Toxicologist here. I think that take is dishonest or dumb.
Taking a lethal dose is almost never the concern with any substance in our drinking water.
Hormones, heavy metals, persistent organic chemicals, ammonia are all in our drinking water. But for all of them we can’t drink enough water to die from a high dose.
Some of them still have a large effect on our bodies.
It’s about the longterm effects. Which we need longterm studies to learn about. That makes them harder to study.
Still doesn’t mean flouride does anything bad longerm. But the argument is bad.
It’s so funny I was just having a similar conversation about neurotoxic venomous animals in another thread. Lethality is an obviously concerning threshold, but there are substances out there that can easily destroy your quality of life and livelihood that never reach the concern of being lethal.
I think for mostly rational people concerned about fluoride in their water is that it was a public health decision made with little to no actual science proving it’s safety or efficacy when it was first decided that they were going to add it to the public water supply. The proposed benefits of it weren’t even supported by scientific evidence, it was just supposed that exposure to sodium fluoride could potentially reduce tooth decay for some.
Personally, I’ve suffered from the cosmetic damage of dental fluorosis, and I’m not necessarily thrilled about fluoride. But I have way more issues with public mandates founded on pseudoscience than I am with sodium fluoride. Especially now that we can see evidence that for some people fluoride can be especially beneficial.
So what was wrong with giving people the option of using fluoride toothpaste or mouthwashes… Why did it have to go into the public water supply?
Mate, your entire second paragraph is completely false. Like, you need to just read this: https://www.nidcr.nih.gov/health-info/fluoride/the-story-of-fluoridation
It’s considered by the CDC as one of the greatest Public Health Achievements of the last Century. There have been dozens, if not hundreds of studies about fluoride affects in the water supply.
Yeah that proves my point entirely.
In 1945 they fluoridated the first public water supply.
In 1979 the first published research began to appear to show how fluoride might be able to remineralize dental enamel.
In 1945, Grand Rapids became the first city in the world to fluoridate its drinking water.The Grand Rapids water fluoridation study was originally sponsored by the U.S. Surgeon General, but was taken over by the NIDR shortly after the Institute’s inception in 1948. During the 15-year project, researchers monitored the rate of tooth decay among Grand Rapids’ almost 30,000 schoolchildren. After just 11 years, Dean- who was now director of the NIDR-announced an amazing finding. The caries rate among Grand Rapids children born after fluoride was added to the water supply dropped more than 60 percent. This finding, considering the thousands of participants in the study, amounted to a giant scientific breakthrough that promised to revolutionize dental care, making tooth decay for the first time in history a preventable disease for most people.
In our area, the only water supply WITH Fluoride serves an area with a median HOUSEHOLD income of less than $40k with more than 25% living below the poverty line. For communities like these the fluoride is critical because there will be a lot of children that don’t have access to fluoride supplements, or regular care from a pediatric (or regular) dentist.
Yeah, by this argument lead in the water isn’t a concern.
You just made me mad by helping me realize that the Trump bros are going to break water by removing fluoride long before they fix water by removing lead.
Yeah but lead bioaccumulates where as fluoride/ine doesn’t
Are you sure fluoride doesn’t? It does accumulate in the soil, building up in crops. Considering fluoride exposure from all sources, many people are above upper safe limits, even from tea drinking alone
I don’t think fluoride should be added to water as it just pollutes the environment, where 99.99% of water isn’t coming in contact with teeth
It doesn’t. This is high-school chemistry.
Fluoride only “accumulates” up to the peak concentration of the environment (no further) on places where it is removed from contact with that environment.
You can only accumulate fluoride in the soil if you keep adding it and there is almost no rain to wash it away.
We probably have enough A/B data now to make some inferences yeah? Compare countries with fluoridated water to countries without.
You can get even more granular than that. CDC maintains a list of water systems and whether or not they add fluoride. CDC My Water System. To give you an idea of how granular that is, there are 78 different water systems in my county alone. For most of my life I assumed we had fluoridated water but apparently only 1/78 of our water systems are. I only checked when we had kids and I needed to know whether or not I needed to give them Fluoride Drops.
My thing is this…
- Adding it requires effort
- Removing it, if possible, requires effort
- It’s not a requirement
- There are other alternative methods to get it, like toothpaste, or sumpliments, that don’t force your neighbors to have your fluoride.
For what’s it worth, in my country (Netherlands), we don’t add fluoride to our tap water anymore since the early 70s. We just have it in our toothpaste (though you can also get fluoride free toothpaste for those who don’t want it).
Sure there’s still traces of fluoride in our water, as it appears in nature. But it’s not artificially added by our water companies.
If they remove it from the water, then change the availability to be OTC for multivitamins with fluoride. I want to be able to get it with our having a copay and whatever else the Dr wants to charge .
many toothpastes have it, no need to use multivitamins
The question to me is - do we even have to fluoridate water and is this really the best approach?
For example, most European countries do not commonly use fluoride in their water supply, and everyone’s just fine! No extra cavities, no special health risks. People commonly drink tap water and do not care about potential for any adverse effects, because it’s just that - clean water. And for any teeth-related issues, you already have your toothpaste providing more than enough fluorine.
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Water fluoridation reaches over 13 million Europeans through programs in England, Ireland, Poland, Serbia and Spain
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Children in deprived areas benefit most from water fluoridation according to 2018 English health agency report
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Over 70 million Europeans receive fluoridated salt through programs in Austria, France, Germany, Switzerland and other countries. Salt fluoridation is recommended when water fluoridation is not feasible
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European Academy of Pediatric Dentistry endorses water fluoridation as “core component of oral health policy”
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Fluoridated milk programs have operated in Bulgaria, England, Hungary, Russia and Scotland
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Several European countries provide free or subsidized fluoride treatments through national healthcare:
- Sweden: free dental care through age 23
- Denmark: free dental care until age 18
- Finland: public dental clinic access for all legal residents
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Scandinavian schools offer fluoride varnish, tablets and rinse programs
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Some regions in Europe have naturally fluoridated water, such as parts of Italy. Italian health officials support water fluoridation but don’t implement additional programs due to naturally optimal fluoride levels in some areas
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Evidence shows that water fluoridation prevents tooth decay by providing frequent and consistent contact with low levels of fluoride, ultimately reducing tooth decay by about 25% in children and adults.
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evidence shows that schoolchildren living in communities where water is fluoridated have, on average, 2.25 fewer decayed teeth compared to similar children not living in fluoridated communities.
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A study to compare costs associated with community water fluoridation with treatment savings achieved through reduced tooth decay, which included 172 public water systems, each serving populations of 1,000 individuals or more, found that 1 year of exposure to fluoridated water yielded an average savings of $60 per person when the lifetime costs of maintaining a restoration were included.
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Analyses of Medicaid claims data in 3 other states (Louisiana, New York, and Texas), have also found that children living in fluoridated communities have lower caries related treatment costs than do similar children living in non-fluoridated communities; the difference in annual per child treatment costs ranged from $28 to $67.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9544072/
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community water fluoridation continues to decrease cavities by 25% at the population level.
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Even with fluoridated products such as toothpaste and mouth rinses, this public health practice can reduce an additional 25% of tooth decay in children and adults
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In 1945, Grand Rapids, Michigan became the first U.S. city to fluoridate its public water supply. Five years later, Grand Rapids schoolchildren were found to have significantly fewer cavities than children from the control community of Muskegon, and additional water districts, including Muskegon began fluoridating and seeing similar results
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Studies have shown that populations from lower socioeconomic groups within fluoridated communities have less tooth decay when compared to peers in nonfluoridated communities
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The cost of a lifetime of water fluoridation for one person is less than the cost of one filling
More info: https://www.ada.org/resources/community-initiatives/fluoride-in-water
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The fluoride added to water gets it up to 0.7mg/liter.
That ends up to be 2 or 3 drops in a 55 gallon drums worth of water. Not much.
Fluoride is a natural substance and is found in many areas drinking water already. Many areas in much higher concentrations than 0.7mg/liter, so realistically people all over the world have drank fluoridated water for thousands of years.
You have to well over double the 0.7 before any health issues may appear and the first to appear is at about triple the concentration in kids under 8 years old who drink it for years getting spots on their teeth. The spots are only superficial.
Going into concentrations even higher than that CAN cause health issues when drank for longer periods of time. All of those cases being from naturally occurring fluoride, which actually effects somewhere north of 20% of the world’s population.
Which makes the argument that fluoride in our water keeps us passive as being extra stupid, since water sourced around Columbia (the country) is far higher than .07mg/liter and Columbia seems to be caught in violence and turmoil and instability quite a bit over the decades.
*edit: Colombia
Its presence in groundwater is how we discovered it’s good for teeth.
In fact, there used to be so much in some areas,it actually stained the teeth. In Colorado Springs a dentist noticed that the children were developing brown stains on their teeth. In researching it, it was discovered that the “Colorado Brown Stain” was caused by excessive fluoride in the drinking water. But it also lead to the discovery that regions with natural fluoride present but in lower levels than Colorado Springs didn’t have stained teeth, but did have lower levels of tooth decay.
I want someone who knows about these things to respond to this 2012 metastudy that ties naturally fluoridated groundwater to neurological problems. I have used this the past decade to say “well the science is unclear;” I found it back then (2013 at the latest) when I was trying to disprove a crank and really questioned my shit. There was a(n unrelated?) follow up later that questioned the benefits. Since this is very far from my area of expertise, I’m not championing these; I just want to understand why they’re wrong or at least don’t matter in the discourse.
(Edit: for the educated, there could be a million ways these are wrong. Authors are idiots, study isn’t reproducible, industry capture, conclusions not backed up by data, whatever. I just don’t have the requisite knowledge to say these are wrong and therefore fluoridated water is both safe and useful)
Update: great newer studies in responses! You can have a rational convo starting with these two that moves to newer stuff.
There’s a follow up meta study from 2020.:
In conclusion, based on the totality of currently available scientific evidence, the present review does not support the presumption that fluoride should be assessed as a human developmental neurotoxicant at the current exposure levels in Europe.
Next headline will be how fluoride contributes to autism and it will have just as much evidence as the vaccine bit does. How is this even a thing? Is ground zero on this RFK?
Meanwhile, all the people who can’t afford dentists will have even worse teeth going forward. Make America’s teeth British again.
Well look at the statistics:
Fluoride:
- Water fluoridation in the United States began in the 1940s
- By 1949, nearly 1 million Americans were receiving fluoridated tap water
- In 1951, the number jumped dramatically to 4.85 million people
- By 1952, the number nearly tripled again to 13.3 million Americans
- In 1954, the number exceeded 20 million people
- In 1965 an additional 13.5 million Americans gained access to fluoridated water.
- By 1969, 43.7% of Americans had access to fluoridated tap water.
- In 2000, approximately 162 million Americans (65.8% of the population served by public water systems) received optimally fluoridated water
- 2006: 69.2% of people on public water systems (61.5% of total population)
- 2012: 74.6% of people on public water systems (67.1% of total population)
Autism:
- First recognised in the 1940s
- During the 1960s and 1970s, prevalence estimates were approximately 0.5 cases per 1,000 children.
- Prevalence rates increased to about 1 case per 1,000 children in the 1980s.
- 2000: 1 in 150 children
- 2006: 1 in 110 children
- 2014: 1 in 59 children
- 2016: 1 in 54 children
- 2020: 1 in 36 children
Seems pretty clear cut to me.
/s because people think I posted this in seriousness.
So, once again, DHMO is the chemical we need to fear.
The stuff also known as hydric acid. People just don’t talk enough about how corrosive it is. Plus, it gets in the air and gets in your lungs!
There was an incident involving it on April 14th 1912 that took over 1500 lives.
I heard that anyone who’s ever come into contact with it has later died
terrorists will drink vast amounts of it every day before an attack
Its a common component of all cancer cells, and trace amounts have been found in the blood of dead lab rats.
