The fear of ingesting all kind of micro/macroscopic eggs/larvae was my main concern before and after I started to eat raw veggies & fruits (this is my 6th month of raw).

What the veterans into the vegetarian lifestyle can say about this?

Did u ever have problems of this kind?

How do u minimize the risk?

Do you go to be tested from time to time?

Do you use/recommend the blanching technique for everything is green?

Pls. excuse my English - foreigner.

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i have never heard of such a thing. i would like very much if someone on this forum knows about this if they could post it.

erik, why were you worried about this? have you heard of this happening to someone before?

i personally would be more concerned about this happening to meat eatters, not raw vegans.

by the way, your english is great!

just eat some ginger and garlic every now and then and parasites wont be a concern. plus, a healthy immune system is fully equipped to destroy anything it detects as harmful.

so, does this mean that there are bugs and bug eggs in raw fruit and veg? doesnt washing your food remove this? sorry to be so ignorant but i have never heard this before. what the hell is it?

there are microscopic critters everywhere .. i didnt worry about them when i was eating meat and i dotn worry about them now .. my body is healthier now and more readily able to deal with such critters

...Jodi, the banana eating buddhist

yes, people LOVE their paranoias and addictions and dedicate TONS of their energy to holding on to them at all costs, especially when cleansing.

Assuming these sort of things wern't present in their lifestyle before is quite common.

I agree with the above, do your best to bring your health into alignment with your GOALS. do what you think is best to avoid ingesting non-pure water or contaminated fruits and veggies. Use any tools as your disposal fasting, herbs, ginger/garlic etc...to flush/kill parasites if necessary.

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pihourova Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> [...]
> erik, why were you worried about this? have you
> heard of this happening to someone before?
> [...]
-------------------------------------------------------

I posted this question because I am a statistical person and I wanted to take advantage of other people's experience.
I am not obsessed about parasitosis (I had a problem of this kind when I was kid and neglected to wash the fruits and veggies (and my hands).

Parasitosis are a very common thing - every vet or doctor knows that.

Animals or people are sometime heavy infested and they only find out several months after, when the parasites multiplied so much or those worms grew couple of feet each.
Most of them they live symbiotic inside of the digestive tract from the nutrients provided by the host and semi(digested) by the stomach. Some of them travel inside of human body, penetrating tissues, blood vessels, some don't.

You are right, we can't blame only the vegetables and fruits for being carriers of parasites, eating (raw or insufficient cooked) meat can bring this kind of problem too.
Parasitism was present on Earth even before human kind and co-existed symbiotic with their hosts all the time.

Having a strong immune system helps, but believe me, sometimes its hard to get rid of parasites since our food is feeding them too and whatever is toxic for parasites is usually toxic for human/animal kind too.

I do eat a garlic clove and a slice of ginger in every day and I do wash well my fruits and veggies. When I'm not lazy, I use the blanching technique (just throw the veggies into boiling water and stir, but don't keep them until the green color is fading too much).

My question was not meant to scare/intimidate.
It was for my statistic/informal need, nothing more and I do understand that there are subjects people are not comfortable to discuss.

I consider this Forum an excellent way to share our experience and to learn from our vegetarian fellows, without to have to reinvent the wheel and to find out from our experience what other people knew for thousands of years.

Thank you for your input.

Pls. excuse my English - foreigner.

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Medicine, Food Industry and Commerce are businesses.
Is their goal to make/keep me healthy or to make more profit?
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It's impossible to be parasite free for life, everyone on earth has parasites inside of them. Some people have more then others due to how healthy they are. It's probably best just to cleanse on a periodic basis to keep any problem under control. Even rawfoodists have parasites in my opinion. You can send your stools to the best labs and still come up with false negatives.

Erik, your english is so good! You need not apologize! I am bulgarian and i have seen and heard much worse english. your english is probably better than mine! ))

thank you for clarifying parasitosis. i have actually heard of such a thing, but i thought it was only dangerous in 3rd world countries. like, i heard of a little boy in india that had flys coming out of his mouth because he ate something with the maggots on it. gross, huh?

Just parasite zap. Read Hulda Clark's book "The Cure to All Diseases".

All animal "foods" no matter how much you cook them, are filled with millions more pathogenic microorganisms than fruits and vegetables are, so no, I'm not concerned. I don't wash my food either, as there are beneficial soil organisms on them; and blanching is cooking.

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anaken Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> yes, people LOVE their paranoias and addictions
> and dedicate TONS of their energy to holding on to
> them at all costs, especially when cleansing.
>
> Assuming these sort of things wern't present in
> their lifestyle before is quite common.
>
LOVE THIS!
patty

over-santizing yourself and environment can pose some hazards as well .. it can leave you open to even stronger bugs, critters , virus's because you are not building any sort of immunity through some exposure and having a healthy internal invironment

...Jodi, the banana eating buddhist

But Erik actually had a problem with this when he was young.....I know other people who had serious health challenges and have never gotten over the fear of getting them again: polio in the family, severe intestinal worms, etc.


There's no point in jeering at someone who wants to take steps to avoid something terrible. If someone knows a better way of avoiding it, why not just share it with him instead of taking a superior attitude?

Some parasites need to be gotten rid of but parasites are basically unavoidable. I was listening to Dr Dean Odell and he said that if YOU (all your cells) were to suddenly disappear there would remain behind a perfect image of your form (until gravity took effect) because of all the parasites which were living on/in you, and he said that most of them are harmless.

Now you know how "Mother Earth" feels with all of us living on her :-)

One can have parasites if your body has a large number of dead and dying cells in it. These dead cells could be food that is rotting in your intestines, or it could be your own flesh that is dead or dying from exposure to toxins. A person eating a healthy raw diet like 80-10-10 over a number of years is going to see the amount of dead and dying cells decrease in their bodies until there are not enough to sustain parasites.

In a healthy body with a strong immune system, one need not worry about parasites.

As for parasites on fresh vegetables, I don't worry about them, nor do I exhibit any symptoms of parasite infestation. If I were to show symptoms, a supervised water fast would kill those parasites.

Doing treatments like cleanses or using a zapper might kill some parasites, but unless you remove the cause of those dead and dying cells in your body, the parasites will come back the next time you are exposed to them. It is a much better strategy to improve your lifestyle habits to increase your health. A lot of these anti-parasite treatments are downright toxic and will weaken your body and it will take some downtime to heal the side effects of these treatments. Again, its better to improve your health than to engage in a parasite cleanse.

I've heard about this in nature in several instances: predatory animals targeting the weakest of the herds, bugs attacking only damaged plants, and what Bryan said above.

I've been soaking my produce in a solution of food grade hydrogen peroxide and water, because I buy all my food and it passes through many hands,

Eventually I will be growing a lot of it (I hope) and can't imagine worrying about problems with it. I like the taste of garden dirt.

theres a difference between someone doing their best to avoid pesticides or parasites - or of taking steps to rid themselves of parasites - and blanching all your vegetables and eating ketchup.


growing your own is great, but the 'people touching' thing...i dunno. I like to shake hands with folks, not bow or cower from them. Same with produce. And like I said...you have to be honest about the level worry about who was touching/preparing your foods before you made dietary changes...and how that lines up with your current mindset, whether you are now in a MORE neurotic place (because your conventions are crumbling or whatever, or through emotional detoxing) ...I think jGunn has the D-L on Nestle-covered -cockroaches. heh.

I think the critters def ARE an issue..I consistently run into folks who look like they are in the passenger seat...it can be unnerving.

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Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/03/2007 01:20AM by anaken.

anaken Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
"> yes, people LOVE their paranoias and addictions
> and dedicate TONS of their energy to holding on to
> them at all costs, especially when cleansing."

Perhaps you will be statistically correct without the "especially when cleansing" part.
The majority of those people sticking to their bad habits and self-destructive life-style don't even try to improve or to do anything to help them self (being ready to accept all the consequences), even some of them need help desperately.
They made their choice already: to not do nothing.

I made my own choice too and if you think that I am one of that kind you are terrible wrong.

>[...]
> short and sweet....and DEEP
>
> __________________________________________________
> ___ ...and FREE"

Yes, you are right: you are FREE, but NOT short and sweet.
Maybe only deep insulting with your sarcasm, really in a hurry to label people u don't know as paranoiacs and addicted.
Just try to use common sense. You don't have to be so poisonous showing such a superior attitude.

I am positive that you have the ability to express your opinion nicely.


... and about your other sentence:
"
> Assuming these sort of things wern't present in
> their lifestyle before is quite common."

I don't think you pointed your finger toward me - but if you did, I can provide you with more details.

On this forum, (registered or not) we have all kind of audience, different culture, education, habits, beliefs.
One should show diplomacy having a pleasant attitude toward other ppl opinions.

Thank you.

Pls. excuse my English - foreigner.

=============================================================
Medicine, Food Industry and Commerce are businesses.
Is their goal to make/keep me healthy or to make more profit?
=============================================================

First-time post from a new member here, but I'll post in this thread because I have first-hand experience of this. Not paranoia or something in my imagination: I actually passed a foot-long roundworm,as thick as a fat pencil ... as a middle-aged adult! I did some real research on this subject in specialist medical texts and elsewhere, after that experience.

When my worm came out, I preserved it in a bottle and took it into the hospital, where I had had NEGATIVE (no parasites) test result just weeks before. Given the life cycle of this worm, there was no question it was a "false negative" test. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that ONE IN FOUR humans on earth carry roundworms; it is the most common larger parasite. The majority of people are unaware that they carry it, even if they have a few symptoms, and it isn't confined only to the "third world", although it may be more common in those areas.

There are hundreds and hundreds of species of smaller (microscopic) parasites and symbiotes which inhabit our bodies,too. Recent research with scanning electron microscopes and DNA sequencers is showing that the number of "creatures" inside of us is far greater than anyone previously suspected, and they are suspected of playing major roles in many chronic and degenerative diseases, including heart disease. It is an area that is as-yet little understood. WHile there are a lot of false beliefs and near-hypochondriac paranoid people out there when it comes to this topic, to dismiss parasites as un-important or paranoia or something one needn't consider is foolishly risky, especially for raw-foodists. [In case you are wondering, I'm a BIG fan of raw foods! They helped turn my whole life around!

Parasites can be a problem on any diet, cooked or raw, but they ARE a BIGGER concern for raw-foodists, simply because the heat of cooking kills most parasites and parasite eggs. If you don't cook the food, you must use some other method to remove and to kill them, or eventually you WILL end up with more parasites.

To trust the immune system to kill them all is foolish: they have evolved right alongside their host organisms, and continue to exist because they are capable of doing so, in spite of immune systems. Some of them stay within the gut, feeding off of the food you eat, but even this is not very desireable: they are competing with you for nutrition, and may lead to you ending up with some deficiencies, despite eating a good diet. Secondly, their waste products are often mildly toxic, which can add to the burden on your immune system and detocification channels. Parasite waste produvts are implicated in many types of allergies, too.
While some of the gut flora (bacteria) can produce helpful waste products -- we rely on some gut flora to produce "vitamin K" for example -- the wastes of most parasites are an unwanted burden.

The ones that feed from the food in our gut are basically "putside" of us (think of the gastrointestinal tract as a long, twisty hole through a donut, and you'll understand what I mean); they are isolated from our immune systems, and do not feed off of our dead cell tissues. But they stay there, robbing our nutrition and giving off toxic wastes that we can absorb. Those wastes also can impact the balance of our gut flora, indirectly causing other problems.

Even if you take all possible precautions, though, you may still get them: roundworm eggs (to stick with my example) can even be inhaled with wind-born dust, and enter the body that way! Eating ginger and garlic will help, but I ate ginger, garlic, along with horseradish and cayenne peppers DAILY for MONTHS before my worm came out. It died after I ate a meal with plenty of pumpkin, which may have helped to kill it (pumpkin seeds also stun worms!), or it may just have died of old age; I'll never know. I do know that while garlic and ginger are powerful healers, SOME parasites like roundworms have mucus coatings that allow them to survive substantial assaults from these substances.

Ordinarily, worms come in groups, not just one, but as far as I know -- and despite taking anti-worm medications, The doctors (backed up by the research I have done since) said I should expect to have from a few to a dozen or more come out after taking the medicine, but I haven't passed any more. I honestly don't know if there are more inside of me; I'd rate the chances now at 50/50.

However, one time after taking the worm medication, I dumped a huge amount of bile (I had a history of "congested liver" or "chronic liver disease" and felt MUCH better afterwards I have had markedly reduced problems ever since then, suggesting it was, indeed, something that died, This makes me suspect I may have had liver flukes or similar parasites in my liver. I have gluten-intolerance issues, and a mildly damaged gut (from traces of gluten) at that time would have allowed an unusual amount of the medicine to enter the blood circulation and thus enter the liver, killing parasites there. Although I have no proof that this is what happened, it is wholly consistent with what happened.

Many people carry worms for years with no, or very few, symptoms. Others have occasional or mild symptoms of abdominal discomfort, gas, diarrhea, night sweats, etc... In the worst cases, some varieties may tunnel into other organs and cause all kinds of havoc. The roungworm -- like I had -- goes through the intestinal wall, travels to the lungs and emerges there, is coughed up and swallowed back down, passing back through the intestines where it takes up residence for the rest of its life. A female (like mine was) will lay tens of thousands of eggs in a laying spree, then rest and feed, making more, then laying them again. This cycle repeats itself over several years of the worm's lifespan. Those eggs leave the body with stools, dry out and wait to be eaten (or inhaled) into a host, where they travel to the stomach and intestine (the ph change from stomach acid to bile-alkaline gut appears to trigger their emergence in the gut) and the above cycle is repeated.

The reason so many parasite tests come back with false negatives is that they are looking for eggs: if the test is run when the female is in a resting phase (no eggs being laid) then there is nothing to detect. Negative ests need to be repeated after an interval of time, to increase the chances of detecting eggs,

You ordinarily cannot see the eggs with the naked eye. Washing raw food with water will not remove them very well; at the very least use a "fruit and veggie wash". Some may still remain. Soaking in something like hudrogen peroxide may help with remaining ones. Simply slicing off the outside of unwashed fruits or veggies won't work, either: the knife blade passing through may well just pick up and push/carry the eggs, to deposit them on/into the cut surface, leaving them there for you to ingest.

There are many other types of parasites; tapeworms and ringworms are other common larger ones, and there are MANY small ones. Most of the smaller ones are not really problematic most of the time, but they can burden the body's systems and weaken us, and some are now suspected of being implicated in a variety of diseases. This is much like when helicobactor pylori bacteria were first found to cause stomach ulcers; the medical community took 25 years to accept the finding, but the discoverers were eventually awarded Nobel prizes. More disease will be found to be linked to parasites and tiny micro-organisms in the coming years. The process is slow, because there is little profit incentive from the drug industry to support it, and that is how most medical research is funded.

You cannot entirely eliminate parasites, and it is stupid to become over-stressed about them. The benefits of eating raw foods (increased nutritional density and all those "life factors" etc...) far outweigh the risks. BUT awareness and prudent precautions can help to prevent unwanted parasite infestations, and reduce the parasite load our bodies have to deal with. DO wash your foods very well, using a good cleaning agent. Research which foods are the worst offenders, and reduce your consumpion of them and take extra precautions when you do eat them.

Yes, parasites are a part of nature. But so are poisonous mushrooms, poison ivy and rattlesnakes. We don't need to fear these things excessively or be stressed by them, but should try to manage our contact with them intelligently. We eat raw foods for various reasons: to heal illnesses and to enhance our health; to make us more vigorous and energetic, more youthful, more attractive, etc... but parasites work AGAINST these aims. It only makes sense to take some prudent anti-parasite precautions, to help us meet our health-related goals.

Sorry for the l-o-n-g first post, but I hope this information may help someone. There is a lot of incomplete and misleading information out there about parasites!

The issue to focus on isn't whether or not we ingest parasites and/or their eggs. As made clear above, if we're living breathing creatures, at some point we've already done so or are doing so now.

Eating raw in itself isn't the problem. If that were the case, then animals in the wild who don't cook (actually which of them do?) should be seriously afflicted. Whether meat eaters (lions, tigers et. al) or vegans (i.e. giraffes) or those that live almost exclusively on marine life (as close to fresh sushi as we can get), these animals don't boil, bake, rinse their greens and fruits with veggie wash nor go to great lenghts to avoid tainted seafood.

Instead, the question to look at is: are we providing the terrain to nourish them and promote their growth? In other words, how hospitable are we? Just eating in itself will not encourage them to hang around, but rather the chemistry of our insides (fermentation, putrefaction, ph level, etc) will help determine if once they're in there if they want to stay or move on. Think of the Pasteur/ Beauchamp views on germs.

Wishing you vibrant health

Arkay, what medicine did you take to get that worm out? (If you remember)

yes, the above posts are excellent and translate so well into the issue of health and healthful eating in general.

there is the issue of the foods and the environment (body).

you can bring as much attention to foods as you want, but neglecting the issues with the environment makes all the nasty things (living or habitual) stay at home to roost.

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/04/2007 01:21AM by anaken.

My dad used to make me shuck the corn and wash the vegetables he brought home from the farmer's market, and there were crab apple trees and berry bushes where I lived, so I guess I'm used to washing fruit off before I eat it. I've never worried about eating bugs. ;-)

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EXCELLENT post, arkay! thank you. very informative. i too would like to know what meds you were taking to get rid of the worm. also, do you have any good weblinks where i could find some more info on this subject. for example, a link that might have info on the foods that contain round worms, tape worms, etc, and any other info on this subject?

thank you so much

I tried a number of anti-worm remedies, both conventional and alternative. Ironically, the only whole, huge and obvious worm that came out was the FIRST one, when I had not consciously taken anything against worms!

The conventional medicine was Mebendazole (or something very similar to that in spelling). It is sold under several trade names, but the most common name is "Vermox". It is by far the most commonly-prescribed anti-worm medicne. Incidentally, the time that I got a big "bile dump" and very noticeable improvement was when I technically OVERdosed slightly on the vermox, and took it twice a day (instead of once) for four days (instead of one to three days). NOT advisable, but when you have suffered for as many years as I have, you learn which risks might be worth taking. This one paid off for me.

There are also a variety of "alternative" and "natural" remedies, including wormwood (note the name!), black walnut husks (the husts of green walnuts that have fallen from the tree,,actually), pumpkin seeds, etc... I don't remember them all right now, but I did some research and came up with a 3-day program where I was eating ONLY anti-worm substances. It ended up making me feel a bit ill, without passing any more worms. I have also tried some commercially-prepared anti-parasite mixtures. One of them in partucular is good, but the name escapes me at the moment.

I MAY still have some worms inside me. Other than going for expensive specialized tests (like swallowing a capsule that contains a miniaturised camaera and transmitter, and staying next to a receiving unit until it finishes travelling through my tract, or a very careful ultrasound specifically looking for worm-like stuctures) there is no way to be sure --and those kinds of tests are very expensive! The usual stool tests are cheaper but unreliable, as my own previous experience showed.

If I do still have worms in me, though, they are having much less effect, as I have fewer symtpoms that could be atrributed to them, than I used to. I might even be free of them now -- the doctors suspect it, since they say the Vermox SHOULD be completely effective. I'm skeptical of some of their claims, though, for obvious reasons.

A few more (and more brief) comments/responses on this subject:

The digestive tract of a high predator such as a lion or tiger is MUCH shorter - about one-third - the length of our own, and its stomach acid is MUCH more powerful; about four times as strong/acidic as our own. This makes it more resistant to animal-borne parasites than we are.

Other animals in nature, especially, DO SUFFER from parasites, sometimes to the point of dying, or at least being weakened enough that they fall prey more easily to other problems, like lions and tigers.

In the old debate about the "soil", the answer really should be that BOTH are important! Some parasites will find a cleaner, healthier host a less hospitable environment ... but not all will, as long as they can "evade" our immune systems. Those who draw nourishment directly from our blood flow (there are some) may find an otherwise healthier person a BETTER host than a weakened, more toxic one. Of course we need to do what we can to keep our bodies strong and clean and less-suitable hosts, but to rely on that as our sole approach or "means of defence" is, frankly, foolish. We should ALSO seek to minimize the exposure to parasites in the first place. The best solution has to lie in pursuing BOTH approaches.

Wash your food well, and preferably soak foods so as to kill parasites. Wash your hands any time you have been handling a lot of things outdoors, and ABSOLUTELY after every visit to the bathroom. Then also do as much as you can to make yourself strong and healthy. The combination should work well to keep parasite loads from becoming a problem.

"People who are afraid of germs have them", I heard that once. Makes one more paranoid. Sorry.

Thanks for the info Arkay. Your comment about the the strength of the stomach acid of a predator reminds me of the time I experimented with a little puppy worming medicine a few years ago (on me not a puppy). It obviously wasn't meant for humans, my digestive system was rather "sore" for a few days, it felt like it stripped the lining.

That's interesting, tropical.

I wonder if it feels any less harmful if you're a puppy.