 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, 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 therapy, and much more. The moral of the story is, always check your sources. There is one source cited by oilpulling proponents that seems legit, published in the British Dental Journal, but it's just a letter from some guy saying that the literature is reported that oilpulling can effectively treat things like paralysis, meningitis, and chronic diseases like oh, cancer, AIDS, etc. But absolutely no references are given, so this literature, 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 Ben E. Fitz, I think oilpulling may adversely impact a 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 a bath water, let's see what they say. The study started out like this. Add oilpulling to some people's regular oil hygiene regimens and stand back and watch gingivitis get better week after week as the amount of plaque gets less and less. Conclusion, oilpulling 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, oilpulling 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, down to less than half the black, 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 merrily 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. I mean, don't you think you'd brush a little extra wealth, 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. There was never any compilation of controlled studies until now, which we'll cover next.