Not all parasites or mutualistic symbionts are good for you.

For instance Taenia solium has been linked to epilepsy in adolescents in the third world, and any parasite/mutualist that has an organism other than humans as its definitive host has the possibility of mis migration.

It is also the organism infamous for all the enviroporn to do with parasite mis migration on channels like Discovery, National Geographic, etc. They end up in your head, and other places, when things go wrong.

So Taenia solium , pig tapeworm, is to be avoided at all costs, as one example.

Iron is really hard to metabolise, so I am not sure most of that would end up in our bodies from eating a lot of meat.

But even if it did the iron loss to hookworm is so trivial, unless you have a really big population, which generally does not happen. So because it is relatively rare I doubt that would cause an adaptation in humans. The circumstances of such a large infection are so rare it would not exert any evolutionary pressure on us.

Some people with Hemochromatosis have contacted us to get hookworm, but again the blood loss is not enough to produce benefits in those folks.

This is what I was trying to get at. Which species of parasites have humans as their definitive commensal hosts and which animals do humans eat to get these beneficial mutuals?

Too numerous to tell, we still have not even surveyed the human body to know precisely how many can. I often fantasise about getting a research grant so I can go around the world with an endoscope and survey/assay the contents of various peoples' digestive tracts so we can capture what lives there before modern life wipes them all out. But once that survey was done it would take a team of hundreds decades to identify every organism I found. The survey would be every foot so along the length of the intestinal tract, starting in the mouth and ending at the anus.

Hey, it floats my boat.

If you are thinking only of worms, I would then have to ask "just of the intestines, or of tissue and blood?" For instance filariasis, the mosquito transmitted helminth that lives in our blood stream and lymph system itself is parasitised by a fungus. It is that fungus that causes the human disease elephantiasis.

Symbionts are endlessly fascinating, but it will be centuries before they are all identified and understood.

I read the link, but I think the concept is taken too far.

Eating raw foods does increase the chances of infection with parasites, I think if you live in the industrialised world though your risk is substantially reduced by organisations like the USDA, who require testing and management of the whole food production chain to avoid disease transmission.

Look at the guy living in the Far East who has tapeworm, he would have been very unlikely to have gotten that from beef raised in the US eaten raw, and it would be absolutely impossible to catch it from beef raised anywhere that was completely cooked.

That is not me saying I think the USDA, etc., are uniformly good. Or that I think eating raw food is bad. I eat a lot of raw food, including flesh.

But if you lived in the bush in Africa or South East Asia you would undoubtedly have parasites, where instinctive eating is far more common than anywhere in the industrialised world after all. Your lifetime exposure growing up in the tropics in 3rd world conditions, even palaeolithic conditions, would include multiple concurrent infections with helminths, protozoa, bacteria, fungi and viruses. All derived from food or drink. But I also don't think that is necessarily a bad thing.

The issue with parasites is one of type and degree. The CDC recommends US doctors not treat light infections of various helminths, including hookworm (see graphic). But 67,000 people (estimated) die from infection with too many hookworm globally, each year. Are hookworm bad or good? Depends on the circumstances.

Just as you depend on water for life you can die from drinking too much. Nothing like this is as cut and dried, or as black and white, as a simple yes or no "this is good/bad". Life in everything it is a matter of degree and circumstance.

Referring to hookworm again, if you are malnourished and anaemic, you are as a result much more vulnerable to hookworm. You will be able to tolerate far fewer before developing anaemia, the only disease they cause. They feed on blood (0.01-0.03 ml/day per adult N. Americanus) and are approximately 1cm long and 0.5 mm wide. I host about 300 and do not take iron supplements, and am not anaemic.

For the same reason pregnant women are more vulnerable, because they have to produce blood, increasing in volume, for them and for the foetus and supporting tissue throughout pregnancy.

So a "light" infection in a well-fed Western man may not be in a malnourished 3rd-world expectant mother.

I don't agree with the idea that instinctive eating would either help one avoid, or kill, parasites.

All you have to do is look at the third world, what could be more instinctive than a tribe in the Amazon living as their ancestors did? All will have more than one helminth, throughout their lives, as well as various species of protozoa. Also changing throughout their lives, bacteria, etc.

But the issue is not whether parasites are going to get you if you eat raw food, it is whether the parasite you acquire is bad for you, or bad for you in large numbers. Note: One should be particularly wary of acquiring parasites with various animals, not humans, as their definitive host. In those cases mis migration is possible.

For a start most organisms commonly described as parasites are not strictly parasites. A parasite is a class of symbiont, as are commensal and mutualist symbionts. Parasite is a word that has come to mean much more, nothing about it being good, than the original meaning. So people do not think dispassionately or objectively about them. They are just "bad", and that misconception informs both points of view in that post.

Secondly some of those organisms now classified as parasites by scientists, based on a very old, and incomplete, understanding of what they do, such as hookworm, should not now be classified as parasites. They should be classified as mutualist. This is because instead of simply deriving food and a living environment from humans it is now clear they provide certain benefits in return. A parasite is any organism that derives benefits at the expense of another, the host, without providing any benefit in return. A mutualist derives and provides benefits to it's associated organism.

Humans by this definition are parasites, of cows for instance. In fact by one estimate I read, which almost certainly did not include humans in its number, 70% of species are parasites.

But, it is much easier to write an article or headline calling something a parasite, a word everyone "understands", than to write about mutualists, and then have to explain why the readers are mistaken in their understanding of the word parasite.

I will leave it at that.

What parasites a person would expect to host, ignoring bacteria, would vary tremendously based on soil types, rainfall, host genetics, food gathering or farming practices, climate, etc.

But in a lifetime it was typical to be constantly infected with a variety of helminths and protozoa. There was an interesting, if speculative, paper positing that the rise in colorectal cancer was linked to clean drinking water, specifically the elimination of the protozoa Eimeria. It was just epidemiological evidence but it was compelling.

Basically the numbers and variety of parasitic, commensal and mutualist symbionts we are exposed to, the most important probably being in childhood, have been substantially reduced. We are also no longer required to "tough it out" with infections, antibiotics have put paid to that. So that even non-lethal infections are not allowed to run their course.

Then there are all the vaccines, the number given before age six routinely in the US is ridiculous already (Chicken pox, really?) and set to DOUBLE in the next decade or so. And these are mandatory. When my kids were in school you could refuse for religious reasons (in my opinion superstition) but not on the basis of reason or science... That is your kid would be excluded from school if you did not get them all the shots, including chicken pox.

Then there are all the lame ads for hand sanitisers, etc.

The irony is that while everyone worries about the "environment" as something over there and separate from them, natural selection through the destruction of our personal ecosystems is already sickening and shortening the lives of literally hundreds of millions of people world wide. People who represent the very latest genetic model, in Palaeolithic terms.

Crohn's, UC and Coeliac disease have all been shown to arise out of polymorphisms that have been shaped by coevolution with parasites, and in particular helminths for instance. People are getting sick because they are so well adapted to parasites, but the immuno modulatory effect is absent, because they are.

Obviously I could go on all day. 

I've got "fully natural hair", if you want to see what that looks like. Haven't brushed/combed my hair in almost two years and rarely wash it. Definitely lacking in facial hair because of my health and low testosterone, though.

bummer, but it could just be youth and a relatively hairless face. I have friends with little facial hair, and am jealous. I hate shaving, and the disposable industry providing hideously overpriced razors and blades. I used a straight razor for years, but when I left the US carrying a whetstone, strap and straight razor could not be justified. The backpack was too small and I did not want to carry anything I did not absolutely need.

We left on foot, for Mexico, via Tijuana. No border control entering Mexico there.

A tip.

I have tapeworms. live proglotids in my poop from time to time.
But I'm still on the fence whether I should get rid of it now or wait later.
Probably the raw beef I eat here is where I got it.

If you live in the US I am surprised, I thought tapeworm had been eliminated except for pockets in Africa and bits of the Far East.

If I drug them and they go away for a while, a reinfection is assured anyway.
So why not just keep my little tapeworm friend for a while?

I considered tapeworm for my immunological problems, but rejected them as too large and too consumptive of calories. But for immune modulation I would bet they have no equal just because of their size. All that mass and contact with our tissues, they have to secrete anti inflammatory molecules along their length.

Any changes to your skin, hayfever, or whatever. I am curious.

Did you know a grown beef tapeworm consumes up to 30% of your caloric intake?

I really am uncomfortable discussing it in public, for what I hope are obvious reasons. But in short:

I did not fancy my odds because they classified them as an Investigational New Drug, a pharmaceutical.

Add in interstate commerce, medical claims (we published survey results to show, well, results), deliberately infecting people with a "disease", see AIDS related laws about deliberate infection, which are written broadly, etc., etc., etc.

Now they refuse to tell my lawyer anything.

Add in a hostile ex, plus the fact that children cannot travel abroad without permission of both parents.

Then there are all the stories of the FDA essentially abducting people they want from abroad, and you get a nervous person.
http://www.naturalnews.com/027750_Greg_Caton_FDA.html

If you are naive then I was too.

Serious.

Not only that but they refuse to tell my attorney what the charges are, a sealed warrant "if there are any" and "he will have to return to the US to talk to us in person if he wants to know what the charges are".

The only side effect was when the FDA visited me, classified them as an Investigational New Drug and I had to leave my home of 23 years and my children permanently. I now live outside the US, never to return. It is pretty weird.

Hookworm cause no pathology and the CDC actually recommends US doctors not treat light infections, which is all anyone needs.

Thank you, Federal Government.