We’ve entered March and, if the UK Met Office is to believed, it’s spring. If only the mercury in the thermometer agreed.

Be that as it may, in spring two things traditionally happen:

  1. A young man’s fancy turns to love
  2. We spring clean our homes. Cue much de-cluttering and sweeping away of winter’s dust and cobwebs.

But it’s a good time to think about digestive de-cluttering along with getting rid of the unwanted guests from our system.

Parasites
Did you know there are more than 100 kinds of human parasites?

They can be microscopic in size or grow up to 40 cm long – e.g. the Ascaris/Giant roundworm. If they take up residence in your body, they steal precious nutrients from your system while intoxicating it with its faeces. Yuk!

Why anybody would allow such guests in their home? As William Morris said: ‘Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.’

So follow your gut instinct and evict the unwelcome guests squatting in your digestive tract.

But I don’t have them!
Unfortunately a parasitic infestation is not always so obvious as you might hope and imagine.

While there are easily recogni-itchy-able symptoms for pinworm infestation, other kinds can behave rather differently and cause other symptoms.

For example, a roundworm infestation might manifest itself with a cough and throat pain. How come? Well because the roundworm larvae travels, via the blood stream, through the liver and onto the heart and lungs where it moulds. It rests there for a while before moving to the throat where it’s coughed up, swallowed and returned to the intestines to grow and take advantage of your hospitality. The roundworm can produce as many as 200,000 eggs per day for a year. A fertilised egg can live up to 10 years in soil and still be infectious.

There’s a common belief that if you’ve got a parasite infection, you’ll see the worms in your stool. Well yes, that’s true – in individuals infected with parasites for a prolonged period. And when that’s happened the parasites might well have left the guts and be living it up in your liver or having a jolly time in your joints.

This is rare though right?
Hmmm – you’d think so wouldn’t you? But:

• 20% of the human population is infested with roundworm as described above. [1]
• 5-10% of the population is a host for blastocystosis which is responsible for many cases of IBS, chronic fatigue and digestive issues [2]
• One third of individuals with pinworm infection are totally asymptomatic. [3]

Until you perform stool tests designed to detect parasitic infection or you have just completed a parasite detox programme you simply can’t be sure.

The toxins released into the bloodstream by these squatters can manifest themselves in ways you might not associate with a parasitic infestation.

If you’ve got symptoms that appear unrelated and are otherwise unexplained it’s just possible that the culprit is a parasite. The symptoms may last for weeks and return several times a year.

12 Signs that you may have got the house-guests from hell

  1. You’ve travelled abroad and had diarrhoea or dysentery.
  2. You’ve had a food poisoning episode and your digestion has not been right since.
  3. Unexplained constipation, diarrhoea, wind or other IBS symptoms.
  4. You can’t get to sleep or you have disturbed sleep.
  5. Skin irritations and unexplained rashes such as rosacea, hives and eczema.
  6. Nocturnal teeth grinding.
  7. Muscular and joint aches and pains
  8. You’re knackered all the time! You feel low and apathetic. Or perhaps anxious and irritable for no explicable reason.
  9. A diagnosis of iron-deficiency anaemia.
  10. You eat but never feel full.
  11. Strong cravings for sugary and processed foods.
  12. Asthma and other respiratory conditions.

How to get rid of your unwelcome guests

Step one: dietary adjustments

Cutting out or severely restricting your intake of sugar and grains is a good starting point.

Then look at foods that have anti-parasitic effects while boosting immunity and being anti-bacterial: pumpkin seeds, papaya juice, herbs such as oregano and ginger, and onions and garlic. The latter also being useful if vampires are a nuisance in your neighbourhood.

Step two: herbal help

Black walnuts are well known as a parasite expeller. Beyond that though they’re a powerful anti-bacterial and anti-viral agent. Hand-in-hand with that is their ability to clean the intestines. Effective on their own, black walnut has a useful symbiotic relationship with wormwood and ground cloves.

Cloves contain a compound called eugenol. Eugenol can create an inhospitable gut environment to harmful organisms.

Wormwood, something you might know better as absinthe, contains two digestive bitters renowned as slayers of parasites.

All these herbs have been known and used since ancient times to fight parasite infestations. The Ancient Greeks called wormwood Artemisia after the goddess of the hunt, Artemis. For at least 2000 years the Chinese have used cloves and Pliny the Elder described the properties of black walnut in the 1st century AD.

Here at Health4All we’ve prepared a special set of all these herbs.

In convenient capsules, they’re tasteless and odourless. They’re a great first choice herbal supplement for all those who’d like to use natural products to detox their intestines from parasites.

References:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parasites_of_humans
[2] http://allergymedicaluk.com/conditions/immune-problems/blastocystis-hominis-and-dientamoeba-fragilis/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinworm_infection

 

 

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