties and seems designed purely for
people with no self control whatsoever. It seems to rely solely on the concept
that if you're sleeping, you aren't busy eating, so naturally, it was
given the name the Sleeping Beauty diet. People looking to lose weight quickly would
block out a few weeks of their life and then basically just sleep. Now,
obviously, the human body can't do that naturally, and so they would
employ the use of copious amounts of sedatives, sleeping pools, alcohol, and
other drugs to force the body to stay as sleepy as possible, sometimes for
up to twenty hours a day. Elvis found out about this actors, and,
desperate to shed a few pounds, had a doctor put him in a
medically induced coma for a few days to stop him being tempted to eat.
The King did have a rather unhealthy relationship with food, The diet often ranging
from deep fried pickles to peanut butter, bacon and banana sandwiches. After gorging
on meals like that for a while, it's no wonder he felt the need
to sleep it off. Well. There have been so many fad diets throughout
the ages, many of which have proven to be physically harmful and damaging,
that any perceived gain from the regime is often more than artweighed by the negative
effects on the body. I am, by no means a doctor or a
dietitian, but in my experience, our bodies all need different combinations and variations
of certain eating habits to perform at their optimum. Moderation is always key,
but so is finding out what works for you in a sustainable manner. But
that's enough for me. I hope that whenever you eat your next meal,
you savor it and enjoy it, as that truly is the essence of the
joy that is food. This show is made entirely by me Nick Charlie Key,
with our theme music having been made by the enigma that is the mysterious
Breakmaster Cylinder. If you'd like to support the show, the simplest way to
do that is over on our Patreon account. There's just one option, So
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Fame over on our website and then maybe listen out for your name in an
upcoming episode. So until next time, bono petit damn