Clayton Peppler - Evaluating Resources

Is Gluten Free Healthier?

Part One:

Website Title: The Truth About Gluten - WebMD

Record Your Impressions: The website is designed to be easy to follow with a clean interface. I was able to easily navigate through the links to relevant websites with information on my topic. There is a presence of ads, ads that do not pertain to the information that I am reading about. The information on the website talked about the celiac disease, going gluten free as a trend and the risks of living a gluten free lifestyle. The information is from WebMD.com, which makes me believe that it is very credible and trustworthy. I think that the website has to be .com instead of .edu because the website does not want to be held responsible for people trying to use this website to be “educated” enough to diagnose diseases.

Gather Information: The author is clearly stated at the top of the page, Peter Jaret. The sponsors are clearly named at the bottom of the page; there are fifteen different sponsors named. The sources that the website uses are clearly acknowledged and all are experts in the field or experts in surrounding fields. The information is used to inform; I cannot find any biases in the information. The website is backed by advertising, but the advertising does not influence the information on the website. The website does reference many different academic studies such as “a 2005 report from the American Dietetic Association warned that gluten-free products tend to be low in a wide range of important nutrients, including B vitamins, calcium, iron, zinc, magnesium, and fiber” (Jaret). I did do a Google search for a couple of the studies, researchers and facts that the website claimed to be true and my web search verified their results. The site has not been updated recently, as a matter of fact the last time that the website was updated was 2011. This is concerning because there have been many developments regarding gluten free in the past four years. The links are appropriate and relevant. I would say that the material is covered between superficial and in depth. I would have liked the information to go a step further, but I guess that is why I would use other sources along with this source. Yes, the material is appropriate for printed publication.

Part Two:

Article Title: Gluten Free Diets? - Scholarly Article

Evaluate: The article that I chose is very easy to follow and navigate. I really like that there are no distracting ads popping out at me every time I scroll through the page. The author is an organization called International Business Times and is displayed very prominently on the page. I like that the author is an organization because that means that there are probably many experts that wrote the article. The article has an array of information that I would be able to use in my research paper.

Compare: If I had to rank each piece of writing that I evaluated, I would rank the WebMD website an 8/10 and the scholarly article, Gluten Free Diets, a 9/10. The information that is on Gluten Free Diets is more about the information itself rather than personal opinion. WebMD was very informative as well, but did include more personal opinion than I would have liked. Both the Gluten Free Diet article and WebMD have authors that are experts in the field, but I am a lot more inclined to trust the information that was published in a journal. I especially like the layout of the article, things such as the author, publisher and other important information is clearly displayed, something that I had to do a little more digging to find on WebMD. I also really liked that Gluten Free Diet was recently published, meaning it probably has more accurate information over the WebMD’s four-year-old website. The writing style on the article was more professional compared to the writing style on WebMD. There was one glaring error on the article that threw me off and that was the spelling of gluten with two t’s. Other than that, the article was grammatically correct. I also found it very enjoyable that there were no ads on the article to distract the reader from the content, ads that were everywhere on WebMD. Overall, if I had to choose a website to use in my research paper, I would use the scholarly article.

Source: “International Business Times, Fri, 1 Aug 2014”

Works Cited

International Business Times. Gluten Free Diets? Research Says it Contains No Nutrients! 1       August 2014. 12 October 2015<http://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?vid=24&sid=752d8139-9f1f-4542- 
acde72b8ce68bc7a%40sessionmgr4003&hid=4206&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ           %3d%3d#AN=561433.20140801&db=bwh>.

Jaret, Peter. The Truth About Gluten. Ed. Louis Chang M.D. 2 March 2011. 12 October 2015                     <http://www.webmd.com/diet/healthy-kitchen-11/truth-about-gluten>.

Part One:

·      Author or sponsor: Peter Jaret

·      Site Title in italics: The Truth About Gluten

·      Access date: October 12, 2015

·       “Web.”

·      Date the site was last updated*: 2011

·      (if applicable) URL**: http://www.webmd.com/diet/healthy-kitchen-11/truth-about-gluten?page

Part Two:

·      Author: International Business Times

·      Article title in quotation marks: Gluten Free Diets? Research Says it Contains No Nutrients!

·      Journal title in italics

·      Journal publication date: page number (if available)

·      Database name: Regional Business News

·      Where accessed (e.g. Auraria Library, Denver CO) FRCC, Longmont CO

·      Access date: October 12, 2015 ·       “Web.”

Photo from: http://www.leprechauncider.com/100-gluten-free/