Cultural Literacy Essay: The Tapeworm Diet

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Cultural Literacy Essay

It was complete chaos. My ears were still ringing from the screaming. I was panting heavily from having to run; I barely made it out. I wiped the sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand and my eyes frantically searched the area for my friend. My heart was still pounding in my chest, I couldn’t believe that things escalated so quickly in just a moment. Someone shouts my name and I turn around. My friend comes running up to me sweaty and out of breath as well. I grab her hand and we start to walk away from the mayhem. “Seriously, I hate back to school shopping. People get way to crazy about these sales. Also, who starts a fistfight over a backpack?” she says, still out of breath. I look at her and take a gulp from my water bottle. “Let’s just hit the regular stores for now. I don’t feel like running out of anymore places because the soccer mom’s are throwing down over backpack sales;” I said. We walk throughout the mall and a dark store catches my
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A person knowingly starts out by eating a piece of meat with a tapeworm cyst placed on it. The cyst eventually matures into a tapeworm thus the name “tapeworm diet.” The tapeworm diet started in the 1900s. At the time diets became a craze and hundreds of different diets and tools came out claiming to help you lose weight. The tapeworm diet was by far the most dangerous however. Photo advertisements for beef tapeworms at the time sported slogans such as “live tapeworm eggs, easy to swallow,” and “don’t be fat, it’s the enemy.” The one I found most comical was “lose life threatening fat without exercise, dieting, or surgery with the tapeworm.” I found this particular advertisement comical because it mentioned life threatening fat. The ad completely ignores the fact that deliberately putting a parasite into your stomach is more “life threatening” than having some excess

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