I always used to pretend my Kraft Macaroni and Cheese was made of worms — it made dinner time twice as fun and drove my sister nuts. But the massive conglomerate Kraft Foods has taken my childhood clowning in the opposite direction: They're working on a food product that kills intestinal worms while being cheesy and delicious.
Kraft Foods hasn't announced what form the the food will take, but they confirmed that it contains deworming chemicals developed by TyraTech, a company that develops "safe pesticides." The chemicals are derived from plant oils, and though TyraTech's CEO wouldn't say which plants they came from, he compared the chemical's power to citronella oil's ability to repel mosquitos.
It won't be sold in the U.S., but instead will be marketed to rural Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where parasitic worms often "leave millions of children lethargic, dangerously anemic and, sometimes, passing blood."
The oils work by overstimulating three olfactory and central nervous system receptors present only in invertebrates; this overstimulation leads to wave after wave of unstoppable impulses, which eventually overwhelms the parasites and repels or kills them. Vertebrates lack these receptors and are safe from the effects.
Continue reading 'Kraft Mac n' Cheese — now with 100% more worm-killing power!' >
When I was growing up, we nicknamed my mom 'Gaia' because we joked that she could feel when a tree died in the woods. When we passed construction sites, she winced in pain at all the trees cut down to make room for another Ass-O-Mart. By contrast, my father, polymer chemist to the oil industry, would ask "What have trees ever done for us?"
