131: Parasite Cleanses are Full of Sh*t (feat Mallory DeMille)
Did you know, right now, as you sit there listening to this, your body is filled with parasites that need to be cleansed? Of course, that’s if you live in America, since every other country on the planet cleanses four times a year. Seriously. We heard it on TikTok.Scrolling through the gutters of TikTok is challenging for us Gen Xers, and so our TikTok correspondent, Mallory DeMille, has done the dirty work for us. After laying out an all-too-common supplement scam, she looks at the shitty world of parasite cleanses where budding influencers snap strange shots of their feces before scaring you into their downline. I’ll also preview a bit of my upcoming conversation with dietician Kevin Klatt, who’s been tracking this TikTok trend with dismay as well. He’ll bring the science while Mallory breaks down the techniques.Show NotesMallory DeMille on TwitterKevin Klatt on InstagramParasite cleanses are ‘modern snake oil.’ Experts explain why.Mason Kuhr on TikTokStampede Network on TikTokKim Rogers on TikTok
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In Spirituality 131, parasite cleanses are full of shit, featuring Mallory DeMille.
Did you know, right now, as you sit there listening to this, your body is filled with parasites that need to be cleansed?
Of course, that's if you live in America, since every other country on the planet cleanses four times a year.
Seriously, we heard it on TikTok.
Now, scrolling through the gutters of TikTok is challenging for us Gen Xers.
And that's why our TikTok correspondent, Mallory DeMille, has done the dirty work for us.
After laying out an all-too-common supplement scam, she looks at the shitty world of parasite cleanses where budding influencers snap strange shots to their feces before scaring you into their downline.
I'll also preview a bit of my upcoming conversation with dietician Kevin Klatt who's been tracking this TikTok trend with dismay as well.
He'll bring the science while Mallory breaks down the techniques.
He eats a brainy pill, he eats a wormy pill, he eats a goji pill, he eats a liver pill,
He chants the prayers that remind him of his high tea.
He chants the prayers that remind him of his tire tea.
Om, aho om, aho om, aho om.
I get cancelled, but I can post again.
You're never gonna woke me down.
I get cancelled, but I can post again.
You're never gonna woke me down.
Hello listeners, this is Mallory.
Today we're taking the red pill, and the blue pill, and the green pill,
and actually a lot of them are just different shades of beige now.
Also, don't forget about the multicolored powders, oil drops, and sprays.
From get-ready-with-me morning supplement routines to who's-the-manlier-man capsule swallowing contests, it's really not surprising that supplement peddling has infiltrated health and wellness TikTok.
Hashtag supplements has 1.6 billion views on TikTok and if you scroll long enough it will seem like there's one for everyone and everything.
How will folks online know that you care about your health or maybe more importantly your masculinity if you're not showing off the handful of capsules you have every day?
Good morning, welcome to my morning supplement routine.
Here are all the supplements that I take that got me huge.
I take like 70 supplements a day.
Essential supplements you need for PCOS weight loss.
Here are nine testosterone-boosting supplements.
Three supplements you need to be taking for a healthy vagina.
Mainstream media is at it again, and this time they're attacking probably one of the most helpful natural supplements for the body with pain and inflammation, and it has also been shown to help regenerate stem cells.
With his almost half a million TikTok followers gained by posting videos about being a ball-sunning, red-pilled, anti-soyboy soldier of God, Mason Kuru decided that what the world needed was for his apparel business, the Stampede Network, to start selling supplements.
Before we get into his supplements, Mallory, what kind of clothing does Mason sell?
Does he sell like J.P.
Sears Freedom shirts or maybe Unvaxed hats?
I was really hoping you'd ask this.
He's got a sleeveless hoodie called the Assassin Hoodie and the copy on the website reads, By making the choice to don the Assassin Hoodie, you are putting on the cloak that will signify your personal transformation.
It's not just a hoodie, it's a trophy, and you have to earn it.
Which sounds obviously super cruel and manly until you realize anyone can buy it as long as they have $45.
You know, it's worth pointing out the poetic misspelling of Dawn as D-A-W-N in the copy instead of, you know, the right way around.
Also, like, assassins, I just would not make jokes about that around this time.
Yeah, and I think Derek's gonna get dive into some of the other poetic marketing copy in a second.
Then Mason's got a t-shirt and a tank top and, more interestingly, weight belts named Belt of the Gods and Big Daddy Belt.
And the Big Daddy Belt literally says, in big bold letters, Daddy across the back.
Its copy reads, The Big Daddy Belt is a symbol of courage.
You put this on and you immediately stop caring about other people's opinions.
I mean, you're walking around with the word Daddy on a belt.
But it's more than that.
It's a symbol for your strength and being the absolute giga chad of the gym.
This belt establishes your dominance.
If you're a man wearing this belt, you better walk up and squat that woman now.
Which, we haven't even started talking about supplements and this is the creepiest thing I've ever come across doing this research.
Well, can you just explain this to me like I've never even lifted?
The belts?
Yeah.
Yeah, they're used a lot in like heavy lifting to provide stability and support alignment.
The ones that I've seen are typically blank or they just have the company logo on it, Sans Daddy.
I promise I won't say daddy again in the script.
I'll add in, Matthew, that weight belts are often overused by people in the gym to make it look like they're doing heavy weights.
You're only supposed to use a belt if you're going over 80% of your max, so only your last set, and it actually is a tool to help you to breathe properly.
So you're supposed to engage your entire diaphragm when you're lifting heavy weights, and a lot of people don't.
They will fall into bad patterns.
So when you see guys making them really tight to look buffered, that actually is restricting their breathing.
They're supposed to be loose, and you're supposed to breathe and fill the belt, and then do the lift.
But the way that it's presented in stuff like this is completely wrong.
Yeah, but what is the part about, you better walk up and squat that woman?
Is that about spotting?
I don't think so.
I think it's just creepy.
I didn't know this dude and because of Mallory, I did watch some of his videos and read his content.
He, it's just a mishmash of bullshit.
He doesn't actually, I'm sure he, he looks ripped.
I'm sure he works out, but I am also sure that he does not have any sort of fitness certifications and he's just completely going for whatever trend he's trying to sell at the moment.
Right.
Okay.
He does have TikToks where he literally is curling women.
I think that's just a part of his brand, unfortunately.
You mean they sort of lie in a plank form and he curls them?
Yeah.
Okay, alright.
So that's cool.
And you definitely need the right supplements to be able to do that.
Once you've got the right shirt, the Stampede Network's main supplement offering is called Spartan Bee Bread, and in a TikTok with over 7 million views, Mason calls it a God Mode supplement, explaining what it is while awkwardly holding it in front of his bathroom sink.
If you want to become absolutely shredded, aesthetic, jacked, a Greek God, a Spartan, any of those things, this is something you should be taking.
This is called bee bread.
It's a mix of honey, pollen, 240 essential nutrients, and 20 essential amino acids that the human body needs, including eight that we can't even make on our own.
The bees use this for fuel when they're making their hive, and it's the only naturally occurring substance in the world that has every single nutrient the human body needs.
This one's actually from my personal brand that I'll be dropping next week.
These are 100% organic, natural, nothing in them other than the bee bread and some fruit that is used for taste.
So you can't see it, but it's not a capsule.
It's like a dark brown tab, but it's soft so you chew it.
It's honestly quite possibly the most awkward and unappetizing supplement I've ever seen.
I'm kind of bummed because I actually bought Matthew a year's supply for Christmas, but now he knows all about it.
Can't be surprised.
I thought they were like smushed rabbit turds actually.
Formed into a square.
It does look like that.
I also want to point out his marketing copy, which says, Spartan Bee Bread is known for its vitality, energy, immunity, recovery, anti-aging, and sleep enhancing properties.
I don't think Mason realizes that vitality and sleep enhancing is a contradiction.
I also want to point out that further down the page, it says that this product puts the immune system, vision, memory, As well as activity of the gastrointestinal system into overdrive.
I have no idea what that means.
It doesn't sound good.
It means having superhero senses and enormous vigorous bowel movements, Derek.
Come on.
I also really enjoyed this gem.
It is the only naturally occurring supplement in the world that contains every single essential nutrient required for a well-functioning human body.
How is bread with added apples, cinnamon, blackcurrant, and sea buckthorn naturally occurring?
I'm sorry, but I really, really hate bad marketing copy.
I've worked in marketing in various facets for years.
And so, Mason, my man, if you write other benefits and are referring to the product, every bullet point should speak to the benefits of the bread and ideally be written in the same tense.
So Bullets shouldn't also talk about the emotional capacities of the beekeepers, as you write, or the supposed integrity of the nutrition experts on your staff.
And if you have to say it, well, I don't know how good that is for the actual integrity.
I did find Mason on LinkedIn, and you'll be thrilled to know he actually went to university for marketing.
Wow.
Okay.
You know, I just, I do have to say that I understand the sort of hockey puck of healthy snack attraction.
I remember when I was doing a lot of ashram vegetarian and vegan cooking.
There were a lot of super sweet desserts flying around and, you know, partly this was because I was cooking with a lot of people who used to be at Rajneeshpuram or at ISKCON Krishna temples.
And I think that when things are really protein poor, you can wind up craving a lot of sugar.
When I learned how to make complex, dense, sweet, ball, treat stuff things out of roasted and ground mung beans and things like that and ghee and ground almonds all stuck together with honey, that felt more substantial.
It felt more virtuous.
It stuck to the ribs.
So for some of these guys, I'm thinking that they're eating their Virtue Pucks instead of candy bars.
And I understand that that might give them a feeling of lower glycemic punch.
But on the other hand, calories are calories in the end.
That's one thing I find about the whole wellness space and their nutrition advice is they're anti-sugar.
I do a lot of endurance cycling and I'm taking down sugar packs every 15-20 minutes because if you're going to go 50-70 miles, some people can fast, I can't.
Calories are not just calories either.
It does matter where you're getting them and it matters the movement that you're doing with them.
So for heavy lifting, adding some sugars in is fine because you're burning through them.
You're using it for fuel.
But it's my problem with how these things are presented are always to do with the virtuousness them. Just call it what it is. Sugar is predominantly a
sugar and a carbohydrate turns into sugar in your body. So it's just fuel regardless pretty much of
where you're getting it from.
Yeah, I completely agree. And I was calories curious and so I looked it up and each tab
is only 15 calories. And actually the whole nutritional label is pretty insignificant
when you compare it to other supplements on the market or you know, like food. If we navigate
to the Stampede Network TikTok, which only has 56,000 followers things don't get better.
Just earlier this month, Mason posted this TikTok titled, Your Doctor is Lying to You.
You know, your doctor, big corporations, all of them, they don't want you to know that they're not actually helping you.
They don't want you to know that they're medicating something that needs cured at the root.
Why?
Because they make money.
Majority of your problems will come from fixing your health.
The underlying health.
What you eat, what you consume.
These will help with that.
These eliminate the toxins and help you absorb the nutrients and minerals that you need.
Olympian vitality capsules.
But change your diet and you'll change your life.
We should just say that like all of that ASMR stuff is him stirring his supplement powder into a glass of water.
Just if you didn't catch that.
Yep, definitely.
And also apparently the entire medical establishment is corrupt, but you can totally trust this random dude on the internet who says a natural way to boost your testosterone is to speak your truth.
That TikTok actually doesn't even have a caption, just the following hashtags.
Hashtag truth.
Hashtag awakening.
Hashtag wake up.
Hashtag holistic healing.
Hashtag holistic wellness and hashtag holistic nutrition.
Can we guess what kind of people Mason's trying to attract as customers?
I can guess.
I know you're going to get into his fascination with Greek warriors, but the Stampede Network uses a Greek warhorse as a symbol, and Mason, or his copywriter, writes, The warhorse is a sight to behold when traveling alone, but when a group of warhorses charge together, as a stampede, the whole earth shakes.
I previewed a bunch of pages on the site, and it is peak bro science.
It also feels like the copy syncs up with TikTok, I don't know, like grammar and, you know, sort of like just copy standards.
And what's going on with the music that goes on behind these things?
Because I've heard that kind of dramatic looping cello in other things as well.
These are like loops, right, Mallory, that are used over and over again?
Yeah, so you can pick audio on TikTok.
Sometimes creators will pick audio just because it's trending and not because it has anything to do with the actual, like what they're actually saying.
And so sometimes, you know, these creators that I follow are playing Taylor Swift and I'm like, Taylor Swift?
I would totally not agree with anything you're posting and yet you're leveraging her trending, you know, existence.
Um, but those types of audios, those kind of like mysterious something is, you know, shadowy in the corner.
Um, those are pretty common, especially on Mason's.
There's one that he uses quite often that I've seen across like conspiracy TikTok.
And you're going to love this one.
Mason actually claims in a TikTok that his 10,000 plus customers have one trait in common, and that's that they've gone through a spiritual awakening.
Out of 10,000 orders at our company, I've noticed one trait that seems to be a commonality between the customers.
A lot of them seem to have gone through spiritual awakenings, and a lot of people think that's taboo.
I've gone through it myself.
And I'll tell you this right now, it never ends.
You're gonna keep waking up.
But that's what us as a brand stand for.
We want to wake the world up to its full potential.
We're entering a new period in time where conscious living, holistic living, that's something that needs to be mainstream.
Here's that music again, speaking of it.
He reminds me of all of my friends who do a lot of ayahuasca, who every time they do it, they say they hit another level.
When he says you're going to keep waking up, how many times do you have to wake up?
If you wake up, you're up.
So why do you have to keep doing it?
That idea, I mean, that's what I guess keeps people buying the products, because there's always another way to wake up.
You're always waking up, but you're not woke.
After looking through his profile for as long as I could before my entire brain melted, my interpretation of this spiritual awakening that Mason had includes the following.
Being proud to be a toxic man.
Calling out the declining testosterone levels in men pandemic.
Claiming that society is feminizing men because lower testosterone makes you more compliant.
Did I mention Mason is also anti-mask?
Shocking.
Shooting airsoft guns while dressed in camo to prep for the end of the world.
Sharing incredibly vague self-help antidotes for men that if you really broke it down don't actually make any sense.
Appreciating being compared to Andrew Tate, who was famously banned from TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube this summer for his violently misogynistic videos.
He was also banned from Twitter, but was reinstated this week.
I wonder how that happened?
And the final piece to this spiritual awakening is building a legion of chads, which chad, of course, is slang from 4chan to mean a stereotypically alpha male and is associated with the incel community.
I find these influencers' focus on testosterone so telling.
I just finished reading Of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves, which is actually about the male crisis.
But wait a minute, wait a minute.
How does Reeves define the male crisis?
Because this sounds like a Tucker Carlson tip.
No, no, not at all.
He's a political scientist and an economist, actually.
He's looking at it through a half a century of data as it relates to men, white American, but especially black American men predominantly, though he does look at global trends as well.
But he focuses on education, earning potential, and careers.
And it's a fascinating survey that I'm sure I'll want to cover in a bonus at some point.
The point for now is the distance between measurable effects of maleness in our culture and this nebulous men are losing testosterone gamut is disturbing.
Now, that said, there's actually plenty of evidence that male testosterone levels are declining, and it is often related to health issues like diet and exercise.
But the way that these influencers extrapolate from that and make shit up is pretty astounding.
So, I think we're going to get to the Spartans next, right Mallory?
Yeah, Mason has branded the Stampede Network to be very focused on God language and Greek gods and becoming a Spartan.
I won't play the clips, but they also have supplements named Enlightened Beetroot And Mushrooms of the Gods, and a Zeus's Lightning Capsule that will apparently make you strong, handsome, and ready to fight.
Then there's the Olympian Vitality Capsules that Mason mentioned earlier, and he describes as literally a god-tier supplement that removes toxins while absorbing the nutrients in your food, which I would have thought if you have the body of a Greek god, that would include being able to remove toxins and absorb nutrients without supplements.
But I think, I mean, the key is in the term itself, supplement, and I think what supplement really means in this discourse is that something has to fill in the gap between the reality of a kind of disembodied screen adult life, which people actually recognize and feel, and the romance of reconstructing a kind of ancient manhood.
Right, I don't think Greek gods wore weightlifting belts either.
If anything, Mason is a fantastic case study for how literally anyone, including a red-pilled ball-sunner, can start selling supplements using a previously-grown TikTok following as a customer funnel.
We all knew supplements would get copied and pasted onto TikTok by wellness folks, but within the supplement TikTok space specifically, there's something squirmy that has sprung up, and it's ready to take your money.
Certain TikTok creators are convincing their followers and beyond that there's something dangerous and scary wiggling inside of them, and it's the cause of all of their health problems.
Nervous you don't know what to do about this troublesome news now?
Not to fear, they have the solution for you, sold with a side of delusional confidence.
Listeners, today we're going to focus on unpacking a problematic and profitable TikTok trend, parasite cleansing.
Today, we're getting rid of parasites.
The chokehold you TikTok people have on my life.
If you say to buy something, I'm on Amazon.
I gave in to TikTok pressure and I am doing a parasite cleanse.
I started researching and I also started to watch a bunch of TikToks about parasite cleanses and I was so intrigued.
So I bought the parasite cleanse from Amazon.
Let's talk about the three main parasite cleanses that are on the market right now.
Am I on my way to Walgreens to pick up a dewormer to deworm myself?
Yes.
Do you want to shit out worms just like me?
I want to introduce you today to Kim Rogers or the Worm Queen of at Miss Rogers Hood.
She has over 379,000 TikTok followers.
Her bio reads, Welcome to my hood.
Parasites, mushrooms, natural healing.
Here's a taste of what you can expect if you follow her.
Did you have itchy butt last night?
It was the full moon and that's when parasites really start to come out.
If you had itchy butt, you really need to go do a parasite cleanse with Parify.
Cleanse the system of the itchy butt.
You know, I just want to point out that a comment under that one comes from Sarah saying, asking, can kids use it?
Now there's no reply to that, but I guess we can see that the self-diagnostic kind of landscape here just extends further and further out from the target market, right?
So whoever's listening to the Worm Queen is going to be thinking about their parents or their kids as well.
Or they need their dog chiropractor, right?
Yeah.
All sorts of people who can't make decisions for themselves, they'll just put it on to them.
Unfortunately, there's a whole side to Parasite Clem's TikTok that does put a spotlight on kids.
We're not going to touch on that today, but that's probably why they were asking.
Yeah.
For context before we dig deeper, on her website, Kim shares this brief background info.
Kim worked in western medicine for 18 plus years, holding an associate's in medical specialties and bachelor's in healthcare.
During her 18 years in medical, she worked in the field, academics, authored multiple medical books, wrote national allied health certification tests, and served on medical advisory boards.
Impressive, yet so vague.
While her own personal health took her away from this amazing path, it led her to an even better opportunity helping others realize how important it is to understand their own bodies and health.
Kim is the Mushroom and Da Worm Queen.
Let her know how she can help you.
I love the worked in Western medicine bit.
Obviously made Matthew laugh as well there.
I just know she uses the term allopathic at times.
Does she ever talk about what she actually did in Western medicine?
She doesn't.
Not that I could find.
And unfortunately, Kim Rogers isn't a super unique name, which makes searching for the multiple medical books she authored very challenging.
And while I haven't come across a video of her saying the term allopathic, she runs in the same circle as many influencers who often do.
Kim's claim to TikTok fame, and why she calls herself Da Worm Queen, is the parasite cleanse kit she sells, but that's not how her TikTok started.
I scrolled back to her very first video to follow her evolution, and Kim's TikTok started as a place where she'd mostly share videos about the log cabin she's building, along with content about homesteading, the mushrooms she was growing and presumably selling through her apothecary, and a sassy detox water.
Which, if you're curious, was just mint, ginger, lemon, and cucumber.
The mushrooms in particular did become a bigger focus.
What was the sassy part?
What was sassy about the detox water?
I literally have no idea.
She definitely didn't make up that combo though.
She says in the TikTok that it's for if you want a flatter belly, if you want to detox, or if you're on a parasite cleanse, which seem like very sassy activities.
So throwing in some fat phobia with the detox to really market it.
So that was her angle at the time.
Does she still use that flatter tummy language now around parasite cleanses?
Have you seen that?
She had a video where she shared about her own personal weight loss and she did attribute it to the parasite cleanse that she sells.
Kim's first mention of deworming was in July 2021 in a TikTok that currently has over 10 million views and over 700,000 likes.
The audio is pretty terrible, so I will give a brief synopsis.
She first starts by stating that she worked in the medical field for 18 years, gotta make sure that gets in, and immediately, you know, gives her some sort of authority to be speaking about this.
She claims there were dead carcasses everywhere that apparently came out of her skin and in her pee.
What caught my attention is when Kim mentions the supplement Paragard, which is, quote, the same thing everyone else is doing.
TikTok is a place where trends are born, or maybe intentionally created, and this Paragard Parasite Cleanse is one of them.
Here's some numbers.
On TikTok, hashtag Paragard has over 100 million views.
Hashtag Parasite Cleanse has over 325 million views.
But I don't think this happened totally by accident, because one of Hashtag Paragard videos that I watched, the creator, who has over 700,000 followers, said the company that owns Paragard reached out to her, said that they loved how she was talking about gut health, and they wanted to send her a product, which was Paragard.
And now this video, where she's talking about how she loves it, has 1.6 million views and over 200,000 likes.
Multiply this impact, carefully curated by the company's marketing team, over many influencer campaigns and you have a TikTok made-me-buy-it trend.
After Kim, the future Worm Queen, has her first brush with virality thanks to Paragard, her page becomes a regular spot for Parasite Clan's discussion.
And not even six months later, she's come out with her own supplement, Parify.
To cleanse the parasites you totally, definitely have, at least according to Kim, you only have to have $100, which is in US.
It's about $135 Canadian, which actually sounds like a good deal if you've got unresolved chronic issues.
TikTok is all but promising that this could be the cure.
Are we curious about what's in Kim's Parasite Cleanse Kit?
I definitely am.
So the kit has four products.
The first one is Parify, which she mentioned.
This is the main parasite cleanse.
It is made up of distilled water, green alcohol, raw honey, wormwood, black walnut hull, hawthorn berry, clove, and garlic.
The second product is called Sustain, which is the candida support, made up of, again, distilled water, grain alcohol, raw honey, Oregon grape root, usnea, and peppermint.
The third product is Metal Flush, which is the heavy metal detox, liver cleanse, and pain and mucus assistance, made up of distilled water, grain alcohol, raw honey, lungwort, burdock root, willow bark, cilantro, and dandelion root.
And the final product is called Cinnabon, which looks and sounds a lot like Cinnabon, but it's not.
That would be a parasite cleanse I would totally get on board for.
That sounds healthier than anything you've described so far.
And cheaper.
So cinnabin is a binder for Hexheimer-Herxheimer reactions, or die-off symptoms, made of Ceylon cinnamon, coconut-activated charcoal, and vegan capsules.
The first three are droppers, and then this one is a capsule.
Let me point out because my wife sent me a video the other day and then I sent it to you, Mallory.
This whole binder thing is another, we should probably do an episode down the line on binders because that's become its own thing.
So, not only now do you need supplements, you need supplements to make the supplements work.
It's just incredible.
The downline is just growing because every supplement needs it.
And what I actually love about it is that they could just say adjuvant Right?
Because that's what they use in vaccines to help certain of the elements of the vaccines work, but they would never use that term, so they've come up with binder.
Yeah and like I'm not a scientist I have no idea what it is or how it works but I never saw binder until recently and so I think it's something that's being tagged on it's like the supplements new best friend onto everything.
Yep.
So also on her website Kim has she sells a pre-cleansed drink and it's called A pre-binder!
You know, before you do the thing, you have to do the pre-thing.
It is a pre-cleansed drink mix.
It's called Gutty, and it apparently needs to be done before the Parify Kit to cleanse your colon, which sounds like something that should be done under the direction of a medical professional, but anyway.
That could just go back in infinite regress, right?
Like you could have a series of products that just, there would always be something that came before the thing that you were doing, and then probably always something that came after the thing that you were doing.
Yes.
This one, Gutty, is an extra $25, so it doesn't come with the kit.
So $25 for organic chia seeds, whole psyllium husk, bentonite clay, and coconut activated charcoal.
That's just laxative stuff, right?
Yep.
Yeah, right, okay.
Yeah, absolutely.
And then she also has a Fulvic Soak for $15, which is sold as a heavy metal detox to help assist with parasite die-offs.
It can apparently be used as a bath soak or foot soak.
It's not to be ingested.
There are TikToks suggesting on Kim's page that this soak makes parasites come out of your feet.
So, to your point, Matthew, I'm going to play a clip with Kevin Klatt talking about parasite cleanses now.
And I want to flag one thing that you just preempted there, that all of these cleanses contain some sort of laxative so that you feel it, quote unquote, working In your gut and intestines.
In the case of Paragard, it's slippery elm bark, which contains indigestible fiber, which acts as a laxative.
And it's also diuretic, so it'll make you pee as well.
And as I told him, we're going to run the full interview in a couple episodes, but I asked him at the end of it to talk about parasite cleanses because he also is big on TikTok, and Matthew and I get aneurysms when we go on TikTok.
Younger kids do it for us.
But I told him, I've done parasite cleanses, and I remember the intense pain.
This is like 15, 18 years ago when I was more into that world.
And I remember the intense pain that occurred.
And then you just shit for a long time.
And you're like, oh my god, it's working.
And it's the fucking laxative.
That's all it is.
So, Kevin, just to set the stage, Kevin Klatt is a registered dietitian as well as an assistant research scientist and instructor in the Department of Nutrition Sciences and Toxicology at the University of Berkeley.
He received his PhD in molecular nutrition from Cornell University and completed his dietetic internship at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center.
So notice, when people actually work in quote-unquote Western medicine, they list their credentials.
I want to point that out.
I met Kevin through our mutual friend, Dr. Danielle Bilardo, whose clinic he also works at on the side.
As I said, I did the full interview.
It'll drop in a few weeks.
But here's what he has to say about their efficacy and, as you're going to get into after this clip, Mallory, their marketing as well.
I get asked by patients, if you, Danielle Bilardo's podcast, Dr. Danielle Bilardo's podcast, Wellness Fact vs. Fiction, and Austin Chang on, who's also a physician and a gastroenterologist, and he tackled parasite cleanses, but you know, there's these claims out there, and unfortunately, like way too many pictures of people's poop with like something in it that they're claiming is a visible parasite that can be seen.
And of course, you know, it's attached to medicine doesn't know about this, we're all infected with parasites, it's hard to test for, but trust me, I know it's there, and I have the answer and the cure for it.
Which is like the most wash, rinse, repeat version of everything in wellness, of like, the problem everybody doesn't know about, and only I have the cure-all and the secret knowledge, but somehow all medicine doesn't.
And the moment you question that, it's like, well, big pharma doesn't want to sell cures.
It wants to sell treatments you have to be on for forever, which is kind of hilarious
because wiping out and controlling parasites and helminths and all sorts of other microorganisms
has been the goal of public health for the past couple hundred years.
And we've done it quite successfully.
But there's actually, there are, if you travel to parts of sub-Saharan Africa or some places
in the Middle East, you can potentially get a parasite from unclean water.
And there's robust ways to test it via their antigens in the blood or the parasite itself
or the egg of the parasite being in the urine or the feces.
And so if you suspect you have a parasite for some reason, please go see a doctor.
See a doctor, see a gastroenterologist or urologist, whatever your concern is related to, and there is testing for this kind of stuff.
Often they're so small you need to see them with a microscope too, and so people pointing to chunks of undetermined matter in their poop on the internet are really not all that trustworthy.
I know that sounds shocking.
This comes into diet, and the only reason I've had to even look into this is because there are all these parasite-cleansed diets where microorganisms eat sugar, and so if you go on a super low-carbohydrate diet, you will starve the parasite, all these kinds of claims, which is not true for so many reasons.
There's plenty of carbohydrate available in the in the environment.
It's the mucus of your gut lining, it's your blood sugar, it's structural proteins
and things that are around.
If you have a legit concern related to a parasite, please do not try and treat it with your diet.
And if you have a specific dietary concern, definitely check it
with your doctor and a dietitian, ideally to make sure it's done well and done appropriately.
I admit I did one like 18 years ago
probably because I was very much in that world.
And I remember pooping a lot.
And when I looked into the ingredients, some of them seemed to be laxatives.
Yeah.
Have you looked into the actual cleanses that are sold as vitamin supplementation to rid yourself of the parasites?
Yeah, oh it's almost always something to make you have diarrhea and push a massive amount of not only fecal matter out, what it's doing to your intestine, like nobody's really studied all that well, but it looks like sometimes people have pretty substantial undigested food matter in there, so whether there's like something that's sort of a pro-kinetic agent that's moving things along faster and they're not being digested as completely is less clear, but One thing I've always noticed, people show these things and nobody's taking tweezers and pulling it out and being like, look at this worm carcass that I just defecated out.
It's often just an obscure, strange-looking thing that could be anything from a food particle or something they implanted in there before they took their TikTok video.
You have really no idea.
A lot of these things are like a laxative tease that are out there to claim you to lose weight.
Very easy to put something in your GI tract that irritates the lining of the GI tract, causes contraction, then pushes a whole bunch of poop out, or pulls water into the GI tract, and then also puts more poop out.
And so, you know, if you want to go poop, just eat a high-fiber diet, and eat well, and talk to your doctor about it.
But these fancy cleanses and whatnot, The biggest problem with all of these things, and this may be a good final note, is that they end up being a distraction.
If you have legitimate problems, no one's trying to gaslight you and say that you're... no one should be trying to gaslight you and say your problems aren't real, but just because someone said they have a solution for a range of symptoms that sound like your problem doesn't mean... I mean, this is America, it's 2022, I don't know why we think the internet's honest, but like...
To really hit it home, a lot of these things are the fancy cure-alls are really not the cure-all that you want it to be and it's a lot of symptoms are so non-specific for conditions that it's easy to have say you have a claim for and list a bunch of symptoms that end up covering the symptoms that come with like a vast majority of the common conditions and even some rare conditions that people are afflicted by but that's TikTok is not a real medical workup.
It's not a real diagnostic.
If you're seeing worms wriggling in your poop, please don't listen to anything anybody's on TikTok saying.
Please go to some sort of physician rapidly.
So it seems like the ritual is that you take laxatives and diuretics, and then you read the turds like tea leaves.
And then you decide that you've purged unknown aliens.
And I just want to point out that it does seem to be a kind of end-of-the-world exercise in self-awareness in an age where it's very difficult to have an undistorted image of yourself.
This is something that you can really look at.
I think when you're looking at that turd, it's unfamiliar, it's a new landscape, it's telling you something about your inner life, and that probably has a lot of value.
But, I mean, one thing I noticed in looking at the sample TikToks that Mallory fed to us this week is that the vast majority of deworming influencers are They're extremely young and they're well-kept.
They're usually thin.
They're wearing clean, newish clothes.
They've got good hairstyling, good makeup.
And they're completely giddy over turds.
And that makes it feel like there's a real taboo being broken.
It feels very sort of like anal stage of development.
I mean, for those of you who have kids, you're gonna know that there's a point at around a year or so when they manage to get their hand down the back of a full diaper and they wind up staring like in fascination at their smeared hands.
And this all feels a little bit like that to me, which makes me think that I don't think this can have a lot of longevity as an activity.
So Mallory, I wanted to ask whether you have any sense about whether any of the worm people have been on this bullshit for more than a year or so?
Does it last?
Do they have longevity?
The worm people.
For those actually selling it, even the idea of it to boost their brand, this is definitely a topic that's grown over the past year, year and a bit maybe, at least based on what I've seen on TikTok, Instagram, now too.
That said, I'm sure there are wellness folks who have been keeping their parasites in check for years.
It's just, you know, it didn't have the power of TikTok behind it yet.
My business and marketing brain immediately thinks that you can only sell a detox for so long before it gets boring or people realize it's not living up to the hype, right?
Exactly, right.
And so eventually you need something new and shiny to keep selling products to keep your audience invested in constantly needing to heal something and you know more importantly to keep the money flowing.
So Matthew, I said, I've done, I believe it was Paragard or a like product from Zellers like 15, 16 years ago.
So at that time in the New York City yoga community, cleansing was a big part of the master cleanse.
There was a whole bunch of them.
So it's not new, this idea, but it has definitely reached a fever pitch over the last few months and year.
Well, in my case, I was very committed to the, you know, yoga or reconstructed yoga practices of shatkarma, which involved like, you know, a salt water cleanse and purgation and stuff like that.
But I don't think I could have sustained that as a personal interest for more than about a year.
I think I did it, you know, three or four times or something like that.
And it just didn't, you know, it's a very, like, provocative experience.
You get a lot of feelings.
You feel like you're doing something really incredible.
But the after effect is kind of sad trombones.
It's not really, you can't really tell what has happened.
And so the results just aren't really prominent.
They're not that attractive.
Yeah, I think there's like this cycling through of what is getting the most verbal traffic right now because that's where the money's gonna come from and so a lot of folks who maybe didn't think that parasites would ever become a part of their brand, they see that it's getting a lot of attention and they're like, oh, this would be like an easy buck if I start talking about it, if I start selling something.
Off of one round of customers, probably, because I don't, yeah, I just don't think that, I just don't think it's gonna capture people's passion for very long.
And like we've gotten this far and we haven't even talked about the symptoms of parasites or at least the symptom lists that are going around TikTok because that is where mostly women are self-diagnosing themselves before pulling out their credit cards.
Some of the most commonly discussed parasite symptoms across parasite clans TikTok are anxiety, digestive issues, skin issues like acne and eczema, grinding teeth, chronic issues that conventional medicine can't fix.
Muscle and joint pain, or as Kim alluded to at the top, an itchy rectum.
So, you know, like Kevin mentioned, symptoms that could be caused by a lot of different things.
But because those experiencing these symptoms could be desperate to resolve them, and Kim is so confident in her remote diagnosis, why not at least try the latest TikTok trend that everyone's talking about?
Especially when you keep seeing videos of women talking about the worms and carcasses they're apparently expelling.
And there is this big hype around it.
Will you see the worms or not?
Kim's website has a whole section dedicated to parasite pictures that we're expected to believe are one, real, and two, the result of her Parify kit.
She's also shared pictures on her TikTok, but doesn't seem to do that anymore because I guess TikTok was flagging the videos.
This shock value marketing works by Kim assigning a scary face to your health problems and she's priming you to believe that you'll see worms or see worms, but also shares that if you don't, it doesn't mean the cleanse isn't working.
And I love that part because it's both sides, right?
If you see them excellent, If you don't, you are being dewormed on the astral plane.
You are yanking gossamer tapeworms out of your better angel's butt, right?
Yeah, but like Kevin said, non-parasite matter could be interpreted as parasite matter, and all of a sudden you're singing your praises on TikTok about how this product works, you know, furthering the trend.
And much like other forms of misinformation that breed on TikTok, a lot of it comes down to folks wanting a simple answer for a complex problem.
And much like conspiracy theories, there's an element of, you know, privileged knowledge at play here too, right?
Like, I know parasites are the cause of all these health problems and now I need to wake everyone else up.
And this privileged knowledge piece is seen on Kim's TikTok because she actually does claim that parasites are the cause of most chronic illnesses.
What's a hill that you're willing to die on a thousand percent of the time?
Parasites and worms are a root cause of chronic illness and autoimmune.
Maybe not the only root cause, but it's a big one.
And Western medicine denies it.
You should be cleansing three to four times a year.
Other countries cleanse two times a year.
They have since birth.
But we do not.
We are in denial.
Did you like that little Western medicine denies it bit?
Yeah, that's great.
Now, does she mention anywhere what other countries or cultures she has in mind?
What's she talking about?
So Kim has a number of videos that she makes in response to a comment left on a previous video, which is very common, a very common thing to do on TikTok.
And the comment will be like, yeah, people in Mexico cleanse X number of times per year, or yeah, people in the Caribbean cleanse all the time.
And her video will just be her saying, see, you know, see, I told you, buy my kit.
And like, no point substantiating that with anything, right?
Random comment or confirmation is enough.
I want to point out, Matthew, that as I was cleaning up Mallory's clips that she sent, or making them from video to audio for this episode, I wasn't wearing headphones and my wife was in the room next door to us, to me, and she heard some of it and she was like, what the fuck are you listening to?
My partner did the same thing.
And the thing is, though, she always laughs because the comedian Ali Wong has this saying about fancy Asians and jungle Asians, right?
And the difference, which one you grew up in.
And Callan's always took to that because Callan's mother is from the border of Laos and Thailand in the Isan region.
Right.
Very much jungle Asian.
And she's like, you know, my family deals with this on a regular basis, like because of the environment and the food supply and the water and everything there.
So to hear these predominantly white Western women talk about this as if it's something that, you know, that is endemic across everyone is just complete nonsense.
Yeah.
Because her family actually experiences it and they don't do Yeah, so my partner was also tortured listening to me going through these TikToks as well.
And this one comment about, you know, people in Mexico, my partner's family is from Mexico.
And I said, do you cleanse?
And he's like, I've never heard of this before.
And I'm like, cool.
In other TikToks, Kim claims that you should be parasite-cleansing your autistic children and autistic teenagers, that you need to be cleansing if you let your dog lick your face or if you eat sushi, that parasites can leave toxic memories which can impact your mental health, and that Hives on your body after starting Parify are actually not hives.
They're parasites leaving through your skin.
And I won't play the clip, but someone actually made a TikTok saying that Kim bugged her for a year to start doing her parasite cleanse, which is weird.
We don't like that.
And then the woman said after taking it, she had what resembled hives all over her body, but Kim reassured her it was just parasites leaving her body.
Yeah, Mallory, one thing I appreciate about your social media feeds is that you call out companies directly when their ambassadors make medical claims.
And I have to say, this focus on gut health and autism, which I'm seeing more and more of recently, is really exploitative of parents with autistic children, and of course anyone with autism as well, as well as our understanding of autism and where we are with the research.
Selling unproven supplements is always problematic, but this one just really gets me in a different way.
Have you ever seen evidence of a company disciplining an ambassador for making such bullshit claims?
I personally haven't, and it's infuriating.
For context for the listeners, this is something I often do for multi-level marketing companies, which I've purposely left out of this episode because 1. it's too big to tackle, there's too much, and 2.
MLM promotion actually isn't allowed on TikTok.
Fun-ish fact, there is another parasite clans going around TikTok, preying on mothers specifically, and I think it is an MLM.
You know, we've sort of touched on this before in the podcast, but it really seems like there's nothing more ambivalent in New Age wellness than the autistic child or the idea of the autistic child, like they are really the green screen.
For every sort of panic but also idealization that that parents want to endow them with, you know, either they're born sacred and indigo or they are victimized by vaccine injury or they are highly sensitive or they're Intuitives.
Rarely, they are presented or talked about as though they're just people with unique qualities and perhaps personalities that we would do well to get to know.
But, you know, now what you're saying is there's another trend that suggests that autistic children must be crawling with worms, which is really gross.
And I think that to the extent that New Agers have body fascism going on, that they tend to be super concerned with, you know, with cleanliness, but they're also concerned with orderliness.
And often the whole sort of aesthetics of the presentation features this kind of And I think the truth is that, you know, neurodiverse children are just not made to conform.
You know, they are like neurocognitive anti-fascists.
And, you know, if people don't like that, they're going to try to purify them.
They're going to try to pathologize them first and then purify them.
It's really gross.
I have a second Instagram account where I follow conspiracy theorists and pseudoscience grifters and the Venn diagram with MLM distributors is almost a circle.
And there is unfortunately a lot of discussion about children and using the products on children.
And to your question, Derek, when I post about truly terrible and false claims distributors have made, I sometimes get a response from the company that is just a A copy and paste, you can report it here comment, which is such a bullshit response and makes me so mad because it basically confirms that the company will happily let distributors say whatever they need in order to sell the product and recruit more people until someone steps in and says, you know, excuse me, what the fuck are you doing?
And I'm happy to be that person and I want to be that person, but the times I have actually put the work in to report a distributor, nothing happens.
And so, sorry, I'll get off my MLM soapbox.
The crossover between, you know, pseudoscience and conspiracies and MLMs is probably the corner of this whole world that pisses me off the most.
So while Parasite Cleansing and the Parify Kit are not an MLM, Kim is really smart at marketing on TikTok.
I think she's got a group of high follower count influencers in her marketing strategy because I've seen a few who regularly talk about the Parify Kit and who conveniently also have a discount code to share with their allopathic-medicine-is-corrupt-leaning followers.
Here's one example that also suggests Parasite Cleansing helps with your spiritual journey.
We're in a time right now where a lot of truth and lies are being spread everywhere about everything and everyone.
I mean, you guys have probably heard all the lies and rumors about me that are completely all false allegations.
But it really happens to anyone.
Like my dear friend Miss Rogers Hood here, who is constantly being banned for misinformation.
For telling people that we should be deworming because we are full of parasites on the inside.
We're literally one of the very, very few countries, if not the only country, that doesn't deworm.
And you know our FDA is corrupt, so you know that food that we're eating is full of fucking worms and parasites.
So thankfully, enough time has passed where more people have awakened and realized that she actually was telling the truth, and that it wasn't misinformation.
To quote the famous Justin Bobby, truth in time tells all.
So now that word is getting around, a lot of people are starting to get deworming kits.
Deworming really, really helps with your whole spiritual journey to cleanse your body, really clear out all those toxins.
So of course, I had to get you guys a discount.
If you guys click the link in my link tree, it is the first one up there.
Get your deworming kit today because Lord knows we need it.
The FDA is corrupt.
I got you a discount.
Apparently, when there's little or no evidence to support meaningful claims, just say your supplement is for those on a spiritual journey.
Kim also has a TikTok claiming that her intuition is stronger since cleansing and that if you're ready to enter 5D, Parify is the cleanse for you.
Watch Kim's TikTok long enough and you'll see that her overarching message is that everyone should be parasite cleansing and so isn't it so convenient that she sells a $100 kit just for that?
It is very unlikely that most of the women doing a parasite cleanse because of TikTok actually have parasites, but parasites do obviously exist.
Pivoting for a moment to reference the CDC, quote, neglected tropical diseases affect 1 billion
people worldwide, largely in rural areas of low-income countries, end quote. They then have
a section specifically for parasitic infections in the United States that says, quote, anyone can
become infected although certain racial and ethnic minority groups, persons born outside of the
United States, and people with lower incomes appear to be most at risk, end quote.
Which is a much different picture than what's painted on TikTok.
And that's probably because if someone like Kim referenced what's on the CDC, she might put herself out of business.
Because nowhere does the CDC say that parasites should be diagnosed and treated via TikTok content creators and business owners.
Yeah.
So basically, if you suspect you have a parasite, Talk to your doctor so you can be properly diagnosed and treated.
I spent quite possibly an unhealthy amount of time watching Parasite Cleanse TikToks and under hashtag Parasite Cleanse it is also a lot of women sharing their experience so they're not trying to sell anything necessarily they're just adding to the trend and I did come across a video of a woman talking about her own parasite journey and the caption to her TikTok was just I don't know.
Immediately made me think of exorcisms.
Like, investing a lot to rid your body of something it probably doesn't have, and you have to trust this authority figure making grand claims.
I think it's a great observation and I think there's something to it because I'm willing to bet there's somewhere a satanic panic and deworming overlap.
Julian and I did a whole piece on The Exorcist in 1977 and its reactionary stance towards medicine and psychiatry.
So, we're going on 50 years of popularizing human bodies, especially white female human bodies being possessed by worms or lizards.
But, Mallory, I mean, do you feel that you ever need to deworm from TikTok?
And, you know, when you do, why do you use turmeric?
I recently started taking drumming lessons, and that's my TikTok detox protocol.
Well, that's awesome.
I mean, I can kind of see that being effective against what I see as the claustrophobia of this medium.
That's mostly what I feel in the format.
There's this really compressed timing of everything.
There's this tight, overlapping edit-cut structure so that sentences begin over the endings of previous sentences.
It's like an amplification app for, you know, being trapped in the corner at a party by somebody who's on coke.
And, you know, even light language TikTok was like this from your last presentation.
It's almost like the task is to fill up every pixel of space so that you are entirely passive as the consumer.
That's a really great way to describe it.
I'll even say I'm guilty of it, too, because when you're making a TikTok, you have to think about, like, how do I convince somebody in a split second to watch my video before they scroll on to the next one?
And so it's like shoving as much information as you can into as little time as possible and maybe saying something that's very, like, bait-y and makes someone curious, it hooks them.
And so I think that's The nature of the app and stitching over like cutting over words is just a part of it and so that's very like TikTok and now Instagram specific like you might never ever see that on a place like YouTube.
Does TikTok actually do the overlapping words for you as you make the various cuts or do you have to do that yourself?
You do it yourself, yeah, and so you can.
There is an option to have TikTok time things a certain way, but typically you're, as the creator, are in control of how your pieces are stitched together.
But the pressure is to just be fast.
Really, really fast.
Yeah, and with TikToks, like when you are creating one, there's an option for 15 seconds, 60 seconds, or three minutes.
And obviously you can make it any length you want, but those are the options.
And so if you're picking one that's 15 seconds, you know, what can you do in 15 seconds?
How quick can you make your point?
Even 60 seconds when I'm making one seems like almost not enough time, but I have to really drive it home.
But yeah, that's a really great observation and a great way to describe it.
When it comes to marketing on social media, people don't typically like to feel like they're being directly advertised to, especially on places like TikTok where authenticity is what sells.
So then there's this new kind of promotional influence or strategy born that I like to call, from the goodness of my own heart, marketing.
Basically, Kim is selling first the problem and then the solution that she profits off.
Her first video on doing a parasite cleanse has over 10 million views.
It went viral.
So she knew that this was a topic getting a lot of traffic.
She also saw how many people were buying into parasite cleanse supplements because she also bought into it.
If Kim can convince people that parasites are a major issue and they're the root cause of chronic illness and Western medicine is denying it, when she comes out with a product for sale, it seems like she's doing it from the goodness of her own heart and not from her wallet.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
This from-the-goodness-of-my-own-heart marketing is especially amplified when Kim stitches videos from other creators who are sharing their chronic issues and illnesses, and she wants to gift them a Parify kit, seemingly diagnosing them from afar.
And for me, this is where it gets kind of dark, right?
Like, her website has the legal, this is not medical advice statement because it has to, but on TikTok, she's literally putting a spotlight on strangers who are suffering through something and telling them that all they need is to parasite cleanse and she's going to send them this kit that she just so happens to sell.
And if they're not suffering from something, she's going to try to convince you that you are.
All that's happened is Kim leveraged their vulnerability to promote her products.
And for me, that's gross and unethical marketing.
And if they're not suffering from something, she's going to try to convince you that you are.
That's part of the game too.
Yeah, like, are you bloated?
Parasites.
Do you have acne?
Parasites.
Like, it's these very vague things that, like, a lot of people suffer from, um, or, like, have.
At best, all of this is manipulative influencer marketing, and at worst, it's a scam that's also a health risk.
TikTok snake oil is actually worm oil.
Thank you, everyone, for listening to another episode of Conspirituality Podcast.
Join us again next week when we'll feature Julian's interview with Francesca Tripodi.
