why is it that when you eat something with a tapeworm , the tape worm doesn’t die?
They have a skin/cuticle that’s resistant to being digested by the host - in fact, it’s not all that much of a stretch to think of a tapeworm’s outside as being like your own insides - they have no mouths or digestive systems - they absorb nutrients through their skin.
So tapeworms don’t get digested for the same sort of reason that you don’t digest your own initestines from the inside out.
Keep in mind that you don’t actually swallow a long, living worm-like object. You swallow a sort of egg-like object - cyst, perhaps? I forget what the technical term is. It doesn’t hatch and start growing in your system until the intestine.