My gut doctor says I'm in trouble for eating too much spaghetti but it's my fav vegetable! pic.twitter.com/Ct51Pnvu2z
— Pazuzu (@ThatPazuzu) May 7, 2019
You've probably seen the internet as in which a "gut doctor" says “I beg Americans to throw out this vegetable now.” The ads are often in a chumbox, which is a slang term for the promoted links often found at the bottom of a webpage. The ads are so ubiquitous that they've become a meme. What vegetable could that be? The pictures vary, and are hard to decipher. The answer is actually quite elusive. See, chumbox links fall into five categories: they go to search results, or affiliate marketing links, or long slideshows, or advertisements, or hidden content.
The gut doctor falls into the fifth category, hidden content: These ads redirect someplace totally unexpected, a website unrelated in any obvious way to what you originally clicked, and lead you on a wild goose chase between loosely connected sites that are also littered with ads.
The identity of the vegetable is still a question with no answer. However, Kaitlyn Tiffany took a deep dive and found the "gut doctor" the ads refer to. Read about him, and about the business of chumboxes at Vox.