Jenny Hills, Nutritionist & Medical Writer, I call bullshit.

It seems possible, at least, that Jenny Hills, Nutritionist and Medical Writer for healthyandnaturalworld.com simply throws together text and misrepresents its credibility in order to ultimately win web traffic to earn advertising revenue.

This writer may possibly be a peddler of click-bait and bullshit which, in this case, is also bad health advice. This is one example of the many (many) people who are killing the web, the most intellectually enriching technology ever invented, reduced to this. Shame on you!

In the text, ‘Scientific studies‘ links to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6051571/ which is indeed a reputable source of information.

However, this linked study clearly does not support the claim made by Nutritionist and Medical Writer Jenny Hills, as we can see by reading the conclusions: –

In conclusion, chewing an apple does not necessarily have a mechanical plaque removal effect. In fact, there is an immediate increase in the tooth surface stained by the plaque-disclosing agent, although this is probably because the fruit contains some component able to adhere to the tooth surface and that stains with erythrosine. Apple produces an immediate reduction in salivary bacterial vitality, similar to that achieved with tooth brushing. In terms of plaque index and bacterial vitality, apple is associated with greater plaque regrowth than tooth brushing over a period of at least 24 hours.

This is astonishingly at odds with with the claim in the article. Eating an apple does not seem to do your teeth any good at all.

To avoid this kind of nonsense on the web, I suggest installing uBlock Origin to your web browser (use Firefox if your browser doesn’t support this plugin).

This will tell you, on every site you visit, how many advertising and tracking links were blocked. Higher numbers typically correlate with click-bait content. Any number with double digits is a strong signal of bullshit.

An article from healthyandnaturalworld.com yielded 50 hits by uBlock Origin.

The article that I refer to is: – https://www.healthyandnaturalworld.com/how-to-remove-plaque-the-natural-way/ and it yields 50 uBlock Origin hits. It works!

Here are the claims made on the website, in an attempt to convey credibility. We are told that “All the content of this website is written and medically reviewed by experts”. Really? Would you care to divulge verifiable people who will put their name to your work? Please do respond via the comments.

I left in the list of sites that, it is claimed at least, use content from healthyandnaturalworld.com. By implication, this would mean these sites are bullshitting us too.

Idea for a project: The bullshit map of the Internet.