Are Parasites Eating Your Collagen? Are “Age Spots” Toxic Waste Dumps? (Part 2)
Contaminated water from a house with a broken water heater made me sick & fat & ruined my skin. I worked with an AI chatbot to reverse-engineer the cure. At the end of this series, I'll share the exact protocol that's working for me and why I think it works.
This is Part 2 of a 6‑part series on my current working theories about parasites, bacteria, heavy metals, fluoride, biofilms, and how they cause aging. These are hypotheses I’m actively exploring in real time via biohacking, not medical advice or proven facts. I’m sharing my thinking process, experiments, and results as I go so you can decide what resonates and do your own research.
In Part 1 of Are Parasites Eating Your Collagen?, I shared how one year in a house with contaminated water seemed to age me almost overnight—sudden weight gain, new cellulite, bigger pores, and “age spots” that showed up out of nowhere.
In this article, we're going to talk about age spots and cellulite.
What if age spots are not actually from aging but are actually from parasites? This is just a theory at this point but I honestly think this makes a lot more sense than the idea that we are just getting old. I'll explain my thinking in this article.
And what if cellulite is just damaged collagen? Fascia, which is the layer of skin that covers your fat, is what the fat "pops through" and causes a dimpled appearance. Even skinny people have cellulite – so it isn't about being fat or obese. It's about damaged fascia that needs to be repaired/strengthened.
What If Skin Can Naturally Repair Itself When It Is Not Being Constantly Attacked?
If cells constantly regenerate (and they do) then this explains why we can heal and repair our skin from the inside out.
But it also explains why consuming more collagen is not enough if we have an internal population of parasites who are damaging our skin from the inside. We gotta kill those suckers if we want to repair our skin.
Perhaps aging is really just parasites and heavy metals! Detox to the rescue... I will talk about solutions at the the end of the series (Parts 5 and 6) – so keep reading.
Are These "Age" Spots or Toxic Waste Dumps?
After living in the rental house with contaminated water for a year, I had obvious “age” spots on my face. I never had these before. They really got bad over a short period of time.
A dermatologist would call these seborrheic keratoses—"barnacles of aging."
But I kept thinking:
- I didn't have them before that house.
- They appeared during that exact year.
So I asked Chat GPT:
What if these "age spots" aren't really "age" spots? What if they are caused by toxins in the deeper layers of my skin? What if they showed up and are being pushed out because my water was contaminated? We know the skin is a detoxification pathway – so what if the spots are actually signs that I'm trying to detox the toxins I'm being exposed to?
The answer described my situation as a perfect storm.
The rental house I was living in had a number of things that were malfunctioning, which caused the contaminated water:
- A water heater that never reached temperatures high enough to kill microbes properly.
- Standing water in the broken dishwasher – colonies of bacteria and fungi coating dishes – which were ending up inside me.
My skin was working overtime trying to detox all this crud.
Those clusters on my face – what looked like "age spots" – what if they were actually waste dumps, containment sacs where metals, microbial waste, and other toxins are being pushed out through the skin?
That framework fit exactly with how and when these spots appeared on my face.
The Skin as Lawn Analogy
Almost everyone thinks of skin problems including age spots and enlarged pores, wrinkles and sagging skin, as “aging." I used to think so, too.
But what if it's something else? What if it's just signs of an unhealthy terrain?
What if the problem isn’t just that our skin is “getting older”?
What if something is actually living in the terrain—down in the hair follicles and sebaceous oil glands—feeding on the oily and cellular material that’s supposed to keep skin soft, supple, and protected?
Enter the Skin Mite
Demodex mites, or skin mites, are tiny parasites that live in “hair follicles and sebaceous glands” and feed on “sebum” (the body's natural oil) and cells in that environment.
What? They are eating our skin's oil and cells? Yes!
"Once in the skin, Demodex brevis feeds off sebum in the oil glands. These glands are attached to hair follicles underneath the skin’s surface." (Source: Cleveland Clinic Healthline PMC review)
Yuck! That's right – these creatures are literally feeding on our sebum.
What is Sebum?
Sebum the body's natural oil. Sebum is made in the sebaceous glands, released into the follicles, and then carried up onto the surface of the skin, where it helps protect the barrier, reduce water loss, and support the skin’s natural defenses. (Source: NIH/PMC: Aging in the sebaceous gland)
So if these mites are living in that follicle-and-gland system, feeding on sebum and the cellular material around them, they’re not just sitting harmlessly on top of the skin.
Thee parasites are living inside the very machinery that helps keep the terrain healthy – and these little buggers are gumming up the works.
Get Off My Lawn!
The more I researched mites, microbes, sebum, collagen, and waste, the less I saw a normal aging process and the more I saw a lawn under attack.
Collagen exists deeper in the dermis (skin layers), but sebum helps protect the terrain above it. By supporting the skin barrier and helping the skin hold moisture, sebum creates a healthier environment for the deeper collagen-rich structure to stay resilient.
Elastin and collagen are part of the deeper dermal support structure, while sebum mainly supports the surface barrier and moisture balance. (Source: Cleveland Clinic on elastin Clinical Relevance of Elastin in the Structure and Function of Skin)
So if something is interfering with the skin’s oils, inflaming the tissue, and chronically irritating the follicle environment, it makes sense that the whole terrain would, over time, start to dry out, weaken, and break down from the top down and the inside out.
Run Don't Walk to Tractor Supply
We're gonna get to the solutions in parts 5 and 6 of this series so stay tuned... but just to give you a quick heads up because you're probably freaked out right now...
YES you can treat these creepy crawlers with that good old "horse paste" – you know, the one they didn't let us talk about back in 2021 – you can get at the Tractor Supply. (Source: Demodex on Wikipedia)
This is the one I get at Tractor Supply – you can use a plastic syringe or a steak knife to get it out.
Dried, Wrinkled Crepey Skin
Suddenly, dried-out skin, crepey skin, rough texture, wrinkles, enlarged pores, and strange discolored patches make sense.
They start to look like the visible surface of a deeper infestation. If microscopic parasites are consuming our sebum and the glands that make the sebum, you can imagine that your skin would start to dry out over time.
In addition to that, the tissue is being irritated, the collagen-rich support structure underneath is getting damaged, and the waste from that whole process is getting pushed back up through the pores in an effort to detoxify.
YUCK!
And remember, these parasites LAY EGGS. So they are continually repopulating.
What Parasites Do to the “Grass”
When parasites, mites, and their biofilms live in this lawn long enough, they destroy high‑quality collagen — the strong “grass roots” that hold everything together.
The parasites start to melt the underlying netting (fascia) that keeps fat, fluid, and tissue in place. Over time, it's only logical that they will leave behind holes and weak spots in the structure.
The body is always trying to repair itself. It hates empty holes, so it does the only thing it can: it tries to patch them.
As the parasites destroy your high‑quality collagen, the body patches the holes with low‑quality fibrosis or keratin—thicker, tougher, but not truly functional tissue.
On the surface, this can look like barnacle spots, rough plaques, scar‑like areas, and strange bumps. What I think of as “keratin vaults” the body built around nests and waste.
So you don’t just get a thin lawn; you get a lawn with weird, crusty patches where the body tried to wall off the damage.
Is Cellulite Just Collagen Damaged by Parasites?
If parasites are chronically damaging collagen, the cellulite picture fits really easily into my lawn model.
When I look at cellulite through this lens, I no longer see cellulite as caused by obesity. It is clear to me that the collagen net under the skin has been damaged and weakened over time.
If parasites and microbes are living in that terrain – feeding on oils, proteins, and cells, secreting enzymes, and dumping waste – they’re not politely sitting on top of the net. They’re irritating and breaking it down, the same way bugs and weeds slowly destroy the root system in a lawn.
In a healthy thigh, the collagen “mesh” under the skin holds fat and fluid in a smooth, even layer — like thick, dense grass with strong roots.
But if that mesh is constantly under attack — by enzymes, toxins, and chronic inflammation from parasites and microbes — you get frayed, thinned, and broken strands of collagen.
Now, instead of a tight net, you have gaps and weak spots. Fat bulges up through those gaps in little pockets. On the surface, that shows up as the classic dimples and uneven "cottage cheese" texture we call cellulite.
So in this model, cellulite isn’t caused by being "fat” or “bad genetics.” Cellulite is what parasite‑damaged turf looks like in 3D.
The organisms living in that collagen layer may be using your proteins and lipids as a resource, constantly irritating and dissolving the structure, while your body does frantic patch jobs instead of true repair.
The result: a lumpy, buckled “ground” where the collagen net has been chewed through and the lawn can’t grow back thick and smooth.
Could Parasites Also Cause Hair Loss & Thinning?
Yes, parasites can cause hair loss and thinning. Not just on your head but also on your eyelashes and eyebrows, which is common as we age.
Demodex mites do cause hair loss. They call it mange in animals.
Could Killing Parasites Make Us Look Younger?
I can't stop asking the obvious question: if parasites and mites can damage the terrain of the skin, dry it out by consuming the sebum, destroy collagen, create cellulite, and even slow hair growth and cause hair loss, then what happens when you start killing them?
What if looking older isn’t just about “aging” at all? What if part of what we call aging is really the visible damage left behind by parasites? And what if cleaning up the terrain can help the body do what it already knows how to do – repair, rebuild, and regenerate?
Once I started seeing cellulite, thinning hair, wrinkles, and sagging skin through this lens, the next question became impossible to ignore: what are these organisms actually doing inside us? Are they just irritating the terrain—or are they literally living off our collagen, fascia, and connective tissue while using our stored metals to build stronger nests?
That question changed everything for me. Because if parasites are not just sitting on the surface, but feeding on the very proteins that hold us together, then aging starts to look a lot less like a mystery and a lot more like an invasion.
In Part 3 of this series, we're going to delve deeper into this concept: how parasites may be consuming our collagen and connective tissue, how fluoride and heavy metals may be helping them fortify their nests, and why biofilms may be the hidden reason – the missing link – that's making this whole thing is so hard to clean up.
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