I WANT TO EAT WORMS

Originally published on ProfessorYeti.com

Most people are quite reasonably averse to eating worms, cockroaches, centipedes or any other critter that falls into the broad “creepy crawly” category.

I am one of those people. I hope you will understand.

That said, there’s something mildly intriguing about eating worms. They have no legs, no discernable body parts as such. Compared to other creatures you might find if you peer under a rotten log, they seem downright edible — long, stringy, distinctly non-threatening, and rather pasta-like.

There’s a great book for the preteen set titled How to Eat Fried Worms, and speaking as someone who was once, unavoidably, a prepubescent male, I can vouch for the fact that the title alone makes boys suddenly more interested in reading. That which was gross and that which was cool were nearly interchangeable among my peers when I was that age, making this book, and all its details of, yes, how to eat fried worms, the epitome of “radical” (a word that has sadly fallen out of my vocabulary). In the book, young Billy takes a bet to eat fifteen worms in as many days; needless to say, in pursuit of this goal, he becomes an accomplished cook, masking worms with condiments, burying them in an ice cream cake, and, of course, frying them.

It was an inspiring read, to be sure, but more in the “triumph of the human spirit” sort of way rather than “I want to do that!” Even after reading the book, my aversion to having worms, alive or dead, in my body remained.

By middle school, worms in the body was not such an odd concept, although the form we learned about in Mr. Husby’s biology class was arguably more disgusting than the earthworms consumed by the intrepid Billy. These worms were the kind that basically ate you: tapeworms, roundworms, hookworms, whipworms, etc. Mr. Husby once told us about Ascaris lumbricoides, a particularly nasty parasite that can be contracted by going barefoot. It’s more complicated than that, of course — you have to be walking around with open wounds or lesions on your foot (there needs to be an opening for the things to get inside you), in a warm climate, and, most of all, you have to be stomping around in a place where such worms can be found, which means, basically, “where infected animals have been shitting.” In other words, a Northern city kid is highly unlikely to get it. Nonetheless, the description of the profound effects of this worm on the human body were enough to make me swear off traipsing barefoot through mud, even on the tundra, just in case.

Ascaris lumbricoides, according to a web site cheerfully titled “Graphic Images of Parasites,” “is one of the largest and most common parasites found in humans. The adult females of this species can measure up to 18 inches long (males are generally shorter), and it is estimated that 25 percent of the world’s population is infected with this nematode.” Let’s stop and ponder this for a moment. Eighteen inches is, I believe you’ll agree, an alarming length for a worm — if you found one that long in your back yard, you’d probably give a bit of a yelp, decide to stay inside for the next week or so, and perhaps place a call to Agents Scully and Mulder. Thankfully, you’re not likely to find this sort of X-Files creature squirming near your azaleas. So relax. But on second thought, don’t, because these things do live inside the intestinal tract of over a billion people. And I probably don’t need to point out that while they’re in there, the Ascaris lumbricoides aren’t just hanging out, sipping worm-sized daiquiris and minding their own business. Among a great many alarming things they sometimes do are to block the gastrointestinal tract, and, while in the larval stage, migrate through the lungs and cause the sometimes-fatal condition known as “ascaris pneumonia.”

So let’s just say that my squeamishness when it comes to worms in close proximity to my bodily orifices is extremely well-founded.

And yet. And yet there’s a very real possibility that I will, in fact, ingest worms in the foreseeable future. Many thousands of them, in fact. Really little ones, mind you, not the big spaghetti suckers. But still: worms. It is not a fact that makes me happy, really, but I will do it voluntarily, and without the excuse of losing a bet or being involved in a fraternity hazing ritual.

Worms, it turns out, may make me feel better. Eating them, so the literature suggests, could vastly enhance my life.

Worm consumption is the latest hope for helping to relieve the symptoms of Crohn’s disease, which I have, and which is, long story short, a malady involving inflammation of the small intestine. It’s a miserable oddball of a disease for which there is no cure. I’ll spare you the list of symptoms, though many are borderline scatological and therefore doubly fun when they manifest themselves in public, and many others involve what laypersons might call “severefuckingpain.”

But there’s a new treatment that, in the one study on people with Crohn’s, resulted in remission of symptoms in seventy percent of patients. And none of the patients, even those who didn’t have full remission, had any adverse reactions (except, presumably, the mental trauma of the initial consumption). The treatment was devised by a researcher at the University of Iowa; the results were published last year in a journal called, splendidly and with straight face, Gut. Twenty-nine people with moderate Crohn’s participated, with each gulping down 2,500 microscopic whipworm eggs of the type found in pigs (not humans), stirred (or shaken, presumably) into a refreshing beverage. One worm cocktail every three weeks. Twenty-four weeks later, twenty-one people had no Crohn’s symptoms, and only one had not shown improvement (but, importantly, that person did not suffer a decline in health, either).

It is, without a doubt, the first medical treatment whose description alone has adverse side effects.

I’m not quite sure how it works. Apparently the little squirmy guys suppress the immune system somehow and lessen inflammation. Frankly, I don’t really care. When the first WormShake or WormAde hits the stores, I’ll be the first in line. I still have no interest in eating fried worms. But pig worms? It may sound like an epic joke, but sign me up.