Stuff that occurs to me

All of my 'how to' posts are tagged here. The most popular posts are about blocking and private accounts on Twitter, also the science communication jobs list. None of the science or medical information I might post to this blog should be taken as medical advice (I'm not medically trained).

Think of this blog as a sort of nursery for my half-baked ideas hence 'stuff that occurs to me'.

Contact: @JoBrodie Email: jo DOT brodie AT gmail DOT com

Science in London: The 2018/19 scientific society talks in London blog post

Monday 26 December 2011

Polite suggestion to people writing about diet pills, patches or other supplements

Please (please!) cross reference the name of the product from any press release that advertises some new diet pill, patch or supplement against the MoreNiche affiliate forum and others like it (edit: I also recommend checking the ASA's website too). Thank you :) 

The simplest way to do this is to run a Google search that will pick out the product's name from the MN site, as in site:www.moreniche.com Nuratrim which will bring up this list of items. I'm sure there are other affiliate stables too. 

This is a shortcut to using the advanced search function of Google, allowing you to search for a term within a website and can be quite useful. You can even find instances of your word of interest in PDFs, for example, by adding the file:pdf search string.

You can also find other sites that are flogging these products by using the following search string "track.moreniche.com" Nuratrim 

It's also worth cross-checking against adjudications published on the ASA's (Advertising Standards Authority) website. Advanced Health Ltd who are the merchants / distributors for Nuratrim had a complaint against them upheld earlier this year for the marketing claims they made for another of their products, Meratol.

You can search on Google for the following search string:
site:http://www.asa.org.uk/ASA-action/Adjudications meratol 
- the results will look like this

The Telegraph has published this today (no wish to pick on T'graph, just they provide a convenient examp) about a product called Nuratrim (here's what I wrote about it a few days ago) but as you can see from the search results above it's one of a suite of pills, patches and supplements flogged at fairly high cost. Evidence is a bit cherry-picked I think. The Daily Mail has also published the 'story'.

Further reading
You may also be interested in the article spinning / SEO techniques which affiliate marketers use (really, it's quite clever) to route Googling eyeballs to sites where money can be made. See the bit below the grey line in this post.

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Comment policy: I enthusiastically welcome corrections and I entertain polite disagreement ;) Because of the nature of this blog it attracts a LOT - 5 a day at the moment - of spam comments (I write about spam practices,misleading marketing and unevidenced quackery) and so I'm more likely to post a pasted version of your comment, removing any hyperlinks.

Comments written in ALL CAPS LOCK will be deleted and I won't publish any pro-homeopathy comments, that ship has sailed I'm afraid (it's nonsense).