This news story sounds interesting but it bugs me. It looks and reads like a science or health story, but it’s just fluff.
The title, “Playoff game snack gorging linked to rise in mouth burns”, sounds like there was a study done to suggest this. Maybe two groups of volunteers, one ate vinegar chips every day for a week, the other didn’t, and the first group got mouth burns. A simple experiment that a child could have done for a school science fair.
But once you start reading, it quickly becomes anecdotal, and then descends from there to guesses.
”A Montreal dentist says…”
”We’ve had a couple of cases…”
”...patient really didn’t know what caused it”
”...perhaps the potato chips…”
Yeah. If there were science tabloids this would be on the cover. I’m not saying that there is no way that this could be true. Sure, it’s possible the chips are related to mouth burns. It’s also possible that the celebrities on the covers of the checkout counter magazines are really pregnant and depressed, but it isn’t actual news until their publicist confirms it. With the chips it isn’t actual news until there has been some sort of controlled study. Then we can worry about the chips and about our favourite depressed or pregnant celebrities.
May be the child who was eating the vinegar chips had his hands dirty? Or alternatively, to clean his hands off the salt on the chips, he was touching his trousers, or the couch, which was dirty. Or may be it was the bag which contained the chips that was dirty. Sounds like they need to do a lot of experiments to address all these hypotheses.
8-}