Actual reseachers don't really talk about links to IQ. The main concern is actually around dental fluorosis. Too much flouride can replace minerals in your teeth causing them to become brittle over time
There's a subset of researchers that argue that now that fluoride toothpaste is widespread, the benefit of fluoridating water is much much smaller than it first was and the (small) risk of fluorosis is now comparatively more significant
Where "main concern" means not a practical concern at all. You are adopting the talking points of cranks when what is of actual concern is things like drinking sugar, negligent parents or basic access to dental healthcare or even just dental education.
The CDC tracks some key indicators like mean decayed, missing or filled teeth (DMFT) and in critical age groups like 12-15 there has been no progress made in the past 20 years and the US continue lagging behind European countries: https://www.cdc.gov/oral-health/media/pdfs/Oral-Health-Surve...
And none of that has anything to do with fluoride in the water or not.
“ Actual reseachers don't really talk about links to IQ.”
Sorry but this reddit consensus is out of step with actual researchers. The #1 paediatric journal has published quite a bit on this recently. Basically the evidence isn’t of high quality but what we have doesn’t look great.
How did you compile this list? Asking some LLM service?
From the first link:
> It is important to note that there were insufficient data to determine if the low fluoride level of 0.7 mg/L currently recommended for U.S. community water supplies has a negative effect on children’s IQ
Regardless of where they got the list (edit: which I do think is a fair question)...
> the first link [...] doesn't seem in favor of this?
To me that falls under "the best evidence [available] in favor of this." It's not great, but it's not nothing; it's certainly something in favor. After all.. I guess I don't know about you, but I feel like if someone told me dose X of something is toxic, I would not feel comfortable feeding myself and the entire country 50% of that dose, on that basis alone.
Why does it matter how the list was compiled? Is the information accurate or not? The first link you referenced with the cherry picked sentence about uncertainty for levels below .7mg/l was a meta analysis of 74 different studies, 64 of which showed a negative correlation between child IQ and fluoridation. This isn’t even taking into account evidence of a positive correlation for early onset puberty, sleep disruption and bone cancer with fluoridation.
It matters when you say it has the "most convincing" evidence as if you have read them all and are keeping up with the field and didn't just summarize them with some service like https://consensus.app/
I don't know if what you are repeating is slop, etc. I can't trust the source.
A single recent systematic review is more trustworthy than that.
Okay, well, let me know how you came up with the list?
Also, nothing in that list of papers supports your initial claim? I know you'll say you didn't claim anything, so I will say also, that nothing in those links provides for what the prior commenter asked for evidence for.
Other than, fluoride consumption at high concentrations is bad (which is something that was already agreed upon, and is not being questioned in this thread)?
It matters because your statement of "Here’s a list of the most convincing studies or meta analyses." assumes some kind of curating. If all you're doing is providing something akin to a google search, it's not really valuable.
So what? Asking “What is the best evidence in favor of this” is equivalent to saying I don’t want to google this, so google this for me. Literally all researchers at all levels in all fields use google for this stuff. I was in academia for years.
Put simply, it's a wall of links. No quotes. No claims. Its valid to ask if the person posting the links has actually read those articles, or if there is a primary source recommending them. (Or no source if it's LLM copypasta.)
It was a direct response to a question with the answer they were looking for. It was provided in good faith, previously researched and sourced by me within the last 12 months.
I am the OP and someone asked for evidence and the only answer after an hour, falsely stated there was no evidence. I didn't want to challenge anyone directly so I posted what I thought were the top few more convincing links I have compiled out of 30+.
I am disappointed that I am getting downvoted and this is somehow being made into something political when people deserve to see the evidence for and against supplementing fluoride the drinking water of every living thing because the government wants to improve the health of our teeth. It is a fair question to ask.
The main problem with your wall of links from a professional medical PoV is it utterly lacks any context.
The very famous meta studies with all the negative correlations get all the bad associations with flouride from regions where water naturally has extremely high (relative to most other parts of the world) levels of fluoride in addition to high levels of many other uncommon concentrations.
Some of these regions also have additional problems with industry waste.
Put simply, negative correlations about unattended children in swimming pools cannot be extrapolated to infer negative correlations about young children and sippy cups of water.
It’s basically coping responses from people who are starting to realize they have been loudly wrong for years. It’s a fairly human response I suppose. They’ll get over it eventually after they go through the stages of grief or whatever.
No? What is a coping response? I asked the commenter to provide context to their links that supposedly show evidence for what the initial question was (does fluoride at the concentrations in drinking water cause harm), which they definitely do not show evidence for.
> You are basically putting your head in the sand and goading at people to drag it out for you
Nah. I pretty much agree with what Utah is doing here (though I’d prefer just not mandating it and making the decision as local as it needs to be). OP’s link list looks AI generated. That’s just not a good-faith comment.
You need to stop attacking people on HN. It's not permitted here. You are free to disagree with their statements and positions, but making character judgments like this is not OK.
> I am disappointed that I am getting downvoted and this is somehow being made into something political when people deserve to see the evidence
I didn’t downvote. (I don’t think.) But as a non-expert, I also didn’t see value in a wall of links. (Particularly when you wouldn’t confirm it wasn’t AI generated.)
A better presentation would pull quotes or make an argument, in your voice, with the citations as scaffolding for your arguments.
To illustrate the issue, I believe I could construct a context-free wall of links justifying just about anything.
Honestly, I think people downvoted it because it sounded a lot like LLM output.
If you could explain the process that led to the production of the list & what led you to the belief that those are the best studies/evidence so far, that would probably help people view it more favorably.
> Asking “What is the best evidence in favor of this” is equivalent to saying I don’t want to google this, so google this for me.
Perhaps I should note that I had indeed (believe it or not) already Googled this before asking the question. I asked not because I was too lazy to search but because I didn't know if my search was turning up the best studies from anyone's perspective.
So, no, this wasn't equivalent to saying "I don’t want to google this, so google this for me."
Yeah finding some random links through google that one does not go through to -to some degree- verify/vouch for is identically bad practice. Researchers do not cite studies that just happen to come up in their google searches, they actually try to assess the quality of the research, understand the methods/results etc. Nothing like this happened here. Giving such a wall of links as an argument to a discussion without checking their quality or relevance is more akin to trolling behaviour than academic research.
Another question is whether there's still evidence for continuing to fluoridate water with how common toothpaste use is now. If nothing else, if it isn't providing benefits over toothpaste use, then fluoridating water could just be a waste of public funds.
There isn’t any. The very little research showing any effects on cognitive abilities are experiments using very high fluoride levels - nowhere near the levels in water. Like most conservative “stances”, it’s a farce.
> Is there scope to believe they just think it may be better not to have it in the water?
Are you asking if there's room to believe it's just a sincere "everything you eat or drink should stay untouched, like it's found in nature" belief? OK sure, let's go with that. So why aren't they working to dismantle water treatment plants altogether and e.g. fighting against modern industrial farming practices in that case?
> No, I’m asking if it’s possible they might just rightly or wrongly believe water fluoridation is bad.
I'm happy to believe it if I can understand what is leading them to that belief, which is exactly what I'm asking. Is it a general aversion to unnatural stuff (hence my previous comment) or based on some evidence (hence my initial question) or something else (what?)?
> I believe they think water fluoridation is linked it lower IQs, again, rightly or wrongly. I could be mistaken but that’s always seemed pretty clear.
Again, we go back to my initial question [1]: what is the best evidence in favor of this?
By default, we should not add anything to the water.
The burden of proof should be on the people who want to add it. Because that is extra cost, extra chemical. If they can't prove it, then we don't do it.
> However, in 1973, the Dutch Supreme Court ruled that there was no legal basis for fluoridation…. The debate hasn’t been meaningfully revived since then, Hofman told Euronews Health. "People started to say, ‘Well, the government should not give us some medicine [when] we cannot choose where to buy our drinking water from," she said.
That’s the “little c” conservative viewpoint. You don’t need to prove it’s harmful. The default should be not putting chemicals in everyone’s drinking water.
but youre taking chemicals out right? and lots of water has natural flouride?
there is definitely an argument for an optimal amount of minerals in water being non zero (not only because having it that clean would be practically expensive) but also because we benefit from natural minerals. now if some natural water source isnt as good as another one, why not correct it? we have the technology.
especially at the community level. the little c stance should be to let communities decide, not ban it from the top down.
im not saying they are putting too much in. im saying natural water is already fluorinated in many places and doesnt need supplementation. so to treat fluorinful water as unnatural is disingenuous.
You are assuming they are just randomly flouridating water without measuring for target levels. I don't even know if you are thinking this through clearly as if they are just randomly dumping flouride into water supplies without measuring against specific targets.
Because if adding fluoride to water isn't additionally preventative beyond the use of toothpaste, then adding the fluoride to the public water system is just wasting public funds.
How do you prove no effect on any bodily system long term? People don’t like to talk about it, or they pretend otherwise, but this is basically impossible.
If the benefit is great enough then the risk makes sense. That is the case in a lot of areas. Is it worth taking a risk of an unknown effect somewhere in the body in exchange for… a marked but not even drastic reduction in cavities…? Not sure…
The bitch about scientific studies is you can’t find what you don’t know to look for. That has to be part of the trade off calculus when deciding what substances to introduce to our internal environment.
Okay? You can still come up with a correlation between net fluoride mass of bones and teeth and negative health traits or outcomes. You can also compare occupational exposure against normal exposure, no drinking water exposure (lived life in country without this policy), etc. There are many different types of scientific studies.
I am much less confident than you appear to be that we are able to detect a significant percentage of negative health traits.
Let’s say that hypothetically there is a 3rd order effect on the excretion pattern of some neurotransmitter. Can we detect that? Could it negatively affect mood regulation? There are a million things like that.
I guess the question is why your priors are so far weighted to the side of negative outcomes. If we're talking about yet undiscovered effects of something it seems equally plausible for those effects to be positive. Aspirin is a pretty good example of this where we keep discovering more positive effects. And I can understand somewhat the bias toward the state of nature but there's lots of examples where our deviations were positive, the biggest one being the cognitive effects of cooking food.
> If we're talking about yet undiscovered effects of something it seems equally plausible for those effects to be positive.
Where do you get this from? If you ingest a random chemical (or imagine licking random objects...), do you really expect the chances of it being beneficial vs. detrimental to your health to be remotely close to 50/50?
> The bitch about scientific studies is you can’t find what you don’t know to look for.
This is only true if you assume that all effects are too small to notice. If you run an experiment on adding fluoride to water, declare an interest in enamel thickness, and then observe that 30% of the experimental group died within six months, you just made a finding that you didn't know you should have been looking for.
> The fractional retention or balance of fluoride at any age depends on the quantitative features of absorption and excretion. For healthy, young, or middle-aged adults, approximately 50 percent of absorbed fluoride is retained by uptake in calcified tissues, and 50 percent is excreted in the urine. For young children, as much as 80 percent can be retained owing to increased uptake by the developing skeleton and teeth (Ekstrand et al., 1994a, b). Such data are not available for persons in the later years of life, but based on bone mineral dynamics, it is likely that the fraction excreted is greater than the fraction retained.
> .9 Radiographic detection of teeth and skeletal changes and microscopic examination of affected bone are helpful adjunct procedures for diagnosis.
> Histopathologic and radiographic examination of bones detects bone lesions and tentatively confirms osteofluorosis.14,26 Biopsy or rib or coccygeal vertebrae is used to obtain samples for skeletal fluoride analysis.23
> We have developed a localized noninvasive nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) method for determining the accumulated bone fluoride content in human index fingers
I'd like to point out that fluoride was previously very much a liberal stance until the rise in MAGA/Qanon conservatives.
I grew up in the PNW of the USA and lots of small hippie towns have been removing fluoride for decades. It comes up on city ballots every year in Oregon.
When it comes to things like radioactivity we assume a linear no threshhold model (e.g. that lower concentrations still have effects, just our measuring tools aren't good enough to detect it) and spend billions as a result. Why wouldn't we do the same for flouride?
Highly recommend visiting the link for details about each point an references (it is not that long), here is a summary, don't comment if you haven't visited the link:
1) Fluoride is the only chemical added to water for the purpose of medical treatment.
2) Fluoridation is unethical.
3) The dose cannot be controlled.
4) The fluoride goes to everyone regardless of age, health or vulnerability.
5) People now receive fluoride from many other sources besides water.
6) Fluoride is not an essential nutrient.
7) The level in mothers’ milk is very low.
9) No health agency in fluoridated countries is monitoring fluoride exposure or side effects.
10) There has never been a single randomized controlled trial to demonstrate fluoridation’s effectiveness or safety.
11) Benefit is topical not systemic.
12) Fluoridation is not necessary.
13) Fluoridation’s role in the decline of tooth decay is in serious doubt.
14) NIH-funded study on individual fluoride ingestion and tooth decay found no significant correlation.
15) Tooth decay is high in low-income communities that have been fluoridated for years.
16) Tooth decay does not go up when fluoridation is stopped.
17) Tooth decay was coming down before fluoridation started.
18) The studies that launched fluoridation were methodologically flawed.
19) Children are being over-exposed to fluoride.
20) The highest doses of fluoride are going to bottle-fed babies.
21) Dental fluorosis may be an indicator of wider systemic damage.
22) Fluoride may damage the brain.
23) Fluoride may lower IQ.
24) Fluoride may cause non-IQ neurotoxic effects.
25) Fluoride affects the pineal gland.
26) Fluoride affects thyroid function.
27) Fluoride causes arthritic symptoms.
28) Fluoride damages bone.
29) Fluoride may increase hip fractures in the elderly.
30) People with impaired kidney function are particularly vulnerable to bone damage.
31) Fluoride may cause bone cancer (osteosarcoma).
32) Proponents have failed to refute the Bassin-Osteosarcoma study.
33) Fluoride may cause reproductive problems.
34) Some individuals are highly sensitive to low levels of fluoride as shown by case studies and double blind studies.
35) Other subsets of population are more vulnerable to fluoride’s toxicity.
36) There is no margin of safety for several health effects.
37) Low-income families penalized by fluoridation.
38) Black and Hispanic children are more vulnerable to fluoride’s toxicity.
39) Minorities are not being warned about their vulnerabilities to fluoride.
40) Tooth decay reflects low-income not low-fluoride intake.
41) The chemicals used to fluoridate water are not pharmaceutical grade.
42) The silicon fluorides have not been tested comprehensively.
43) The silicon fluorides may increase lead uptake into children’s blood.
44) Fluoride may leach lead from pipes, brass fittings and soldered joints.
45) Key health studies have not been done.
46) Endorsements do not represent scientific evidence.
47) Review panels hand-picked to deliver a pro-fluoridation result.
48) Many scientists oppose fluoridation.
49) Proponents usually refuse to defend fluoridation in open debate.
50) Proponents use very dubious tactics to promote fluoridation.
Actual reseachers don't really talk about links to IQ. The main concern is actually around dental fluorosis. Too much flouride can replace minerals in your teeth causing them to become brittle over time
There's a subset of researchers that argue that now that fluoride toothpaste is widespread, the benefit of fluoridating water is much much smaller than it first was and the (small) risk of fluorosis is now comparatively more significant
Where "main concern" means not a practical concern at all. You are adopting the talking points of cranks when what is of actual concern is things like drinking sugar, negligent parents or basic access to dental healthcare or even just dental education.
The CDC tracks some key indicators like mean decayed, missing or filled teeth (DMFT) and in critical age groups like 12-15 there has been no progress made in the past 20 years and the US continue lagging behind European countries: https://www.cdc.gov/oral-health/media/pdfs/Oral-Health-Surve...
And none of that has anything to do with fluoride in the water or not.
“ Actual reseachers don't really talk about links to IQ.”
Sorry but this reddit consensus is out of step with actual researchers. The #1 paediatric journal has published quite a bit on this recently. Basically the evidence isn’t of high quality but what we have doesn’t look great.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
Here’s a list of the most convincing studies or meta analyses.
2023 – NTP Monograph on Fluoride Neurotoxicity – National Toxicology Program (USA)
2020 – Till et al. – Infant Formula Fluoride Exposure & IQ – Till C, Green R, Lanphear B, Hornung R, Martinez-Mier EA (Canada)
2019 – Green et al. – Maternal Fluoride Exposure & IQ – Green R, Lanphear B, Hornung R, Flora D, Martinez-Mier EA, et al. (Canada)
2017 – Bashash et al. – Prenatal Fluoride Exposure & Offspring IQ – Bashash M, Thomas D, Hu H, et al. (Mexico/USA)
2012 – Choi et al. – Meta-analysis on Fluoride & Neurodevelopment – Choi AL, Sun G, Zhang Y, Grandjean P (Harvard/China)
2006 – NRC Report – Fluoride in Drinking Water – National Research Council (USA)
[1] https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/whatwestudy/assessments/noncancer/...
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31743803/
[3] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
[4] https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/EHP655
[5] https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/ehp.1104912
[6] https://www.nap.edu/catalog/11571/fluoride-in-drinking-water...
How did you compile this list? Asking some LLM service?
From the first link:
> It is important to note that there were insufficient data to determine if the low fluoride level of 0.7 mg/L currently recommended for U.S. community water supplies has a negative effect on children’s IQ
It doesn't seem in favor of this?
Regardless of where they got the list (edit: which I do think is a fair question)...
> the first link [...] doesn't seem in favor of this?
To me that falls under "the best evidence [available] in favor of this." It's not great, but it's not nothing; it's certainly something in favor. After all.. I guess I don't know about you, but I feel like if someone told me dose X of something is toxic, I would not feel comfortable feeding myself and the entire country 50% of that dose, on that basis alone.
I mean, technically our atmosphere gives us oxygen at 35% of a toxic dose/concentration.
Granted, 35% < 50%, but not really that much less.
Yes, this completely demolished my argument.
Why does it matter how the list was compiled? Is the information accurate or not? The first link you referenced with the cherry picked sentence about uncertainty for levels below .7mg/l was a meta analysis of 74 different studies, 64 of which showed a negative correlation between child IQ and fluoridation. This isn’t even taking into account evidence of a positive correlation for early onset puberty, sleep disruption and bone cancer with fluoridation.
It matters when you say it has the "most convincing" evidence as if you have read them all and are keeping up with the field and didn't just summarize them with some service like https://consensus.app/
I don't know if what you are repeating is slop, etc. I can't trust the source.
A single recent systematic review is more trustworthy than that.
You don't know, but it is not. Feel free not to read it.
Okay, well, let me know how you came up with the list?
Also, nothing in that list of papers supports your initial claim? I know you'll say you didn't claim anything, so I will say also, that nothing in those links provides for what the prior commenter asked for evidence for.
Other than, fluoride consumption at high concentrations is bad (which is something that was already agreed upon, and is not being questioned in this thread)?
It matters because your statement of "Here’s a list of the most convincing studies or meta analyses." assumes some kind of curating. If all you're doing is providing something akin to a google search, it's not really valuable.
So what? Asking “What is the best evidence in favor of this” is equivalent to saying I don’t want to google this, so google this for me. Literally all researchers at all levels in all fields use google for this stuff. I was in academia for years.
> So what?
Put simply, it's a wall of links. No quotes. No claims. Its valid to ask if the person posting the links has actually read those articles, or if there is a primary source recommending them. (Or no source if it's LLM copypasta.)
It was a direct response to a question with the answer they were looking for. It was provided in good faith, previously researched and sourced by me within the last 12 months.
I am the OP and someone asked for evidence and the only answer after an hour, falsely stated there was no evidence. I didn't want to challenge anyone directly so I posted what I thought were the top few more convincing links I have compiled out of 30+.
I am disappointed that I am getting downvoted and this is somehow being made into something political when people deserve to see the evidence for and against supplementing fluoride the drinking water of every living thing because the government wants to improve the health of our teeth. It is a fair question to ask.
The main problem with your wall of links from a professional medical PoV is it utterly lacks any context.
The very famous meta studies with all the negative correlations get all the bad associations with flouride from regions where water naturally has extremely high (relative to most other parts of the world) levels of fluoride in addition to high levels of many other uncommon concentrations.
Some of these regions also have additional problems with industry waste.
Put simply, negative correlations about unattended children in swimming pools cannot be extrapolated to infer negative correlations about young children and sippy cups of water.
Again, it was in response to an (mis)unanswered question for that specific information. I don't get what the issue is.
It’s basically coping responses from people who are starting to realize they have been loudly wrong for years. It’s a fairly human response I suppose. They’ll get over it eventually after they go through the stages of grief or whatever.
> coping responses
No? What is a coping response? I asked the commenter to provide context to their links that supposedly show evidence for what the initial question was (does fluoride at the concentrations in drinking water cause harm), which they definitely do not show evidence for.
The thing is you are not being curious. You are basically putting your head in the sand and goading at people to drag it out for you.
> You are basically putting your head in the sand and goading at people to drag it out for you
Nah. I pretty much agree with what Utah is doing here (though I’d prefer just not mandating it and making the decision as local as it needs to be). OP’s link list looks AI generated. That’s just not a good-faith comment.
OP has already said that it was not AI generated and that he spent months doing due diligence to compile that list.
I suppose you want a summary, well read the abstracts of the papers. It's not that challenging, is it?
> OP has already said that it was not AI generated
They first went defensive when asked about it up thread [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43519312
You need to stop attacking people on HN. It's not permitted here. You are free to disagree with their statements and positions, but making character judgments like this is not OK.
> I am disappointed that I am getting downvoted and this is somehow being made into something political when people deserve to see the evidence
I didn’t downvote. (I don’t think.) But as a non-expert, I also didn’t see value in a wall of links. (Particularly when you wouldn’t confirm it wasn’t AI generated.)
A better presentation would pull quotes or make an argument, in your voice, with the citations as scaffolding for your arguments.
To illustrate the issue, I believe I could construct a context-free wall of links justifying just about anything.
Honestly, I think people downvoted it because it sounded a lot like LLM output.
If you could explain the process that led to the production of the list & what led you to the belief that those are the best studies/evidence so far, that would probably help people view it more favorably.
> Asking “What is the best evidence in favor of this” is equivalent to saying I don’t want to google this, so google this for me.
Perhaps I should note that I had indeed (believe it or not) already Googled this before asking the question. I asked not because I was too lazy to search but because I didn't know if my search was turning up the best studies from anyone's perspective.
So, no, this wasn't equivalent to saying "I don’t want to google this, so google this for me."
Yeah finding some random links through google that one does not go through to -to some degree- verify/vouch for is identically bad practice. Researchers do not cite studies that just happen to come up in their google searches, they actually try to assess the quality of the research, understand the methods/results etc. Nothing like this happened here. Giving such a wall of links as an argument to a discussion without checking their quality or relevance is more akin to trolling behaviour than academic research.
I agree with you and think you should reread. My response was not an argument, it was a response of requested information that I had compiled.
> It matters because your statement of "Here’s a list of the most convincing studies or meta analyses." assumes some kind of curating.
Agreed
Another question is whether there's still evidence for continuing to fluoridate water with how common toothpaste use is now. If nothing else, if it isn't providing benefits over toothpaste use, then fluoridating water could just be a waste of public funds.
There isn’t any. The very little research showing any effects on cognitive abilities are experiments using very high fluoride levels - nowhere near the levels in water. Like most conservative “stances”, it’s a farce.
Thanks. I guess then my next question is, why are they doing this? Whom is it benefiting? Big Water?
Is there scope to believe they just think it may be better not to have it in the water?
> Is there scope to believe they just think it may be better not to have it in the water?
Are you asking if there's room to believe it's just a sincere "everything you eat or drink should stay untouched, like it's found in nature" belief? OK sure, let's go with that. So why aren't they working to dismantle water treatment plants altogether and e.g. fighting against modern industrial farming practices in that case?
No, I’m asking if it’s possible they might just rightly or wrongly believe water fluoridation is bad.
> No, I’m asking if it’s possible they might just rightly or wrongly believe water fluoridation is bad.
I'm happy to believe it if I can understand what is leading them to that belief, which is exactly what I'm asking. Is it a general aversion to unnatural stuff (hence my previous comment) or based on some evidence (hence my initial question) or something else (what?)?
I believe they think water fluoridation is linked it lower IQs, again, rightly or wrongly. I could be mistaken but that’s always seemed pretty clear.
> I believe they think water fluoridation is linked it lower IQs, again, rightly or wrongly. I could be mistaken but that’s always seemed pretty clear.
Again, we go back to my initial question [1]: what is the best evidence in favor of this?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43518377
He's just doing whatever's politically expedient.
[1:20] "I do believe that autism comes from vaccines" [https://www.foxnews.com/video/6330950198112]
Does it matter what he actually believes? If it's different from the Trump's policy he'll keep it to himself.
Why should his beliefs be considered at all over scientific evidence?
By default, we should not add anything to the water.
The burden of proof should be on the people who want to add it. Because that is extra cost, extra chemical. If they can't prove it, then we don't do it.
It doesn’t always have to monetarily benefit anyone. It’s just fringe leaders playing to fringe ideas in this case
Dentists are going to make a lot of money filling so many more cavities.
Why did many European countries discontinue fluoridation? https://www.euronews.com/health/2024/11/23/trump-could-push-...
> However, in 1973, the Dutch Supreme Court ruled that there was no legal basis for fluoridation…. The debate hasn’t been meaningfully revived since then, Hofman told Euronews Health. "People started to say, ‘Well, the government should not give us some medicine [when] we cannot choose where to buy our drinking water from," she said.
That’s the “little c” conservative viewpoint. You don’t need to prove it’s harmful. The default should be not putting chemicals in everyone’s drinking water.
Thanks for sharing the link. Learned something new today.
but youre taking chemicals out right? and lots of water has natural flouride?
there is definitely an argument for an optimal amount of minerals in water being non zero (not only because having it that clean would be practically expensive) but also because we benefit from natural minerals. now if some natural water source isnt as good as another one, why not correct it? we have the technology.
especially at the community level. the little c stance should be to let communities decide, not ban it from the top down.
100% the treatment plant is adjusting for the natural amount of flouride to meet specific target PPM
im not saying they are putting too much in. im saying natural water is already fluorinated in many places and doesnt need supplementation. so to treat fluorinful water as unnatural is disingenuous.
> im saying natural water is already fluorinated in many places
Fluoridated water seems not to have major effects.
I wouldn't want to drink, touch, or be near fluorinated water.
You are assuming they are just randomly flouridating water without measuring for target levels. I don't even know if you are thinking this through clearly as if they are just randomly dumping flouride into water supplies without measuring against specific targets.
I didn’t say anything remotely like that, pretty much the opposite actually.
> Why did many European countries discontinue fluoridation?
Could it have something to do with the increasing use of fluoridated toothpaste?
Probably. But why take fluoride out of the water?
Because if adding fluoride to water isn't additionally preventative beyond the use of toothpaste, then adding the fluoride to the public water system is just wasting public funds.
Do not discount the tendency of Europeans to be wellness hippies.
Nobody tell him what chemicals were put in his drinking water to produce it. This might be the dumbest sentence uttered yet.
Why does the “little c” conservative look to Europe when convenient, hmm?
How do you prove no effect on any bodily system long term? People don’t like to talk about it, or they pretend otherwise, but this is basically impossible.
If the benefit is great enough then the risk makes sense. That is the case in a lot of areas. Is it worth taking a risk of an unknown effect somewhere in the body in exchange for… a marked but not even drastic reduction in cavities…? Not sure…
Fluoride stays in your body, should be some way to measure it?
The bitch about scientific studies is you can’t find what you don’t know to look for. That has to be part of the trade off calculus when deciding what substances to introduce to our internal environment.
Okay? You can still come up with a correlation between net fluoride mass of bones and teeth and negative health traits or outcomes. You can also compare occupational exposure against normal exposure, no drinking water exposure (lived life in country without this policy), etc. There are many different types of scientific studies.
I am much less confident than you appear to be that we are able to detect a significant percentage of negative health traits.
Let’s say that hypothetically there is a 3rd order effect on the excretion pattern of some neurotransmitter. Can we detect that? Could it negatively affect mood regulation? There are a million things like that.
I guess the question is why your priors are so far weighted to the side of negative outcomes. If we're talking about yet undiscovered effects of something it seems equally plausible for those effects to be positive. Aspirin is a pretty good example of this where we keep discovering more positive effects. And I can understand somewhat the bias toward the state of nature but there's lots of examples where our deviations were positive, the biggest one being the cognitive effects of cooking food.
> If we're talking about yet undiscovered effects of something it seems equally plausible for those effects to be positive.
Where do you get this from? If you ingest a random chemical (or imagine licking random objects...), do you really expect the chances of it being beneficial vs. detrimental to your health to be remotely close to 50/50?
> The bitch about scientific studies is you can’t find what you don’t know to look for.
This is only true if you assume that all effects are too small to notice. If you run an experiment on adding fluoride to water, declare an interest in enamel thickness, and then observe that 30% of the experimental group died within six months, you just made a finding that you didn't know you should have been looking for.
Fluoride rapidly forms a highly insoluble calcium fluoride salt. So you won't find a lot of it in blood or other easily accessible body fluids.
> The fractional retention or balance of fluoride at any age depends on the quantitative features of absorption and excretion. For healthy, young, or middle-aged adults, approximately 50 percent of absorbed fluoride is retained by uptake in calcified tissues, and 50 percent is excreted in the urine. For young children, as much as 80 percent can be retained owing to increased uptake by the developing skeleton and teeth (Ekstrand et al., 1994a, b). Such data are not available for persons in the later years of life, but based on bone mineral dynamics, it is likely that the fraction excreted is greater than the fraction retained.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK109832/=
> .9 Radiographic detection of teeth and skeletal changes and microscopic examination of affected bone are helpful adjunct procedures for diagnosis.
> Histopathologic and radiographic examination of bones detects bone lesions and tentatively confirms osteofluorosis.14,26 Biopsy or rib or coccygeal vertebrae is used to obtain samples for skeletal fluoride analysis.23
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B03230...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeletal_fluorosis
> We have developed a localized noninvasive nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) method for determining the accumulated bone fluoride content in human index fingers
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2339643/
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It sounds like people who have time to pay attention to this have a better chance of discerning a methodology of assay.
Oh, certainly. I'm just saying that it's not easy and straightforward.
I'd like to point out that fluoride was previously very much a liberal stance until the rise in MAGA/Qanon conservatives.
I grew up in the PNW of the USA and lots of small hippie towns have been removing fluoride for decades. It comes up on city ballots every year in Oregon.
This stance is a bit confusing...
When it comes to things like radioactivity we assume a linear no threshhold model (e.g. that lower concentrations still have effects, just our measuring tools aren't good enough to detect it) and spend billions as a result. Why wouldn't we do the same for flouride?
2012: https://fluoridealert.org/content/50-reasons/
Highly recommend visiting the link for details about each point an references (it is not that long), here is a summary, don't comment if you haven't visited the link:
1) Fluoride is the only chemical added to water for the purpose of medical treatment. 2) Fluoridation is unethical. 3) The dose cannot be controlled. 4) The fluoride goes to everyone regardless of age, health or vulnerability. 5) People now receive fluoride from many other sources besides water. 6) Fluoride is not an essential nutrient. 7) The level in mothers’ milk is very low. 9) No health agency in fluoridated countries is monitoring fluoride exposure or side effects. 10) There has never been a single randomized controlled trial to demonstrate fluoridation’s effectiveness or safety. 11) Benefit is topical not systemic. 12) Fluoridation is not necessary. 13) Fluoridation’s role in the decline of tooth decay is in serious doubt. 14) NIH-funded study on individual fluoride ingestion and tooth decay found no significant correlation. 15) Tooth decay is high in low-income communities that have been fluoridated for years. 16) Tooth decay does not go up when fluoridation is stopped. 17) Tooth decay was coming down before fluoridation started. 18) The studies that launched fluoridation were methodologically flawed. 19) Children are being over-exposed to fluoride. 20) The highest doses of fluoride are going to bottle-fed babies. 21) Dental fluorosis may be an indicator of wider systemic damage. 22) Fluoride may damage the brain. 23) Fluoride may lower IQ. 24) Fluoride may cause non-IQ neurotoxic effects. 25) Fluoride affects the pineal gland. 26) Fluoride affects thyroid function. 27) Fluoride causes arthritic symptoms. 28) Fluoride damages bone. 29) Fluoride may increase hip fractures in the elderly. 30) People with impaired kidney function are particularly vulnerable to bone damage. 31) Fluoride may cause bone cancer (osteosarcoma). 32) Proponents have failed to refute the Bassin-Osteosarcoma study. 33) Fluoride may cause reproductive problems. 34) Some individuals are highly sensitive to low levels of fluoride as shown by case studies and double blind studies. 35) Other subsets of population are more vulnerable to fluoride’s toxicity. 36) There is no margin of safety for several health effects. 37) Low-income families penalized by fluoridation. 38) Black and Hispanic children are more vulnerable to fluoride’s toxicity. 39) Minorities are not being warned about their vulnerabilities to fluoride. 40) Tooth decay reflects low-income not low-fluoride intake. 41) The chemicals used to fluoridate water are not pharmaceutical grade. 42) The silicon fluorides have not been tested comprehensively. 43) The silicon fluorides may increase lead uptake into children’s blood. 44) Fluoride may leach lead from pipes, brass fittings and soldered joints. 45) Key health studies have not been done. 46) Endorsements do not represent scientific evidence. 47) Review panels hand-picked to deliver a pro-fluoridation result. 48) Many scientists oppose fluoridation. 49) Proponents usually refuse to defend fluoridation in open debate. 50) Proponents use very dubious tactics to promote fluoridation.