"Does Oil Pulling Help With Cancer?"
I've done videos on how coconut oil is safe to put on your hair
or on your skin, but you certainly don't want to eat the stuff.
You may not even want to be in the same kitchen
when it's being cooked with.
I don't know where people get the idea it's safe to cook with.
It's got one of the lowest smoke points.
At typical frying temperatures, it can release a variety
of toxic compounds; in fact even below the smoke point,
so you want there to be good ventilation.
You also don't want to inject it into your privates,
and even standing under a coconut tree is not completely without risk.
But what about swishing coconut oil around in your mouth?
So-called "oil pulling" is evidently a time-honored folk remedy
that involves swishing oil in your mouth, "pulling" it back and forth
between your teeth for purported oral and systemic health benefits.
You put a spoonful of oil in your mouth,
swishing for up to 20 minutes.
If that's too much, you can go 5 or 10 minutes.
Then you spit it out, rinse out your mouth, and then brush your teeth.
I could see how it might dislodge dental plaque or something,
and have oral health benefits, but what's this about systemic effects?
Not only is it supposedly absolutely harmless,
but it effectively treats the most varied diseases,
in some cases enabling one to avoid drugs and surgery.
I was excited to check out this citation,
until I realized the citation was to oilpulling.com, an e-book,
where you can evidently get answers to questions like
"oil for oil pulling, pulling oil and diseases cured,
and the science behind oil pulling 'therpy' and much more."
The moral of the story is: always check your sources.
There is one source cited by oil pulling proponents that seems legit,
published in the British Dental Journal,
but it's just a letter from some guy saying that the literature
has reported that oil pulling can effectively treat things like
paralysis, meningitis, and chronic diseases like, oh, cancer, AIDS, etc.
But absolutely no references are given, so this literature
of which he speaks is presumably the fairy tale literature.
The bottom line is that there's simply no scientific proof.
OK, but what about the oral health claims?
If you look at the list of purported "benifits"
(I think oil pulling may adversely impact spell check),
they go from blood clots to stopping the growth of malignant tumors.
And you look at those citations purported to back such wild statements up,
and you won't be surprised at this point to see
they have absolutely nothing to do
with blood clots, cancer, or any of those other diseases,
but instead are references to studies done on dental health.
OK, well, let's not spit the baby out with the bathwater; let's see what they say.
The studies started out like this:
add oil pulling to some people's regular oral hygiene regimens
and stand back and watch gingivitis get better week after week,
as the amount of plaque gets less and less.
Conclusion: oil pulling has dental benefits.
This was with sunflower oil, same thing with coconut oil.
Gingivitis, gum inflammation started to get better within a week,
as the dental plaque goes down.
Looks pretty good, right?
So same conclusion: oil pulling could be an effective addition
to one's oral hygiene habits.
OK, so what's wrong with these studies?
Right, no control group.
But why am I always going on and on about needing control groups?
I mean didn't they each act as their own control?
Look, we know where they were at baseline, and then look at that:
week after week, bam, bam, bam, bam—
down to less than half the plaque, half the gingivitis.
What? Are we supposed to imagine it's all just one big coincidence
that they all just happened to start getting better
right after they started the coconut oil?
Come on!
Let me tell you about the Hawthorne Effect.
"Patients frequently appear to improve
merely from the effects of being placed in a clinical trial."
Why? Because patients may improve oral hygiene
as a result of the special attention or frequent examinations they get.
That's the Hawthorne Effect,
and why it's so important to do controlled trials.
Think about it.
You know how you may like brush really good
the morning of your dentist appointment?
Well, imagine knowing you're going to be going
back to the dentist for an exam every single week to see
how your plaque and gingivitis is going?
Don't you think you'd brush a little extra well,
floss a few more times that month?
And that alone could get you these kinds of results.
So the only way to tell if the oil pulling had anything to do with it
is to have a control group that didn't do the oil pulling,
but also knew they would be getting these weekly checkups.
But there was never any compilation of controlled studies
until now, which we'll cover next.