Marketing or evidence?

The game needs JavaScript, which appears to be switched off. The five tells it teaches are in the article below, and every claim it uses comes from an article on this site.

An advert has about four seconds to make you believe something. The game above gives you the same four seconds, then shows you what the trials actually measured. It is not a test of what you know; it is practice at noticing the shape of a claim before you read the small print — and after ten cards, most people can.

How to tell marketing from evidence in ten seconds

Five tells cover most of it. None of them requires you to know any dentistry.

1. No named study. “Studies show” and “research suggests” are what a claim says when it cannot say who studied what, in how many people, for how long. A real finding has a name and a year attached. The reference checker sorts a whole list of these in one go.
2. “Clinically proven” with no citation. In the United States the phrase has a legal meaning — competent and reliable scientific evidence, which for a health benefit generally means randomised trials of the thing being sold. Used without a source it is a mood, not a finding. See what we found when we read all fourteen references on one sales page.
3. A percentage with no denominator. “Removes 5× more plaque” and “100% more effective” are real numbers from somewhere, measured against something, over some period. Without the comparator they cannot be wrong, which is why they are used. The electric toothbrush figures are the worked example: 11% and 21%, both true, and only one of them ever travels.
4. Regrow, reverse, cure. Gum tissue that has receded does not grow back; enamel that has been scrubbed or dissolved away does not return; a cavity that has broken the surface does not close. Any product using those verbs is describing something the tissue does not do — see receding gums and can teeth remineralise?
5. A dentist quote with no name. “Recommended by dentists” and a stock photograph in a white coat are copywriting. The professional bodies attach their endorsements to fluoride and nothing else, and “approved” is not a thing any of them do — see what the ADA and FDA actually say.

The sixth tell is the one the game is built to teach, and it is not on the list because it takes more than ten seconds: a real study that does not support the sentence it is attached to. A trial of a different strain, a different dose, a different outcome or a different population is real evidence for something else. That is what “it depends” means on the cards.

Where the claims in this game come from

The bank is written from this site’s own articles. Every verdict is lifted from a page that read its sources at source — the indexed abstract, the guideline, the regulation — and each one names that source and links the article, so you can disagree with the verdict on the evidence rather than on trust. Nothing is asserted in the game that the site has not already researched, and where the site has published a correction (the flossing page, the tongue-scraping page, the 30-minute rule), the cards carry the corrected position.

The claims themselves are written to sound like adverts and belong to no real product. No brand is named and no product’s copy is quoted. If a card reads like something you have seen on a shelf, that is because the shelf is not very original.

Roughly half the cards are marketing, a third are supported by decent evidence, and the rest are the interesting ones — true of one thing and false of the next. There is no grade beyond the count, because a single number would hide exactly the distinction the game exists to make.

This is a game about reading claims, not advice about your mouth. Nothing here is medical or dental advice; see a dentist about your own teeth, particularly for pain, bleeding or anything that has changed.

Our illustrations and tools are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 — see the diagrams page.