I initially dismissed it as the same category of stupid as anti-vax beliefs, but it turns out that there are a decent amount of good studies showing a link between fluoride in water and (slightly) lower IQ when pregnant mothers ingest the fluoride. Note that there is no significant effect after birth.
The idea is to remove fluoride from water and advise pregnant women to use fluoride-free toothpaste.
Everyone else can get enough fluoride from modern toothpastes, or regular dentist treatments.
The logic is that fluoride in tap water made sense in the era before toothpaste had it, but now it is “overmedicating” a vulnerable fraction of the population.
In the actual research the main "risk" posed by flouridated water is actually fluorosis. This causes minerals in your enamel to be replaced with flouride which can cause them to be brittle in the long term. It's pretty uncommon but the thought is that now that flouride toothpaste are commonplace, the benefit of flouridated water is also way less. Which changes the calculus.
A not insignificant number of researchers are advocating for the view that flouridating water just isn't worth it anymore and the (slight) risk of flourosis is more significant than the (slight) benefit of decreased dental caries.
Children are the main group that benefits from fluoride in water because the fluoride helps strengthen teeth as they form. Lack of fluoride increases childhood cavities, leading to decreased academic performance.
This was a real problem in the San Jose school district until recently. They started fluoridation of water in the last ten years, and were the biggest US city that didn’t fluoridate. The evidence of the above is clear according to SJ dentists I have talked to.
The National Toxicology Program recently completed a fairly substantial meta study and concluded that "for every 1 mg/L increase in urinary fluoride, there is a decrease of 1.63 IQ points in children.". [1] This is also relevant to OP since it's not just pregnant women at risk from excessive fluoridation but also children. For now it seems that adults are, somewhat oddly, unaffected.
> 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.
Yeah, note the measurement is in urine. So there are two separate issues. Determining whether fluoride is damaging to IQ, and then whether the levels in water can drive this. The former is way easier to evaluate than the latter. The reason comes from that study's intro pargraphs:
---
"Since 1945, the use of fluoride has been a successful public health initiative for reducing dental cavities and improving general oral health of adults and children. There is a concern, however, that some pregnant women and children may be getting more fluoride than they need because they now get fluoride from many sources including treated public water, water-added foods and beverages, teas, toothpaste, floss, and mouthwash, and the combined total intake of fluoride may exceed safe amounts."
---
So the issue is trying to isolate the exact amount and source of fluoride people are getting. And that probably has no answer because it's going to vary dependent on how much fluoridated water somebody drinks, the rest of their diet, their other dental hygiene composition, and more. So levels that would be safe for one percent of the population, will be dangerous for another percent of it.
Fluorosis is very common afaik. My dentist told me I have it: slightly whiter patches on my teeth. Then he showed me his own fluorosis. It actually is stronger than the old enamel.
Does the study not literally refute the claim that fluoride's negative impact on IQ is lacking in evidence, contrary to the original claim? What exactly do you think needs to be updated?
the original refutation was "fluoride in the drinking water concentrations is proven safe and it doesn't affect brains". Your study does not show that IQ is effected at concentrations that are being added to water supplies. Just because X can result from Y levels of some substance does't mean X results from Y-n concentrations.
> the original refutation was "fluoride in the drinking water concentrations is proven safe and it doesn't affect brains".
No, this is the original claim:
> but it turns out that there are a decent amount of good studies showing a link between fluoride in water and (slightly) lower IQ when pregnant mothers ingest the fluoride.
Then the parent replied that this IQ link is lacking evidence, which it's not, per the meta-analysis I cited.
For fluoride measured in water, associations remained inverse when exposed groups were restricted to less than 4 mg/L or less than 2 mg/L but not when restricted to less than 1.5 mg/L
There were limited data and uncertainty in the dose-response association between fluoride exposure and children’s IQ when fluoride exposure was estimated by drinking water alone at concentrations less than 1.5 mg/L.
The meta analysis you linked gets the strongest results in areas of the world with outstandingly high levels of fluoride and other elements in the ground water .. water with so many additives it rings like a bell when tapped with a hammer (okay, that's an embellishment).
> but now it is “overmedicating” a vulnerable fraction of the population.
Makes sense, but the intention also is that many people do not brush their teeth, or at least do not brush them as often as they should, and so fluoride is added to drinking water to compensate so people's teeth don't start to fall out at an alarming rate.
Sadly, an alarming percentage of Americans don't drink water. I’ve spoken to way too many people who think water tastes wrong because it’s not sweet enough.
It’s heartbreaking, but not surprising. When you’re dealing with limited resources, constant stress, and often living in areas where healthy options are harder to access or more expensive, sugary drinks can feel like an affordable comfort. Instead of judging SNAP recipients, we should be looking at the systems that make soda more accessible than clean, appealing
, and fresh food.
Are SNAP recipients not allowed to enjoy a soda at all? I really don't understand the problem with this. Society acts like signing up for SNAP involves signing a contract to lose 100 pounds and only eat iceberg lettuce or something.
Americans seem to love to gatekeep what the poor are allowed to have or not have.
They have this image of the Welfare Queen driving a pink Cadillac to cash her welfare checks at the liquor store.
It seems that no matter how desperately destitute someone might be,
there's a person who will point at something they have,
whether it's a tent to sleep in under a bridge (a gift from an organization providing assistance to the houseless),
a bicycle that's their only means of transportation,
or a garden planted on public property,
and say "they can't be that poor if they have that!
When someone lives off of public benefit, there's a sense in which the public can have an interest in how the money is used -- its use should correlate with its intent.
That's why SNAP money is restricted to particular categories. So caring about how it's spent is already a foregone conclusion, and rightly so.
If someone wants to spend money however they like, they'll have to earn it themselves. Even inherited money carries a sense of obligation to honor the family with how it's used (like not blowing it all in a week of lavish partying in Vegas, as an extreme example).
If an individual spends 10% of their SNAP benefits on soda, they’ve spent about ~$30 over a month on it, which is ten 20fl oz drinks. People drinking a bit more than a gallon of soda per month only supports the notion that they can subsist on that without any water if you believe that they categorically have some sort of exceptional unhuman biology.
Well, it's true that water has zero calories and is neutral tasting. It's not filling to any degree, and milk will give you a lot more of what your body needs.
Water is great for hydration without filling you otherwise. Like, say you need to drink a lot of fluid because you are really active, you would probably get sick of milk pretty quickly.
But anyway, in most cases, the fact that drinking milk doubles as a source of food is clearly a benefit. It's hard to explain a common behavior by reference to a rare circumstance.
The idea of sports drinks is that you can drink them without getting water poisoning. This is only a concern if you need a lot of water because you've been sweating a lot, but I thought that was the scenario you were pointing to.
Probably because the overwhelming majority of countries chlorinates their water to various degrees because they don't have the exceptional plumbing quality needed to otherwise guarantee potability.
Countries where the tap water is drinkable without chlorination have quality that exceeds bottled water, and it might even be sourced from the same aquifers.
When travelling where? The blanket statement here just doesn't work. Every major area has very different water in the tap. A lot of the bottled water is just tap water from another region.
When traveling by vehicle (pickup truck for me) I've thrown in a 5 gallon cooler of water from home. It was so nice to want to drink water because it was my own good well water that tastes like I'm used to.
When I had to fly to NY for work I felt like I couldn't get water anywhere that was worth drinking.
Where in New York? If NYC, this sounds insane to me, because New York municipal water is objectively speaking among the purest (if not the purest) in the country.
San Francisco tap water is almost as good. It was better before they started mixing reclaimed water into it, though I’ve either gotten used to the new taste or they’ve fixed the treatment process.
I question this as a bad take or a data-point of one, because NYC water is the best of Upstate water.
I’ve travelled and lived across the country during my high school and college years; and I’ve travelled my
extensively within Upstate very (Adirondacks, Catskills, and Finger Lakes) and the taste of local water is the first thing I notice.
Bad building pipes aside, I have not tasted any water that exceeds NYC’s tap water in taste.
I’m not the only person who’s expressed this, and guests from other regions have also admitted the same consistently over the years.
It can vary much more closely than that. I moved from one town to another 12 miles away, and the tap water in the new town tasted horrible compared to my old town's tap.
I'm pretty sure that no amount of fluoridated water is going to save you if you do not brush your teeth.
Even if the fluoride somehow manages to overcome all that and prevent you from getting cavities, the gum disease will eventually cause all your teeth to fall out.
The levels of fluoridation in order to cause difference in IQ as I understand it, from the Chinese studies, suggest that basically the effect if true occurs at around 2x+ the concentration found in supplemented water supplies.
My understanding also is that if you’re a dentist wanting to get rich, move somewhere that has unfluoridated water.
So if your training and double your water intake your basically lowering you IQ? (according to the Chinese studies) I wonder the method this uses.. has anyone looked at dementia rates in high fluoride areas.. Particularly in people with high water intake?
There is also a host of things we use water for from cooking to preserving, distilling and cooling.. i wonder if any of these things could concentrate the fluoride.
Also since fluoride has a lower boiling point any studies tracked what breathing in fluoride gas over long periods cause?
2x is honestly pretty small. I would expect the amount required to drop IQ to be larger by an order of magnitude or more to conclude that fluoridating water is totally safe.
2x is basically no safe margin for something like water. Of course you can question the quality of the study, but if it's actually 2x, fluoride in tap water should be treated like lead pipes.
> I initially dismissed it as the same category of stupid as anti-vax beliefs
Dismissing things out of hand like this is a category of stupid in itself.
Look at the current research, listen to people who devoted their careers to studying this, make up your own mind. If you're on HN, then you're qualified enough to at least figure out who the genuine experts are and read what they recommend.
Putting any science-based debate into a "category" to dismiss is turning yourself into one of the stupid people.
This is bad advice that no one could possibly follow.
> Look at the current research, listen to people who devoted their careers to studying this, make up your own mind.
Do you honestly do this with every single belief you have? Even every single controversial belief? Have you looked, yourself, into whether the world is flat? Whether the 9/11 conspiracy theories are true? Whether crop circles were created by aliens? These are all absurd conspiracy theories, but I assume most people don't know the "up to date" research on any of them, or what people who have "devote their careers" to research them say.
And those are incredibly common and well known to be false theories.
You have to take some things on faith to at least some degree - though to be clear, by "on faith" I mean "on faith of people you trust", which should really start with professional scientists etc. Also, it's totally fine to just say "I have no actual idea" about most things, and just go with what your current understanding of the status-quo position is.
> Have you looked, yourself, into whether the world is flat? Whether the 9/11 conspiracy theories are true? Whether crop circles were created by aliens?
> Everyone else can get enough fluoride from modern toothpastes, or regular dentist treatments.
The advantage of putting it in water is that it ensures all children get it, not just the children whose parents can and do make sure they brush their teeth and go to the dentist.
Agree, my biggest issue is often where they source the fluoride and whether they test it. We found out in my (liberal) hometown that they were actually sourcing some derivative which has no human studies.
Given that everyone gets enough in toothpaste I just don’t see the reason to keep doing it, too much can go wrong. It’s kind of a strange mass medication that I’m not sure the government needs to be involved in.
> The idea is to remove fluoride from water and advise pregnant women to use fluoride-free toothpaste.
What most people don't understand here are the levels of fluoride being ingested. You can very easily remove all fluoride from your water with a relatively cheap RO system. But the recommendation to use "fluoride-free toothpaste" is just plain misinformation.
The reason is that you don't eat toothpaste. And even when adults ingest small amounts of toothpaste, again, the amount of fluoride is basically beyond negligible. Fluoride can both be applied to teeth as a varnish and/or consumed in drinking water. Using a flouride-free toothpaste can oftentimes do more damage than good because of SLS in those alternatives and because those alternatives often have abrasives that do far more harm than good. It's amazing people will recommend a product that may likely be worse because they have no domain expertise. So, yes, people should talk to their Dentist about these things and ask questions of them vs the Internet.
Really the downside to removing fluoride from city water is that low income families will be worse off with respect to dental related issues compared to more well off families that spend time instilling dental hygiene and preventative care for their kids. As you mentioned most people who have decent oral hygiene get enough flouride.
Where we live we have well water. Fluoride in the water isn't a concern, and if it was in our drinking water it generally wouldn't be consumed because of the water filtration anyway.
My anecdotal experience says that using fluride-free biomine toothpaste makes my tooth highly sensitive than using a good ol' Colgate. Now, I use it only twice or thrice per month randomly.
It is trivial today to get whatever level of fluoride is recommended for dental health, via toothpaste. So there is no compelling need to fluoridate as there exist viable alternatives to achieve the same that fluoridation is for any other purpose than dental health.
In the USA, dental care is not covered by public insurance, and is an optional add-on to insurance through one’s employer.
So without addressing at all whether fluoridation is effective or safe, there doesn’t seem to be any compelling need to fluoridate public water, and there’s no economic down side for the public if governments choose not to do so.
Given this, why not just leave people alone to make their own choices? If the citizens in a city or state want to fluoridate the public water supply, then do so; if they choose not to, then leave them alone. It’s a free country and voters are grownups; let them choose for themselves.
If you live in a place that chooses the choice you dislike but for some reason fluoridated public water supply is a critical issue for you, either campaign to change it or vote with your feet.
This issue just doesn’t seem important enough to me to spend any effort arguing either way.
> This issue just doesn’t seem important enough to me to spend any effort arguing either way.
Your comment is well-stated, and in the spirit of a free and liberal society. The problem—not with your argument, but with the world—is that today there seems to be literally no issue unimportant enough not to argue about, or use as the battlefield for an unending ideological proxy war. My guess is that few of the people arguing this issue on HN have strong feelings about flouride qua flouride, but have strong feelings about the kinds of people they believe oppose or support the use of flouride in water, and this notion is what they're really railing against.
This rings true for my gut reaction. The family and acquaintances in my life who have been up in arms against fluoride for years now are actual neo nzs (like “deport all non whites”, “you-know-who controls america”, “superiority of the white race” level).
So my instinct is to really be afraid of this anti-fluoride wave, even tho practically I don’t care one way or another.
I think one thing you're not considering (especially when you say we should vote with our feet) is poverty. It’s true that fluoride toothpaste is widely available, but for people in poverty, of which there are millions in our country, basic hygiene items like toothpaste and a toothbrush aren’t guaranteed. Neither is it guaranteed that everyone has a perfect daily brushing habit like the dentist tells us; there are people who don't brush every day, or even every week.
You talked about dental care not being covered by public insurance — is it not worth considering that some basic level of dental care is already being applied to the country via fluoridation? It's a minimal, cost-effective way to prevent tooth decay at scale. Fluoridated water is one of the few dental protections available to everyone regardless of their income.
If you're not brushing your teeth, periodontitis will get you; the resulting bone decay will cause your teeth will fall out. But sure, great, the water was fluoridated, so I guess it's nice that those now-missing teeth are free of caries?
there are people who own a toothbrush but do not purchase toothpaste. money is not something everyone has and when you start having to choose between certain things, tough choices get made.
I really don't feel like you're interpreting my comment in good faith. Do you really think I was arguing that poor people literally never brush their teeth, and every single poor person in the country will eventually suffer from periodontitis? If you read my comment again, I'm sure you could find a way to engage in better faith.
I don't believe there's a single person in the USA that's so poor they can't pay $3 for toothpaste every 3 months. I also believe that having such a low personal hygiene where you don't brush your teeth altogether, even if you drink water with fluoride, will have terrible results anyway for your teeth anyway.
I'm completely sure that any people that don't brush their teeth is just because they are too lazy to even bother.
This trope of justifying everything with "but there are millions of poor people in the USA" is really tiresome.
It's not that they can't afford a $3 toothpaste, it is the environment they are in that makes it hard to prioritize things like this. It is the education and the overall life quality (or the lack there of) that causes this problem.
Trivial is what we have now. Taking fluoride from the water means people will have to spend extra time and money on fluoride and dental treatments. When I viewed it, your comment appeared directly after this one (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43524171), which talks about a town in Canada that voted to abandon fluoride , saw worse health outcomes, and then voted to reinstate it. This tells us that fluoride is not trivially available to people, and taking it away from them enriches corporations while making people less healthy.
It is trivial today to get whatever level of fluoride is recommended for dental health, via toothpaste. So there is no compelling need to fluoridate as there exist viable alternatives to achieve the same that fluoridation is for any other purpose than dental health.
I also agree that people should be able to make decisions like this, but they should be aware that one of the results of these kinds of efforts could be that everyone gets less healthy, rather than everyone stays at the same level of health with less cost.
Presumably when they voted to get rid of fluoride in the water in Calgary, they didn't do so expecting the outcome would be that people in their town would be less healthy overall. Nonetheless, that was the outcome of their vote.
The anecdote shows that it's not trivial, because when the fluoride in the water went away, people were not able to trivially replace it, leading to worse health outcomes. Ultimately people found too high of a cost, seeing as that they reversed the decision.
Sadly it took a decade for them to realize their mistake. I worry people today are making the same mistake, and we will reverse it in a decade after health outcomes are shown to have worsened.
Perhaps, sadly, because if the State doesn't have to pick up the costs in health care, as in large parts of the developed world, then they lose their incentive to be proactive in addressing health issues.
In countries with some form of universal health care, simple proactive health interventions can save the State large amounts of money.
In theory health insurance in the US has the same incentive. But it's cheaper to deny preventative care and then deny or minimize or cap coverage later on.
Your indifference is based on some core assumptions that are false. In reality,
1) Fluoride in water works in addition to fluoride in toothpaste to protect our teeth - rather than two highly concentrated events of reminieralization, fluoriated water reminieralizes the teeth throughout the day.
2) There is a strong economic downside to ceasing fluoridation: Fluoridation saves millions of dollars that otherwise would be spent on dental bills by the public - https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/abs/10.1377/hlthaff.2016.0... - shows cost savings ratio of twenty dollars for every.
dollar invested in reduced treament costs. This remains apt: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7164347/
3) The best way to preserve choice is to maintain fluoridation. People cannot choose to fluoridated their own water system - they can choose to live in unfluoridated areas, use filters that remove fluoride, or otherwise avoid the tap water.
4) Removing fluoridation means acces to fluoride becomes much more difficult and expensive. The reason fluoridation is so cost effective is that it is delivered through the public water system - a community resource. Bottled fluoridated water is more expensive than gasoline. It is also less regulated and less available in the U.S.A.
In general it's some weird relic of medieval view on dentists not being medical professionals but someone akin to barbers. It shouldn't exits but it persists.
That’s going to go poorly. A Canadian city removed fluoride from water in 2011 and reversed that decision 10 years later. There’s hard data on the effects and they’re not good [0].
The study [1] that's based on seems pretty typical, and is precisely what drives skepticism towards these policies. The differences for permanent teeth were not significant. The paper claimed this may be because "7-year-olds have not had the time to accumulate enough permanent dentition caries experience for differences to have become apparent." The differences in temporary teeth had a deft (decay, extracted, filled teeth) of 66.1% in Calgary (no fluoride) and 54.3% in Edmonton (fluoridated).
So you're looking at a small positive improvements in dental outcomes, for what may be a permanent decline to IQ. That's obviously not a trade I think anybody would make, so the real issue is not whether or not it improves dental outcomes but whether it's having measurable effects on IQ as we have seen in other studies. [2] I don't understand why a study operating in good faith wouldn't also pursue this question in unison, or in fact as the primary question. I think relatively few people outright doubt the dental benefits of fluoride, but rather are concerned about the cost we may pay for such.
In the 2nd study that shows correlation between fluoride and lower IQ in children, the water had twice as much fluoride as the recommended amount in the US (1.5 mg/L vs 0.7 mg/L).
The only reason for lack of concrete statements on the 0.7 level was a lack of data, owing largely to US political culture (1.5 is the World Health Organization 'safe' limit). Not long ago fluoride stuff was considered a 'conspiracy theory' which greatly deters meaningful scientific research on the topic. This is in part because of social reasons (most people don't want to be perceived as 'fringe') and in part because it results in funding for such research drying up. For that matter even IQ studies themselves are borderline given the US political culture.
So for instance of the 19 low risk-of-bias studies, exactly 0 came from the US. 10 were in China, 3 were in Mexico, 2 in Canada, 3 in India, and 1 in Iran. 18 of those 19 studies found a significant reduction in IQ that corresponds strongly with increases in fluoride (the outlier was in Mexico). With the current administration we'll certainly be seeing funding for such studies in the US and so there should be much more high quality data on the 0.7 level forthcoming. But in general this is a major problem that needs solving. Exploring the breadths of science, including the fringes, should not require an activist political administration.
There are natural experiments where the correlation between IQ and lower amounts of fluoride can be studied. For example in Israel, until 2014, the fluoride level was 0.8-1.0 mg/L depending on the region but starting in 2014 water is no longer fluoridated (naturally occurring fluoride level is in the 0.1-0.3 mg/L range for the vast majority of the population) so the data should be there, it's just a matter of collecting it. Some countries can provide data for the opposite natural experiment (adding fluoride in recent years).
To me, using the 1.5 mg/L doesn't tell anything about lower levels but it does make me interested in seeing such study whereas before I'd have just dismissed it.
This might have been a viable argument a decade ago because these rules were implicit and not explicit. But as of 2022 they've become explicit. [1] IQ is distributed dramatically differently in different groups, which makes it difficult to meaningfully study in the US because, as Nature now puts it, "Although academic freedom is fundamental, it is not unbounded... Science has for too long been complicit in perpetuating structural inequalities and discrimination in society..."
This is why meaningful studies on IQ are basically dead in the US and similarly why we were one of last countries to confirm the absolutely critical reversal of the Flynn Effect. I think the political tide started to turn really hard after the decades long Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study ended up definitively proving the opposite of what it intended. [2]
Most working in the field in the US are doing so only due to an effort to undermine it, not study it. Otherwise - they aren't getting published, at least not by the traditionally prestigious journals. Here [1] is a search in reverse chronological order from Nature for studies with the terms IQ and intelligence. The exact demarcation mark is difficult to find, but I do think 1996 is a reasonable indicator. In any case the difference is plainly visible.
I particularly like their trend of publishing editorials with ledes like, "We are leading Nature on a journey to help decolonize research and forge a path towards restorative justice and reconciliation." How can that not make you cringe? People are going to look back at this as the equal but opposite of phrenology. Or perhaps we've had our own Al-Ghazali [2] moment and people will look back at this era as an inflection point in science shifting from one culture to another.
So the problem isn't that the science is being done, it's that the results are challenging conclusions you've already drawn? At least we're clear on what the issue is. The work I'm talking about has nothing about "decolonization" in it, but lots on GWAS and population stratification statistics.
On the contrary, I think the one and only thing that really enabled such widespread advances in science over the past few centuries was the same thing that initially enabled such for the Greeks - people were able to pursue things with near to no limitations, no taboo, no dogma. And it seems that perhaps such things are inherently liminal in nature. The Greeks would then go to on to execute perhaps the greatest thinker in humanity's history for wrongthink, and we ourselves are already well into the times of where not only is there taboo and dogma, but it's even overtly stated.
When you get into population stratification issues you're already again flirting with taboo depending on what is being studied. So yeah - low sample sized, poorly controlled, correlation exclusive GWAS studies are the gold standard in genetics publications. I'm so completely surprised that such, alongside the rusty hacksaw that's CRISPR, failed to live up to even a zillionth of their 'potential'.
Any characteristic being studied whose presence or absence would be seen as socially negative sense is going to be walking a very fine line if it turns out to be associated (or not) with certain subgroups because then you're right back to, in Nature's terms "[being] complicit in perpetuating structural inequalities and discrimination in society."
The most ridiculous part is that we have an alternative way to apply fluoride without intaking it. It's called toothpaste. But for some reason people act like Utah is banning vaccine.
Using toothpaste with fluoride can be effective when used regularly as part of dental hygiene. What percentage of the population is going to do this? I've encountered grade school children who have never owned a toothbrush.
I don't think it's about hard data and optimization of health, but rather bodily autonomy.
I'm sure there are plenty of chemicals that could be forcibly put in the drinking supply that, based on current scient, would be beneficial for the public. But I would still be skeptical. Sell me these substances in my food or toothpaste, but don't put it in my drinking water by default.
It's also worth noting about 3% of western Europe has fluorinated so let's not pretend like this is unprecedented
Many places in Europe have high levels of fluoride in their water naturally. In fact many of them are likely getting far too much fluoride.
Also realistically, if people cared about bodily autonomy cars would've been banned immediately thanks to the amount of particulates and local pollution produced causing far more adverse health effects.
If a state wants to ban cars it should be free to do so. I think the benefits outweigh the costs and no one would choose to live there.
Also important to note no one is banning flouride. They're preventing it from being put in the drinking water. The equivalent would be if cars were distributed upon arriving to the state.
The state is taking the rights away from the municipalities. Why not leave it up to the local people? No one was forcing local towns to fluoridate their water.
But municipalities that chose to do so would be taking the choice away from each individual.
I don't know enough to form an opinion about whether Utah's new policy is good or bad, but it is clearly on the side of individual freedom. (of course that's not the only concern)
I would say that it's not on the side of individual freedom but the will of the state. It's easier to build a local coalition than a state wide one. Democracy has costs but they're usually lessened when you're going down to the local levels. Sure an individual may not get to choose everything (such as zoning laws) but zoning laws are best managed by the municipality and not at the state nor federal level.
Imagine if 70% of Salt Lake City wants this but can't because of people living hundreds of miles away. Not sure if that's a huge win.
Democracies have costs. Unless you expect 100% of people to agree on everything, then you have to accept that the minority should accept certain outcomes. The smaller the group that chooses, the better the majority. The more likely that you personally will be able to make a change.
Local is better than State. State is better than Federal. If this was going from the federal level to the state, I would agree that it's a win for personal liberty. Unfortunately it's local going to the state level. If a water district of 100,000 people all want this, they simply can't do it. It doesn't seem fair that people who won't be impacted get to decide.
Yes, municipality is better than state which is better than federal government. The same viewpoint with gun laws, taxation, regulation, etc. It's easier for me to move a few miles to find like minded people than it is for me to move hundreds of miles to leave a state or thousands to leave the my country.
Personally I see states as an artifact of the 20th century. Why can't municipalities govern themselves? Why shouldn't my city be able to leave my state and join another. States made sense before the internet and communication was difficult. Now they're just a middle man without a lot of value.
If eastern towns of California don't want to be grouped together with San Francisco or Los Angeles: why should they be forced to be? Because someone in the 18th or 19th century determined it?
Is one due the right to potable water at a tap at their home? Or is purified water a service offered by the government as one source of many available to the us population?
Are you not allowed to pay for bottled water instead of paying your local utility for drinking water?
The bodily autonomy argument seems bad to me because you are buying water from the government when you could buy water from any other source instead.
Is the argument that the government water is too convenient and so it should be unfiltered? Who is to say that filtering out poop is not infringing on my right to consume unfiltered water?
Fluoride was introduced late enough in Zimbabwe that many of my childhood adults easily remembered life before it. There were many horror stories about the general state of teeth prior.
That being said, your dentist can apply fluoride to your teeth (boggles the mind why insurance won't pay the $50), and flouride toothpaste is still much more common than not. It's probably not needed in the water supply for dental purposes.
That being said, what are the other fringe benefits: such as microbe control?
The city of Houston has stopped adding fluoride to water but allows natural fluoride levels to exist[0]. We are going on year 6 and the only thing we have noticed is harder water.
There is probably more nuance to both stories tho.
Perhaps more could be done. The situation is complex because of several compounding factors for sure. There are European countries that have no water fluoridation and better oral health outcomes than in North America.
Regardless, there’s 10 years where a city in North America turned off water fluoridation and we have results of that decision to study.
I'm skimming the results, but it looks like adult teeth had less cavities when they turned the fluoride off...and that was not observed in Edmonton where they left the fluoride on the whole time.
"For all tooth surfaces among permanent teeth (Table 1a), there was a statistically significant decrease in Calgary, for the overall mean DMFS, which was not observed in Edmonton."
Based on their data, you could argue that fluoride increases cavities in adults... I'm not making that argument. I agree with you in that I think confounders are at play and the difference attributed to fluorinated water isn't as large.
People will use this study to take about the rampant tooth decay in Calgary, ignoring that there is roughly as much decay in Edmonton which had the fluoride on the whole time.
Hawaii does not add fluoride to their water. Utah may be the first to out-right ban it, but there are quite a few local communities and cities that opt-out of adding it to their drinking water.
The US is, according to Wikipedia, among a small minority of countries in which a majority of people drink fluoridated water. Various European countries have discontinued doing so. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation>
Yep. My favorite thing is when I am not even at a restaurant and I'm being asked to tip a retail worker making well above minimum wage. As a former bartender who made $2.65US an hour and relied on tips for my "paycheck" each week, seeing this new "tipping everyone" trend is like a slap in the face.
Bottom line, if your business can't afford to pay its people a living wage, then it can't afford to operate.
Two of the most hilarious things I've seen are tips at self-serve kiosks, and tips where you carry the food to the person behind the counter. Tipping them for ringing up an item..
At a corner store I frequent, they recently changed POS systems, and the new ones show a tipping screen. The person there always quickly dismisses it; I think they haven't figured out how to disable it, and are a little embarrassed that the machine is asking you to tip for just ringing up your items.
(Well, they also make espresso drinks and made-to-order deli sandwiches, so I guess it's appropriate to tip if you order those.)
Sorry for the late reply, but I'm wondering if you can explain why you tip for delivery?
In my area, pizza delivery drivers (read: not DoorDashers, etc. I am not sure what they make since I refuse to use those services) make about $12 - $15/hour and get paid for mileage (usually between $0.50 - $0.62 per mile.) I'm not seeing a reason to tip them. They are making well above minimum wage in my State, unlike the restaurant servers/bartenders that only just barely crested $4/hour as of 2025. The latter is in a position to rely on tips, the former is far from it.
I ask because we don't seem to have an established "hard line" on when tipping is appropriate in the United States, and when it is not. This extremely fuzzy understanding is allowing companies like DoorDash, coffee shops, etc to under pay their staff by off-loading part of the cost to the customer, which makes your $7 latte cost $10, or whatever. It's steamy bullshit and needs to be shoveled into the bin.
If we had a hard line on when tipping is justified, we'd quickly see a change in the other direction. I've always felt that the hard line should be "if you are making less than minimum wage, then tipping is justified." That's it. No soft maybes, no washy-washy justifications.
That being the case, if a barista (avg $15/hour in the US) is not happy _without_ the tips, then they have two options: demand more from their employer, or find a different job that pays better. Either way, the employer is left to consider either raising wages to keep people satisfied, or doing the same just to keep people in the door and stay in business. The barista is, in essence, the face of the company. They do the work the customer sees, which makes them important to the sustainability of the company. Ergo, the company needs to put more resources in the barista's pocket to ensure quality work.
It sort of blows my mind why everyone else in the US does not think this way, but I have tried to dissect my own stance on tipping (from the standpoint of having spent nearly a decade working front-of-the-house in restaurants), and I'm really having trouble poking holes in my own logic. So, I'm always interested to hear other people's takes on why they tip the way they do.
Imagine it’s raining, or they come really fast. Even if not so, it is always expected to tip the person doing delivery. That’s just the custom, like tipping in restaurant or tipping the bartender is the custom.
This is the problem. You basically said "we do it like this because that's the way we've always done it," which is the weakest form of justification for anything.
Rain, snow, etc...do you tip the person who delivers your mail? They do it in an LLV (a rather treacherous vehicle with little to no climate control) or on foot, but nobody tips them. When the pizza delivery person applied for the job, they did so knowing they would have to deliver in bad weather, but somehow we reach the conclusion that the responsibility of making sure that driver is being paid adequately for their risk and efforts is shifted to the customer, rather than than their employer.
Now, I should clarify that despite my years of restaurant service where my $2.65/hour paycheck existed nominally for the sole purpose of covering taxes (hence, my "take home" pay coming directly from the customers to my pocket), that I am in the camp of abolishing tipping altogether. Raise the wages of all service workers to a livable wage, which all these companies can certainly afford, and we'd be done with it. But I know that's a huge leap, so we need to take baby steps to get there.
Having a well-defined notion of which positions should be tip-based and which should not is the first baby step.
Great film, but bad scene, honestly. The arguments it makes are intended to make Mr Pink look like the pseudo-intellectual a-hole of the group, rather than be the social commentary on capitalism, labor relations and whose responsibility employee compensation actually is or should be, which is at the crux of any good discussion about the appropriateness of tipping.
I guess what I am getting at with my other comments is that we do not have a clear understanding of said appropriateness, and thus, we, the consumer, along side the food service worker, are generally taken advantage of by the companies that perpetuate the idea while said companies are off the hook for labor costs.
Now, before someone (if anyone is still following this thread) chimes in with "but if the restaurants pay the bartenders/servers a full wage, the food and drinks would be way more expensive!" I am here to tell you "travel more." I have been to many other countries where tipping is not at all a thing, and the food costs about the same as it does in the US.
When you walk into a restaurant in the US, you're getting ripped off. The dish you just paid $16US for cost them about $3 to make, including wage. It's not like the cooks are prepping one dish at a time, or the servers are only taking one table at a time...not to mention most restaurants in the US are using frozen, prepared ingredients that they are really just heating up or re-hydrating. Overhead costs like electricity and rent? A drop in the bucket compared to what small businesses have to deal with. The staff is making bare-minimum wages as it is while the parent companies and investors are making bank. That money from your $16US meal goes up, but very little of it actually comes back down.
Tipping exists because greed at the top exists and its unfair to both food service workers and the customers, but we've been at it so long that it's been normalized. And now it's spreading to other industries, like retail and online sales.
Yes, it's pretty common. It's also common for businesses where customers tip to underpay their employees on the expectation that they'll make it up with tips. It's legal to do this in many jurisdictions.
As an American, I wish we didn't do this, but it's a collective action problem that's very hard to solve.
What exactly is the definition of "underpay" here? Back when my wife was a server, it seemed like a cheat code to the service industry - she was making way more money waiting tables for $2.65/hr + tips than she had made at any other job she'd had (something like $18-20/hr 15 years ago)
Correct. bruckie has never actually worked as a server; otherwise he would know that tipping in the US is hugely beneficial to waiters, bartenders, etc., even with the legally allowed lower minimum wage. This is why tipping has never gone away through legislative means despite no shortage of waiters and bartenders in the populace, and why the occasional restaurant that proudly announces that it is a "no-tipping" establishment, and gets the requisite amount of slavering coverage in the usual virtue-signaling subreddits, never stays open long.
My dislike of tipping isn't to help the "poor servers" (and other employees partially compensated via tips). You're correct that I've never been a server, but I've had several friends and roommates who have been, and I'm aware of how it works. The good ones make (relatively) a lot of money; the bad ones sometimes don't, and usually find a different job pretty quickly. (I totally see how mentioning the lower minimum wage muddled my point, though.)
The reason I wish we didn't tip is because I think the list price should reflect the true cost of whatever I'm buying. I think that is more honest, encourages healthy competition, and is a pleasant consumer experience.
I was really glad when the DOT forced airlines to include taxes and fees in ticket prices in 2012, and wish there were a similar law/regulation that applied to all commerce. (And yes, I realize this is hard, given the incredible complexity of U.S. tax laws in a bazillion different—and often overlapping—jurisdictions.)
One thing that annoys me is that some states, like California, don't have a tipped minimum wage. (Well, we do, it's just set to the same number as the non-tipped minimum.) And yet we're still expected to tip. I guess the real problem is that it's expensive to live in CA, and our minimum wage needs to be hiked up quite a bit.
One of the many reasons I left the USA. Too bad US-Americans are so used to tipping 20% they even do it when traveling... giving the rest of us a reputation as being suckers.
Yes, one of the MANY cultural reasons. One less thing I have to think about when paying for food. There's honestly too many reasons to list: cost, safety, food, transportation, work life balance, education, being near family, and to see more of the world.
"Guilt" is an exaggeration, but the human behind the machine might care. It's a tiny inconvenience all things considered, and more of a principal than a practical issue. It helps tip the scale of where I'd rather live.
Yes, for nearly any restaurant this is the unspoken recommendation, and sometimes enforced automatically if your group is larger than 6-8. Source: I am an American.
Yes, at least in NYC. And you get to tip in coffee places too, even when your coffee is to go. The card payment device (whatever they are called) gives you options such as 20%, 40%, 60% when you try to pay.
for some people it is. Maybe you'll become a believer when you realize that waiters wages are only around $2.35 an hour plus tips. Some states require that wait staff make -at least- federal minimum wage ($7.50? or so). Most do quite a bit better than that in all but the worst restaurant jobs. Not really a living wage tho. Some people do well on tips in upper crust restaurants, and often bartenders have enough turnover to do pretty well too.
Yeah, this is one of those places where because RFK Jr took the anti- stand there's an understandable assumption that it's more nutty anti-science stuff, but it's much less clear cut when it comes to fluoridation. Europe has much lower rates than the US, which is an outlier on these stats only approached by Australia, and before Utah the major high profile anti-fluoride stance was made by Portland:
I'd be happier if that broken-but-correct-2x-a-day guy banned HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup) instead. It is my personal hypothesis that it is the cause of 'sugar cancer' (general cases of bad sugars / imbalances of sugars in the body), including Diabetes.
Sucrose is 50% fructose, 50% glucose. HFCS has from 42-55% fructose (there are grades), the rest being glucose (well some 25% of HFCS is water, but simplifying to the nutritive parts)
In the body it's literally all the same with minor variations in ratios. Indeed, the revered Mexican coke with cane sugar...the sucrose is broken down to component glucose and fructose in the acidic environment [1], exactly as happens with HFCS variants, and it would have been the moment it hit your digestive tract anyways.
There is zero scientific justification for the weird focus on HFCS. Yes, glucose and grossly excessive amounts of fructose are a serious problem. Especially in forms that rapidly get absorbed and go off like a glucose bomb -- our bodies are not adapted to the extremely rapid intake of glucose forms of food we eat now, including ultra-processed foods fill with refined carbs.
The #1 source of glucose in most diets is white breads, rices and so on. White flour is 60-80% starch, while white rice pushes 90% starch. Starch is strings of glucose molecules, and indeed enzymes turn that starch to free glucose almost immediately when eaten. So from a glucose perspective flour is much worse than an equal amount of sugar.
And of course nutritive sweeteners in all their forms should be avoided. But table sugar isn't more wholesome or better than HFCS.
Interesting hypothesis, is it based on anything specific? I think refined/added sugars in general are probably something best avoided, but admittedly still eat plenty. The idea that one sugar is materially worse than another feels off, but I can't quite put my finger on why.
The GI of sugar (sucrose) and HFCS is largely the same. Indeed, the HFCS-55 used in colas actually has less glucose and more fructose, and fructose actually doesn't lead to a blood sugar spike (or, more correctly, a much lower impact), leading to HFCS-55 having a lower glycemic index. HFCS and sugar are both just combinations of glucose and fructose molecules.
HFCS is not worse than sugar unless you're consuming such an outrageous amount that the fructose leads to a fatty liver (which does happen). But if you're consuming that much HFCS, it's only a small amount more of sucrose to yield the same outcome, as of course both have loads of fructose.
The one viable argument to vilify HFCS is simply that it's so convenient and inexpensive (courtesy of massively subsidized corn production) that it led to many more products having added sugars. But people who carefully pour over ingredients looking for HFCS, but treat sugar as wholesome, are usually operating on ignorance.
Not a chance that will happen, given the corn production of America. We have the most productive land in the world for growing maize, and Lord knows we’ll find shit to do with it.
We grow lots of corn because it is very heavily subsidized and insured by the US government. At scale you are guaranteed to make a profit, even during bad weather years.
Have you ever tried to purchase things in a US supermarket that lack HFCS? Chances are good you're looking at raw meats and vegetables and the like for a high effort meal made out of relatively high cost components.
I don't buy anything with HFCS at US supermarkets. I get all sorts of prepared foods: bread, yogurt, crackers, sweets, cereals (and a lot of more basic things to make meals with).
Using certain family members as a personal rubric, fluoridated water has been a right-left issue for at least 2.5 decades. I think it’s been pretty polarized for longer, though it may have taken a long time to gain steam in mainstream “discourse”.
I'm not sure you can use personal anecdotes to come to any conclusions about broad trends. To look at some actual data, I took the 2008 and 2024 election results and compared them with fluoridation rates. The split is pretty even:
The top 10 most fluoridated states went 5/5 Rep/Dem in 2008 and 6/4 Rep/Dem in 2024. These were Kentucky, Minnesota, Illinois, North Dakota, Virginia, Georgia, South Dakota, Maryland, Ohio, and South Carolina. Hardly a blue wall.
The bottom 10 least fluoridated states with 6/4 Rep/Dem in 2008 and 6/4 Rep/Dem in 2024. These were Hawaii, New Jersey, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Louisiana, Alaska, Utah, New Hampshire, and Mississippi. Hardly a red wall.
The bottom three least fluoridated states are all hardcore blue: Hawaii, New Jersey, and Oregon.
I just don't see any evidence here that this has been a left-right polarized issue until this year. The distribution of fluoride by political leanings is just too random.
I was surprised to learn this. "Worldwide, the Irish Republic, Singapore and New Zealand are the only countries which implement mandatory water fluoridation."
I live in New Zealand and my town doesn't put fluoride in the water but it seems like they'll be made to do so fairly soon. I don't really care one way or the other from the point of view of ingesting the stuff, but I do consider it a bit of a waste of money. People who brush with toothpaste don't need this and people who don't are probably drinking too much soda. A more useful thing to do might be to subsidize toothpaste for people who can't / won't buy it for their kids.
> People who brush with toothpaste don't need this and people who don't are probably drinking too much soda
I think every person in my social circles with any kind of illness or disability would be incredibly grateful for fluoridation, and it's not because of drinking too much soda
Yeah fair call. There's always some edge cases which is why I'm not the one making public policy. Although I don't think they sell the policy very well. There would be other ways to spend money for better dental health, NZ really doesn't subsidize dental care much compared to European countries.
Many other places fluoridate salt. There’s many ways to get flourish (toothpaste being the best if you can get people to use it correctly) but the evidence that mass fluoridation of some kind is good for dental health is enormous.
It seems like they could compare states/countries/cities while controlling for other factors (age, income level, etc) to see how well fluoridation works. I'm pretty sure you'll find that fluoridation helps lower the number of cavities, but it's not going to be a slam dunk.
People who want to remove fluoride from the water should visit countries where fluoride is not added and look at people's teeth.
I live in France and it's just so obvious that people grew up without fluoride — even celebrities try to talk without showing their teeth when they're on TV!
I'm all for getting consent in most cases, but sometimes you'd have to be an idiot not to take the obvious win.
It's like we were delivering flakes of gold with the mail and people complained — that's not what mailboxes are for!
You're misattributing: the U.S. has a perfect white teeth culture that doesn't exist elsewhere. Many people outside of the U.S. have healthier but uglier teeth. Fluoride isn't the reason for good/bad teeth inside/outside of the U.S, it's cultural. Many places outside of the U.S. do put fluoride in their water (nationally or regionally) and have "bad" teeth (e.g: England).
People in the U.S. don't have perfect white teeth, they have are cosmetic procedures on their teeth equivalent to liposuction, silicone, botox, hair plugs and/or laminated face.
People don't bleach their teeth much outside the US as far as I know. You can see it especially well with US actors, their teeth looking like the someone photoshopped them to #FFFFFF
Others note the bleaching, which is relatively low cost, but the (purely cosmetic) straightening is probably the more interesting example.
People in the US pay a lot of money to have very straight teeth. You can see this clearly with American celebrities and actors (versus European counterparts), but the culture of cosmetically modifying teeth is very strong all across "middle class" and up America as well.
While tooth whiteness in the US is often divorced from tooth health, fluoride does add a yellowish tint to your teeth, so the healthiest teeth — those imbued with fluoride — are slightly yellow. (In fact when they first decided to add fluoride to water, one of the questions was just how much they could add before your teeth would turn completely yellow. Health-wise the yellowing was fine, but it was obviously visually unappealing.) Ugly teeth may be due to poor/lack of orthodontia, but it's probably not due to better dental care.
But flakes of gold are not associated with a lower IQ in children.
"The NTP monograph concluded, with moderate confidence, that higher levels of fluoride exposure, such as drinking water containing more than 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter, are associated with lower IQ in children."
So it is also not clear, if the lower concentration typically found also has this effect.
"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."
But the solution of just using (cheap) Fluor in toothpaste to apply the Flour where it should go - to the teeth and not the stomach, sounds smarter to me.
So in other words, 0.7mg/L fluoridated water is also not associated with lower IQ in children. That study did not prove it safe, but it did prove it unsafe, either.
That study did prove, that too much flouride is not good for intelligence.
And there are other sources besides water from the tap, so I don't think it is intelligent to raise the base level, when the option of local applying exists. What is wrong with toothpaste?
Where I live, dental health is good and we don’t have fluorides in the water (we have free, mandatory dental care for children). We recently banned the use of fluorides to make our skis go fast because of the environmental impact.
Utah has naturally occurring fluoride in their water and some water systems its more than double(2.0mg/l) what they add to prevent dental issues. Why were they fluorinating their water?
this is it exactly. See west virginia recently banning artificial coloring. Because MAGA said so, is basically the reason, they were completely unworried about it before it became important to MAGA world by way of RFK
I am saying it’s weird to fluoridate water in areas with high levels of naturally occurring fluoride. Also to point out that there is naturally occurring fluoride. If Utah believed fluoride was a health risk, why aren’t they spending tens of millions to filter it out. Or is it just virtue signaling.
> This is the US health system being lead by a bunch of woo-woo people who don’t understand how research works.
The majority of the developed world does not fluoridate their water supply. The US has one of the highest rates of fluoridation in the developed world. Within America, fluoridation rates are highest on the East Coast and in the South, and lowest on the Left Coast.
The people leading the health system are highly credentialed. Moreover, highly credentialed people, in medicine as in all fields, frequently disagree on what studies show, how valid a study is, what it's flaws and limits are, how conclusive it is, and so forth. And the consensus has a long, time honored tradition of being wrong from time to time.
Ultimately, the woo woo people are the ones who rely on someone in a labcoat to tell them whether ingesting government approved (there's your first red flag) synthetic fluoride from industrial byproducts is "necessary".
If it's useful, brushing it onto your teeth and into your gums 56,000 times in your life is probably sufficient, particularly given that we don't know with absolute certainty beyond any shadow of a doubt that the industrial waste options are totally without health consequences. I'll literally just take care of my teeth and cross my fingers over listening to modern medical consensus on a range of topics where I simply trust intuition and common sense more.
For me as a European, adding fluoride to water for your teeth is as ridiculous as cutting the foreskin of babies' penis in name of (dubious) "hygienic reasons".
But people get used to it. Specially when they don't get to experience the alternative. Most people rationalise it is a good thing. Stockholm syndrome.
Which part of Europe are you in? Countries in Europe add fluoride to water, salt, milk, and Italy has naturally fluoridated water.
> The European Academy of Pediatric Dentistry
(EAPD) recently called water fluoridation "a core component of oral health policy" and adds that salt fluoridation "is suggested when water fluoridation cannot be implemented" due to
technical, logistical or political reasons.
I was thinking exactly the same thing, down to the circumcision thing. This whole discourse gives me the vibe of something the American society has randomly walked on and now is an "it has always been like this".
They also keep passing laws to specifically support burning coal, which is (slightly more credibly) shown to reduce IQ in children exposed to its pollution.
Note that while this may be first state to ban fluoride, it's not the first state to not have fluoride in the water. That would be Hawaii (effectively).
Strangely, I never see the people demanding we ban fluoride also demand we ban cars, considering the amount of particulates and rubber wheels we inhale as a result of policy, road design and car design. And I can almost guarantee you that's resulting in an actual meaningful drop in IQ and health outcomes as opposed to fluoridating water.
But I guess freedom to pollute matters more than bodily autonomy in terms of mental priority.
>I never see the people demanding we ban fluoride also demand we ban cars,
Perhaps you could take a dive into the youtubes, and find "crash detectives" (Welsh-based, so you may have to put captions on), but none of those professionals check for mouthwash.
Preventing cavities is far more effective with topical application of fluoride on the teeth, rather than ingestion.
I personally don’t buy the passive health benefit. Even if it’s true, there’s no proof that fluoridated water is superior to topical application.
Not to mention that if we’re going to just roll over and accept stuff in the water for public health reasons, what really should be added are more vitamins, not fluoride. In particular vitamin D
For children developing their “adult teeth” fluoride ingestion strengthens those teeth before they pop out. Topical has no effect obviously since they haven’t surfaced yet.
Great - so why do we need it in the water then? Not to mention that caries in kids teeth isn't really that relevant anyway since they fall out. Fact is, adult teeth is what matters and topical fluoridation is the most effective way, in addition to brushing and flossing to maintain dental health.
Would love to see evidence to the contrary (ingestion is superior to topical application w.r.t. fluoride).
Where did I say it had to be put in water? I literally said kids should consume vitamins with fluoride. You’re the one making up things about a topic you don’t understand.
You really want to strengthen teeth as they’re developing. It’s critical. Your “fact is” is wrong although you want to do that too. Continue to fortify after they grow in.
May I ask what motivates you to post things here where you clearly have 0 knowledge about a subject and you just write things that sound logically right in your head but are wrong?
> Preventing cavities is far more effective with topical application of fluoride on the teeth, rather than ingestion.
Since you don't seem to disagree, there's nothing to discuss then. Cheers! Also, it is a fact that fluoride is most effective towards preventing cavities topically. You can Google Scholar this and see for yourself. There's a reason dentists prescribe high-fluoride toothpaste or gel, instead of just saying drink more fluoridated water.
Putting fluoride in water promotes freedom. That sounds crazy, but let me justify it.
If you are poor you can't go anywhere or buy anything. You're not free if you're poor. If you are sick, you may be confined to a hospital bed or not feel good enough to do anything. If you are sick you're not free.
Putting fluoride in water reduces dental costs and incidence of cavities and therefore tooth infections, particularly among societies poorest. Therefore, due to fluoridation in water some people are less sick and have more money and therefore are more free.
The contrasting view is that putting fluoride in water is literally medicating people without their affirmative consent. It is the government forcing you to take a medication. It is coercive and therefore an attack on your freedom to not take medication. It is the government interfering in your life.
The contrast between positive freedom, the freedom to do something, and negative freedom, the freedom from interference in your life, is the core political argument in America right now. Negative freedom, freedom from government interference, is being promoted by those seeking to weaken the government enough to supplant it. People who are poor and sick are likely unable to stand up for themselves or participate in solidarity against authority. This individual issue is relatively small, but you take 100's of issues like this, and the effect is to create a class of people who aren't able to do anything but be obedient workers.
This take has a few problems:
Poor people in the US are capable of using fluoride toothpaste and flossing. At least at homeless shelters at outreach things I’ve been to, toothpaste and toothbrushes are freely available. Your argument hinges on them being incapable on the whole and needing a Benevolent But Superior Intelligence to provide an alternative for them.
Second, it completely ignores any debate over effectiveness or side effects. It could well be that fluoride in water is great for teeth but bad for brains. The objections to fluoride in water I’ve seen are more along those lines. Im not clear the validity of those claims but for example anti fluoride advocates don’t typically object to chlorine in water to kill germs. That seems the core issue- without bias from stakeholders, is the benefit of fluoride proven and the risks disproven? It’s hard to answer because a study needs to span many years and exclude many variables.
And in general I think that is what needs to happen with these type debates. Take them _out_ of the sphere of charged political opinion and focus on getting to the objective truth of risks and benefits, then be transparent. People can handle “here are the known pros and cons and what we think that means” over “there are only pros and no cons and if you disagree you hate poor people”
> Second, it completely ignores any debate over effectiveness or side effects. It could well be that fluoride in water is great for teeth but bad for brains.
Except it's not—fluoride in the drinking water concentrations is proven safe and it doesn't affect brains.
> Im not clear the validity of those claims
Thoroughly scientifically debunked. Repeatedly, over decades.
> That seems the core issue- without bias from stakeholders, is the benefit of fluoride proven and the risks disproven? It’s hard to answer because a study needs to span many years and exclude many variables.
No, it's not hard to answer, because all those studies have been done and the results were that fluoride is safe.
> And in general I think that is what needs to happen with these type debates.
What needs to stop happening is people ignoring objective reality just because the results happen to align with the other "team's" position on something.
What needs to stop happening is people ignoring objective reality just because the results happen to align with the other "team's" position on something.
"Out of a population of about three-quarters of a billion, under 14 million people (approximately 2%) in Europe receive artificially-fluoridated water."
The problem I continually see in the USA is the ascription of differences of opinion on [any topic] to America's Great Divide between enlightenment and barbarism. I find it often helpful to just check, what do these policies look like outside of America? It doesn't mean Europe got it right on fluoride, it just suggests against adopting the framing that your POV is 100% objective reality proven beyond doubt by Science™ and no rational person not in the throes of "own the [other team]" bad faith might disagree.
Maybe Utah will be a place with alternative systems, based on another thread it sounds like they have an interesting Mormon safety net. But I would hope states do pilot tests first at least. If studies show that the historic gap in dental health between fluorinated & unfluorinated communities no longer apply, then that would be data driven policy
But it seems like this policy is based on someone's common sense that you shouldn't put minerals in water
"In Switzerland 85% of domestic salt consumed is fluoridated and 67% in Germany. Salt fluoridation schemes are reaching more than one hundred million in Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Cuba. The cost of salt fluoridation is very low, within 0.02 and 0.05 € per year and capita. Children and adults of the low socio-economic strata tend to have substantially more untreated caries than higher strata. Salt fluoridation is by far the cheapest method for improving oral health. "
(Sea salt and Kosher salt are the salts that aren't fluoridated and iodated in those countries, fancy, more expensive salts, regular table salt- and the salt added in commercial/restaurants has both.)
So sure, you don't need to fluoridate the water, if you fluoridate the salt instead. But you have to do it some way or another. And the US and Canada doesn't, at present fluoridate the salt because we have it in the water. Remove it from some people's water but don't add it to the salt because everyone else has it in the water? Bad combination.
heh, I feel it, I'm in Canada where oral healthcare is deemed cosmetic. Giving us some 22minutes satire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZsUp-DHMZ4 "do people really need to see & chew?"
That said, WHO does profiles of dental health, providing comparison:
Didn't the NDP and Liberals recently pass universal government payer dental coverage in Canada?
It never made sense that dentistry somehow is considered a separate form of healthcare from the rest of your body.
Especially considering researchers are increasingly finding links between oral health and other conditions such as Alzheimer's heart disease. And that preventative dental care is so much cheaper and less invasive than treating major decay when care is delayed.
Look - all for whatever science says is best, but wouldn’t countries with public healthcare also be incentivised to have fluoride in the water to reduce costs/public efficiency of public dental healthcare?
themgt quoted the 2% figure to show that the europoors reject fluoride in water, but neglects to mention that tap water often naturally contains significant levels of fluoride already, nevermind other fluoride-fortified foodstuffs.
Indeed. While the UK and the USA have comparable levels of dental health, in US television actors typically require very good (or rather, cosmetically appealing according to local norms) teeth in order to succeed. In the UK, it's less important.
Not just comparable, UK is actually a bit higher. The difference is the NHS doesn't cover anything cosmetic, so they are very healthy teeth but they look rubbish unless you're lucky.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but you made multiple strong claims without a single citation or study link. We could have a better conversation with data to look at. There's a decent (though somewhat biased) review of the debate in [1]. It's worth noting that if you read the linked studies there closely you'll find the truth is, as usual, nuanced. Specifically, that "fluoridation is a population-level caries preventive strategy" [which may or may not be effective at the individual or small community level due to other factors]. I.e., good at the national level for statistically significant reduction of tooth disease incidence, but at less-aggregated levels the confounding factors like diet and how often/well people brush their teeth are going to be bigger determinants of efficacy.
It's also worth nothing that 1) over-fluoridation is pretty bad and can affect poor or malnourished communities (ex, [2]); and 2) there are alternatives to fluoride that may be equally effective with fewer risks at higher concentrations (ex. nano hydroxyapatite).
That's a whole lot of words for you acknowledging that I'm right. Fluoridated drinking water, at the appropriate levels, has no effect on IQ.
Would you like to debate the reality of anthropogenic climate change next? This will be another area where any links you dig up will only point to a single conclusion.
> Fluoridated drinking water, at the appropriate levels
Going to hijack this comment to ask about something I've always wondered: how robust are "appropriate" drinking levels to the different things you can reasonably expect people to do with the water? Not all water is simply drunk as is.
For example, I like to make beans in my slow cooker. This involves simmering them for 9 or 10 hours, periodically adding more water. In theory, this will increase the concentration of fluoride because the fluoride doesn't boil off while the water does. I assume, based on how much water I need to keep adding, this could double the fluoride concentration. Is that still appropriate levels? What about a cup that has been left out such that a lot of the water evaporates? That won't increase the amount of fluoride, but will increase its concentration.
I have to assume the "wiggle room" they build into the fluoridation rate handles these cases, but it's been hard to find any details on it since most of the results are about stuff like boiling water removing fluoride or turning it into poison fluorine gas and stuff.
Nevertheless, every time I see discussion where people talk about safe levels, I wonder how that works with all the things people do with water other than just drinking it as is.
And how does the fluoride get in the water? Our water tastes strongly of chlorine because we are near the treatment plant and they put in enough so that it’s still effective at the edges of the system. I don’t know if fluoride works the same way, but what makes people think it’s always added at exactly the right levels?
The chlorine you are tasting in your water is an active, reacting compound. It has to be because it literally reacts with cells to kill them and keep the water (relatively) free from living organisms. It's great as a cheap way to keep living things out of the water but at the end of the pipe it should be removed - a simple Brita filter is fine.
Flouride added is in a chemical state that makes it stable, like the chlorine in table salt. It will stay at the same concentration as it travels in the pipe.
I remember this from a water chemistry course at university.
If there were issues, they’d appear at population level studies. Lots of people boil coffee, tea, potatoes, rice, etc. and, as far as I know, are not suffering brain damage as a result.
You missed the point. It’s not objectively true in all situations that if you don’t believe fluorinating water is necessary that you’re an a-scientific bad faith actor. One can argue the opposite position in good faith, reasonably. Your statements very strongly supposed that this is a solved case closed topic and any challenges are not supported by evidence. The response was that there is nuance and a better conversation would acknowledge it.
> You missed the point. It’s not objectively true in all situations that if you don’t believe fluorinating water is necessary that you’re an a-scientific bad faith actor.
That's not what was being debated. What was asserted was that fluoride in water lowers IQ, a position that has been so thoroughly debunked at this point, that if, much like being anti-vax or thinking climate change doesn't exist, any continued movement reinforcing it is almost by definition bad faith. The information exists and short of purposely going out and looking for contrarian nonsense relative to the established position of science on the subject, you and everyone else can find it.
As frustrating as it is that "do your own research" has been basically ruined as a phrase by the professional internet bullshitter industrial complex, you really should, with a nod to the need for critical analysis of sources, an important part of that that frequently gets left to the side.
> Your statements very strongly supposed that this is a solved case closed topic
Because it is, and we need more of that and less endless citation. Not because citation is impossible or bad, but because we don't need to keep arguing every last point. If you think certain things, like fluoride lowers IQ, or that climate change doesn't exist, you are not needing an intellectual rebuke, you're needing enough people making fun of you that you stop spouting horseshit and go learn about things. All of humanity's knowledge is at your fingertips. It is not the responsibility of reasonable people to educate you against your will.
I've never thought much about it as tap water tastes nasty to me, but it does seem like legit scientists are still studying the issue, as of 2023.[0] Course we over produce scientists and so much of science is low efficiency, but they're getting funding and being published none-the-less.
I’m actually now much less certain that fluoride is unequivocally safe and newly skeptical of anybody arguing that anybody else questioning it, including effects on the brain, is a whacko. Thanks to down-thread links to the meta analysis from this year by the national toxicology program, it is crystal clear that high levels of fluoride ARE linked to lower IQ. It begs the question about working to better understand the effects of lower levels. Absolutely nothing presented thus far draws the conclusion that low levels of fluoride are safe, full stop. Thank you for changing my mind and making me look deeper, fervent fluoride supporters.
There are also other harmful side effects of fluoride, such as fluorosis, which I have. It’s not a huge deal, and I personally still think it’s a huge net positive, but people should be allowed to make their own decisions, and the science is far less settled than you claim, and not comparable at all to the debate over climate change.
I guess I (and probably the GGP) understood the response to be more general, picking out the IQ point as easily refutable therefore a short-circuit way to dismiss the broader narrative.
The "let's have a nuanced debate and use reason and intellect" bias is useful in most contexts. Bold claims, hot takes, that's the future. Citations can be ai'd now.
Please define appropriate levels and then cite some evidence that proves with high certainty that level is safe.
For the sake of argument, assume that only 1% of the US has levels that harm IQ. Would it not be worth it to remove fluoride from the water to improve the intelligence of 1% of the population? Especially when you consider we can get fluoride from toothpaste?
> Thoroughly scientifically debunked. Repeatedly, over decades.
"The NTP monograph concluded, with moderate confidence, that higher levels of fluoride exposure, such as drinking water containing more than 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter, are associated with lower IQ in children"
This is from an NIH meta-analysis. Its a pretty rigorous study.
"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"
This is why there's such a fierce debate. Based on the most recent scientific literature there seems to be evidence of a dose-dependent effect of fluorine levels in water and lowered IQ in children, meaning it has some kind of neurotoxic effect. But we don't have robust evidence to say 0.7 mg/L has a similar effect. That doesn't mean it is DEFINITELY safe, it just means more research needs to be done and the current research that does cover the 0.7 mg/L range may not reach statistical significance.
The fact though the NIH suggests 1.5mg/L is likely unsafe, which is only 2x what America's tap water contains, I would not blame people for being uneasy about. It is often the case the that the FDA regulates food additives that have potential negative side effects to be limited to concentrations 10x lower than what is seen as unsafe.
I am not suggesting it's a straightforward choice to defluorinate water, but I see people often repeating claims like you have that dangers of fluoride are "thoroughly debunked" and that's simply not true. I don't blame people for having that sentiment either, because 0.7mg/L is seemingly still considered safe, and some of the loudest advocates of defluorination have no shortage of thoroughly debunked crazy views on things (possibly due to brains half eaten by worms). It makes it very easy to brush off the skepticism.
But it's also important to keep in mind science is built on the premise that one must be ready to re-evaluate past assumptions when new data arises, and generally speaking the new data around fluoride I hate to say seems to show there is indeed smoke.
It's also the case that when the US initially fluorinated water supplies it was a massive public health success, but these days it seems to make a much lower impact now that fluoride toothpaste use is ubiquitous (plus the levels were lowered from 1.0mg/L in the 70s, likely reducing its overall effectiveness). It is IMO both very reasonable to fund more research into this to know conclusively if 0.7mg/L is indeed safe, and also consider public health policy that focuses on promoting dental hygiene through other means in places that do defluorinate.
I do not agree with Utah's decision here mostly because it seems to neglect that defluorination will create a void that requires other public health policy efforts to fill it, poorer and less educated communities will suffer unless government led efforts to promote and make dental hygine affordable are not also undertaken.
> It is IMO both very reasonable to fund more research into this to know conclusively if 0.7mg/L is indeed safe
How exactly do you propose we do this? It's tough to prove absence of harm.
The meta-analysis put together tons of research under different situations, and found a weak and relatively small dose-response relationship above 1.0 mg/L and failed to find a relationship below. The evidence between 1.0mg/L and 1.5mg/L is particularly weak. And, of course, most dose-response curves are sigmoidal, so the failure to find a response under 1.0 mg/L is most easily explained by the inflection point being above that level.
If you're not satisfied when combining 74 studies fails to find a relationship, will you be happy with 75? 76? 100?
(Sure, a big proportion of the studies and study power focused on higher levels of fluorination-- and I always support filling gaps in research; but it's not like we have an absence of research below 1.5 mg/L).
The Cochrane Collaboration's research is near the gold standard, and yet they find surprisingly limited evidence of benefit for CWF in the modern research:
"These low‐certainty findings (a 4 percentage point difference and 3 percentage point difference for primary and permanent dentition, respectively) favoured CWF."
3-4% reduction in cavities is not nothing, but it's a far cry from the 60% drop observed in the 1940s and certainly much less than what I think most strong proponents of water fluoridation would have you believe. The ongoing discussion I find quite legitimate given we're no longer living in the 1940s and CWF seems to have a substantially lower benefit than it once did, and likewise we do notice a concerning trend with fluorine neurotoxicity that has only emerged in the last few decades of research.
Public health policy is all about a risk/benefit analysis, and CWF is one of those topics that I feel legitimately should be discussed because much has changed over the many decades since the US first introduced it and since then the risks seemingly have gone up and the benefit has astronomically gone down.
Again, I do not think there'd be much discussion if current water fluorination was at 0.15mg/L, and we started seeing a negative trend at 1.5mg/L. But I don't think its actually at all unreasonable for public health officials to be worried and possibly start considering alternatives to CWF out of an abundance of caution.
> but it's not like we have an absence of research below 1.5 mg/L).
But it is?
>> "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"
Yes you would need a higher powered study to rule out the potentially smaller effect, but when your treatment can affect tens of millions of children, it doesn't seem crazy to ask for more funding.
> > but it's not like we have an absence of research below 1.5 mg/L).
> But it is?
But it isn't. There's 7 studies included in that meta-analysis looking at levels below 1.5mg/L, covering 2832 children. The effect measured so far across all of the studies is a statistically insignificant increase in IQ.
I'm in favor of additional research; I just don't think getting to n=10,000 showing little or no effect is going to convince anyone. I also don't think that these possible modest effects are going to be in the top 5 most important environmental stressors to measure the effects of.
While I would like to think that I have gotten a lot smarter in the last 20 years it seems more likely that other people have on average gotten a lot dumber.
While I’m sure there are many causes I’m of the opinion that no stone should remain unturned when looking for answers. Fluorine in water has a viable alternative (toothpaste that is spit out) so out of an abundance of caution my preference is for unflurinated water. In my past life as an applied researcher I have learned to be rather distrustful of academia and the ‘science’ that is produced, ‘fruit from a poisonous tree’.
"The NTP monograph concluded, with moderate confidence, that higher levels of fluoride exposure, such as drinking water containing more than 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter, are associated with lower IQ in children"
They found fluoride in drinking water concentrations was associated with lower IQ, the opposite of your claim of "proven safe".
Show us some evidence that is proven safe, so far as I can tell all evidence points to unsafe or "we're not sure".
> What needs to stop happening is people ignoring objective reality just because the results happen to align with the other "team's" position on something.
I couldn't agree more. The study that is cited above started when Obama was president by the way.
Why did you omit the sentence immediately after the one you quoted?
> The NTP review was designed to evaluate total fluoride exposure from all sources and was not designed to evaluate the health effects of fluoridated drinking water alone.
…or the following sentence, which they bolded to ensure the reader wouldn't miss it?
> 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.
So no, they very explicitly did not find that fluoride in drinking water concentrations was associated with lower IQ.
I see the goalposts are moving from "fluoride in drinking water concentrations" (implication: concentrations commonly found in municipal drinking water) to "fluoride in drinking water at certain concentrations" (i.e. any arbitrary number that could support your position).
Anyway, there's a pretty obvious definition of "drinking water concentrations": the recommended amount for US drinking water. Again, the authors of the study bolded this sentence to ensure you wouldn't miss it:
> 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.
My first sentence in my original post was " The conclusion from the largest and strongest studies is that there is a certain level of fluoride that harms IQ." I did not move the goal posts from there.
I was replying to a comment that said "fluoride in the drinking water concentrations is proven safe" (there is actually no proof of this).
I never claimed that all fluoride levels harm IQ.
It's great that the US recommends that fluoride doesn't exceed levels that are proven to harm children's IQ, instead they only recommend levels for which there is "insufficient data".
I suppose we will ignore the people who are still drinking water with levels above what is known to be harmful.
To be clear, about whom exactly are we talking here? Who are the actual people drinking water with known harmful levels of fluoride that we’re ignoring?
Anyone who talks about who was President when a study was done is immediately clarifying for you that they have a political agenda.
If there’s a problem with a study, or a study is particularly strong, that should be due to something about the study itself (methodology, significance of results, etc), not its political environment.
> Except it's not—fluoride in the drinking water concentrations is proven safe and it doesn't affect brains.
What's amazing is these anti-science wackos are rejecting the largest-scale experiment of all time, with the best evidence that anyone is ever going to have on the subject. We have both temporal and spatial boundary conditions with and without community water fluoridation, where a large population has it and another large population doesn't have it. There is no evidence that the without-fluoridation population has higher intelligence! There is a huge body of evidence that the people without fluoridation have more decayed teeth.
Before calling them "anti science wackos", why not review the evidence or cite some of your own. Ironic that the "wackos" seem to be the only ones providing any evidence for their claims.
There is high quality evidence that fluoride at levels contained in some US water supplies is associated with lower childhood intelligence. For lower levels, the conclusion is "we don't know", not that there is no harm.
There is also high quality evidence that in the age of fluorinated toothpaste, fluorinated water "may slightly" improve dental health.
“The evidence suggests that water fluoridation may slightly reduce tooth decay in children,” says co-author Dr Lucy O’Malley, Senior Lecturer in Health Services Research at the University of Manchester. “Given that the benefit has reduced over time, before introducing a new fluoridation scheme, careful thought needs to be given to costs, acceptability, feasibility and ongoing monitoring."
The literally bold-faced conclusion of your article is that no evidence exists that community water fluoridation affects childhood IQ.
We have a natural experiment running for 80 years where each arm of the experiment has N > 100e6. If there was going to be evidence of community water fluoridation lowering IQ, it would have emerged by now.
"The NTP monograph concluded, with moderate confidence, that higher levels of fluoride exposure, such as drinking water containing more than 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter, are associated with lower IQ in children".
They found drinking water with levels that lowered IQ. The actual conclusion was that higher levels (that were found in drinking water) lower IQ.
For lower levels the conclusion is we don't know how it effects IQ. The actual bold face conclusion is "More research is needed to better understand if there are health risks associated with low fluoride exposures".
The National Toxicology Program’s monograph failed peer review by the prestigious and independent National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine. In fact, the document failed peer review twice:
It seems that this team found what they wanted to find. Are they scientists or ideologues? Were they creating the 'evidence' for the San Francisco trail?
> fluoride in the drinking water concentrations is proven safe and it doesn't affect brains.
We can never be sure who funded the studies and whether or not the results can be trusted. Studies have shown that studies cannot be trusted. I err on the side of caution.
You're welcome to put it in your own drinking water if you trust the studies.
> What needs to stop happening is people ignoring objective reality just because the results happen to align with the other "team's" position on something.
Nobody can perceive objective reality. Everyone is delusional concerning just about everything. The people who think they know what's going on, are most delusional of all.
Dark times are ahead, I'm afraid, and people's trust-meters are going to be valuable again.
> We can never be sure who funded the studies and whether or not the results can be trusted. Studies have shown that studies cannot be trusted. I err on the side of caution.
What does this mean for you in practice? Do you see just fluoride studies this way, or "studies" in general? If the former, what makes those different? If the latter, what is your stance on science-backed decision-making and policymaking in general?
> Studies have shown that studies cannot be trusted.
Well, that's basically the end of the debate, isn't it? Before we can have reasonable discourse, everyone has to agree on some points. Sure, individual studies have problems. That's why we make them reproducible and aggregate the results. So yeah, don't trust some individual paper; but if you're distrusting the aggregate, well, you're distrusting all of science.
> Nobody can perceive objective reality. Everyone is delusional concerning just about everything.
This is the entire point of the scientific method. It's why we make sure tests are reproducible by other people in other teams in other countries. Each with their own funding and biases. What remains after all of that is as close to objective reality as possible without decompiling the universe.
> Dark times are ahead, I'm afraid, and people's trust-meters are going to be valuable again.
You know what else has been shown to be unequivocal bullshit? People making decisions based on their "gut". Your personal "trust-meter" is just another form of that. Dark times are indeed ahead, but it's because there are people out there who want to do whatever the hell they want- and it's easier for them to get away with it if they discredit science and get the population to do so as well. This is what you're helping by spreading such things. Please stop.
> We can never be sure who funded the studies and whether or not the results can be trusted
> Nobody can perceive objective reality. Everyone is delusional concerning just about everything
This is just hyper-cynical fear mongering. An excuse to reject inconvenient things you see and substitute them with your own alternative reality.
The people who sell fear and things like alternative medicine love to push this angle: They want you to distrust everything. Everything except what they tell you, of course.
> We can never be sure who funded the studies and whether or not the results can be trusted. Studies have shown that studies cannot be trusted
the growing prevalence of anti science thinking like this has been a disaster for humanity. There's so much time and good faith effort put into trying to better understand our reality then people like you come along and handwave it all away because "well can we really know anything"
How does one live or even function with no trust? You’re going to do your own experiments on everything in your life? Do you purchase any food, take any medicines, travel in any vehicles, or use any technology? You’re relying on products that are the outcome of studies if you do. Sure people are fallible and sometimes have agendas or are wrong, but approaching objectivity is not impossible, it just takes a little work. Science is the best thing we’ve got, it has brought humanity further and faster than anything else ever. There’s nothing else to even compare it to. If we throw our hands up and insist on trusting no one, dismantle public health and public education and public trust, then yeah we could go back to the dark ages. If instead we trust that science works over time, and we are diligent about electing leaders who stop stoking fears and using pseudoscience and intentionally eroding trust in science and education, then we might have the chance to be able to trust each other and make forward progress.
"Findings: Despite differences in exposure and outcome measures and risk of bias across studies, and when using group-level and individual-level exposure estimates, this systematic review and meta-analysis of 74 cross-sectional and prospective cohort studies found significant inverse associations between fluoride exposure and children’s IQ scores. [...]"
Maybe you should reconsider that what you heard once was the definite truth.
Isn't this talking about naturally-occurring fluoridation, not added? The concentrations they describe as having an inverse affect are far higher than what gets added to water on purpose:
What the study measured:
"For fluoride measured in water, associations remained inverse when exposed groups were restricted to less than 4 mg/L or less than 2 mg/L but not when restricted to less than 1.5 mg/L"
And what the US federal government recommends (or I guess soon, previously recommended):
"Through this final recommendation, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) updates and replaces its 1962 Drinking Water Standards related to community water fluoridation—the controlled addition of a fluoride compound to a community water supply to achieve a concentration optimal for dental caries prevention.1 For these community water systems that add fluoride, PHS now recommends an optimal fluoride concentration of 0.7 milligrams/liter (mg/L)" [1]
The source of fluoride is irrelevant, the effect of fluoride is cumulative. If you're getting half of the "harmful dosage" just from your water, you're much more likely to pass that threshold than if the water had no fluoride. In nations with easy access to fluoridated toothpaste and where dental hygiene is common, the cost-benefit is not at all clear.
If the source of fluoride is irrelevant, then shouldn't fluoridated toothpaste also be banned as a result of harmful dosages? Even assuming someone spits out said toothpaste, they are still increasing the fluoride levels in their body.
The US government isn't forcing people to use fluoridated toothpaste. There's plenty of non-fluoridated toothpaste available if people want it.
Also: fluoride works topically, not when ingested. That implies we should try to deliver fluoride to teeth in a way that is focused on topical application (toothpaste), not ingestion (water supply).
When I say "fluoride works topically, not when ingested", I mean there's no benefit to teeth from swallowing fluoride, the only benefit to teeth is from it touching teeth directly. That link doesn't say that there's a tooth health benefit from swallowing fluoride.
Both toothpaste and water supply cause some fluoride to touch the teeth (topical) and some fluoride to be swallowed (ingestion). However, toothpaste has a higher ratio of topical application to swallowing, vs water supply which has a lower ratio of topical application to swallowing. That's why I said toothpaste is focused on topical application and water supply is focused on ingestion.
"The bill, signed by Cox on Thursday, prohibits communities from adding fluoride to their public water supplies.
The law does not mention any public health concerns related to the mineral, but Republican state lawmaker Stephanie Gricius - who introduced the bill in the state legislature - has argued that there is research suggesting fluoride could have possible cognitive effects in children."
You're lying through some linguistic convolution. What you said is wrong on a factual level. Communities cannot decide to include fluoride in their water, as that is banned, so fluoride is banned from Utah water. This is what words mean
If people getting under 2mg/L were getting harmed, doesn't it seem logical that people getting 0.7 mg/L would also get harmed, just by a smaller amount?
Not necessarily. For instance, if you take enough ibuprofen you'll suffer liver damage, but it doesn't follow that a smaller dose you'll still suffer damage.
I only really have enough general understanding of chemistry and biology to note that dosage generally is pretty important and often non-linear in its effects -- I write JavaScript, not drug formulations -- but "dosage makes the poison" has always struck me a good general purpose aphorism to keep in mind.
> For fluoride measured in water, associations remained inverse when exposed groups were restricted to less than 4 mg/L or less than 2 mg/L but not when restricted to less than 1.5 mg/L;
So this study found no negative effects on IQ when the fluoride concentration is less than 1.5mg/L
The U.S. Public Health Service recommends 0.7mg/L of fluoride[1]. This study supports the idea that the amount of fluoride used in the US drinking water is safe.
I couldn't find any information on how much fluoride is in utah drinking water as a whole, but a report from Davis County shows that they stay between 0.6mg/L and 0.8mg/L [2]. I'd say its fair to assume basically all the water in Utah doesn't have too much fluoride, and if it did, lowering the amount to 0.7mg/L would be enough to address the health concerns.
I think you should read it. It literally says fluoride in higher concentrations is linked to lower IQ. It says there is insufficient evidence to draw any conclusions in lower concentrations. NOT that fluoride in lower concentrations is definitely without a doubt safe. It leaves open the question. And, it studied fluoride in urine, which means even if the drinking water levels in the US are in the “insufficient data” range, the cumulative effect of multiple sources of fluoride is still a factor.
Also note that in reality 0.7 mg/L is the “low” value and 1.5 mg/L is the high water mark from the study. That’s not a huge window by any means…
Maybe apply some critical thinking and notice that the water levels from fluoridation add on top of any other sources of fluoride people ingest, eg. toothpaste, food, etc.
The source of fluoride is irrelevant, the effect of fluoride is cumulative. If you get 0.7mg/L from drinking water and then add toothpaste and other sources, you could easily surmount the level where harmful effects occur.
Truth and even the idea that there is objective truth is a fundamentally political concept. Authoritarians are opposed to the idea of objective truth because objective truth gives a person a foundation on which to criticize and dissent from those in power. Truth is threatening to authoritarians. Truth is an alternative source of legitimacy.
We are experiencing an assault on objective truth in the US in order to get scientific institutions to submit to political authority rather than the authority of reason.
So I agree with you, it is policy that should not be handled by politicians but by experts, which none of us are. Unfortunately science is being politicized.
The problem is science challenges those who derive power from means other than reason.
Defending scientific consensus is seen as an equally political act as denying it.
"The problem is science challenges those who derive power from means other than reason."
There's been a fundamental shift away from science in the last fifty years or so. Some is understandable—chemical pollution, etc. which is unreasonably blamed on science instead of industry's bad behavior—but there's another thread running here and it's an anti-establishment one.
The question I can't fully put a measure on is why nowadays so many people automatically reject anything that's mandated by government even when they'll benefit from that mandate. The fluoride debate is somewhat akin to the vaccination one, rather than weighing up the comparatively minor risks versus overwhelmingly beneficial outcomes of those mandates they'll simply reject them outright.
It's pretty easy actually. Rejecting the mandate gives people political platform. If the issue at hand isnt directly affecting you in the meaningfull way, it works like a charm every single time.
Not to stir the pot even more however when a vaccine does go bad, it goes really bad
The narrative around vaccines has been completely strong armed in different ways by both sides. Which has left legitimate cases of bad reactions to be largely ignored, underreported and/or not believed, and carries a negative stigma.
My wife has had a medically verified bad reaction to vaccine it was extremely severe. It took multiple doctors before it was recognized and by that point she progressed to having permanent disability
"Not to stir the pot even more however when a vaccine does go bad, it goes really bad"
I'm frightfully aware of that. I'm old enough to remember the polio epidemic in the 1950s and the bad batch of polio vaccine that killed kids.
I wasn't in the US and the Salk vaccine wasn't available where I was living and it was another five or so years before we were vaccinated. Before that one kid in my school class died and another ended up in calipers.
Despite everyone knowing about the bad batch and the deaths I cannot tell you how relieved everyone was when the vaccine finally arrived. No one—not one single kid—at my school skipped the vaccine. To not have it would have been unthinkable, it wasn't even a consideration.
Frankly, it horrifies me how risk averse and timid people have become these days. How thinking has changed since that time is frightening.
That's not to say things don't go wrong—they do and all too often as you are aware, and even at this distance I can't help but feel sorry for both you and your wife.
Right, that Salk vaccine killed people but saved millions of others, even now the live attenuated Sabin vaccine occasionally goes rogue mutates and gives people polio but both of those vaccines have almost eradicated that fucking horrible disease from the face of the planet, it's only politics and misinformation that have stopped that from happening.
What are we to do when things are beneficial on a large scale yet are nevertheless responsible for a small number of tragedies? For instance, almost everyone on the planet loves their smartphone yet they kill innocent people—albeit indirectly when irresponsible drivers who are driving and texting at the same time hit and kill pedestrians.
When that happens we don't call for smartphones to be banned, same when a passenger jet clashes. But it's a different story with vaccines, fluoride in water, chemicals in foods. For some illogical reason suddenly all hell breaks loose and people become quite irrational.
BTW, over the years I've had many, many dozen vaccine shots for many different diseases and I've never had a negative reaction. That's not to say it won't happen on my next visit to the doctor or, say, to next person who's next in line in the doctor's surgery.
Unfortunately, life's dangerous and it's eventually fatal. As I see it, these scientific discoveries—whilst imperfect—ameliorate that condition somewhat.
I think there should be such a thing as just compensation when anyone effectively takes one for the team for the rest of humanity. There is one way to help significantly once something bad does happen.
Awareness too, and more testing never hurts. One thing we learned about post incident is that a test of her immune system would have likely shown she shouldn’t be vaccinated at all, due to potential reactions. Why not work on making such tests cheaper and faster so we can prevent needless harm?
"I think there should be such a thing as just compensation when anyone effectively takes one for the team for the rest of humanity."
I agree absolutely. What really pisses me off is how governments seemingly everywhere become misers—miserable bastards—and either deny responsibility or when cornered screw compensation down as far as possible.
It's not only in matters such as vaccine failures, or Flint's lead-in-water crisis but you see this miserly attitude with war veterans, and so on.
Trouble is, we the citizenry are ultimately responsible. For some reason we see someone getting something from government that we are not getting and that brings out the worst in us—we seem to forget too easily that the injured or those disadvantaged through no fault of their own deserve fair and reasonable compensation.
In my opinion that all-too-common attitude is a blight on the human character.
Awareness, that goes back to proper schooling. That that's lacking is another tragedy.
Edit: both government and the companies responsible for vaccines, pharmaceuticals, etc. ought to take much greater responsibly to inform people of the risks even if they are minor. One way of achieving this would be to hold those employees (both in government and in those companies) directly responsible for providing the necessary information. This would go a long way in stopping pharmaceutical companies hiding the unsatisfactory results of drug trials etc.
Don't hold your breath though, I can't see that happening anytime soon.
Tolerating this slippery slope that “theres always the other side” is how we got to a place where I have to vaccinate again for measles at 40 because there are people out there saying the measles vaccine isn’t safe.
I don’t agree with the framing of “we are experiencing an assault on objective truth…”.
We are experiencing a challenge to some existing status quo practices, some of which have come out of science in the past.
But nowhere in any conversation has the dialog been “we must question status quo institutional knowledge, and objective truth, to dismantle the institution”. (That’s left speak, actually, and I am acutely aware of leftist circles where that is the conversation.)
Look at RFK Jr. This guy doesn't need power and control. He’s a whacko with some different beliefs about health—who fundamentally believes he’s making humans safer because of his negative lived experience with health policy in the US.
Occam's razor points to there being a credible benign reason for him to be motivated to challenge existing policy. (And if there is one area of science ripe for iteration, it’s nutritional health.) We don’t need to grab for more extreme alarmist narratives to explain what’s happening.
It simply doesn't take some autocratic utopian agenda to question whether fluoride is worth it and advocate for political change.
It’s honestly really disingenuous and disheartening to hear people towing this “the right is trying to dismantle the fabric of western liberal democracy and install fascism” line.
He is a dangerous crank, but fresh roadkill is a perfectly fine practice.
You have to cook it thoroughly, same as any other game meat. Do not eat the central nervous system, again same as game. But dead is dead, and a car is no worse than a bullet.
That does not alter that we have a dangerous idiot running out health care policy.
Dead is dead but for how long? If you hunt, you know when the animal died and presumably cleaned it promptly. It didn't bake on the pavement with all its guts inside for hours or days.
Sure! Which means he’s either a really effective covert operative, or just a crank. To be clear I’m not arguing in support of crack science. I’m arguing against him being plugged into some broader insidious agenda.
The Republican party has been trying to squash inconvenient science for a long time.
One of the signature pieces of Gingrich's "Contract With America" in 1995 was the elimination of the Office of Technology Assessment. The office had the unfortunate duty to communicate well researched facts, and these facts contradicted conservative policy positions. (OTA: The planet is warming. R: No it's not. Exxon says it's not.) So the OTA had to go.
There are a nearly endless list of these things over the last 30 years.
The fluoride thing alone wouldn't even move the needle or be too worth talking about on its own, but when you see everything that is happening and you know it's just the public things, it gives a distinctly different context around what is happening. You know we are overtly threatening Canadian sovereignty right? Countries are setting up travel warnings. Plain clothes officers have abducted people in public. People have been robbed of due process. The head of the office of management and budget said he wants to put government workers in trauma. Deleting public data sets... At least two second in commands to the entire US military have said he is unfit. A chief of staff said the president said "I wish I had Hitler's generals." At least 4 prominent republicans have Sieg Heiled in front of a crowd, including Bannon who did not put his hand over his heart first.
> question status quo institutional knowledge
I am in favor of this when its done in good faith, but good faith hasn't been established.
> It’s honestly really disingenuous and disheartening to hear people towing this “the right is trying to take over the world and install fascism” line.
I find it disheartening that people are in denial about it.
What does Canadian sovereignty have to do with even a broader picture argument that the right is using illiberal science to undermine and dismantle political institutions?
“Anybody who wants to debate me must first demonstrate good faith by espousing my political stance before we can continue.” Really now…
People can’t be in denial about something that isn't happening. That’s called crazy.
This is a direct quote from the guy running the Office of Management and Budget, Russel Vought:
We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.
I think equating poor people to homeless people is non sequitur.
What about the vast population of “barely making it” people?
But have it your way. I’ve given up on American people (I exist as a 54 year old one amongst them). Decades of wealth have created a society so “me” centric it makes me nauseous sick. Never have I respected those older than me so little. It makes me so sad what we’ve done for those younger.
It’s even worse than that. People aren’t even voting for their own self interest. The people in the poorest states and in poor counties in richer states in the United States are consistently voting against universal healthcare, affordable post high school education and are cheering the government taking away services that they depend on the most.
There are two basic categories of causes.
The first is being pure anti science - anti vaccine, anti fluoride, etc
The second is they are more concerned about “God and guns”, immigrants, and the demographic shifts in the US than their own interest.
Oh and the third is the cult of MAGA.
I’m 50, Native born American and on a meta level it concerns me. On a micro level, me and mine will be okay.
While I am not one of these shrill people saying I’m leaving the US tomorrow, my wife and I are definitely putting plans in place to have a dual residency (not citizenship) in Costa Rica closer to when I get ready to retire.
> Poor people in the US are capable of using fluoride toothpaste and flossing. At least at homeless shelters at outreach things I’ve been to, toothpaste and toothbrushes are freely available. Your argument hinges on them being incapable on the whole and needing a Benevolent But Superior Intelligence to provide an alternative for them.
This is so incurious. Obviously most people, poor or not, have access to fluoridated toothpaste and toothbrushes, and can brush.
Fluoridated water makes the most impact on poor and undeserved communities: Why?
Is it because poor people are less capable of brushing or have less access to fluoridated toothpaste?
Is it because poor people are poor because they have poor self control, which prevents them from regular brushing?
Does it matter? Nothing hinges on them being incapable at all - your conjecture can be as uncharitable - poor people are dirty and incapable - or charitable - poor people have less money and time to seek dental care, have higher rates of untreated mental and physical illness i.e. ADHD, disabilities that interrupt daily tooth-brushing routine - as you want.
But the result is still that if we want children from poor families to have less cavities by the time they reach adulthood - we should fluoridate the water! If you trust the western medical establishment, it's broadly safe. If you don't, then none of the evidence above matters to you anyways.
You're close but still a bit strawmanny. If we want poor kids to have better dental outcomes we should do more than just flouridate. We should find out why the poor have worse dental outcomes and address the root problem(s), which I would imagine in the US is something like soda consumption or lack of dentists in poor areas.
What is strawman in my comment? I'm genuinely interested.
> We should find out why the poor have worse dental outcomes and address the root problem
The root problem is that parents that are absent, either for noble reasons (working multiple low-wage jobs) or less noble reasons (addiction, abandonment) will not have the presence to enforce good dental hygiene.
There will always be some subset of parents that are more or less absent, and the main solution that exists for that in the US currently i.e. the foster care system has measurably terrible outcomes, and so it is only applied in the most egregious cases.
Why should we let perfect be the enemy of good here? I'm all for removing fluoride from the water, once it has no benefit on the population. But currently, it has a huge benefit, just on people who are least likely to advocate for it.
"You're just pushing your "Benevolent But Superior Intelligence" onto people" is an appeal to emotion, not a solution to real problems that real children face.
More emotionally: it's fucking embarrassing we let bullshit arguments like this hurt people in real life.
See this is the problem today. Just because some one doesn’t know doesn’t make it non existent. We have decades of studies and evidence that fluoride is good and has no side effects, but the detractors ignore all of it and keep nullifying all that knowledge. Now they are successful too. In a society where everyone wants the whole boat to rise up, we need a certain amount of honesty and integrity and sadly these arguments don’t have it
> Poor people in the US are capable of using fluoride toothpaste and flossing
This is absolutely not a substitute for fluoride in drinking water, which is most important for kids. When your teeth are forming below the gumline, the fluoride you ingest strengthens them. Brushing gums with fluoride doesn’t help.
Objective truth isn't something you can know, but it's a destination that must exist for pursuit of knowledge/curiosity to have any meaning.
With contradictions you know what is not true, and through knowing what is not true, you can approach what is true. Truth is expressed in consistency, not completeness.
That's why anyone should be extremely suspicious of anyone who is not, or doesn't care about, being internally consistent.
You're getting downvoted because you're retreating into philosophical nihilism rather than actually addressing the points. If you disagree with how people interpret the studies, the studies themselves, or how science measures reality - just say that.
Adding fluoride to water was revolutionary in the 1940s, but its benefits have significantly declined since fluoride toothpaste became common in the 1970s. While fluoridation made sense when products containing fluoride weren't widely available, it is much less effective and necessary now. Sure, some countries and communities may still see benefits from it, but widespread fluoridation doesn't seem necessary in many parts of the world.
Not true. Every time I see a dentist here in Queensland (non-fluoridated water) he asks me where else I lived as my teeth are so much better than what he usually sees, and if drilling my teeth are much harder than most Queenslanders.
My early years were spent in Melbourne, where fluoridation was introduced around 1970. That's the only time I lived with fluoridated water, for about 3 years. yet dentists can see the effects 50+ years later.
I don't use a toothbrush or toothpaste, and haven't ever really, as my ASD makes it unbearable.
You're refuting a statment based on studies and statistics by anecdotal evedince. Also, GP never denied that flouridation is still helpful for non-brushing residents.
Poster claimed fluoridation was unnessecary in many parts of the world. This is true of places with natural fluoridation. But not everyone has access to fluoridated toothpaste, or even toothpaste. To assume otherwise is assuming everyone is neurotypical in a developed country.
Anything to back that up? And even if it's true, the person would logically still not be to tier as the people with good nutrition and genetics who also brush would likely be better.
True. Part of the reason is aggressive saliva that just doesn't let some bacteria live and thus keeps the teeth healthy for longer. Dry mouth is literally damaging your teeth as well.
You need zero water to brush your teeth with toothpaste. Many dentists even say it’s preferable to not rinse your brush before and not rinse your mouth after.
So when you go to brush your teeth you don't wet the toothpaste and toothbrush from the tap? Is it the fear of tap water that centers around this? I am curious about this as it seems the answers carry some cultural significance.
No - toothpaste is in part an abrasive. If it's wetter, the abrasive is less effective at removing biofilm/plaque, and the chemical components are diluted in situ. Your mouth is plenty wet enough as-is.
That implies toothpaste isn't designed with this water dilution in mind, as that is common practice. If I don't wet it beforehand it's too thick and doesn't get distributed as easily.
Water treatment is usually done at the municipal or regional level. The state government is declaring that towns and cities may not do this. The alternative would be each and every municipal water authority deciding on its own.
Not really when it comes to government initiatives. They'd like the water plants to stop adding fluoride, so they make a policy that the plants should not add fluoride.
That wouldn’t require a ban. The state banned it because some towns wanted to add it to their water supply. It’s literally big government stopping the will of the people.
Of course it does. Their goal was to stop it from being added, including in said towns.
Policy makers make things happen by passing laws that make it a requirement or provide financial incentives to do it, and make things stop by outlawing it or taxing it. It is what they are elected to do.
This is not "big government" - democracy does not mean that small groups that disagree should be allowed to do whatever they want, and water additives is a quite signficant thing to mess with.
Democracy and big government aren’t in opposition. Social Security for example is extremely popular.
Letting small groups that disagree do what they want is the definition of small government. Outlawing water additives is a significant thing to mess with, it’s a meaningful intrusion on people’s heath and general welfare.
What makes this entire thing silly is many areas of the US ~11% naturally have fluoride levels high enough not to need supplementation, but nobody seems to want to drop that to some ultra low level when they argue for outlawing adding fluoride. It’s not an argument that these levels are unhealthy, just the naturalist fallacy in action. https://www.usgs.gov/publications/fluoride-occurrence-united...
Nobody's preventing you from going and finding your own water source either. The government is too much of a nanny state for putting flouride in water for public health, but it's just fine for providing water to you in the first place?
Where do you live where you can collect rain at a quantity that would allow you to forgo central water?
I’m not talking about having a barrel. Most states don’t care about that quantity. I’m talking about storing on the order of 10k gallons. A rain barrel is nothing. An average family in the USA uses hundreds of gallons a day. It doesn’t rain daily so you’d need thousands of gallons. Most states do not allow this, nor is it actually feasible for everyone to do this due to space constraints, which is why it’s generally not allowed.
Which state is this? Some states such as Massachusetts and Maine, will allow you to have a well, but then you cannot have central water. Thus, the dichotomy is irrelevant since it's not like someone actually has a choose, since it's done on the municipal level.
In fact, generally the places in Connecticut, and New England that have well water are because they specifically cannot have the other.
I don't know much about western USA, but I suspect it's similar.
You're being actively misleading. Like on a scale of normal people to politicians to liars you're at least in the politicians range.
The only states with restrictive surface water policies, generally, are the western ones, because every drop of water is allocated according to interstate agreements and letting peasants take what falls on their land is like the toddler version of letting privateers crap on a treaty.
In New England and the east generally, you can either have a well or municipal water, not both, because they don't want to worry about back flows and contamination of the municipal water supply, etc. It's not the big deal you're making it out to be.
> In New England and the east generally, you can either have a well or municipal water, not both, because they don't want to worry about back flows and contamination of the municipal water supply, etc. It's not the big deal you're making it out to be.
this just isn't true. Can you have private well water in Boston, Hartford or Portsmouth? The answer is no. In general in the northeast, those who have well water have it explicitly because they're not served by the municipality. Feel free to give counter examples with specific cities or towns that serve both and actively let you switch between both for a given address that supports both.
There are some towns in New Hampshire for example where the town has municipal water but a given house does not (it has well water), but usually that’s due to specific characteristics of the lot that forbid it from having a municipal without a large cost, so the developer sets up well water instead.
What you're saying doesn't even make sense - municipal water is routed to a treatment plant, so it wouldn't matter anyway.
> Most states do not allow this, nor is it actually feasible for everyone to do this due to space constraints, which is why it’s generally not allowed.
You are getting into something there. You understand the necessity of municipal water collection mandates due to space constraints, but when it comes to public health (e.g vaccines) or public dental health (e.g fluoride in water), that's beyond comprehension and an infringement on your right (to have bad teeth)?
Also, in the real world, most (emphasis on most) states don't have any restrictions on collecting rainwater, and some actively encourage people to do so.
That's not true in general especially if you weight it with population in mind, such as the wet states of NJ, PA, MD etc. that have more population; though there are areas where the states have passed laws concerning water rights where it is true(CO, WY).
Nobody is preventing the citizens from digging their own well and ensuring their own water supply and having bad teeth.
I like it how when it comes to fluoride in water, that's the nanny state pushing things on people, but when it comes to municipal water, said people can't bother to use their freedom and get their own water supply. It's the same that parents refuse to vaccinate their children for measles and then hurry to the doctors when the child inevitably gets sick. The freedom to die of preventable diseases is a great thing!
You can also remove fluoride from your own water if you want to. Although I don't know if there are any filters that can distinguish between naturally occurring fluoride (ok) and fluoride added by the government (evil).
This requires a Reverse-Osmosis filter which is super expensive. So if you really want to give fluoride, I'd be happy for the government to hand out free sodium fluoride tabs for whoever wants it, in exchange to not force the water to have fluoride by default. See, we get the best of both worlds?
How much of your water treatment do you want to do yourself? I assume you don’t want the ‘government’ to send you completely untreated water. So what is the problem with fluoridation as compared to all the other uncontroversial ways in which your tap water has been treated? All kinds of stuff gets added to and removed from the water.
Also, there are simple (and cheap) water filters that are quite effective at removing fluoride. As fluoride is often naturally present in water anyway, it is only really necessary to remove the majority of the added fluoride to get the water back into a ‘natural’ state.
But you will brush your teeth anyway, and then you apply fluoride topically. It works.
Here in Sweden we decided against fluoride for this reason and the fact that it is in fact toxic. It isn't sensible to use systemic exposure when we can use topical exposure and can improve mouth health by education, so that people do what they're supposed to.
The fluoride approach achieves a basic level of health, but you can do so much better.
Fluoride is not "in fact toxic". A substance becomes toxic in high amounts. Vitamin D becomes toxic in high amounts. The level of fluoride in drinking water is well below the toxic level.
I really don't agree with that Paracelsian view. Some substances are Paracelsian, other are like lead, and I'd place fluorides in-between these two, a neither fully Paracelsian or non-Paracelsian poison.
I can't believe so many people would downvote a peer-reviewed paper just because it doesn't sit well with their politics, it really shows how cult-like science discourse in the US has become.
Somewhat related, as a teen in the 90s I worked at McDonald’s in The Netherlands. Because of the diet in the US, the bread used for hamburgers contained extra calcium to be more ‘healthy’, because many people did not get enough calcium intake. In The Netherlands, where people drink much more dairy products, especially back in the 90s, people would get plenty of calcium so there was no need to put extra in the bread. But because a hamburger should be a hamburger no matter where you buy it worldwide, the Dutch McDonald’s hamburger bread still had the added calcium
I was surprised when I realized that milk didn’t have that much calcium by volume, relative to how it was promoted to me as a kid.
I found that almond milk had a good bit more by volume and the US dairy industry probably just had some good marketing in the 2000s with the Got Milk campaign.
Too much calcium is a bad thing. I had enormous amounts of milk as a child, a multivitamin containing calcium and a calcium supplement. I probably had 2 to 3 people’s recommended daily amount of calcium per day. Now as an adult, the calcium is in my muscles and it occasionally causes me to feel like my arm has been dislocated from my socket for days whenever there is a flare up. Moving my arm during a flare up makes it worse. It occurs in my dominant arm and the pain is so bad that during flare ups, I sometimes contemplate amputation. There is no cure for this condition. The “get enough calcium” stuff really backfired in my case since I clearly overdosed on calcium because of it. On the bright side, I have excellent bone health.
They drink A LOT of milk! I went to a business meeting in the Netherlands and the cafeteria had buttermilk machine on tap like an elementary school in the US. They set the meeting table with pitchers of milk and buttermilk. And breakfast / lunch always has cheese.
Which is also happens to be the average daily milk consumption in the Netherlands. They drink 340 kg per year on average which is 33 oz per day. And people used to drink more milk back then.
In the UK at least some areas have fluoridated water, despite almost all toothpaste being fluoridated. I suppose it most benefits the minority of people who do not brush their teeth. That benefit has to be balanced[1] against some evidence of risk.
IMO the right fix is better dental hygiene, and a better (less sugary) diet. These are in turn are in part symptomatic of other problems (poverty, long working hours with regards to lack of supervision of children).
There a really unfortunate use of "significant" in that document. The scientific meaning and the general meaning will cause very different interpretations from laymen.
"Here in Sweden we decided against fluoride for this reason and the fact that it is in fact toxic."
All water collected from natural sources contains some level of fluoride and other salts (which varies greatly from place to place). Does then your local water authority remove these naturally-acquired chemicals?
Generally not, but we choose where we take our from water from.
If there's too much fluoride in the rock water we take soil or surface water instead, for example. If there's too much fluoride in the water we do not supply it to people's taps, but this is for values like 4 mg/L.
So we mostly don't take any measures. In Stockholm it's apparently less than 0.2 mg/L though.
Yes, I was going to mention this. Had a friend who went down the coast for a day trip with a bunch of mates. On the way back on the train (1.5 hour ride) they had a competition to see who could drink the most water and most of them had several litres, a few of them managed a bit more. My mate also had a bunch of chips/snacks, but not everyone did.
Later that night, he got a desperate phone from his friends mum, screaming at him "What did you take! What drugs did you take!!!", he replied that they hadn't taken anything, but wasn't really believed. His friend was rushed to hospital with severe seizures and convulsions. The doctors eventually put him on a saline drip and he recovered.
Basically his friend lowered the salt content in his body so much that his body could not pass electrical signals. My friend was fine because he had consumed a bit of salt in his snacks. Kinda crazy.
Three DJs and 7 other employees got fired for running a contest where whoever could hold their pee for the longest after drinking too much water would win a prize and someone died.
There was an infamous death in Australia when a young girl drank too much water after taking MDMA. It's blamed on the drug, but the thing that actually killed her was water intoxication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Wood_(born_1980)
Your GDP per capita is 50% higher than ours. You have money for this.
If there's no will to raise up the poor, you it should be straightforward to use the state directly to ensure that everyone is taught how to brush their teeth and ensured to have access to brushes and toothpaste.
I agree with you, but GDP per capita isn't the correct measure here when the bottom 8% in the US has no health insurance compared to Sweden's 0%, which I have to assume because I didn't even find this measured anywhere due to universal healthcare.
While Sweden has free health care, it does not completely include dental care. It's free until you turn 20, after that you pay out of your own pocket. This is to incentivize people to take care of their teeth, instead of not caring and then expecting free replacement of your teeth. One you're 20, you only get a very tiny deductible on your dental care which equates to almost the exactly the cost of a single basic check-up once a year.
I think that's the same mentality, "yes I'm poor now, but I'll get the break I deserve soon enough, and I don't want all these undesirables to benefit when I do".
I agree with this in an American context. In Sweden, it will be much less true. This difference can also however be attributed to government "interference" with higher taxation supporting better social care for those at the poorer end of the scale.
Freedom comes at a cost, the US and Sweden are paying that cost in different ways.
> Here in Sweden we decided against fluoride for this reason and the fact that it is in fact toxic.
How?
Please don't express that it damages development. That's trivially refutable by statistics. We can compare Canada's and UK's IQs for example, or some other proxy to the G factor, said countries were chosen for their similar cultural demographics, we find then that the metrics are mostly identical, while the difference in consumption of fluoride is staggering.
That's why Canada becoming an American anything is ridiculous and pisses off Canada so much that, for example, we've reduced our flights to America by +70% over the coming months.
Not when it comes to religion though: the European way (and I feel very much like considering Canadians something like honorary Europeans these days) was forged in painful wars stemming from and fueled by influence of religion on politics, and abuse of religion by politics. Both on the collective level, not so much on the individual level. The European way is all about having a strong firewall between religion and politics, to keep the former out of the later. Freedom from.
The American way is completely devoid of that concept. It's all built on that Pilgrim Fathers founding myth and only ever cares about keeping the state from getting in the way of individual beliefs. It's so focused on that part and only that part that even an almost-all-out theocracy would be fine as long as it did not mess with individual beliefs. "Freedom to" without the tiniest trace of "freedom from".
This is factually incorrect. Even though in most European countries there is a formal separation of religion and state, there is nothing that "forbids" any political party from having a strong religious affiliation. In fact, in nearly every European country there are major political parties with a strong Christian affiliation. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_democracy
There are even countries which have political parties that are Islamic affiliated.
The separation between religion and state refers to two things: the state not being able to enforce any religious aspects on citizens (freedom TO exercise any religion without interference from government), and religious entities not being able to influence or pressure the government outside the electoral process (freedom TO govern without interference from religious entities). Neither of these things prevents a political party founded on religious beliefs to participate in the electoral process.
Parent never said that political parties were forbidden from having a religious affiliation. Yet, the 'Christian' in European 'Christian democracy' is not remotely comparable to the role of religion in the society of the USA.
The USA is overtly and intentionally Christian: American banknotes have "In God We Trust" emblazoned on one side, and schoolchildren (usually) recite an oath pledging allegiance to "one nation under God". Christian democracy, on the other hand, usually stands for a loosely defined, mildly conservative political ideology in a strictly secular system of governance.
> The European way is all about having a strong firewall between religion and politics
I find this quite contrary to my experience of e.g. modern Germany, Spain, Poland, Italy where many politicians are explicitly religious, laws are written with majority religious affiliation in mind, religious taxes may still be levied. Even France still feels in many ways like a "catholic country", even if they do have good explicit separation of church and state.
I would have said that government and (Christian) religion are completely inextricable for most Europeans, even if the majority of the population isn't seriously devout or even practicing.
Things like church taxes handled by the state in Germany (entirely opt-in, even when it's effectively opt-out for individuals opted in by their parents) have the opposite effect though, they make the churches boring institutions (except for the occasional child abuse wtf that haunts them just like any other church) far from any radicalization.
When you dig deeper in Germany it gets surprisingly murky, e.g. bishops not paid out of those church taxes but out of regular state taxes, e.g. those paid by atheists and Muslims, which dates back to Napoleonic age secularization when those payments were introduced as a (meager) compensation for the enormous income the (catholic) church had from being worldly lords of enormous realms. But this as well contribute to keeping the churches out of politics. They know pretty well what is their place and what isn't.
> Canada does the opposite of America even if it hurts Canada - it’s a part of its identity.
As a duel citizen of the US and another Commonwealth nation, I have to say that this is exactly the ridiculous self-caricature perspective that gives foreign nationals a sort of combination of pity and contempt for the average US citizen.
While it's true that your cartoonish portrayal of freedom is one possible interpretation, there are most certainly others, many of which present citizens with actual measurable freedoms that they would not enjoy in the US.
For instance, Australians have, since the late 1990s, been relatively free of mass shootings, especially in schools or other public areas. Because the police are allowed to force you to take a random breathalyser test without probable cause, we are generally substantially freer of drunk driving. Because we have a social safety net, people are free from the need to opt out of life saving surgery because they fear the abject economic violence that the US visits upon the "uninsured".
On the other hand, the US has substantially more sensible libel laws than most Commonwealth countries. These things can cut both ways, but it would be a mistake to interpret other countries as attempting a childish breath holding exercise just to differentiate themselves from the hip and cool nation.
> As a duel citizen of the US and another Commonwealth nation, I have to say that this is exactly the ridiculous self-caricature perspective that gives foreign nationals a sort of combination of pity and contempt for the average US citizen.
Ahh, you see there you made a mistake. I'm not American.
And your examples of "this is better" don't address the point I made - how Canadians identify themselves.
"freedom from", you will not be given a prevention from some horrible disease. You can buy it if you can afford it, but a significant portion of the population can't, and some of them will not be able to enjoy life because of it.
"freedom to", a prevention will be provided. You can always decide to take alternatives, if you can afford it. A significant portion of the population can't. They will be able to enjoy life.
Equating freedom with the liberties the rich have is absurd. In any society, the rich will have the most freedom, even in the most oppressive ones. The true litmus test for freedom is seeing the freedoms the poor can enjoy. By that standard, the US doesn't score very well.
How free a country is can be determined by this question.
Would you choose to be a randomly chosen citizen? You could be anyone in that country with all the rights, privileges - or lack thereof - that that random person has.
I think I'd rather be a random Canadian with healthcare and education than a random American.
Only a few. American Republican voters consistently show a pattern of not regretting their vote because bad things happen to other people, but only because bad things happen to themselves.
It doesn't appear to be that way. If that 1% difference lies in how each country _fundamentally_ defines freedom, then I’d argue that’s more than enough to say Americans and Canadians are not alike. When the core values differ at such a foundational level, the rest of the cultural similarities become irrelevant.
Personal freedom ≠ "freedom of communities"—there is no such thing. Freedom applies to individuals, not collectives. When a community makes a decision that affects all its members, that’s democracy, but democracy is not unlimited authority. A majority vote does not grant the right to infringe on individual autonomy, which is why safeguards exist against the tyranny of the majority.
Banning fluoride does not restrict freedom—it prevents government overreach. In contrast, forcing fluoride on everyone would violate personal autonomy. Protecting individual choice is a fundamental principle, backed by real-world safeguards like constitutional rights, judicial review, and bodily autonomy laws. The burden of proof is always on those seeking to impose a policy, not on those defending individual freedom.
> Freedom applies to individuals, not collectives.
In the US, it most certainly does. We have freedom to associate, and associations also have freedoms. Were it not so, we wouldn't have even been able to arrive at the conclusion we have with regard to corporate money in politics.
Then the community is exactly forcing people to seek other, and way more expensive and way more inconvenient, sources of water. That's the opposite of a freedom.
Really? 'Why is the government providing potable water'? Because that's the point of governments: to provide a framework and the bare essentials of civilization.
And well, libertarian led governments are TERRIBLE.
I think they're saying that the logical conclusion of kebman's libertarian line of argument is that no-one is entitled to municipal water anyway, so it is moot whether or not municipal authorities decide to add a particular substance to the water or not. After all, if you trace things back far enough, the municipal water supply depends on the government 'forcing' lots of people to do things (such as paying taxes and following various regulations).
The whole argument gets weirdly metaphysical. Not many people have a problem with local authorities removing things from the water. That is, I don't see many Americans demanding that their local authority provide them with completely untreated water. But apparently modifying the water by adding something to it is importantly different. You'd think that a more interesting discussion would be a practical one (about the pros of cons of treating water in different ways). But a certain current of American discourse would rather return again and again to essentially theological arguments. We must locate the original sin against freedom in our local water infrastructure!
The opposite is true. If there was no municipal water supply, then you would in theory have a freer market where there would be multiple suppliers and consumers could theoretically make this decision themselves- assuming it doesn't result in a natural monopoly.
Because there is a government monopoly on water, you need these protections to prevent government overreach, because this is the only way for the consumer to express their preferences.
Some people would prefer there to be fluoride added to the water and some people would prefer there not to be. There's one set of pipes (in a given municipality), so you can't please everyone. You might as well complain that the government doesn't offer you a choice of voltage or frequency for your electrical supply.
Looking around the thread, the idea seems to be that there is some kind of important metaphysical distinction between the government "adding" something to the water that people could in principle add themselves or merely "filtering out" bad stuff like pathogens — and that this metaphysical distinction is somehow linked to the difference between positive and negative liberties. As an aside, I think this probably makes no sense on a chemical level, as you generally can't remove stuff without also adding something else. But in any case, this strikes me as a uniquely American perspective. I think a more common perspective is the following:
* Essentially no-one wants raw untreated water supplied to their homes.
* The local government therefore needs to decide in which ways the water is going to be treated.
* This has to involve some compromises (because there's one set of pipes).
* These compromises are boring practical issues of municipal infrastructure and have no interesting philosophical or political implications.
> I think they're saying that the logical conclusion of kebman's libertarian line of argument is that no-one is entitled to municipal water anyway
Oh, I very much understand the libertarian 'argument', and I dismiss it as childish anarcho-primativist horseshit.
Almost all (aside the rare Lefty libertarian types) libertarians utterly leave out the fact that helping each other and coming together collectively can fix problems in what amounts exponentiation, compared to the collective action problem of individualism.
If everyone generated their own power, then grids would be mismatched and slow everyone down.
If water grids were individual wells, we would tap out natural aquifers in short notice. By collectively coming together, desalination plants and mass water purification is doable.
Libertarian types will demand absolute indepenendence for everything, but also want the spoils of a framework of governance. But even when they get their own community, as I linked, they so overwhelmingly fucked it up.
Communism is a better idea than rugged right-wing libertarianism (the common one in the USA). Turns out, none of the richies want to pay for anything.
But adding fluoride WAS everybody coming together to solve a problem (poor dental health). We could have a reasonable argument about whether or not fluorine in the water continues to serve that goal. Instead we’ve got this weird quasi-debate about types of freedoms.
In the political philosophy of the US, the unit whose freedoms matter is the individual, not the community. Freedoms for individuals necessarily come from reducing the freedom of "the community."
yes, and i think that’s a pretty recent reading of the US comprehension of freedom. my sense is that the collective individualistic tendencies have ballooned.
even as recently as the early 90s, my civics classes emphasized the importance of other people’s rights and that of the expression of your individual rights infringed on the rights of others then it was an irresponsible and improper use of individual rights.
it seems like this has devolved into people whose perspective on individual rights loosely aligns enough to coalesce and shout the loudest to create policy. until someone in the in-group’s individual freedom is impacted and the group fractures into smaller coalitions. rinse. lather. repeat.
I disagree with you that this is a recent idea. It goes back to Locke, Hobbes, and the social contract theorists. The "collective freedoms" idea is more recent, if anything, coming from the subsequent generation of philosophers.
i can agree with the theory behind what you’re saying, but also sense that the practical application of individual freedoms has become increasingly prevalent and acute
In some ways, though, this is a reaction to the move in the other direction. The US in the 1800's was very much in favor of individual freedoms, but by the 1920's-1960's things swung heavily towards the idea of "positive freedom" and "community freedom."
But, taking the individual freedom argument to its ultimate implications, the Free individual is also Free to not drink tap water in a community that decided to add fluoride to their water supply, and is also Free to move to a community that decided against it.
It's not a "freedom" to be forced to move away from a community just because you want pure water. Moral philosophy: A democracy should not act as the tyranny of the majority, and governments (local or otherwise) should not overreach their mandate with monopolistic policies that negatively affect individual freedoms.
Use the same argument on air and it falls apart. "The Free individual is also Free to not breathe air in a community that decided to add lead to their air supply." This was a big debate in the 70's btw due to car emissions.
the point was good until you tried to compare it to lead in the air. there are a few factors that make it impossible to use the same argument between lead in the air and fluoride in the water
>A democracy should not act as the tyranny of the majority, and governments (local or otherwise) should not overreach their mandate with monopolistic policies that negatively affect individual freedoms.
Then it shouldn't ban fluoridation when it could instead simply not mandate it.
In reality though, the freedom of the companies, which is just the freedom of the super rich ~100 - 1000 people (proxied via companies without taking direct responsibility: The sacred duty of company is to maximize shareholder returns!)
10,000 food additives that are banned in Europe are perfectly fine in US.
>This ban is anti-freedom. (Just like forcing them could be argued to be, even though that's what you argued against.)
By that logic is the first amendment "anti-freedom", because it prevents communities from instituting censorship laws, even if they actually want them?
You joke, but a lot of these freedom-rah-rah-rah people absolutely cried like babies and resisted seatbelt laws back in the 80s and 90s, too. Half my family believed it was evidence a communist takeover, and they all had those little defeat devices that you plugged into the latch, which silenced the car's seatbelt-off indicator.
"You can't tell me what to do" has been a religion in the USA for a long, long time.
So then, you'd also be against adding folate/folic acid to bread for the same reason?
For those who don't know many countries including the US mandate the inclusion of folic acid in bread and certain other foods to ensure pregnant women get enough. A deficiency of folic acid during pregnancy causes birth defects in infants.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folate
I never heard of that supplement (not a father) and was very surprised to find 80 countries mandate it. I checked the list (below) and it turns out the 80 countries are a bunch of poor nations plus USA, UAE, Qatar, Canada and Australia. I guess our medicare system supports the EU mothers fine enough so we don’t need to put that in the staple of food.
"Despite Public Health Initiatives across Europe recommending that women take 0.4 mg folic acid before becoming pregnant and during the first trimester, the prevalence of NTD pregnancies has not materially decreased in the EU since 1998, in contrast to the dramatic fall observed in the USA. This study aimed to estimate the number of NTD pregnancies that would have been prevented if flour had been fortified with folic acid in Europe from 1998 as it had been in the USA."
"Conclusions: This study suggests that failure to implement mandatory folic acid fortification in the 28 European countries has caused, and continues to cause, neural tube defects to occur in almost 1,000 pregnancies every year."
The most famous NTD is Spina Bifida, and most of them aren't really fixable by modern health care. So this is 1000 babies a year who are either born with severe birth defects, or, in what I'm guessing is many cases, terminated when they could have been born healthy with a flour enrichment mandate.
It would be interesting to know why EU countries chose not to mandate it. Also, I wonder if EU flour millers/producers add it voluntarily, and whether flour produced in Canada destined for EU markets leaves out the folate that's mandated for inclusion in the Canadian market.
Anti-folates (similarly with magnesium and a few other things) are closer to chemotherapy than anything else. They promote cancers because they promote nearly every human cell, and the logic behind removing them is that since cancer cells divide so comparatively rapidly they'll be selectively targeted by a lack of division-enabling nutrients. Most people absolutely shouldn't be restricting their folate intake.
If we take your claim to its logical conclusion (that we shouldn't add those vitamins and minerals to our foods because they might hurt a small percentage of people), the other side of the coin is that we should _remove_ extra vitamins and minerals. If we don't, we're just implicitly medicating a whole population rather than proactively medicating them. Peanuts hurt some people; let's ban them everywhere. End-stage kidney patients without full renal failure often can't tolerate salt or phosphorus; let's not salt any of our food and ban the sale of eggs and meats. Diabetics can't easily tolerate a high glycemic load; let's be extra safe and not use any sugars or alcohols.
Or...make reasonable population-level interventions and let people with special needs handle their own special needs. There are gluten-free breads, no-excess-folate flours, and all sorts of things on the market.
While we're talking about baseline levels of B vitamins (folate), did you know that most bakers are also dumping a rich, broad-spectrum source of most B vitamins and trace minerals into your bread? It's not just folate. They then let that yeast further multiply for 2hr+ just to bump the vitamin levels up (or, worse, add extra yeast at the start to speed up the baking cycle).
Presumably, if you're in the US or any of those countries that mandate folate then you don't eat bread or anything containing flour—or you have to get special flour without it.
I'd imagine that must be very difficult for you.
BTW, that fluoride reference refers to excessive fluoride in water whether natural or added. I've not entered the fluoride debate here except to ask a question. I'd certainly object if fluoride levels were excessive in my water supply.
It is difficult, but not impossible. Many bakeries do not add them to their dough and Whole Foods has some brands without them.
Do not get me started on the IMP and GMP they are adding to foods now...excitatory purine flavor enhancers in the form of things like "Malted Barely Flour"
"Folate is an essential water-soluble B vitamin found in foods, including dark-green leafy vegetables and legumes."
The above quote from that Springer reference reminds me of plant toxins in common foods especially in dark-green leafy ones, spinach, rhubarb, etc. Oxalic acid is one of the main ones but there are many others.
If you worry about what you eat you ought to be concerned about these. It's understandable that these toxins exist in these plants as they use them as protection against insects etc. Incidentally, I use oxalic acid industrially and I'm very careful how I handle it.
So instead of the niche individuals and groups working around society to meet their needs—because this absolutely can be done today—-those with an anti-flouridation belief are mandating that the majority give up economy of scale for something that it still wants and needs.
It’s doubtful that this stance is being promoting in good faith.
We've been trying for the history of mankind to figure out how to "not keep people trapped in poverty". No one has solved that problem yet, despite the best of intentions with monumental effort. I'll agree with Milton Friedman on this, Capitalism, as bad as it is, has been the most successful system to alleviate poverty.
This is getting wildly off topic, but I firmly believe that "we tried everything and free market capitalism is the best we have" is a myth.
It's incontrovertible that, under certain conditions, an unrestricted price system (a "market") is the most efficient allocation mechanism possible. There's a lot of research on that kind of thing.
The myth is that we have ever tried anything resembling that on a nationwide scale, or maybe even that it is achievable at all. There is a fundamental "paradox of tolerance" in economics, where market participants have strong and persistent incentives to distort or damage the market. This is why business interests so often align with free-market liberalism or conservatism.
Most of the so-called deregulation under the current Trump administration for example as little to do with improving the efficiency of market allocation. It's much more about making sure very large and powerful corporations can get even larger and more powerful, and removing the regulatory apparatus to prevent them from distorting and damaging markets to suppress competition, or to suppress labor costs.
Rather than taking choice away, we should be educating people on what the best choice is and letting them make it themselves.
Brush your teeth in the morning and in the evening. Standard dental hygiene - If a person can be an obedient worker they can probably brush their teeth twice a day. If they cant, they have bigger problems to sort out.
Is that not just a passive form of putting fluoride in the water though? Government is still spending money but without the desired outcome of having a healthier fitter population.
Can communities choose to permit murder or ban people of certain races? Is America not free because they cannot choose to vote for a government that would prohibit women from voting or jail people for expressing political opinions?
You're using an extreme definition of freedom that I suspect is not quite the trump card you think it is. No, "communities" can't just do whatever they want because they "choose" to, and nobody ouside the lunatic fringe thinks that's a prerequisite for freedom.
Federal limit is 1.5 mg/l. All water suppliers have to regularly chemically/biologically analyse their water and publish fairly detailed reports. Example: https://www.bwb.de/de/assets/downloads/analysewerte-wasserwe... Some states add extra reporting requirements.
While they don't add fluoride, the natural levels in German tap water can reach 0.3 mg/L. Compared to the US recommended level of 0.7 mg/L in fluoridated water, that's not an insignificant amount.
Sorry if you read my post as snarky - I don't think I missed that point, I meant the question at the end more as food for thought.
The OP contrasts adding fluroide to water vs. not adding fluoride to water and brings up the freedom question. I find that very interesting. But he omits that there's also the variant I sketched, namely that fluoride could still be made available to the population, but not through water.
Now, how does this factoid relate to the freedom (positive or negative) question?
So, please don't read my post as negative, my intent was to bring an additional perspective to the table.
That is not a very good reason. An absurd version of that would be putting antibiotics into the water because a lot of people don't have health insurance and can get infections.
So if the Science™ said it was good to add antibiotics (reduces illness!) and anti-psychotics (reduces violence!) to the water supply, you'd be for it?
That’s an even stupider comparison than the antibiotics one.
Let’s dismantle what you did here that you think is so clever.
You took an absurd comparison of a tried and tested naturally occurring substance with a substance that public health professionals are trying to get us to use less of.
You took that, and replaced it with an even more far-fetched and even more generalised hypothetical.
At least, given your ignorance around antibiotics you might be forgiven for thinking it would be a good thing to give antibiotics for all. I mean if it’s good enough for your food supply it should be good enough for humans right? Ignore egg prices going through the roof cause your flock has no innate immune system.
So then you replace that reasonable sounding but stupid supposition and you replace it with “a word” that you pulled out of the air that sounds like it might be a thing and then wowed us with your abuse of glyphs™
You are nothing but a depressing waste of time and whoever is putting you up to this I’d suggest you go back to them with your cap in hand and admit you’re not up to it.
>You took an absurd comparison of a tried and tested naturally occurring substance
It's ironic that you assert this, and then go on to claim that I'm ignorant, when you seem to be the ignorant one. Penicillin was originally derived from a mold and is one of the popular antibiotics out there, so it's arguably "tried and tested naturally occurring". The same is true of lithium. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_(medication)
>with a substance that public health professionals are trying to get us to use less of.
Under the hypothetical of "if the Science™ said it was good", this would not be a problem. If you can't understand how hypotheticals work, I suggest you stop wasting my time.
You seem to be saying that because Lithium and Flouride are both naturally occurring minerals, that would make it okay to put Lithium in the water supply.
Please go on, the sun is out and I’m enjoying this.
>You seem to be saying that because Lithium and Flouride are both naturally occurring minerals, that would make it okay to put Lithium in the water supply.
1. If you do a quick skim of the comment section, you'll find no shortage of people unironically making such argument.
2. It might seem I'm making such claim if you're rushed or have reading comprehension issues, but if you read my comments more carefully you'd see I'm not making no such claims, only posing it as a hypothetical.
Perhaps, vitamins, micro doses of aspirin, and other low level medical treatments should also be added to water, for the benefit of the silent poor and sick.
Or even crazier, hear me out, maybe we can just let people have healthcare without cost-gating it? Like oh idk, every other even semi-wealthy nation in the world except the one where measles is making a comeback?
Public healthcare systems in other countries have procedures they don't cover, and significant wait periods (i.e., shortages) to see doctors and specialists and have procedures done. Because of the cost.
I'm not saying they aren't better than America's, but the idea you can just let people have it and not worry about costs isn't true. Health is like around quarter of entire government expenditure, it's fantastically expensive. Around the same amount of welfare expenditure, so you could double the number of people receiving welfare or double the amount that welfare recipients get for the same price, for example, which would be lifechanging for millions of the poorest and most disadvantaged people.
> except the one where measles is making a comeback?
I mean, raise taxes on businesses (wanna guess how many walmart employees are on government aid, i.e how much we tax payers are directly subsidizing their exorbitant profits while they pay their employees below a living wage?)Tax the rich, (3 individuals hoard more wealth than 50% of the country combined) + Cut some large percentage of insurance jobs, military spending, and use that money to provide healthcare to every american, without spending time and money making sure they're poor before we deign them able to receive help. really, it's quite simple.
>Public healthcare systems in other countries have procedures they don't cover, and significant wait periods (i.e., shortages) to see doctors and specialists and have procedures done.
Agreed there. Ever wonder why?
Taking your point earnestly for a moment, can you earnestly tell me that's not still miles better than America, with more expensive outcomes, worse care outcomes, lowering life expectancy compared to poorer nations, record maternal mortality rates, and tons of medical bankruptcies?[2]
Cmon, be serious. Go fund me is one of the bigger health insurance systems in the country.[3] Btw, medicare for all saves tremendous amounts of money vs our current system.[1] Much like ubi, the science is clear, but the rich and the naive are too brainwashed or dumb by the propaganda of the oligarchy owned media to think American's deserve healthcare, housing, a dignified life.
Seriously, Compare your "worst case" to america, where people simply can't afford to see the specialists, or get the procedures at ALL. I know which one I would have and my opinion is backed by the sentiment, and empirical data of, like I said, literally every even half developed nation in the world. Your can offer nothing against this. It's simply fact.
That's not even to speak about women dying from things like birth complications because their draconian state let the theocratic fascists dictate what a women and their doctor can and can't do with their own body.[0]
>because of the cost
Drastic, brazen or glib misunderstanding of history and politics. Throughout conservative governments, from reagan to thatcher to bush to trump, the objective of these ayn rand reading dummies, (read, austerity politicians) are as follows:
1. cut funding to vital social agency.
2. point to resulting difficulties as proof it's a silly system.
3. sell it off to private corporations and get hefty kickbacks.
THAT is what causes all of the (still lesser than ours) problems you lament.
>the idea you can just let people have it and not worry about costs isn't true
Where did I say that again?
Man, if only someone had thought of that. If only we had a 1% that controls almost 40% of the wealth in this country. We could raise taxes to pay for such a program. Btw, I reiterate, every study, (even from neocon think tanks) recognize it would save us hundreds of billions.) But austerity/conservative politicians don't want to improve the lives of us, they want to enrich their fellow oligarchs.
Even thinking about this for a second will validate the notion. Instead of hundreds and thousands of employees whose job it is to give the least care to the least people for profit, maybe spend that money oh, idk, giving people healthcare? How much healthcare could've been provided from Luigi's cough victim's salary? If instead of getting paid millions to use AI to deny healthcare to those in need, that money was oh idk, spent on healthcare?
>Health is like around quarter of entire government expenditure, it's fantastically expensive.
Gee, I wonder what the cause of that is. Oh wait, I know this one too. Pretty common conservative talking point. Have you heard of the phrase "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure?"
Do you think a system where people are afraid to go to the dr for economic reasons contribute at all to the drastic healthcare expenses? I know someone that works as an ER nurse, people do not come in til they're at deaths door, with an issue that would have been remedied for a 100th the cost had they simply been able to see a doctor when first troubled. And again, all studies point to medicare for all saving hundreds of billions vs our current system.[1]
>Around the same amount of welfare expenditure, so you could double the number of people receiving welfare or double the amount that welfare recipients get for the same price, for example, which would be lifechanging for millions of the poorest and most disadvantaged people.
Or we could idk, just stop wasting money on evil "who deserves help" jobs and just you know, give that money directly to the people our government is supposed to improve the lives of? This goes for welfare, healthcare, unemployment, etc, too. How much of our social safety nets' budgets are spent in bureaucrats meant to make it difficult to get those benefits? To subsidize billion $ corporations? To bail out banks who speculated on subprime mortgages? To fund a $9T war on terror that did nothing but make us more enemies?
This is a fairly unhinged reply to my quite specific question and comment. Pretty rude saying things like this
> Drastic, brazen or glib misunderstanding of history and politics
while pretending you weren't just spouting on about measels htat you had no idea about.
Healthcare is extremely expensive and taxing more won't magically make costs irrelevant or the cost of healthcare having to be weighed against other important and worthwhile government expenditure like welfare. That's just the reality of it no matter how much you're going to prattle on.
Apparently the US spends twice on healthcare for the same outcomes compared to comparable nations with universal healthcare. Therefore the concern about costs does not add up.
> Apparently the US spends twice on healthcare for the same outcomes compared to comparable nations with universal healthcare.
Sure, but I was talking about costs in other developed countries, not USA. Healthcare in Australia is about 1/4 of government expenditure with welfare being another 1/4, for example.
> Therefore the concern about costs does not add up.
Non-sequitur. Costs obviously do and I explained in very simple terms why (e.g., you could double welfare payments for about the same cost). Please explain your reasoning if you want to support the claim that cost is not a concern.
What's your point equating welfare spending to healthcare spending? To suggest that we fund welfare more instead of putting more money in to healthcare? Why??? Are you simply stating that giving x money to one social program is the same as giving x money to another? What is your point, your policy proscription?
Giving $x to healthcare is almost always better than giving $x to welfare, as well funded universal healthcare reduces OOP costs for citizens, which reduces their need to consume other welfare services.[0,1]
> What's your point equating welfare spending to healthcare spending?
I'm not equating the spending, only the costs.
> To suggest that we fund welfare more instead of putting more money in to healthcare?
I'm not suggesting that, I'm explaining what the cost of healthcare is in terms of another enormous government programe.
> Why??? Are you simply stating that giving x money to one social program is the same as giving x money to another?
No.
> What is your point, your policy proscription?
To try to give you some perspective about the enormous cost of universal healthcare.
> Giving $x to healthcare is almost always better than giving $x to welfare, as well funded universal healthcare reduces OOP costs for citizens, which reduces their need to consume other welfare services.[0,1]
Calm down and take a breath and try re-reading what I wrote in my first comment. It's extremely simple, maybe the fact I pointed out you were wrong about measles set you off badly. I'm not saying healthcare expenditure is bad or worse than other welfare or that America has a good healthcare system. I said that healthcare is cost gated in countries with universal healthcare systems. Which it is. In your hypothetical fairy land of unicorns and pixies where corporations and billionaires pay for everything, sure it's not cost gated, and neither is your government issued pony. But that is not an answer to my point that healthcare in countries with universal healthcare systems (and America, if it were to adopt one), is cost gated. Cost gated meaning people who need or want treatment will not be able to receive it in a timely manner in all cases.
Yeah, I was a little heated, because I misunderstood what you meant by cost-gated, and thought you were being rhetorical and bad faith. My bad there.
We simply had different definitions of cost-gated, and talked past each other because of it.
>my point that healthcare in countries with universal healthcare systems (and America, if it were to adopt one), is cost gated
Sure, but... who cares? It still produces better outcomes, better coverage, better in nearly every measurable way. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
>Cost gated meaning people who need or want treatment will not be able to receive it in a timely manner in all cases.
Yeah, sure, but that really isn't the point. The point was that free at point of service (what I meant by not cost-gated) healthcare produces better outcomes, covers a larger % of citizens, and is generally simply a better way to do healthcare. Not receiving in a timely manner is miles better than not receiving at all because you can't afford it. That's a pretty worthy delineation to make, even if you could in the abstract call both "cost-gated".
The overall point is socialized medicine costs less, provides better outcomes, covers more people. All the rest is besides the point I was trying to make. Sorry again for coming in so hot, I'm clearly much too used to arguing with much more dishonest people than yourself.
Yeah, almost like he's a dishonest fool at best, or propagandist who will do anything to avoid acknowledging the simple, universally backed by data assertion that healthcare for all is cheaper, provides better outcomes, and the source of the problems of universal systems - austerity politicians who's m.o i laid out plainly. Defund, claim it doesn't work, privatize.
Complains I didn't answer every one of his points AND that my response was too long. Clearly a dishonest propagandist or a fool.
Disagreed, If you need soft kind words to believe the guy telling you the sky is blue over the guy speaking softer but telling you the sky is red, you're the problem, not me.
I respond in good faith until the other party shows themselves not to be, and his glib rhetoric of "what do you mean, cost-gated?" while in the next sentence demonstrating he knows exactly what I'm speaking of - a public healthcare option - made it clear what type of person I was dealing with, and it wasn't a good faith commenter.
I've heard every argument that guy made and can make 1000 times over from fox news talking heads or an equivalent level person.
What strengthens my positions are, well, the truthfulness of them. All of the facts and studies support my message, playing nice with a bad faith commenter has no bearing on any of the facts I presented.
Not to mention he calls a thought out, four citation response "unhinged prattle" because he refuses to engage with any of my responses (he knows i'm right) to his dishonest comment. It's the conservative m.o, I've seen it a thousand times.
If you can't/won't accept reality because there was some extremely mild condescension, that's on you. Plus that guy deserved no good faith, I've heard his exact comment from every conservative talking head for a decade+, I know guys like him backwards to forwards (politically)
> I respond in good faith until the other party shows themselves not to be,
That was my first comment.
> and his glib rhetoric of "what do you mean, cost-gated?" while in the next sentence demonstrating he knows exactly what I'm speaking of - a public healthcare option
Public healthcare is cost-gated though. The recipient doesn't see the cost, but they see wait lists and procedures and medications and devices that are not covered. It is cost-gated. Prattling on about taxing the rich doesn't change that, it's just deflecting and changing the subject. If governments had unlimited money then healthcare would not be cost gated. Great. Astounding deduction. Now back to reality...
I think your attempt to spread disinformation about measles -- or worse, simply being willfully uninformed about simple facts yet trying to make statements of authority about them -- shows exactly what kind of person I'm dealing with.
Ok, I see where the misunderstanding arose. Cost-gating in this context meant, to me, preventing access to healthcare based on if the individual can pay at point of service, not if the state program can pay to see people quickly or whatever. Apologies for not giving the best faith interpretation to your comment, but you can hopefully see why I misunderstood your use of the term.
Sure, as a byproduct of systematically underfunded social health programs, you see a similar effect in countries with social healthcare, but I refuted the importance of that point pretty completely by explaining the m.o of austerity politicians and worse than gilded-age levels of wealth inequality[0] as the sources of social healthcare systems' ails and the clear fact that it's still a much better system by any measure.
The outcomes are still better, cheaper, and more have access to healthcare. So, not really relevant to the point that public healthcare > privatized healthcare? The rest is semantic word games. We're talking about which system provides better outcomes to more people for less money. And there is no question as to the answer of that.
>Disinformation about the measles
Sure, I was unaware how severe the anti vaccination rhetoric has taken root in europe too. My tongue in cheek dig at measles being back in the US was not meant to be taken that seriously, but more like a "point and laugh at the us" addendum.
But you are right, though it's besides the point completely. That we're the only country suffering from anti vax idiots is incorrect, sure. But it is not even really part of the argument here, more just a dig on the US. Idk why that tiny part of the discussion was fixated on. Probably because it's the only point I wasn't correct about.
One man's slippery slope, is another man's exploration of an idea. I don't think exploring widely is unproductive.
I could also say, that discussing slippery slopes (a linguistic discussion) is itself what moves the discussion too far from the original topic. You protest too much.
The trouble with slippery slopes is that not all of them are fallacious, as you are suggesting. This is a reasonable point: if we are doing delivery of medicine through tap water, where's the line? A few people have seriously suggested putting low doses of lithium in the tap water as a societal antidepressant.
The line is where we've drawn it now - nothing has changed in decades. A few people suggest all kinds of things, that doesn't make them at imminent risk of happening.
The difference is that fluoride is effectively an industrial waste product and thus it benefits multiple parties to use it. If vitamins were also an industrial waste product, we would indeed be adding them to lots of things.
Do you think there's a difference between a/ treating water to make it clean and b/ adding minerals and vitamins for the benefit of others, whether they want it or not?
Not really. I'm sure some people want distilled water to come out of their tap. You can't provide any service to a large group of people without giving some of them something they don't want in some way or another.
That's exactly what I was trying to convey with my hyperbolic statement. I remember when I first moved to the city after being on well water for the first 25 years of my life and being put off by the chlorinated smell of the water. Now when I go back to visit family I'm put off by the well water... Especially when taking a shower.
I can't help but come away from this conversation with the impression that you people are talking about livestock and not human individuals with rights to their own body and bodily autonomy. This to me is straight out of the nazi/communist/fascist type of mindset.
> The contrast between positive freedom, the freedom to do something, and negative freedom, the freedom from interference in your life, is the core political argument in America right now.
True.
> Negative freedom, freedom from government interference, is being promoted by those seeking to weaken the government enough to supplant it.
Tenuous. Then again, like you, all of my political opponents are either stupid or evil or both.
> People who are poor and sick are likely unable to stand up for themselves or participate in solidarity against authority.
Contentious. Sometimes this is true, sometimes it is not - giving negative liberty rights (e.g. first amendment speech protections) to individuals has proven an incredibly effective tool to protect the individual against the state. Not perfect, but incredibly effective all the same.
> This individual issue is relatively small, but you take 100's of issues like this, and the effect is to create a class of people who aren't able to do anything but be obedient workers.
Any supporter of negative liberty (i.e. someone who is for small government) would tell you, that is what government does, which is a big reason why they want small government.
What in the Berkeley kind of logic is this? You have a pretty solid core logical structure. But, the conclusion is weak. The argument’s weakness lies in its simplifications and the final political assertion, which, although plausible within certain ideological frameworks, isn't logically proven by the earlier premise.
The American view of "freedom" is all messed up. You're "free" if the government doesn't tell you to do stuff. Even if corporations make you do stuff, even if they make you do more stuff the government did, that's somehow "free". And "stuff" somehow only includes trivial things like water fluoridation. No freedom-loving American patriot ever said America isn't free because cops can just murder you if they don't like you.
> The contrasting view is that putting fluoride in water is literally medicating people without their affirmative consent.
Is that the contrasting view, or the contrasting view that is preferred, because it is more easily demolished?
The stronger contrasting view isn't that the government is medicating people without their affirmative consent. It's that it's poisoning people, and no amount of consent by laymen to be poisoned would be acceptable.
I think his view is much stronger, since the intent is obviously to medicate even if it may indeed be inadvertently poisoning people in practice. So it doesn't assume one truth (poison or not) one way or the other, but still argues that it should be unlawful. While your view is much more narrow and suggests it should only be unlawful because it's poisoning people, which then begs the question of whether it is or not.
Fluoride occurs naturally in water, that’s literally how we discovered the effects of fluoride. People in areas where water naturally contained more fluoride had less cavities.
Anything, including water itself, is toxic (not poisonous, but I’m guessing you meant toxic, since fluoride is definitely not poisonous) in high enough doses. So you could say that about ANY mineral we may add to water to adjust its taste or health effects.
I happen to think adding fluoride isn’t worth the effort. But the hysteria against it is also really dumb.
> If you are poor you can't go anywhere or buy anything. You're not free if you're poor.
The solution is lifting people out of poverty not papering over the cracks with fluoride.
There is no fluoride in the water here in Norway yet dental health is good because of good education, free dental care for children, students pregnant women, and little absolute poverty.
I think it's a reductionist word game to reduce everything to a single dimension ("freedom") and then say "I think my policy is better, and since everything can reduce to a single variable it means there is more freedom".
If a right-wing voter thinks banning gay marriage is good for society, it is also positive freedom? If your counter-argument is "no, because while it would be positive freedom if it was good for society, it's not" then maybe I'm just disareeing on your terminology, but I suspect you would say "heck no, telling people what they can't do is not freedom, that's an abuse of the English language as well as being bad for society".
Governments exist to take away some freedoms, it's the whole point of them. People vote for governmets to take away freedoms (with laws and taxes) and get things like public services, justice systems and infrastructure in return. Ideally, they lean towards things that give you a lot of bang for your buck (like flourine), because taking away freedom is not good for creating a dynamic society, and they should be accountable to voters.
Just say that anyone who objects is an anarchist if you want to take the moral high ground from the right in terms they understand.
The issue is not the fluoride in the water, it's all the sugar that poor people eat and drink (especially sodas). And we actively fund the corn syrup industry at both ends via the farm bill (production and consumption via SNAP).
Always question whenever a highly educated and thoughtful (and likely wealthy) person like this commenter is telling you poor people are too stupid for their own good and can’t make decisions for themselves.
This is the definition of the principal-agent problem.
Also, “positive freedom” is a hilarious rebranding of dictatorial decision making.
Why not grant more “positive freedom” to the people by deciding exactly what these poor people should do for a living, how they should live, and how they should spend their money. The experts know best, after all.
I’m not even particularly against fluoride in water, but this kind of reasoning is insidious. If the people have voted for representatives that are against it, we should follow the will of the people. This is the definition of democracy.
Fluoridated water, enriched flour, iodized salt, vaccines, etc. are why we don't see diseases and conditions that plagued us in the past and continue to plague people in places without these measures.
Fluoridated water is the reason I've never had a cavity despite growing up poor with a terrible diet, dental hygiene and care.
There is no leap, when I finally got good access to dental care, I've had dentists tell me water fluoridation is what kept me from tooth decay in the chronic absence of dental care and basic hygiene.
Enriched flour is another good example that I was hoping someone would mention*.
It’s worth noting that it’s also slightly different in that processed flour is deficient in thiamin and calcium, so the fortification adds back these nutrients.
On the other hand, processing water to make it potable doesn’t remove fluoride and so fluoridation is not the process of adding back something that was there beforehand.
*I searched this page and found flouride and flouridation four times before your comment.
I've seen the enriched flour brought up a few times in this thread, and not with the important caveat: This is a poor substitute for the micronutrients that occur naturally in the bran and endosperm; parts of the grain that we've been stripping out for dubious reasons or 50-100 years. (In ~100% of restaurant and bakery food; ~90% of grocery food)
There's no such thing as "free" when something is "given" by a public entity. It always costs the people that actually work and are forcibly taxed, something.
> The contrast between positive freedom, the freedom to do something, and negative freedom, the freedom from interference in your life, is the core political argument in America right now.
Interesing take but I don't buy this part at all. The core political argument in the US is epistemological. What's real and what counts as true? There are some axiological differences but I think they are minor in comparison to not being able to agree on how the world is in the first place.
It seems to be that the battleground is epistemological, but not so much the argument. The difference being that Trump uses 'claims of truth' without any care of how true they are.
I feel the majority of epistemological disagreement is the result of propaganda (not exclusively from MAGA). With only a small bit that is actually a disagreement on core values. Suchs true disagreement does exist, but it is no longer what the political discourse is about.
74.6% of Americans get fluoridated tap water; https://jada.ada.org/article/S0002-8177(24)00204-6/fulltext shows that even with instructions to brush and floss and instructions to use it, water flouridation reduces cavities in a community by at least 20%.
Currently, there is a very effective push by people who want to weaken the government enough to supplant it. They are giving themselves ideological coverage by claiming they protecting people from interference.
No it isn't - OP didn't say everyone who promotes that idea wants to weaken the government, but rather those who wish to weaken the government are promoting that idea.
Fluoride has to be applied to the surface at a high concentration for brief contact time to be effective. What is the freedom to sell industrial waste to the government to pointlessly add to the water supply for profit called?
> Putting fluoride in water promotes freedom. That sounds crazy, but let me justify it.
> If you are poor you can't go anywhere or buy anything. You're not free if you're poor. If you are sick, you may be confined to a hospital bed or not feel good enough to do anything. If you are sick you're not free.
or, you know, you could avoid the problem in the first place and allow "even poors" to go somewhere or buy something... at least base items, and medicines...
this way they could afford dental costs, and you could spare the need to add fluoride in the water
This is the same reasonning with vaccine (only worse because you can die faster from not being vaccinated than from cavities -- although in some cases they can be lethal too).
People who want to be free from government interference should be prevented from using public roads, or public infrastructure of any kind. Want to mail something? Hire a courrier to deliver it for you. Etc.
Sure, go ahead, no taxes! But along with OP's rules against using public roads, or public infrastructure: You also can't use the public's air, because regulation keeps it clean. You can't eat at any restaurants, because the government regulates them and make sure they are serving safe food. No access to medicine, either, for the same reason. No airline travel, which is heavily regulated and safe, No working for any company subject to OSHA and other workplace safety regulations. No calling the police or fire department if you need help. Just you in your homestead in the woods--oh, and if someone robs your homestead, you don't have access to the courts to get your money back, either, money that you can't use anyway because it's issued by the government.
No taxes in exchange for you not benefiting from anything taxpayer-funded. How does that libertarian paradise sound?
That’s a very American perspective (which is fine, given that we are talking about America). Most countries would view this as a non-partisan public health policy issue which has nothing to do with the abstract philosophical debates about freedom beloved of 90s internet libertarians.
Isaiah Berlin wrote about the two concepts of liberty[0] in 1958 and the constitution of the US is based on negative liberty, so it goes back a bit further than the 90s.
I'm aware of the history (I said "beloved of", not "invented by"). My point is that it's idiosyncratically American to think of decisions about municipal water treatment as being fundamentally questions of political liberty.
> I rather define freedom by the government not deciding what's good for me
Does that mean you are against this bill?
Before the bill, your community could either use your own water system, without fluoride, or use the wider system, which has fluoride.
After this bill, your community no longer can use your own water system with fluoride, and the wider system also does not have fluoride.
On a first read, this bill makes the government remove a choice for you, deciding what is good for you.
(I don’t have a horse in this race honestly. Assuming everyone can get toothpaste and toothbrushes, the effect is the same. But the wording of the bill is strange: “may not add fluoride” rather than just “is allowed not to add”.)
"Your community could decide" is not freedom in the American political sense. In US political theory, the unit of freedom is the individual, full stop.
Corporations are not actually persons. You should read the Citizens United opinion if that's what you think it meant.
Corporate owners are people engaging in voluntary transactions. Their freedom was essentially the question in Citizens United. "Corporations are people" emerged from the media as an oversimplified version.
Exactly this. But remember that "legal personhood" basically just means "able to enter contracts" and does not imply any sort of human rights or humanity. It does not mean anything like what "personhood" normally means.
This has also been the case for the entire history of corporations, which is longer than the history of the US.
Are we also "free" to not pay "voluntary" taxes then? We have to understand that we're N-levels deep into this spaghetti mess, and as a consequence of that it's very hard to argue anything from first-principles or absolutes.
The UK government is really big on doing things for our own good, but they don't seem to do much water flouridation. Which I think is some evidence that it's not a clearcut health benefit.
> We believe that water fluoridation is the single most effective public health measure there is for reducing oral health inequalities and tooth decay rates, especially amongst children. We welcome these proposals and believe they represent an opportunity to take a big step forward in not only improving this generation’s oral health, but those for decades to come.
Excessive fluoride exposure is associated with reduced childhood IQ: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/... . Giving poor people (the ones who can't afford to drink bottles water or buy a fancy filter) means to moderate their fluoride intake this risk is creating lower-iq, more obedient workers.
This started out as an interesting and fair take until “…enough to supplant it”. Freedom from the government is the original vision and one of the core principles of America assuming that anybody that wants smaller government just wants to supplant it is a massive misunderstanding of most Americans today and certainly the founding principles.
We can read this country's founding philosophy directly:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
It's not freedom from government but freedom from tyranny. They believed that governments existed to promote the protection of rights.
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
This demonstrates an intentional effort by the founders to strictly limit federal authority by explicitly enumerating government powers and leaving everything else beyond federal reach. It underscores that their conception of freedom involved a government that was deliberately restrained, designed primarily to safeguard individual liberties by minimizing governmental interference, rather than merely protecting from outright tyranny.
They were anti tyranny. Governments tend to be tyrannical, but they weren't against governments, they were against tyranny.
Timothy Snyder is the modern embodiment of founding father ideology/enlightenment philosophy and my original post was almost directly lifted from his talks/books.
Yes they may have been in favor of small government, but we have the tyranny of corporate power now. When healthcare is tied to a job, women are working instead of doing child care, the combined wages are not enough/barely enough to afford rent and necessities, and there are no savings for emergencies, that leads to the tyranny of business and wage slavery.
It leads to individuals without the means to withdrawal consent from a tyrannical government. It structurally disables acts of disobedience. Jefferson said rebellion unto tyranny is obedience to god, not rebellion unto governments. They were not subject to the levels of concentrated corporate power that grew out of industrialization. Robber Barrons were also tyrants who acted tyrannically.
There's probably something to be said about self reliance and protestant work ethic which can result in obedient workers willing to work under poor conditions for cultural reasons, but thinking that government is the only entity capable of unchecked power when we have businesses with a higher revenue than some entire countries/states shows a dogmatic chasing of a justification for a belief, rather than following the principles towards an assessment the principles themselves would lead to. It's a kind of originalism. The appearance of their beliefs, but not the substance of them.
A republic... If we can keep it.
Well good luck keeping it if the average citizen is too weak to project any kind of political power. Good luck having strong citizens (or a cohesive society) without strong social programs like public education.
> rather than merely protecting from outright tyranny.
Enlightenment ideology at it's core, the very central point of it, which our documents were written into respect to, says you give up some rights in order to have other rights protected [from tyranny]. That is why man leaves the state of nature... Greater protection from tyranny.
The constitution was a document meant to be adapted. The goal of the implementation is plainly stated:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
The government can give out toothpaste in school, it doesn't need to add things to water.
The inviolability or integrity of one's own body to me is more important than any of this. You have the right to decide what medication to be given to you with informed consent always, or you have no freedom. Otherwise the freedom argument collapses and you stop having reasons to allow abortions, or a bunch of other informed consent situations.
And "knowing better" than poor people "for their own good" usually doesn't go well (for the people).
Except schools handing out toothpaste will get brought up at thousands of board meetings across the country with sensitive or bored parents claiming government overreach and misuse of budgets.
You can presumably buy a different brand of flour or find a different source quite easily? Same applies to most other “fortified” products. With water your’e basically forced to waste money on bottled water or very expensive filtration systems.
But yes, adding additional vitamins or minerals to food products is generally unnecessary when supplements are generally cheap and highly available these days.
The knowledge about the supplements we need also cheap and highly available and yet lots of people don't have it. I myself don't know all the supplements I need.
I feel like for better or worse we are being forced into an era of individual responsibilities where the safeguards that we used to rely on without having to think are being actively dismantled.
the debate in this thread is a reflection of the politico-scientific standing of the united states. it seems as though fluoridated water has come to be treated as a synechdoche for the role of science (and public health) in society. both sides are trying in earnest to defend their meta-position (“freedom” vs “society”) but slip into logic errors (usually cherry picking and straw man). i think this is because of the context switching between the part (fluoridation) and the whole (freedom/society).
Fluoride in toothpaste already covers most people today. So, if there are legitimate concerns about adding it to the water supply due to fluorosis, even if those concerns are small, removing it seems reasonable to me. Are the number of people who don't brush their teeth really high enough to justify it?
Decades of science show it’s beneficial, and we keep seeing the outcomes validated in practice. Calgary removed fluoride from drinking water, saw a significant increase in dental carries in children, and is adding it back. [1]
Hawaii does not fluoridate and has high rates of children’s tooth decay [2]
All i know is my parents generation grew up without it and saw they dentists for fillings, every year, for years. Seemed like their childhoods played a part here because half their life they had toothpaste at the same rates as me.
I on the other then havnt seen a dentist in 25yrs, have no fillings after 40, and wouldnt say i brush my teeth twice a day, everyday, as recommended. I do however consume water tainted with fluoride.
So maybe there are more factors at play here then simply washing our teeth. I cant fathom how dirty our parents generations teeth must have been before toothpaste to result in the amount of fillings they have compared to people my age (unless your a meth head).
These American experts who are “disheartened” — do they not pay attention to Europe? Or do they only get upset when Republicans do something?
Europe (and many parts of Asia,) is objectively healthier than most of the residents of the USA; so maybe rather than knee-jerking against anything RFK Jr., perhaps the so-called experts should start doing their jobs and looking at what healthier places in the rest of the world are doing. The status quo in the USA is default fat and unhealthy. Why aren’t the fluoride cheerleaders not using their “expert” status to shout against high fructose corn syrup, artificial coloring, or the fact that most American food tastes like sugar?
Do you seriously think that dental and health experts don’t rail against those things? They do, and they consider those things far more important than fluoridated water. Their opinions on fluoride are being shared because there is notable news about fluoridated water.
Americans do not want to hear about how they should eat healthier.
So, Finland gave fluoride a shot in a few cities back in the '60s through the '90s, but they didn’t see much point to it and dropped it. Now, some spots there are even filtering it out of the water. You can still get it in toothpaste and mouthwash, though.
There’s this study I read that says the top five countries for dental health are Denmark, Germany, Finland, Sweden, and the UK. The US? It’s lagging at ninth. Funny thing is, out of those top five, only the UK messes with fluoride in their water, and even then, it’s just for like 5% of folks.
Honestly, it kinda feels like skipping the fluoride in water might be the smarter move.
The solution to ALL of this is a very simple randomised controlled trial. Identify 1000 pregnant women in a fluorinated area, give half of them free unfluorinated bottled water for their pregnancy and first 2 years of babies life, and let the other half drink tap water, then measure all of the kids’ iqs at 5 years.
Sadly noone has done this because the topic is too radioactive for most researchers or science funders to touch.
Does filtering your water with a whole house filter take the fluoride out?
Because I live in a small township that delivers well water to you tap. It tastes horrible, shortens the life of pipes and appliances, and smells like sulfur.
Every year they mail a flyer that explains how the lead levels are dangerously above the national standard and you should run the tap before you drink from it.
Like, sorry there's nothing we can do about it. =(
> Because I live in a small township that delivers well water to you tap. It tastes horrible, shortens the life of pipes and appliances, and smells like sulfur.
Oh man, I used to live in a place like this. You could smell if a restaurant served filtered water (lots filter for the soda machine, to keep mineralization in it down I assume, and use the same water to serve) or straight from the tap, without taking a drink. Like with your nose six inches above the cup, you could smell it. Luckily, almost all served filtered.
Turns out that carbon filters do filter fluoride, but only on the first few X litres of water, where X is in the first 0.01% or so of their expected lifespan. So, they do, but not really usefully in any sense.
My filter that I wanted to know about (so that my kid is getting fluoride) is a 2-stage filter, with the other stage being a particle filter, but fluoride is very small and unaffected.
Your filter might be different of course.
FWIW, in my city, the water has essentially zero fluoride if it isn't added, and it has been a great intervention.
If it's reverse osmosis based, yes. If it's some other kind of filter, likely no, and you should buy a TDS meter and use it, because in all likelihood it's not really filtering anything. I did exactly this. It turned out that my carbon based filter had more TDS than completely unfiltered water from a tap in the garden. RO water, even re-mineralized, had 1/15th the TDS IIRC.
TDS is just Total Dissolved Solids. What solids though you don't know and you could be adding carbon while removing others which is likely the case.
Also those dinky little TDS meters don't even measure TDS. They measure electrical conductivity and with a little math they use the EC as a proxy for TDS. It's typically only calibrated to one specific ion, others will be off by some factor. Also keep in mind TDS is expressed in PPM as CaCO3.
Yes, but be that as it may, at least it shows whether _any_ filtering is occurring at all. Which in the case of even a somewhat spent carbon filter is not a thing. RO does the job so well, you have to remineralize afterwards or the water doesn't taste like anything. You could literally pee into a jar and get fresh water on the other end. That's sort of what happens on sailing vessels that are equipped with water makers - they simply run sea water through RO.
Fluorinating all of the water just to deliver some milligrams to the teeth is incredibly inefficient. Especially when less and less of the stuff people people drink comes out of the tap.
We have toothpastes and fluorinated mouthwash that both get the job done.
Probably there are some people that are unable to afford those and unaware how to use them, but probably are tiny percentage of the state population, especially with the cult of teeth care that the US has.
I also see the fortified flours as example (or iodine in salt) - but the US is different now than in the 30s. The US diet is more varied. Very few people get 80% of their calories from a single starchy staple so developing a severe deficiency of something requires some serious effort from the persons affected.
So who is this policy of fluorination for - the people that are too poor to afford toothpaste, but still have access to municipality treated water and don't drink copious amounts of soda or bottled drinks.
Taking compounds of the most electronegative element, and treating people with them systemically—drink it, bathe in it, cook with it—when local administration directly to the teeth is cheap, easy, & effective makes no sense at all.
Meanwhile, mining industries produce—and must dispose of—a steady stream of fluoride compounds that would otherwise have to be dealt with as toxic waste (i.e. very expensive) if they ever lost the green light to dump them into the water supply.
Three chemicals are used to fluoridate drinking water in the U.S: sodium fluoride (NaF); sodium fluorosilicate (Na2SiF6); and fluorosilicic acid (H2SiF6). Fluorosilicic acid is a byproduct of the manufacture of phosphate fertilizer.
I feel like we are so privileged in the US that there’s little to no personal consequences for being so wrong about a topic. Eventually there’s needs to be a correction, whether it’s because we regain our senses or we stray so far that the majority of people start to be majorly affected. I’m fearing it’s the latter.
There’s a tendency to backwards rationalize anything that is established in the US, that comes from a place of identity.
The current shape of the US is already the best and people consider it a part of who they are, so suggesting a course correction may be seen as both wrong think and a personal attack and wanting radical change would be outright treason.
There’s an array of standard stencils for defense against change: this is the only thing that can work here, this is the only thing that guarantees freedom, this is actually not that bad, I actually prefer it like this, anything else would be expensive/impossible/unamerican.
It’s not even unique to the US, but who cares about other places.
That's because drinking non-fluoridated water is very cheap (a minimal disadvantage). Vs. opposing fluoridated water can be very valuable (give the current culture wars).
Notice that nobody is arguing about keeping water-born pathogens out of the drinking water.
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
“ 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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."
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 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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)?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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 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
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?
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
(I'm having some fun, but it is in fact the first thing that comes to mind when I hear objections to fluoridated water. Since we're talking about RFK and Utah, I kind of assume it more or less stems from the same fears.)
Question: is there something I can do in the office to improve tooth health? E.g. after drinking a cup of coffee, maybe neutralize the pH with some antacid? Or, I don't know, chew some gum? Are there products that are relatively convenient and don't require a brush and water?
I think I'm more interested to know if the fluoride also helps keeps bacteria down in the water. That is, if it's doing anything useful other than dealing with teeth.
A quick search didn't seem to turn up anything related, so maybe not (the concentrations might be too low to be relevant)?
Water fluoridation conspiracy theories were a thing old enough to be a plot point in 1964 Dr. Strangelove. When there's an entire grift or political career to be a "Fluoride truther", it's really hard to take seriously any of these claims. Given it's naturally occurring and often in higher doses and there'd been so much time to control for any side effects, I'd need extraordinary evidence to be swayed on this.
GENERAL JACK D. RIPPER: Mandrake, do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk... ice cream. Ice cream, Mandrake, children's ice cream.
GROUP CAPT. LIONEL MANDRAKE: Lord, Jack.
GENERAL JACK D. RIPPER: You know when fluoridation first began?
GROUP CAPT. LIONEL MANDRAKE: I... no, no. I don't, Jack.
GENERAL JACK D. RIPPER: Nineteen hundred and forty-six. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.
It's the concentration that matters. Toothpaste has over 1000x the concentration of fluoride vs 0.7mg/L as tap water. Many well water sources have naturally occurring fluoride that exceeds the additive levels.
Very low concentrations of medicine are usually ineffective at its stated purpose outside of pseudo scientific theories, so even if it is safe to ingest, it is not clear it is able to do anything for people’s teeth.
That is why I do not understand how the two can co-exist. Either the concentration is so low that drinking it for dental health is pointless, or it is not something people should be drinking. If there was a middle ground, we would have a 1 a day pill for this and not bother brushing our teeth or putting fluoride in water.
> If there was a middle ground, we would have a 1 a day pill for this
We do; fluoride tablets are common.
> and not bother brushing our teeth
Brushing your teeth does a lot of things besides applying fluoride to the surface. It's mostly about getting stuff that's already there off the surface.
My initial searches suggest that these are by prescription only. Do you have any information to the contrary? I did find toothpaste tablets, but those are meant to be used as toothpaste from what I can tell.
This is not a one a day pill then. If ingesting it is regulated, that would be consistent with it not being something regular people should ingest regularly.
This is one of these US-specific polarised debates I find really bizarre, around some kind of issue that the rest of the world has by large solved but without any acknowledgement of this fact. Maybe the US should look into how other countries have solved it? It is completely bizarre witnessing both sides getting so polarised around a basically non-issue.
What I love about this comment is that one person thought "of course every other country just does the right thing when the US doesn't" and posted it, and then a bunch of other people thought "of course every other country just does the right thing when the US doesn't" and upvoted it, and not a single one of them thought to check what the "right thing" is.
> Water fluoridation is considered very common in the United States, Canada, Ireland, Chile and Australia where over 50% of the population drinks fluoridated water.
> Most European countries including Italy, France, Finland, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Hungary and Switzerland do not fluoridate water.
Why is that missing context? I don't think anybody who is against fluoridated tap water rejects the benefits of fluoride, they just think the harms of adding it to tap water outweigh the benefits.
The lethal dose of fluoride is in the 5-10g range for an adult [1] with immediate gastrointestinal effects at 15-20x lower. While those levels are quite obviously far above the recommended level of 0.7mg/l, it's very reasonable to call anything that's lethal at 5g, to a human adult, as dangerous.
The latest report from the National Toxicology Program has found a causal reduction of ~1.63 IQ per additional mg/L concentration of fluoride in their urine [2], which would seem sufficient to also call it a neurotoxin, though the NTP under extensive pressure chose to avoid any particular label after having previously declared it a "presumed neurotoxin."
Notably the study from NTP also mentioned something most people here seem to be missing: "There is a concern, however, that some pregnant women and children may be getting more fluoride than they need because they now get fluoride from many sources including treated public water, water-added foods and beverages, teas, toothpaste, floss, and mouthwash, and the combined total intake of fluoride may exceed safe amounts."
Fluoride being seen as desirable at safe levels, may have drove excessive multi-domain inputs of it, which can combine to drive it to unsafe levels.
> it's very reasonable to call anything that's lethal at 5g, to a human adult, as dangerous.
No it is not. It is sensational and intentionally inflammatory. It is especially damming coming from someone in his position.
Vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin B, iron, and caffeine are all deadly at that level. The first 4 are mandatory for life, shall we call them dangerous too? Or perhaps we have some nuance and acknowledge the co spirit oriel background (and other beliefs) of the people pushing the anti-fluoride message.
Obviously. In looking up the LD50/lethal dose for vitamin A, I ended up here. [1] You might notice the big red symbol "Health Hazard" at the top. And the LD50 for vitamin A ranges from 1500-3700mg/kg, contrasted against fluoride's 26-94! But really one of the biggest issues here is that unless you're actively trying to kill yourself with vitamins, an overdose generally has no major effects beyond some gastrointestinal issues. I've experienced it myself by supplementing with vitamins while body building and consuming an already extremely high nutrient diet.
But with fluoride we're talking about extremely low doses, well below the lethal level, being able to potentially permanently damage the mind's of children. Such an extreme risk justifies an abundance of caution, especially when the reason we're doing it is for some relatively modest dental gains, which are likely increasingly obsolete with fluoride being in tooth paste and many other sources besides water. In fact, as per the study I linked to up above, this is precisely the problem!
"Since 1945, the use of fluoride has been a successful public health initiative for reducing dental cavities and improving general oral health of adults and children. There is a concern, however, that some pregnant women and children may be getting more fluoride than they need because they now get fluoride from many sources including treated public water, water-added foods and beverages, teas, toothpaste, floss, and mouthwash, and the combined total intake of fluoride may exceed safe amounts."
> which are likely increasingly obsolete with fluoride being in tooth paste and many other sources besides water.
See the rest of this thread. If you think the group (at RFK doing so in an official government capacity) using such inflammatory language is going to stop at removing fluoride from just water I don't know what to tell you.
I disagree there. When you actually listen to what RFK says instead of the media's spin on the most extreme cuts taken out of context, it's nowhere near as sensational. In particular RFK has consistently and repeatedly stressed an opt-in view on all things health/pharmaceutical related. If you want it, you can have it. But when you do things like fluoridate public water supplies, you turn it into an opt-out system where unless you go out of your way - you're going to get it.
Tooth paste, and other commercial products, are opt-in systems. And indeed there are already numerous unfluoridated options available.
Generally speaking I see fluoridation as a ridiciulous idea, on the grounds that the vast majority of tap water ends up being used for things other than brushing your teeth. It is wasteful and damaging to the environment, that excess flouride that has no business being there ends up in the drain, or the water you use for your plants.
Flouride should be put in the toothpaste. Then people can make a choice on whether they want it, but most importantly, its in the only product that is actually used for brushing teeth
It's basically a waste product and water naturally has fluoride in it at the same levels, or more, that fluoridated water has, and the environment has been just fine in those places.
While I acknowledge it is not a "solved" issue, I find it bizarre nonetheless, simply because it is so disproportionately low-stakes compared to the amount of controversy around it. Increased risk of cavities versus tentative evidence of losing 1-2 IQ points at 1.5 mg/L? Sounds like a Monty Python sketch to me that people would get so worked up over this.
The risk of cavities is reduced by using toothpaste or mouth washes with fluoride, not by drinking fluoridated water.
Almost all fluoride from the drinking water does not have any effect on tooth enamel, because it has contact with it only for a few seconds, except for an infinitesimal fraction that may exit again the body in saliva.
On the other hand, the harmful effects of fluoride in drinking water are certain and it cannot be predicted exactly how much water will be ingested by someone, i.e. which will be the harmful dose of ingested fluoride.
The only argument of those who support water fluoridation is that most people must be morons who cannot be taught to wash their teeth. I do not believe that this theory can be right.
> The risk of cavities is reduced by using toothpaste or mouth washes with fluoride, not by drinking fluoridated water.
it always surprises me how willing people are to just make something up and be confident in doing so. We've know for almost 75 years that water fluoridation reduces tooth decay[1] and yet here you are straight up denying that.
Do you just not care if you are correct? or do you know you aren't but are driven by the beliefs you already hold?
> Almost all fluoride from the drinking water does not have any effect on tooth enamel, because it has contact with it only for a few seconds
The contact via toothpaste or mouth wash isn’t all that much longer, so why would they be effective if fluoridated water isn’t? People intentionally wash out toothpaste and mouthwash after this short contact.
Im sorry, but I think it’s ridiculous that thinking something that knows off an IQ point or two isn’t a big deal.
For one, we’re literally making everyone slightly less intelligent. While it’s a very small factor, I sure as hell wouldn’t want that for my daughters.
For two, IQ is easy to measure. Through that, we know it’s affecting the brain during development. How else is it affecting it? We don’t know.
Weighed against potentially higher risk of cavities pretty much only during childhood and the math seems incredibly clear to me. I feel like the only reason we haven’t banned adding it to water supplies is because people have a knee jerk reaction to anything that sounds even vaguely anti-vax nowadays.
The fact that until 10 years ago the US allowed significantly higher levels should be a really big deal to people.
I’m on reverse osmosis well water so it doesn’t matter to me personally, for what it’s worth.
IQ points is just an indicator that could be measured consistently. Who knows what else is going on.. and statistically (especially depending on the distribution) 2 IQ points is quite a lot. After all 50% of the population fall into the 20 point range in the middle..
Of course it comes down to whether the relationship actually exists. But picking a slightly higher risk of cavities when the other option is potential mental impairment (however mild) seems like a no-brainer..
you're really genuinely shocked that people would get worked up over chemicals being added to their drinking water without their consent? chemicals which have not been conclusively proven to be non-toxic? chemicals which are already in toothpaste giving people the choice to use them anyway?
flouride naturally occurs in water all over the world, and if you don't want any chemicals in your water you should be drinking distilled water. Almost nobody does, because "chemicals in the water reeeeeee!!!" is just a mindless idiotic shreak, not anything insightful or debatable
having to resort to childish attempts like this essentially invalidates anything "insightful" you might want to say. if you can't see that manually adding safety-unproven chemicals to water without people's consent is a weird and unethical thing to do, then that's fine, but don't embarrass yourself and everyone else like this
> if you can't see that manually adding safety-unproven
Nobody is doing that, so maybe don't embarrass yourself like that?
> without people's consent
Also not happening. Consent was established when it was voted on, and if people want to change their local policies they are always free to do so. People that object against majority are also free to drink alternative water from the free market instead of relying on socialist handouts
If you want to have an actual, good faith debate about the pros/cons of a specific additive that's wonderful. But you didn't, you reduced the entire thing to "chemicals bad because chemicals". But, more significantly, so too has the US's administration which Utah is following suit on. The US is full on "feels not reals" government mode.
my friend at this point you are just wildly throwing whatever pops into your mind into the air and hoping it sticks somewhere
when was it voted on and by who? tell me.
you're also aware that people pay for water, it's not free? quite an odd thing for an adult to not know
"good faith debate". from someone who started making mocking autism noises in the middle of a normal conversation? that's what I suggested was embarrassing, you simply didn't read my comment because you yourself have no interest in having a good faith discussion and you're just blindly throwing terms like that as a way of dismissing an opinion you disagree with.
"chemicals bad because chemicals" I never said anything of the sort, this is a strawman you invented to strengthen your struggling argument. there have quite literally been studies linking increased fluoride to toxicity. it's not "chemicals bad because chemicals" it's "there have been studies suggesting this chemical may be toxic so why are we putting it in drinking water without a public consultation in the last 70 years?"
>The US is full on "feels not reals" government mode.
okay and here we have your real motivation. 90% likely you quite obviously don't give a fuck about fluoridated water or human rights, you are pissed about the current executive branch and you're looking to take it out somewhere. this "debate" is over.
To straw man, you could argue that 1-2 IQ extra might have a large affect on the salary as everything is relative.
If you are on the lower IQ scale, a ten point reduction would double your likelihood of doing crime.
I put in a spelling error in the above paragraph of 215 characters, you still understand it but what was your perception of me from this very small error?
It’s not at all the same, that’s a terrible example. Child vaccinations help reduce the Rt, regardless of whether the benefit to the individual is significant. Statements to the contrary have just confused the public. (biochemist)
What rights of minorities have been targeted? If the only example is trans rights, it's dumb to think it's a simple issue of trampled rights. There are two competing sets of rights, you grant one set you take away from the other. There isn't a good solution.
If you think all the people advocating for small government must be fools or hypocrites, you don't understand the issues an any depth.
Why do trans people not count as a minority being targetted?
I'm curious, what rights are "granted" by making it illegal for doctors to prescribe puberty blocks when they as a medical professional and a child's parents as their guardian agree they're the best medical course of action for a child?
Saying "it's about granting and taking away" like rights are some zero-sum game feels like it's ignoring the complexity of these issues more than what I'm saying.
> What rights of minorities have been targeted? If the only example is trans rights, it's dumb to think it's a simple issue of trampled rights
So it's not an issue of trampled rights if it's just trans rights, yet you can't come up with a reason that trans rights need to be restricted to ensure freedom of others. And it's being disingenuous to call you out for saying trans rights don't matter when you say this...
Example: trans rights in sports. You let them play, you take away the rights to a fair playing field for women born women. You don't let them play, you take away their right to play sport. There isn't a good solution.
You knew the example. You know why society restricts people below 18 from all kinds of things. You are the very definition of disingenuous.
Trans people playing on the sporting team they want to is not "rights", and your focus on it to deflect from the very real issue I brought up is telling...
I don't mind being called "the very definition of disingenuous" by you.
Once you start trying to cross-reference a public health campaign with something related to peoples' diets, it becomes difficult to make super broad and conclusive statements.
Here's some interesting data (2003 I believe, so pretty old) [1]: It reports that most of Europe, Canada, Australia, and South America experiences cavities at rates higher than the United States. However: Many of these countries have public health care; the US does not. Is the US under-reporting? (I didn't dig much deeper into the underlying data; may not be a relevant concern).
Three things I think are likely to be true: (1) Fluoridated toothpaste is widely available and cheap. (2) Cavity rates are significant even in countries with high rates of fluoridation. (3) Fluoridating the water supply carries with it a non-zero monetary cost. I tend to believe that these three realities, at the very least, justify the conversation as being one we should have. It could be the case that water fluoridation made a ton of sense in a world where people didn't have as much access to fluoridated toothpaste, but nowadays the typical person has hit the limit on what it can do for them, and ingesting more is, at best, doing nothing.
Here's another way I like to think about it: Put the science aside for a second (I know, hard, not ideal, but bear with me). You've got two people who are low income. Person A believes, for their own health and in the expression of their own personal liberties, they want access to fluoride; but the Government is not fluoridating their water. They can spend $5 a month to buy fluoridated toothpaste; possibly not even more expensive than the toothpaste they were already buying. Person B is living in the opposite world: They believe that they do not want to ingest fluoride, but the government is fluoridating their water. They would have to spend many dozens to hundreds of dollars a month buying water bottled somewhere more natural. From a personal liberty and economics perspective: Its pretty clear-cut.
Using your "person a" "person b" story, what about "persons c-z" that also want fluoride because they trust doctors?
If one out of a hundred people don't want fluoride, can't they can spend slightly more on bottled water? Why require the other 99 to be up-to-date on research to get the best personal medical outcome?
Direct monetary cost is entirely insignificant, though. Potential risk of mental impairment (of course there is no conclusive evidence of that) seems like a much bigger issue.
IIRC _some_ of the European countries that “do not fluoridate their water” have naturally occurring fluoride levels in their water, obviating the need for them to do it.
Supplementation mainly concerns iodine for non-marine salts. Sea salt naturally contains iodine and fluorine. Salt from salt mines contains much less. For this reason, iodine deficiency was relatively common in the Alps until the beginning of the twentieth century.
To my knowledge, there is no debate or controversy on the subject. Endemic goiters are exceedingly rare and are linked to behavioral and eating disorders.
That is not true. You are probably thinking of iodine. Actually fluoride is prohibited in children's toothpaste in Germany because of its suspected neurotoxicity.
EDIT: I checked. It is possible to buy salt with added fluoride in Germany but it comes with the health note "Zusätzliche fluoridhaltige Präparate sollten nur auf ärztliche Empfehlung eingenommen werden.", which means you should only use it on recommendation by your MD.
Thanks for pointing that out. I wrote "prohibited" from what I remembered when my child was little and the discrepancy to the info you provided made me research the topic, so here is a summary of what the law (1223/2009 Cosmetic Products Regulation Annex III) has to say:
Tooth paste with more than one per mille of fluoride has either to be marked as unsuitable for children or has to have a note that children have to be supervised using it and a doctor or dentist has to be consulted in case the child swallows more than a pea-sized amount.
So, not quite prohibited, but far from recommended.
Germany and France don't fluoridate water, but they add fluorine compounds to table salt.
Meanwhile growing up in Poland in the 90s as kids we had these fluoridation sessions in school, for which everyone had to bring their toothbrush and brush their teeth with some kind of sour tasting fluid that contained fluorine.
The world map is hilarious. Germany sure does not look like this anymore (and this is not the GDR split but goes further back). Maybe they should update this. Draws into the question, the whole data.
Both non-fluoridating countries and country borders are white, so it's not that Germany is drawn wrong, but that that countries near Germany (Czechia, Netherlands, Luxembourg) look like they're part of the same white blob.
The point is basically no one else has politicised this to the extent the US did. Pointing to how different countries solve it differently is missing the point completely.
"Well, whether it's better to fluoridate the water or not, ~half the world got the answer wrong. But the important thing is they didn't argue about it."
They do have a point. If you look at history, Americans do seem to have a bizarre habit of turning everything into a great controversy.
The British abolished slavery with a vote of parliament. The Russian emperor signed a decree, and freed the serfs. Compromised were made, compensation provided and people were made free. But for some reason, Americans felt the matter is important enough to start a civil war around it.
People complain about America being divided and both sides there being unable to compromise, but if anything, that's been the defining feature of the nation since it's creation. "Y'all should take a chill pill, this ain't that important" is a perfectly valid position to have.
> Americans felt the matter is important enough to start a civil war around it.
The answer was the same then as it is now: big business. Slave labor cash crops were central to the economy of the South. Great Britain was not dependent on it in the same way.
> The British abolished slavery with a vote of parliament
The situation was fundamentally different. Colonies that allowed slavery had no representation in parliament and the slave owners received massive “compensation” that the British people had to spend decades paying off..
Also AFAIK most slaveholders were living in Britain and just viewed their plantations as just another investment. There was very little ideological/“way of life”/racial supremacy stuff involved. So if some Liberals wanted to buyout their not necessarily very liquid “property” with cash they didn’t really have much reason to oppose it.
And then there were 5x more slaves in the US in 1864 while the population was only ~30% higher than that of Britain in 1830 (only if we don’t count the colonies).
Not sure how excited would the inhabitants of New England and other free states would have been if they were forced to buy out all the slaves in the country (if that was even an option).
Slavery for the British was a side note at that point while it was a fundamental component of the US economy.
Serfdom was fundamental to the Russian economy, but was abolished nonetheless. Alexander II forced the serfs to pay for their own freedom.
The idea that no compromise was possible sounds somewhat absurd since America did end the civil war with a compromise. "You can free the slaves, but then we oppress them for 100 or so years." Not that it was a good compromise or anything, but it does show that the civil war was fundamentally pointless.
Russia was a centralized absolutist empire. The Tsar could more or less do whatever he wanted as long as the army and some other elements of the bureaucracy supported him.
So it’s hardly applicable to the US (or Britain)
> end the civil war with a compromise
I’m not sure it’s was a compromise per se.
Most people in the north didn’t really actively support country wide abolition before the war (neither did Lincoln) nor were they necessarily particularly concerned about the treatment of the African-American population.
Opposing slavery is a very low bar. Most people in the free states were still deeply racist and segregation was effectively (while not necessarily legally) still a thing there. It only became a major issue in the mid 1900s.
England has 3 or 4 civil wars in it's history entirely focused on the matter of whether people should do as they're told and shut up. The usual result in those conflicts was a resounding victory for the "No" side.
What's rare is for a nation to have a civil war between sides that agree on almost everything, from the structure of the government to the economic system.
I'm not in the US but doesn't that downplay it a bit? Hasn't this been a contentious topic for some time? It's not like no one's been talking about it and Utah suddenly decided out of the blue.
> I'm not in the US but doesn't that downplay it a bit?
No, not really. There are a couple municipalities (Portland, OR, e.g.) that have famously not fluoridated their water forever, but for the most part this is not something most places argue about. UT is an exception.
The irony is that people on the Left will claim that red Utah is ignorantly making public health policy, while deep deep blue Portland is considered “progressive.” The public health “experts” are ripping into Utah but haven’t seemed to care about Portland. Perhaps because the public health people are mostly Democrat and care more about politics than actual health? I would love to be wrong — but why is Portland (and much of Europe) getting a free pass from the controversy, but a (relatively low population) red U.S. state isn’t?
Portland, Oregon is a city so the effects of their policies are a little more limited in scope. IMO if it really is a contentious health issue (well-founded or not, I guess people really do disagree about this issue) it is better to make the decision at the lowest level practical.
I think most cities manage their own utilities. So, Portland has to make some decision on this issue. Utah doesn’t, it was an active choice to intervene.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. What I meant was that it was my impression that the argument over fluoride has been going on for longer and is bigger than this one case. How and why the judge ruled and what the ruling was is tangential to that.
The issue, to my eyes at least, is much less of water, and much more of fluoride itself. That is what seems mostly a settled and non controversial topic elsewhere such that it is not perennially raised anew with tone of fans quoting Dr. Strangelove except meaning it.
I thought the comment was about resolving the issue one way or the other without it becoming yet another polarization topic . It probably matters less in either resolution than the cost due schisms and distrust the "debate" causes.
Regardless of whether the water is fluoridated or not, the main guideline is "brush your teeth with fluoridated toothpaste". No policy maker elsewhere is pushing narratives against fluoride at large like in the US. These narratives there are even dangerous. One can easily look at dental associations reviews, or official state guidelines and see that more or less they say very similar things. It is very easy to find these policy-informing reviews online.
And regardless of whether the water is fluoridated or not, there is no big debate elsewhere about it, nobody cares that much about it, because all the evidence is that in smaller amounts prob it is does not matter much either way, in the presence of people brushing their teeth. A lot of countries stopped it due to logistic purposes. In netherlands they tried fluoride in the water, a court said they should actually pass a law in order to be able to do it, and they did not even bother with that and dropped it. The fact that some countries may not use fluoride in the water is not due to some deeply-held conviction about how destructive fluoride is for the iq of the kids. In terms of risks of fluoride, fluorosis is what is mostly discussed anyway, and to a degree, unless it is too serious, this may just be an aesthetic issue.
From the perspective of one that watches this craziness from outside, the whole debate is non-sense, and whether some european countries use water fluoridation or not is not very important, it does not cause any heated debate in the EU. The debate in the US is not because the US considers some things that others do not consider. There is no actual truthseeking mentality from the current administration or anybody on this to actually find for sure if fluoride decreases iq, or if fluoride in the water is absolutely essential for dental health even if people are brushing their teeth.
What does the UK do? This will tell you what people should do because I’ve seen English teeth.
> In England, approximately 10% of the population, or around 6 million people, receive fluoridated water, either naturally or through water fluoridation schemes, mainly in the West Midlands and the North East.
Uh oh. I know it is better now but in 1978 a third of people in the UK didn’t have their natural teeth.
This was not much different everywhere else. Public dental care campaigns helped a lot, the same with affordable dental care products. Looking at my parents generation there are lots of false teeth going around. (Not uk)
I was reading a while ago about populations that moved to England, and within 2 generations their teeth are messed up (the first gen of kids born is usually raised on the food of their original culture).
You saw it too in Canada when the Inuit went on food stamps and went from eating mostly meat to mostly plants: their teeth went all over the place and full of holes within a single generation.
We also saw that with the advent of agriculture in general, along with a massive decline in average height.
You’re right that dietary changes can impact health, but there are other factors at play. Stress from moving to a new country or experiencing forced dislocation can have serious effects on physical health, weakening the immune system and disrupting overall well-being. Along with this, shifting away from nature-based vocations to more sedentary lifestyles contributes to health decline. The increased consumption of sugar and alcohol also exacerbates dental and general health issues. So, it’s not just diet but a combination of stress, lifestyle changes, and modern substances that contribute to health problems in these populations.
My grandfather, who was still alive in 1978, had all his teeth removed and was given a set of dentures when conscripted into WWII. From what I can gather this was pretty common - the service dentist would check you over on arrival and if you had at least one cavity they'd whip the lot out so that they wouldn't need to do anything else to them for the rest of your service.
The US rarely looks into how other countries solve problems. (i.e. Universal Healthcare, High Speed Trains and so), this is the sad part of "American Exceptionalism"
Those are two odd examples. The Affordable Care Act is similar to the Netherlands health insurance system: https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2011/lessons-abroad-du... (“These similarities are not entirely coincidental. American public officials, health industry leaders, and scholars made frequent visits to the Netherlands in the run-up to the debate over U.S. health care reform, borrowing ideas and, on occasion, citing the Dutch system as a model for what the U.S. might achieve.”).
As to rail, both the first-gen and second-gen Acela is based on the French TGV.
The U.S. has a pitiful amount of high speed rail. It serves no point to mention that this pitiful amount of high speed rail is based off of TGV.
The comparison to the Dutch healthcare system is not apt. While the Heritage foundation may used ideas from the Dutch system our system is quite a bit more Byzantine and inefficient. We spend twice as much per capita on healthcare and have worse outcomes and fewer people covered. Our citizens have far more per capita medical debt than the Dutch.
We didn’t really implement the Dutch system and we didn’t really learn from the French how to build and maintain high speed rail. Saying we learned healthcare from the Dutch because we have doctors like they do makes as much sense as your argument.
The original claim was "The US rarely looks into how other countries solve problems". That claim appears to be false.
Why does the US execution not match that of the countries it looks into? I think it's because talented people in the US disproportionately go into the private sector, leading to an incompetent public sector. American distrust of their government is arguably justified.
I thought the ACA was based on the Swiss system of mandatory insurance? The heritage foundation copied the Swiss, Romney took that proposal to Mass, and Obama thought going with a Conservative initiated plan would make it more bipartisan (it didn’t, but mainly because republicans hated Obama).
IMO the most distinct parts of the Swiss health insurance system is that (1) copay is obligatory but limited (i.e. healthcare isn’t free but it’s not expensive either), and (2) it’s individual, companies cannot pay for it, so there’s no US-like extreme benefit of having a good job.
In the Netherlands we have those two as well, but it is also regulated:
- the cheapest plan must not cost more than 115 eur (dont know exactly), and it has mandatory coverage (‘basisverzekering’)
- there is a maximum copay of 850eur per year (‘eigen risico’)
- some services are not allowed to have copay
- low income people can have extra subsidies to pay for insurance
- insurance is mandatory
- insurance is a personal thing, not a work-thing. Your work absollutely knows nothing about your health insurance
Due to the regulations it is not a big run to the bottom
Yes, having lived in Switzerland I experienced that, and it was the personal buy rather than having group plans was the feature missing from the ACA the most.
aca di. implement a market, it's just that most people buy through their job, because if that's legal you obviously want to be part of a larger bargaining pool for buying.
Group plans suck away cream of crop risk pools. People with good stable high paying jobs tend to be a lot healthier than people working part time crap jobs or working in the trades for themselves.
It isn’t really bargaining power of the pool, but the risk assessment of the pool you are in. Being in a hodge lodge personal pool means you are sharing risk with people who will have more expenses. That’s why Switzerland throws everyone into the same pool, so no crème low risk can be siphoned away.
A less cynical framing is that the US is a much different culture from European countries, and is massively larger in scale. Depending on the problem, some of their solutions simply can't or don't apply.
The scale argument is thrown around a lot as a justification for why the US couldn't possibly implement universal healthcare. The elephant in the room that I'm always surprises at how rarely it's mentioned in these discussions is Brazil, which is a huge country of comparable size (both territory and population wise), and it manages to make UHC work even though it's also a much poorer country.
It's not perfect by any means, but it's definitely much better than nothing. So the US should absolutely be able to at the very least match that, but really most likely it should be able to do much better. That it doesn't is very much a choice.
The elephant in the room is that in every other sphere, scale is the solution, not the problem. The US should find it easier to implement UHC just because of its scale. More tax dollars, more average outcomes, more resources for outliers, more incremental money for research into rarer conditions. That 10x smaller countries like Canada do it effectively is an indictment of America's inability to do it.
America doesn’t do it for political and cultural reasons. It has absolutely nothing to do with scale, economics, or America’s “inability” to do it. Americans (unfortunately imo) have consistently chosen not to do it by not electing politicians who have pledged to do it.
> I think the US would prefer a UHC if we were starting from a blank slate. The difficulty is mapping a path from what we have now to that.
Do you remember when Republicans went on and on about how "Democrats rammed through the ACA without a single Republican vote"? As if that represented a problem on the Democratic Party side, and not the Republican one? Despite the similarities to models proposed by Republicans in the past, and the relative conservative step it represented from "Byzantine kludge of often poor-to-no-coverage" to "something with a higher floor"? That's how hard it would be to find a Republican to "prefer a UHC if we were starting from a blank slate."
It's important not to underestimate the distrust of government services and regulation of any sort of the Republican base. The conservative media - talk-radio, then cable, then social/podcasts - has been intentionally undermining the credibility of government services at every opportunity for 40 years. And the politicians hamstring and sabotage whenever they get a chance to try to make sure that services offered in the US are sub-par compared to elsewhere.
It's a well-oiled machine running a cycle that keeps people focused on anything else but the services they actually use all the time so that cognitive dissonance can't creep in. (Granted, sometimes, when necessary to acknowledge those things, they'll fall back to making it clear that YOU earned/paid for the things you use, but those other gross poor people are just freeloaders.)
It's like with abortion - for decades "overturning Roe V Wade" was what Republicans said they wanted to do. And people kept trying to convince themselves "oh they don't really mean that, they wouldn't do that actually anymore." Take their word on it about wanting to tear down government services.
> It's important not to underestimate the distrust of government services and regulation of any sort of the Republican base. The conservative media - talk-radio, then cable, then social/podcasts - has been intentionally undermining the credibility of government services at every opportunity for 40 years. And the politicians hamstring and sabotage whenever they get a chance to try to make sure that services offered in the US are sub-par compared to elsewhere.
This is partly what I was getting at when I said the culture of the US is different and the scale is much larger than European countries. It's not just geographically larger, but it's politically and ideologically broader too. If you have a wonderful idea like UHC, you need to make it work with liberals, conservatives, and everyone in between. Like it or not, a universal healthcare or Medicare for all plan is either going to be DoA in Congress, or a considerably watered-down and Americanized version if it has any hope at all of getting enough senators to pass it without first seeing massive electoral college reform in this country first.
That is the scale of the US. You can't assume that an idea that's well-liked and popular in another country is going to be popular and well-liked here.
Considering that Europe is composed of many countries with massively different histories, cultures, economies and languages I find that a very unconvincing argument. The US are much more culturualy homogeneous than Europe. I mean just go across the country and look at the patriotic displays of flags which also transcends political differences. In contrast in Europe you first would be seeing different flags, but also displaying flags has very different acceptance rates in different countries.
Right, but we're not talking about "Europe", we're talking about each individual country. I don't think it's reasonable to say that France, for example, is more culturally diverse than the US.
And the various countries in Europe do have different healthcare systems, sometimes significantly different.
> The difficulty is mapping a path from what we have now to that.
It's difficult, but not as difficult as it's often presented to be, as long as you're okay with giving the finger to a relatively small number of wealthy health industry executives.
That depends on who "you" is. Quite a few people in Congress are ok with doing that, but not anywhere near enough to get anything passed. Look at the GOP side of the aisle and you'll essentially find no one willing to do that. Not to mention they are just simply ideologically opposed to the concept of government-provided universal health care.
And that, is the difficulty. Sure, I agree that it wouldn't be too logistically difficult to implement universal healthcare in the US. But that doesn't matter when more than half the country has been propaganda'd into not even wanting it in the first place.
Hell, I expect that there are a ton of Medicaid and Medicare recipients in the US who would tell you that they think government-provided, single-payer healthcare is a bad idea, when that's essentially what they have, to some degree.
I got a Master's Degree in Education and spent 2 years in Educational Psychology Ph.D. program and absolutely 0 time was spent looking at how other countries do education.
It's baffling how despite numerous other countries outperforming the US in educational outcomes we do not even look at other approaches!
Yes, in the Netherlands we have a culture of moaning about everthing. Youd beter not dare suggest sonething is good enough! This complaining is the only thing we are proud of. lol
(If we had patriotic songs worth remembering im sure i would have)
The problem is this, hoe do you fix something you are proud of? It seems a contradiction?
Agreed, I lives in the Netherlands for a couple years and can agree there isn't much patriotism so much as pragmatism! (I actually mean that as a good thing, I was a very fond of NL and the friends I made there).
Speaking as an American, though, I can both be proud of something and recognize its faults. I'm proud of the core principles that America was based upon, for example, but very much recognize how far we've deviated from them and how much we need to fix.
> I'm proud of the core principles that America was based upon
I think there's never much to gain in being proud of things you have nothing to do with or control over. If you like some principles you would be proud when you uphold them personally. It is when we start feeling proud in the abstract that we start having issues.
Can't help but agree. I would go even further and say that pride itself is problematic. Sure, it can perhaps have some good effects, but pride usually blinds people to faults, even if the do acknowledge there are faults.
"Pride goeth before a fall" is a time-worn saying for good reason.
I'm not a big fan of patriotism in general, but something I noticed about the US patriotism is the tendency to call the US "the best country in the world". This crosses all political differences, e.g. I recall being surprised how Michael Moore was saying it in an interview or movie (when justifying criticising policy, he said he does it because he knows that America is the best country in the world). Even the most patriotic friends I have in other countries would typically not say this.
Yeah, as an American I've always found this cringe-worthy, even kinda icky.
Claiming to be the best (at anything) is just tacky and arrogant. Especially with something as impossible to quantify as "best country". There's no such thing as the best country in the world. Every one has strengths and weaknesses, and you can't really balance and rank them.
What does leftist mean in this context? Sure you could say the "nationalist" movements against monarchies and for more democratic processes were progressive at the time, i.e. they wanted to change the status quo. Calling them leftist in the modern sense (again with a huge caveat about what leftist even mean), doesn't make much sense IMO. Also it's important not to forget that the internationalist movements (which I'd argue fit modern definitions of "left" much more closely) developed quite quickly (in historical timeframes) after, e.g. it was only 50 odd years between the Warburg festival in Germany (generally considered the birth of German nationalism) and the Paris commune.
I guess "the best" is doing a lot of work there, for example the most sung anthem for Denmark "Der er et yndigt land" - there is a lovely land does not explicitly say that Denmark is the best ever, there may indeed be other lovely lands, and in comparison with say America the Beautiful it is downright humble, but on the other hand it is my experience that anthems talk up their country, and if they are talking up their struggle for independence or freedom, like say Il Canto degli Italiani, it will be talking up the martial valor of the people so freed and probably talking about how they aren't going to be put down again, another aspect that America the Beautiful goes into.
The difference between America the Beautiful and other anthems is how much it does, for how long, and making sure it gets everything it can possibly cram in there. It's like a bunch of people standing on a stand at a sporting match shouting "America, America, America" unremittingly, whereas most people might be satisfied to shout "Go {my country}" and be done with it.
Which part here exactly cannot work in the US? I am talking about brushing one's teeth with toothpaste containing fluoride, which sounds as plain simple as possible to me. Is it regular brushing teeth that fails in the US for cultural reasons? Fluoride in the toothpaste? Supervising kids while brushing their teeth to make sure they do not swallow? It is an honest question.
In a word: poverty. People do not have free dental care, and poor people aren't guaranteed to have a toothbrush, toothpaste or sometimes even a sink to brush their teeth in. Fluoridated water is one of the few dental protections available to everyone regardless of their income. It's cheap, minimal and cost-effective cavity protection at scale for the entire country.
> poor people aren't guaranteed to have a toothbrush, toothpaste
There is no person in the world who cannot have a toothbrush and toothpaste if they want to. And if you find one such person, they won't have access to any centrally treated water.
Assuming the "less cynical explanation" you're referring to was my original response talking about the cultural and scale differences between America and most countries, that was not in reference to fluoride or dental care. I was specifically referring to the OP's assertion that "American exceptionalism" is the reason that America doesn't just copy things like universal healthcare and gun control policies from other countries.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here, I think we may have lost the plot. Are you simply implying that you find the cynical answer more appealing and believable than the non-cynical answer? In my opinion, the internet and today's modern zeitgeist has instilled a sense in everyone that if it's cynical, or dark, or depressing, it must be the correct answer. That's usually the laziest and easiest answer too.
The other weird thing in US discourse about other countries is that when it does enter the conversation, the "rest of the world", or at least other developed countries, are often treated as some kind of monolithic entity culturally and politically. For example, a lot of people on both left and right in US believe that the rest of the world is single payer, and generally that "single payer" is synonymous to "public healthcare". Similarly with gun control, there's no recognition of the fact that there are countries in Europe where you can own an AR-15 just fine, and countries (different ones!) where silencers are over the counter items not requiring any special registration.
edit: But I will say it works both ways. Most countries do not know what it takes to keep hundreds of millions of people of various backgrounds together under a common way of life with a certain risk vs entitlement balance. Americans as a whole are more risk tolerant AND accepting of failure and reinventing yourself. In most cultures it's a great shame to quit your job with benefits, start a business and not succeed. In the states it's not shameful. You tried? Awesome.
A lot of people are uncomfortable having an opinion without being able to rationalize it.
I have to assume many, maybe most, people that give reasons like you mention just flat out don't want the policy and reach for a reason to justify it.
I can say I don't want gun control laws. Not because it doesn't work elsewhere or couldn't work here. I just fundamentally disagree with it and don't want to live in a place where the only ones with guns are state officials.
Yes, that's my point. We are literally different people with different cultures, values and problems. Case in point: the firearm control you mentioned. I won't get in a gun control debate here, I have my own complicated views on the matter, but it's an undisputed fact that Americans have a right to own guns (maybe with limitations, maybe not) and many Americans deeply cherish that right. There is no gun control solution we can take from Europe that you could apply to the US, it's simply not compatible with our culture, not to mention our own Bill of Rights. It's not a bad thing to recognize that.
The US isn't several countries put together, region by region. It's one big ass country. I really don't see how taking it region by region somehow eliminates scale issues when you still have to apply it to the entire country.
It's a federal country of many states though. The original design of the US is fairly similar to the design of the EU today, US states used to be offered much more independence.
Sure, I don't disagree that in a vague sense the EU and US are kinda similar in terms of countries and states.
> US states used to be offered much more independence.
But even in your own example with the EU, the EU still mandates many health policies for its member countries: food safety; air and water quality; tobacco, sugar and alcohol regulations; and so on. That's not at all dissimilar to what the federal government does in the US, except our states don't implement those policies/directives themselves because the feds enforce it all.
The comment I was replying to pointed out that the US isn't several countries put together. As you describe, the EU is several countries put together and yet the US actually pushes more power to the states.
> yet the US actually pushes more power to the states.
Doesn’t their comment claim the opposite?
Unlike the US Federal government EU has very limited direct means of imposing any if its laws or regulations on member states of they chose not to comply with them.
There shouldn't be a scale issue with regards to fluoride in the water. It is either scientifically shown to be beneficial or it isn't, scale and geography likely have nothing to do with it.
Does it not depend on the chemical composition of local water? The US is vast, geologically diverse, and water quality varies hugely across it. Denmark can likely make a decision that's good for the entire country.
Actually, what most countries seem to do (according to other comments I’ve seen here), is just delegate to local bodies, so country size is a complete non-issue.
You're not wrong in that our culture is different, but that cultural difference is chiefly a self fulfilling prophecy of "the government can't do it," promoted by billionaire owned media, so that those same billionaires can run for-profit industries like healthcare and transportation.
The cultural difference is that our rich people are too rich, our media is too centralized, and none of those in power want to enrich and empower the country, when they could enrich and empower themselves.
This is the excuse all American use about literally every single issue anytime anybody points out that other do things better. Most often without actually having thought about it beyond 'muhuhu US BIGGG! USA! USA! USA!'.
If you want to make that argument, actually make it, because if you try, 99% of the time its not actually true, its simply ignorance.
The point is that flouride has the same effect on your teeth no matter how many hectares of lifeless desert happen to be controlled by your government.
Interesting, though I think you may have missed a good deal of my own point. Regardless, I wasn't actually commenting on the fluoride situation, I was commenting on the belief that American exceptionalism is the reason we don't look at Europe and other countries for a slew of solutions that won't work here. It had nothing to do with fluoride, so I think your comment and hostility are a bit off the mark.
My point is that those that continually point out 'but some things don't apply to the US because X and Y' are mostly themselves just falling into the same trap and almost never actually explain why X and Y change anything, making their 'defense' just more of the same.
I feel like this always comes up in these sorts of arguments, that the US is so unique that solutions that work elsewhere can't work here. And yet this point is always hand-waved in, without and specifics discussed, and is just presented as a given.
I really don't buy it, at least not as a general statement.
If you focus only on the scale part of my argument, sure. But I think the culture part of my argument is more than enough of an answer for insurance and healthcare:
Maybe it's just me, but I find the argument that "Americans won't do X cool thing that Europeans/the rest of the world do because they [are dumb/are corrupt/love money/hate each other/believe in American exceptionalism]" to be a very cynical and lazy argument. Note that the person I was replying to was talking about policies and goals like UHC and High Speed Rail, not specifically about fluoridated water – that was the context in which I was replying.
The simply reality is, culture matters. And if your culture has a strong believe in exceptionalism pointing out how others are better at something often creates backlash and an increase in opposition rather then a decrease.
And this is known by people who do professional advocacy work, on topic I am familiarly with, such as city design and transportation. They take great care to make sure all the examples are from the US, even if those examples aren't nearly as good as others. Because they know, when speaking to American audiences, you lose the audience if you suggest in X town, they should do Y that is done in Europe. In the US selling something as domestic innovation is usually the best, "if people in Indiana can do it, you can do it even better".
To just ignore any explanation that points out that culture matters, and believing that only 'hard' factors matter, is incredibly foolish. Cultural believes, such as exceptionalism absolutely do a play a huge role in determining what happens in the real world. To point that out, is not cynical or lazy.
And this does not just apply to the US, it many countries have different forms of that.
When I was a kid the schools taught us the metric system, telling us it was the world standard, and would become the standard is the US by the time I was an adult. That was over 40 years ago. And that pretty much sums it all up.
The US legally switched to metric when England did. It is taught in all schools and used for international trade. But, just like in England there is a mix of imperial and metric units used domestically. If you dont travel internationally, like many Americans, there is little need to use metric. Another generation and there won't be many people left in the US that didn't at least learn metric.
It's not like England in that respect at all. Yes, there is a mix of usage in the UK but it is very limited. People use metric for everything except miles in cars, pints in pubs, and height and weight of people.
From what I have read about metrication, England required all industries to change. The US government doesn't have authority to do that and US industry wasn't going to change all their tooling at great cost if they didn't need to.
How has the debate been solved by the rest of the world? My understanding is that many countries in Europe don't fluoridate the water supply.
I'm skeptical of results showing IQ loss but I also think fluoridation should be phased out as fluoride toothpaste and mouthwash are now widely available. Banning it seems like the wrong move to me...states should simply decide to continue adding it or not.
> How has the debate been solved by the rest of the world?
By having official country-level guidelines by the health ministries or similar for people to brush their teeth with toothpaste containing fluoride, and specific guidelines around it for kids, as trivial as it may sound. Along with experts' reviews providing more details on these decisions, and explaining tradeoffs properly.
Fluoride containing toothpaste is the main recommendation, even in places that fluoridate the water (which are the minority). There is not much to add to this apart from refining these guidelines. Eg in the EU where some countries fluoridate water, most don't, there is no huge debate about it overall. Most eu countries that fluoridated the water stopped doing it some point mostly because it was no longer needed in preventing cavities, and prob largely due to logistics/costs than possible risks.
Your second paragraph reflects my personal views on it, too. The "banning" is weird, esp since, according to the article, it comes from people that seem to advocate against use of fluoride in general in toothpastes etc. The discussion should be around best policies to prevent cavities etc, but it does not seem to be around that. I see nothing wrong with local communities deciding if they want to put fluoride or not in their water, based on their own opinions but also general situation. Maybe in some much poorer areas fluoridation of water could be beneficial until some other measures take place, for example.
Right. The state made the decision to stop it from being added, which is what OP proposed.
Did OP mean that municipalities should simply decide to keep adding or not? If so, how do we decide (from our various armchairs in most cases far away from Utah) what the appropriate level of government for making this call is?
The state’s Department of Health can issue a guidance explaining the states’ experts’ analysis of the available data and tradeoffs of the decision, and let the municipalities sort it out.
I think the bigger complication though is going to be - depending on the state - how water districts are apportioned. I think even many counties (let alone municipalities) will share water infrastructure so it’s not really clear who has the jurisdiction to make that decision other than the state.
It also makes it easier for the consumer: don’t want fluoride, move to Utah. Rather than having to figure out what random water district is doing what.
Banning its addition is a step beyond — but in Queensland, Australia for example, the state government no longer mandates its inclusion, and thus the local councils are able to set their own policy.
> While more than 90 per cent of Australians have access to fluoridated water, that figure is significantly lagging in the sunshine state, where local councils have ultimate authority over whether it is adopted.
> A decade after the Newman government handed responsibility for fluoridated drinking water to local governments, 51 out of 77 have opted out. That means about 28 per cent of Queenslanders do not have fluoridated drinking water
There’s evidence that despite widespread availability of fluoride toothpaste and mouthwash, fluoridated drinking water improves dental outcomes at the population level.
There’s also evidence that at high levels (not the normal levels it is added at, but at higher levels which can happen on accident) fluoride may reduce IQ.
I’m ok with either trade off but the “solved” phrasing makes it sound like there is an obviously superior choice.
The same discussion happened in Netherlands in the 70s, and water in NL is no longer fluoridated since the 70s for that reason. So it's not that "US-specific". I don't know about other countries from the top of my head.
Funny thing you mention that. Since it is now monitored and maintained by natural source. There is fluoride, just not added anymore. (It is at lower levels than when added obviously)
>(It is at lower levels than when added obviously)
This is not obvious. Some water has high levels of fluoride, which can cause harm (fluoride added for public health reasons is not the highest level of fluoride you will find [in the UK]).
Fluoridation could be done by mixing of naturally high fluoride water sources into other water.
No no, in the US we figure out the worst way to do something, and then do that, and invent reasons why the US is unique such that the reasonable solutions that other countries employ just couldn't possibly work here.
(To be fair, though, many [most?] Western countries do not fluoridate their water. The US is actually not doing the common thing here.)
It's honestly not clear if water fluoridation in the US is necessary or all that useful here anymore, as we started doing it when fluoride toothpaste wasn't really a thing. Now pretty much all(?) toothpaste in the US has fluoride in it. If someone can't afford toothpaste, then they probably can't afford regular dental care either, and fluoridated water isn't going to make much of an impact anyway.
By not adding fluoride into the tap water and let people choose whether to buy toothpaste with fluoride themselves. a.k.a. the European way.
Adding fluoride into tap water always sounds borderline insane to me. The only benefit is to protect your teeth, which, to me, strongly suggests that the correct approach is to put it into toothpaste or other oral hygiene products instead of water.
I remember the first time I went to a German dentist and he told me how amazing my teeth looked and that he could tell I must be American. Fluoride may have some downsides but it definitely has upsides.
Food often has much higher levels of fluoride than water, but the fluoride isn’t as bioavailable to teeth when it is in food, hence putting it in water. Fluorine in food may become more bioavailable further down the digestive tract where it does much less good.
Here in England, there's some areas that put fluoride into the water and other areas already have sufficient fluoride levels. People complaining about the side effects of fluoridation often forget that water can naturally contain high levels of fluoride - it's really not an issue.
If you look at the US as a simulation that branched of the mother tree of Europe in the 15th century, you won't find it odd that it is rediscovering what Europe has already figured out. Just in it's own way and time. (No chemicals/colors in foods and adequate drinking water) Wait till they figure out mass transit, that will be a shocker.
Has Europe figured out mass transit? In Barcelona, a trip that takes me 1.5 hours of total time using “transit” takes me 28 minutes on my motor scooter. I think there is still some figuring out that needs to happen before I’ll add 2 hours to my daily commute.
And when you get a tyrant at the top? Every capability you give the government needs to be viewed through the lens of "what happens when we get a really really bad leader?". If you haven't been paying attention, the majority of countries have had at least one really really bad leader over the past few hundred years. Many have one right now.
If you're always looking at things through that lens, the government can never do anything at all, and you'll be left with "complete freedom" to just die from easily preventable issues.
There's absolutely no need to resort to a slippery slope here. We have plenty of examples around the world for things that work without anyone invoking a boogeyman.
They can, you just have to look at each issue and it's costs and benefits and risks over time. You desperately want to world to be simple. It isn't. There is a slippery slope, you can stand on it but you want to have some concept of what happens when you slip.
There are examples of the boogeyman existing in real life - just 80 years ago we had one of the worst. Right now we have some boogeymen although not Hitler level. Get a little historical perspective.
> This is one of these US-specific polarised debates I find really bizarre, around some kind of issue that the rest of the world has by large solved but without any acknowledgement of this fact.
> Maybe the US should look into how other countries have solved it?
I mean Utah is trying, sorry it took a while. I know Germany and Sweden don't fluoridate its water, I assume you mean Western Europe by the "world" (sorry if I am interpreting too much here, but that's usually what's popular to compare US to and bash US on how bad it is), so US is getting "with the program", finally I suppose. States having individual laws here is a benefit, one state doesn't have to wait for the Federal Government to act.
> This is one of these US-specific polarised debates I find really bizarre,
I don't think it's that polarizing? Unless 1) you're listening to US media more and 2) you're not getting many non-polarizing issues in the news, because those are well are just boring and don't sell ads.
There are a few studies out which say fluoride is bad. But as is often the case with these health idiots, the studies actually refer to places where fluoride is naturally way too high in the water. The entire debate is dumb.
This was my perspective for awhile — recommend you look into more recent studies if you haven’t in the past 2y or so. I don’t think it’s the worst thing in our water but do think it’s objectively a bad idea.
completely bizarre witnessing both sides getting so polarised around a basically non-issue
This isn't a sensible way to think about it. Every contentious conversation I've ever had has gone this way:
Me: why do people want to ban fluoride
Them: [anti government paranoia]
Me: um...but how about tooth decay
Them: pineal gland calcification
Me: idk sounds pretty far-fetched
Them: THAT'S WHAT THEY WANT YOU TO THINK
It's irrational to complain about 'both sides' when only one side is insisting on making it into an issue. I generally just try to disegnage from people as soon as they start freaking out about fluoride/ chemtrails/ vaccinations etc, but people like this frequently treat skepticism as a personal attack. Increasingly they occupy positions of political power (see eg RFK) having acquired them by public displays of conviction rather than any objective criteria.
What they're referring to is the fact that very few countries in the rest of the world even consider the possibility of adding fluoride to the water supply. It's basically just the US, Australia, and to a much lesser extent Canada.
It's not a debate everywhere else because adding fluoride to the water is objectively an unusual thing to do that they just... don't. Presumably they get fluoride other ways.
They are experts in this field, and, unlike “random person on the internet who spent 2 minutes on google”, have informed opinions on this topic.
If you want a serious discussion on why fluoride is good or bad, that’s where you need to go.
Random person on the internet is very easy to disagree with, because we’re all idiots right? It’s a very easy lazy way of self confirmation.
…but if you are serious about critically considering the issue and facing your own biases, talk to an actual topic expert.
My dentist told me he had carefully reviewed the literature and determined to his satisfaction that public fluoridated water was in the best interests of public health, currently. He offered to share some reading that he was convinced by.
You can’t really ask for more that that.
Discussing this here is a bit like protesting by posting on social media; yes, I suppose it’s better than doing nothing and not engaging with the topic at all… but only barely, and not in any meaningful way.
That study is taken grossly out of context. It doesn’t claim what people claim it does and even the study states that the quality of the data on which the weaker claim was made is suspect.
The bigger issue is that we have vast amounts of scientific data and empirical evidence around fluoride toxicity. People are injured and die due to fluorine exposure, we understand how it interacts with biology. Any mechanism of action that can support the hypothesis that fluorine causes brain damage necessarily invalidates all of this evidence and is difficult to explain as a matter of basic chemistry.
And then we have to explain why fluoride in water has this effect but the much higher levels of fluoride in food does not.
Fluoridating municipal water may not offer much benefit but there is no credible science that it is actually harmful. Large regions of the world have water that naturally has far higher fluorine content than municipal water and there is no evidence of IQ reduction in these regions either.
If you're not prepared to listen to an expert, and that's what your dentist is on this topic, then nothing I, or anyone else can say, makes any difference to you.
At some point, you have to accept that your random wikipedia page and 5 minutes on google is not a convincing argument.
This is right up there in the conspiracy theory territory.
Rational discussion means listening to experts and admitting that you are not an expert.
What do you want me to say?
You aren't a qualified expert on this topic. If you want an expert opinion, talk to an expert, not some dubious fucking provenance wikipedia page.
Your dentist is not an expert in this — that’s like saying the guy implementing your frontend is an expert in design. Yes, they’re working in the space, but their job isn’t understanding the whole system.
If you’re this deep on the appeal to authority train, the NIH released a report in the last year linking fluoride exposure to moderate drops in IQ with moderate confidence.
It’s probably not the worst thing in the world, but is definitely not inert.
I am competent on this particular subject matter, I have worked in fluorine chemistry and am familiar with the biology and medical literature of fluorine toxicity. The report made much weaker claims than people seem to think.
There is a very serious mechanism of action problem. Fluorine poisoning is a thing that happens. The observed effects and empirical evidence, as well as the mechanisms of action that cause them, are incompatible with any mechanism of action that supports the hypothesis that it causes brain damage. Basically, it would invalidate the entire history of actual fluoride exposure.
The other serious problem is that people are exposed to far more fluorine through what they eat than through water. What is special about trace levels in municipal water? And many parts of the world have far higher natural fluoride levels in their water than any municipal water supply with no evidence of adverse consequences. This has been studied many times in many countries! In fact, the only consistent correlation with naturally high fluoride levels is better cardiovascular health (for which there is a known mechanism of action).
This notion that trace levels of fluoride in some municipal water is adversely impacting IQ based on thin evidence from the developing world is just the public health version of “faster than light neutrinos”. Someone thinks they measured it but it contradicts everything we know about the subject. The rational approach isn’t to discard everything we know without a hell of a lot more evidence.
I don’t think adding fluoride to municipal water does much these days but it also isn’t harming anyone.
It also seems to mirror the rhyme with the vaccine "debate."
That debate is framed around being vaccinated vs the scare of "vaccine caused autism" (or myocarditis), but that frame is missing the risk of things like measles.
Likewise tooth decay is not only expensive, but it can have dreadful health consequences if left unaddressed. Missing teeth is also socially costly. Being poor or "ugly" or poor looking is a serious adverse health consequence. Imagine parents barely making ends meet or working multiple jobs. It's easy to imagine disadvantaged kids missing out on dental care.
I also explicitly remember reading multiple reports of poor tooth health correlating with dementia development. I've also read that serious infections of any sort can harm IQ.
Sure, but we need to look at this from the other side, too. Does fluoridating water provide benefits? I think it's safe to say it did way back when we started doing it. But we didn't have fluoride toothpaste back then. Putting fluoride in the water is presumably more costly than not doing it. If it's actually providing benefits, and the risk of harm is below some very low threshold, then sure, let's keep doing it. But is it actually providing benefits?
I would be really surprised if dentists had much expertise on the impact of fluorine on physiology or the mechanisms of action for its toxicity. They know what it does to your teeth, and maybe that it is known to have positive effects for cardiovascular health, but that is about the extent of it. The systematic effects on the rest of your body are outside their domain.
Chemists who work in fluorine chemistry on the other hand have to become experts on the biological effects of fluorine exposure. Small and seemingly innocuous exposures can do a lot of damage and kill you, though not in a way that lends any support to the idea that municipal fluoridation will harm you. If you do understand how it kills you (basically by being exceptionally narrowly focused on making free calcium ions and to a lesser extent magnesium ions biologically unavailable), it is hard to describe a chemically plausible scenario that somehow avoids this basic fact of chemistry. Fluoride behaves the same way outside the body.
Municipal water exposure is far below the noise floor for fluoride. Food has far higher levels of fluoride than municipal water and the body has ample excess calcium and magnesium to absorb the loss of bioavailability of a microscopic amount of those minerals. Humans consume calcium measured in grams per day, multiple orders of magnitude more than can be lost via municipal fluoridation. Natural dietary variation will have a far larger effect.
Who do you think conducted those peer-reviewed systematic reviews? I'm sorry if I don't take the word of some random guy's dentist over multiple meta analyses in major medical journals.
And I don't need an expert to tell me people should have the right to make their own medical decisions.
And finally, I live in a country where public health experts have decided against water fluoridation. This is represents the vast majority of countries. What now? Should I pick some other experts to listen to?
Who do you think conducted those peer-reviewed systematic reviews? I'm sorry if I don't take the word of some random guy's dentist over multiple meta analyses in major medical journals.
I don’t understand what you mean here. Are you just wholly rejecting the concept of expert knowledge, trials, meta analyses, basically the foundations of science, just because in order to participate in it you have to have tainted yourself by rigorously studying it?
You are not an expert in this field, and cherry-picking random articles in random journals does not make you an expert.
> Should I pick some other experts to listen to?
I think it's reasonably clear that you haven't spoken to an expert in this field.
> I'm sorry if I don't take the word of some random guy's dentist over multiple meta analyses in major medical journals.
Are you certain you're competent to review and understand the literature on the topic? It takes a lot of time and effort; that's what dentists do as a job. That's why they have to go to school. That's why random people on the internet do not do dentistry.
If you don't trust my dentist, then talk to your dentist.
This is literally my point: I'm not telling you how it is; I'm telling you, talk to someone who knows what they're talking about; and, don't believe that you are an expert because you put some trivial amount of effort into investigating it yourself.
I'm also not convinced that a dentist is credibly an expert here. Sure, I would absolutely expect my dentist to understand what benefits fluoridated water might provide to my teeth. I would not, for example, expect my dentist to be an expert in whether or not fluoridated water could cause damage to other parts of my body.
My previous dentist pushed these $80 (not covered by insurance) fluoride treatments on every cleaning visit. There's no research that shows much of anything about their effectiveness (good or bad). Yet they push them anyway, because it (their words) might help and probably won't harm. That doesn't give me a good feeling about their competence to have an expert opinion on this sort of thing.
I would, however, trust the opinion of someone who is doing medical/dental research, and holds a doctorate in a relevant field.
> Talk to your dentist. They are experts in this field
No they are not. The are experts are filling cavities and treatment. They have no additional knowledge of fluoride in water vs any other interested person.
For that you need to talk to someone in research, which is not someone seeing patients.
The vast majority of dentists are not public health experts, and will have little to offer other than “exposing your teeth to fluoride regularly is good”.
Toxicity of fluoride: critical evaluation of evidence for human developmental neurotoxicity in epidemiological studies, animal experiments and in vitro analyses https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7261729/
I’m disappointed in the news media fails to mention the cascading effects of dental health. Yes, the primary and direct benefit of fluoride is to have a healthier mouth.
But having a healthy mouth is far from the end goal, imo. If your mouth is full of cavities you’re more likely to build up bacteria that cause downstream effects as serious as heart disease. Also if your mouth is routinely uncomfortable you may gravitate towards soft processed foods and away from healthy whole foods like fresh fruits and vegetables.
I know water is not the only way to get fluoride into people. But these politicians who are trying to take it out of the water are just saying basically “it’s fine, let’s do nothing”. They’re not going to fluoridate the salt. They’re not going to run public health campaigns stressing the importance of regular brushing. They’re just willing to let people’s teeth rot to score points.
It’s disgusting, and no matter how you feel about the water you should be able to see that these people are not on your side.
If I went to the store to grab a bottle of water, and they were selling fluoridated water and fluoridated water, I would choose the non-fluoridated water.
I drink tap water now with fluoride so its not like I care strongly, but its a bit weird that many people buy only non-fluoridated water themselves and are confused when other people show a preference for non-fluoridated water in their own taps.
> They’re not going to run public health campaigns stressing the importance of regular brushing. They’re just willing to let people’s teeth rot to score points.
Do you really think there are sizable native born populations that are not aware of tooth brushing?
There’s plenty of people that don’t bother with it, but I don’t see a PR campaign being particularly effective at changing that.
I think there are lots of kids who don’t know how bad their teeth can get and how that can impact their life in the future (and I mean kids like teens, not like four year olds).
I think there are lots of adults who don’t realize that poor dental health can cause heart failure and worsen basically every chronic condition.
I think there are lots of goobers who don’t realize that there’s no reason that United and Elevance and the rest couldn’t be forced to cover dental care via regulation.
I get your point, but big picture there are a lot of impactful education campaigns that should be possible.
The Canadian Dental Care Plan (CDCP) was introduced to provide dental services to uninsured Canadians meeting specific criteria. Its rollout began in December 2023, starting with individuals aged 87 and above, and is set to expand to all eligible adults earning less than $90,000 annually by May 1, 2025.
This is actually a perfect example of how under-served dental needs have been. It was only passed via some interesting political wrangling and alliances. And it hasn’t been a smooth rollout with some dentists not getting on board. Starting with aged seniors is good from a compassion standpoint, but the emphasis should be on prevention at earlier ages.
> I'd actually just like to see more money put into public dental assistance. And education.
I would want to see that in anti fluoride campaigns and laws as well, but have not see that happen in the laws and campaigns I have followed. Or in the HN comments I have responded to on the subject, most focus on banning and provide no follow, or no structured follow up like - free toothpaste, required educations, and follow up studies, reassess in X years.
You can provide lots of stuff yourself if the state abandons the whole idea of public health. Of course, be prepared for your taxes and/or insurance going up to cover your neighbors who don't pay for the same preventative care.
Pretty much-was told by an insurance broker one of the biggest factors past history of weather and the obvious things (flooding possibility, dry trees) is my neighbors. Didn't get into specifics but I suspect drugs and gangs.
Fluoride in water wouldn't be necessary is sugary drinks were taxed heavily (or just banned altogether) and dental care was affordable. But obviously that's considered communism if you're a typical american.
Cynical take: Now that studies have shown that bottled water is loaded with nanoplastics, upper class people want to start drinking tap water again. Now suddenly states don't want fluoride in the tap water...
Fluoridation is literally one of the most successful efforts at improving public health in history. Dental health is keystone to general health.
The idea that the conspiracy theorists are winning the public policy debate enrages me. There's rock solid proof of the benefits of fluoridation extending decades, and there is little to no proof of any adverse side effects.
Oh well, good luck Utah. I'm glad I don't live there, but if I were a young dentist, I know where I'd set up my new practice.
Highly recommend visiting the link for details about each point and 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.
Fluoridation may be useful in the U.S. because unlike most European countries, the U.S. does not have school-based dental care, many children do not visit a dentist regularly, and for many U.S. children water fluoridation is the prime source of exposure to fluoride.
“Do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk, ice cream? Ice cream, Mandrake? Children’s ice cream!...You know when fluoridation began?...1946. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hard-core Commie works. I first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love...Yes, a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I-I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence. I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women, er, women sense my power, and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women, Mandrake...but I do deny them my essence.”
* Evidence: fluoride displaces iodine and other halogens, which disrupts thyroid function and possibly negatively impacts other organs and bones.
* Policy: wealth inequality in the US has created a situation where the poor struggle to such an extent that they don't have access to basic health services like fluoride treatments at the dentist every 6 months, while the rich have grown so greedy that they don't want to pay a fraction of a percent of their taxes for preventative care for children and the impoverished so they instead tolerate slightly more expensive fluoridated tap water at the expense of everyone's health.
This comment is about my subjective experience with a sample size of 1, meaning that it doesn't apply to you or the public:
* My father is a dentist and gave me fluoride treatments every 6 months while I was growing up in Idaho. I was raised mostly on well water which isn't fluoridated. I have never had a cavity, despite not going to the dentist for the decade of my 20s while he lived away from me. My thyroid function is not as high as I would like after a lifetime of acute stress from struggle, multiple insults to the body, drinking fluoridated water after the age of 18, and being exposed to radioactive iodine at 80 times the US drinking water standard for perhaps 1 year after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster (which potentially either gave me a lifetime dose or was insignificant).
This solution is as evidence-based and equitable as I can come up with:
* We should remove fluoride from drinking water and reimburse all dentists for free 6 month fluoride treatments of the general public, which represents some nominal fee of perhaps $15-$20 per person annually (probably less) which is not materially significant to the federal budget of roughly $15-20,000 per person annually.
This take is my personal subjective opinion followed by objective evidence supporting my claims:
* I don't think highly of Robert Kennedy Jr's health initiatives, because they don't ethically weigh evidence and policy, and we don't have enough epidemiological studies to predict outcomes. So they will certainly cause unintended consequences. That said, I believe there is merit to his concerns. So a way forward is not to be anti-vax for example, but to recognize that there are dozens of types of vaccines and to prioritize vaccines for illnesses like polio that have a high risk of negatively impacting quality of life. Health experts should continue advising elected officials on policy decisions. Public health is not a domain that can be left in the trust of individuals acting unilaterally. So removing fluoride from water without providing state or federal funding for fluoride treatments every 6 months will most likely negatively impact public health.
I love the cognitive dissonance in people who say both: "Don't medicate me without permission.", "Masks are oppression.", and "We have to stop those people from dressing and calling themselves what they want."
Please don't be snarky in HN comments, and please don't take threads on generic flamewar tangents. Those are two of the worst things for the curious conversation we're trying to have here.
Generally kids don't use toothpaste with fluoride because of the risk of swollowing it. Yes, we know it's bad in high doses, which is why kids toothpaste often doesn't have it. You have to wait until they are old enough to spit when brushing.
In reality what will happen is that rich kids will be just fine because they will get their fluoride treatments at the dentist every six months.
It's the poor kids who will suffer because they don't see the dentist regularly because it's expensive, so they won't get their treatments.
There is a such thing as baby teeth. Presumably most children learn to brush properly while they still have them. If they do something wrong, they get a second chance when their adult teeth replace them. Why does this even need to be explained?
As for “fluoride treatments”, those are applied to the teeth, not drank. They are not a substitute for regular brushing.
You sound concerned about the kids. We are on the same side. There is evidence that fluoridation level is correlated (dose dependent) with sleep problems, lower IQ scores, early onset puberty and bone cancer in children. There are specific areas outside blood brain barrier that it accumulates to the degree of fluoridation (100x to 200x levels of other tissues), all postmortem tests verify this.
It is true that many studies were at higher doses(2x to 4x), but that should not mean that it is acceptable to intentionally raise fluoride levels to half of harmful levels, because we want to protect teeth.
If you don't want cavities decrease sucrose, brush and floss. Can I brush my teeth with use baking soda, use whatever? Arent they are OUR teeth? What if we find some additive might help some other health issue? Should we add that to everyone's drinking water?
Afaik these findings primarily involve populations exposed to fluoride levels above 1.5 mg/L, which is higher than the 0.7 mg/L recommended for U.S. water supplies. There is insufficient evidence to conclude that fluoride at recommended levels negatively impacts IQ.
At safe levels fluoridation is a public health measure akin to fortifying foods with vitamins (e.g., iodine in salt or folic acid in flour something we do all the time).
Toxicity testing is often carried out on mice, up to the dosage required for any observable effect. From that safe levels for humans are derived, e.g. the NOAEL (No Observed Adverse Effect Level).
To say that a study done in humans, got observable effects at only twice the intended dose (who knows what the s.d. of the dose is, but anyway) and we conclude there's simply not enough evidence?
Many chemicals have been banned on the basis of far less evidence.
Honestly 1.5mg is not that different than 0.7mg..is there some reason to believe a 2X factor makes a big deal? I was expecting to hear of 10x differences or something, but 2x is not much of a factor in these kind of gradient effects.
1.5mg is literally twice the recommended limit. I don't really understand the logic in saying 2x overdosed is negligible. If you consistently eat 2x your daily calories you'll see the results fast. If you drink twice what you can handle, it would be bad. Etc
> Should we add that to everyone's drinking water?
Consider the following: Many water sources have a ton of salts and such in them naturally. Fluoride being one of them. The reason why water fluoridation became a thing in the first place is because it was noticed that higher natural levels of fluoridation resulted in fewer caries.
Water treatment in order to make it safe to drink often involves processes that remove and filter out these minerals and chemicals. Which means said things need to be added back in, as part of the treatment process.
Well, we don’t have that many things that can be added to water and have health benefits with basically no downside. Fluoride is one of the few things where it makes sense to do this. (If you are willing to broaden your horizons, you can buy things like iodized salt or golden rice to get the benefits of those. But food, alas, is not a government service.)
Kids until which age? Ime somewhere between 4-5 seem to be perfectly able to spit their toothpaste without swallowing. Guidelines in the EU typically suggest normally fluoride toothpaste in increasing amounts after 4.
Also, fluoride helps with remineralisation when it is used pretty much regularly, not once per 6 months. Fluoride treatments once per 6 months are not gonna bring back the enamel lost.
I do not understand what is the big deal here. In many countries there are specific recommendations wrt to fluoride and kids brushing their teeth that seem to work fine. This seems to be a solved issue in many places in the world without fluoridating water.
The recommendation from doctors is to use a small amount of toothpaste with fluoride. Apparently even if they cant spit yet. I was surprised to be told that, even though there are a ton of fluoride free toothpastes available.
Fluoride is known to be problematic at high concentrations (hell, everything is). The problems of fluoride really start to come into play at concentrations of around 10-20mg/L, and some of the areas being studied are running well in excess of 100mg/L of fluoride.
The EPA limit for fluoride is 4mg/L. There's an argument to be made that it should be lowered to 2mg/L. When fluoride is added to drinking water, the target is around 0.9mg/L--no one's coming close to the EPA limit, and that exists because groundwater sources can end up being naturally high in fluoride. (I'm not sure what the typical natural occurrence of fluoride is in Utah, but I strongly suspect that they're not making any moves to actually remove fluoride from existing systems.)
Seems to cause problems at lower levels than that:
> The NTP monograph concluded, with moderate confidence, that higher levels of fluoride exposure, such as drinking water containing more than 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter, are associated with lower IQ in children.
Those are based on countries with much higher levels of fluoride than the USA adds.
Follow up studies have found the levels in the USA to be perfectly safe and in fact beneficial since poor people don't get dental care like they do in other countries.
I think the argument they make is fair. The levels that the US aims to have fluorinated water concentrations. If theres a bad actor county well thats on them not the standard thats set.
Please share study that shows it is safe in the US for children. The EPA allows up to 2mg/L in water and we have some evident that 1.5mg/L has negative effects on children.
HN Comments were very credulous before the election. Shows how flexible belief in science is.
It doesn't take much to observe that we've been fluoridating municipal water for over half a century and children are doing mostly fine. It's the actions of children's parents that contribute the most to their IQ losses.
I didnt look too closely, but the concentration recommended by the FDA is much lower than many of the sample sets in that linked study. Some 10 times as much. One is a hundred times as much.
The second link showed a concentration as little 2x the US amount was impactful.
*The NTP monograph concluded, with moderate confidence, that higher levels of fluoride exposure, such as drinking water containing more than 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter, are associated with lower IQ in children. The NTP review was designed to evaluate total fluoride exposure from all sources and was not designed to evaluate the health effects of fluoridated drinking water alone. 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.*
> Republican state lawmaker Stephanie Gricius - who introduced the bill in the state legislature - has argued that there is research suggesting fluoride could have possible cognitive effects in children.
It's kind of amazing to say something like that then be so inconsistent on things that will have real outcomes that make life better for kids. They're all for cutting school support and social services.
Utah and Massachusetts are basically the steel-man versions of their respective ideologies. But Utah doesn’t have the benefit of Harvard and MIT, major Pharma companies, etc. It’s surrounded by desert and has no natural resources to speak of.
A lot of that is due to the Mormons. While they tend to vote Republican, they are some of the biggest socialists out there. They believe in giving 10% of their income to the church (and enforce it!).
Then they redistribute to their poorest members in the form of free private education at all pre-college levels and highly subsidized college as well. And with food banks, free or subsidized medical services, and whole bunch of other things the government doesn't provide.
They've essentially traded one government for another, but theirs requires belief in their religion and only applies to their believers (who happen to concentrate in Utah).
That’s the steel-man version of (american) conservatism: civic institutions provide the safety net instead of the government.
And in terms of aggregate outcomes, Utah’s results are impressive. The LDS apparently does a better job teaching kids to read than the government here in Maryland.
Utah has less money to start with, though. It doesn’t have big industries or things like that. Median income is $40,000 versus about $50,000 in Maryland and Massachusetts.
Yeah, but extremely regressive views on equality and women's rights come along with it....
You can get a lot done when you establish regressive control structures for enforcement. Generally speaking, most people usually don't want that trade-off.
> and only applies to their believers (who happen to concentrate in Utah)
Worth noting here that the church additionally spends north of $1 billion annually on humanitarian aid across the globe [1] (separate from the redistributions to the poor mentioned by OP). Aid is provided independent of religious affiliation.
Al Capone ran soup kitchens. He seemed like a good dude. What percentage of their global wealth is $1 billion? I wish I knew but for some reason they keep that a secret. And don't leave or they'll expect your family to cut you off.
*: searches suggest the wealth of the church to be around $265 billion. So their members give 10% annually to the church and the church gives less than 0.5% of their total wealth to the poor (but mostly to other Mormons or prospective converts). If you're wondering why they keep this massive horde of wealth, it's because they think it'll be needed for the apocalypse. Yes, it's for the apocalypse.
> [The Mormons] believe in giving 10% of their income
Is that income before tax or after tax?
"After tax" seems like it should be obvious, but then wouldn't that require tax specialists to decide how to deal with tax exceptions (retirement taxation incentives, donations, etcetera).
If the 10% donation is tax deductible, doesn't that require some mathematics to work out the 10%?
Irrelevant aside: I think the efficient altruist 10% is "We're often asked how exactly to calculate income — should it be pre-tax or post-tax? Generally, we recommend choosing the option that makes most sense to you, though we think it makes sense to choose pre-tax if your donations are tax-deductible (for example, GiftAid counts towards your Pledge!) and post-tax if they're not.". https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/pledge
It’s up to personal interpretation. Some do before tax, some do after. Some only pay tithing on their regular income (i.e. from a normal job) but not on “already tithed” income (e.g. birthday money from parents), while others do it differently.
The church’s stance is that they say you should pay 10% tithing on your income. They don’t define income. And all they do is ask “do you pay a full tithe?” And it’s up to you to decide if you do or not based on how you view what “income” means.
There are endless debates about gross vs net and as with many things in the CoJCoLDS it is left up to the members to decide/define and to self-certify their compliance. Welfare programs are financed via a separate donation program via a monthly fast where the skipped meals expenses are donated to the program.
I'm not Mormon, so I don't know for sure, but what I hear from people are or were Mormon, the enforcement is a combination of social pressure and the Church demanding you provide them with a copy of your taxes to remain a member. I assume it's pretty loose from there.
I can't speak to how enforcement was in the past (I haven't researched it enough to say), but the way it currently stands is there is a yearly "tithing settlement". No tax documents are requested, all that our church has is the amount I donate. The bishop asks if I'm a full tithe payer, and accepts my answer.
Social pressure perhaps? But at least where I've been it's appeal to morality as taught in our canon.
Membership is not rescinded for not paying tithing, but a temple recommend requires being a full tithe payer (as reported by me).
No. I've been a member all my life in several U.S. states and internationally, and I've also been a volunteer finance clerk at church for many years. I've never been asked for tax forms, or even heard of anyone being asked for tax forms. It's not a thing.
Also, there's no prescriptive guidance on pre-tax vs. post-tax, or how to handle many edge cases, such as capital gains, tax deductions, etc. The church's stance is that it's between you and God to figure out how to apply the "pay 10%" guidance.
“...the simplest statement we know of is that statement of the Lord himself that the members of the Church should pay one-tenth of all their interest annually, which is understood to mean income. No one is justified in making any other statement than this. We feel that every member of the Church should be entitled to make his own decision as to what he thinks he owes the Lord, and to make payment accordingly.”
The quote you provide is grossly misleading, as that isn’t what tithing meant in the early days of the church. The church just says “which is understood to mean income” so causally that it’s essentially a lie. They say that to get more money. They hold peoples salvation at gun point to make sure it gets paid. And then they use their wealth and influence to drive state policy. It’s all very gross.
Not quite following your point? What about that is a lie?
At the beginning of The Church of Jesus Christ, saints were asked to consecrate all that they had to the bishop. Legally they signed away all rights to their property and the bishop leased it back to them.
They found that that wasn't sustainable (due to debts and disputes) and switched to 10% of interest (see Section 119 in D&C, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-test...). While tithing was paid in the past with animals, food, etc, that just doesn't scale beyond local communities.
Yes, our church does use funds for advocacy, but it's hard to ascribe pure malice to a church that spends $1 billion annually on humanitarian aid every year, and is expanding affordable education to tens of thousands of people in developing countries.
Not all of us agree with how much money is being held in reserve, but it's important to understand that we don't have a testimony in the church because of what we get from it, or even agree with all policies, but rather because of a personal witness of its truth. It is true that some stay in our church because of social pressure, and I'm not going to defend that practice. But, that's not what our core doctrine teaches.
I understand that it's easy to think that we are all a homogenous group that all thinks the same, but peek under the surface and you'll find many of us who find the core doctrine so compelling that we are willing to stick with the church and to enact change in constructive instead of destructive ways.
Bing says as of 2023, the church's net worth is estimated to be around $265 billion which would be income of $16 billion (assuming a conservative 6% annual ROI). I'm unsure how correct those numbers are since the article says (US$15.7b land and US$100b investment fund).
The Mormon church earns $7 billion a year from tithing. Even if humanistic aid were $1 billion - it is a relatively poor percentage.
Let's consider healthcare to be humanitarian aid (yeah, obviously not external). Governments spend 30% of taxes on healthcare, and people pay 30% in taxes so we might estimate that people are paying appromx 10% on humanitarian aid via their government. Although perhaps that is just a form of insurance you've paid in and you get paid out. I'm unsure of the statistics but my guess is that most people pay a lot in and get a little out due to skewed distribution of sickness costs. With health insurance the best deal is to never get sick and never claim (and your premiums help the poor bastards that do get sick - the best outcome a society could hope for). Note that health insurance in New Zealand is wildly different from the US model.
I've had a little experience watching how the Mormon church acts in Samoa which is definitely not a wealthy country. I would be interested to know how much of that humanitarian aid was paid for by countries that needed the humanitarian aid? The equivalent to paying in and getting paid out (with the church claiming doing good with the paying out, but not talking about what it keeps).
I'm a little cynical that there's some dissimulation by the LDS church - they are not well known for frank openness.
Hi! Yes, I believe that is correct for 2015. It's been fairly recent that the amount spent has ramped up a lot[1].
A lot of money also goes towards subsidizing education (All the BYUs, including the online classes that are targeted towards developing countries), building churches and temples, supporting local congregation budgets, and supporting church members who are financially insecure (I'm not sure if they counted that last part in the 2024 summary though).
> I've had a little experience watching how the Mormon church acts in Samoa which is definitely not a wealthy country.
> I'm a little cynical that there's some dissimulation by the LDS church - they are not well known for frank openness.
Yeah, it would be nice if they were more transparent here. I understand the legal reasoning--essentially security by obscurity--but it's frustrating to only get peeks and glimpses. I don't blame you for some healthy cynicism.
Not that I know of? I double-checked the handbook and there's nothing in there that mentions requesting tax forms, so it's certainly not official policy and if it did happen it should be reported. (We're very bureaucratic, lol)
The only tax form I can think of is a form they send me so I can deduct it from taxes (as it's legally a tax-deductible donation).
EDIT: Section 34.4, 34.5.2, and 34.5.6 are applicable.
34.4:
> Confidentiality of Tithing and Other Offerings
> The amount of tithing and other offerings paid by a donor is confidential. Only the bishop and those who are authorized to handle or view these contributions should have access to this information. Stake presidencies, bishoprics, and clerks should never inappropriately discuss a member’s tithing status. Nor should they discuss the total amount of tithing or other offerings received.
34.5.2:
> Receiving Tithing and Other Offerings
> The Lord has given bishops the sacred trust of receiving and accounting for the tithes and other offerings of the Saints (see Doctrine and Covenants 42:30–33; 119). Only the bishop and his counselors may receive tithes and other offerings. Under no circumstances should their wives, other members of their families, clerks, or other ward members receive these contributions. The only exception is when Aaronic Priesthood holders are assigned to collect fast offerings (see 34.3.2).
> Church leaders and members should not leave donations unattended.
34.5.6:
> Donation Statements
> Donor Statements of Contributions are available to all members at donations.ChurchofJesusChrist.org. Leaders should encourage members to regularly review their donor statements. Where applicable, official tax statements are also available at donations.ChurchofJesusChrist.org, from the local unit, or from the area office.
Calling Mormons socialist is inaccurate. Socialism is government-forced redistribution of wealth. A large majority of Mormons, at least in Utah, are very much opposed to that. You are correct that a large majority of Mormons voluntarily share their wealth with the poor and needy.
You are incorrect saying that you have to be a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the actual name of the "Mormon church") to receive these benefits. In some cases there will be conditions, like if you want to attend one of the church universities you will need to promise to abstain from alcohol (one example), but becoming a baptized member of the church is not required
I would say it's very accurate. They are forced to share their wealth to get into the Kingdom of God. The only choice they have is to not go to heaven. I'd say that's being forced, just by a different power.
> but becoming a baptized member of the church is not required
You don't get the BYU discount unless you're baptized.
That's pretty different than getting arrested and thrown in jail by government thugs for not paying up, whether you believe in the cause or not, but ok?
Even the non-member BYU tuition is subsidized and a much lower price than other comparable colleges. But really, BYU is not the best example of Mormon charity, it can only accommodate a limited number of students.
I think you are missing the key element, that socialism isnt just a structure or institution, but a government policy and applied to all people within a society.
It is neither optional or excludable.
This is why the monopoly man choosing to share caviar with his family or paying dues to a yacht club does not make them a socialist. The monopoly man retains full agency over who they share with.
Fun anecdote: Utah's Republicans actually rejected the MAGA candidates in the Republican primary for both Senator and Governer by a wide margin, despite the MAGA candidates having Trump's endorsement. If nothing else, Utah doesn't vote MAGA-or-bust like some other states have been.
I truly don't care one way or the other on the dental advantage that fluoride offers in drinking water, or the alleged risks it poses to the IQ of unborn children. I simply hate the fact that public policy is now being driven by what are essentially New World Order conspiracy theorists
Before someone tries to pin this as a decisively left-right political issue, Portland, Oregon has been virulently anti-fluoride for over 70 years (which is probably the last time Portland and Utah agreed on anything):
Portland is a bit odd when it comes to water; they drained an entire (uncovered, open to the elements) city reservoir because a guy peed in it. True story. I assume they have signs for the birds flying aloft to not defecate over the reservoir.
Edit: It appears many posts all over this thread are being brigaded with downvotes. Why? Is Big Fluoride in trouble? Grow up. You people are brain damaged (possibly from fluoride).
What I find fascinating about this debate is that only municipalities/cities add fluoride to water. If you are on well water, no fluoride. So any studies comparing the incidence of tooth decay between populations that are on well water and those that are on fluoridated city water?
I get that this was a great public health benefit before fluoride in toothpaste became widely available but is this still the case? Couldn't it be argued that most of the benefit comes from brushing your teeth?
Flouride incorporates into the tooth structure in developing teeth before they emerge, I'm not sure how effective that is but it is different than the more topical protection.
Tea has enormous amounts of flouride depending on where it is grown and they aren't banning that yet.
For what it's worth, very few locations and processing styles result in significant doses of fluoride in tea. Within the United States, these types of tea are not typically consumed. For example, Tibetan brick tea is consistently high in fluoride, to the extent that fluorosis is actually somewhat common in certain regions. But it's a bit tricky to even buy a brick (meant for consumption) within the US. Bagged tea, more commonly available, has to be drunk regularly in very significant volumes to have a deleterious effect.
Put another way, for issues to rise to the level of public policy, they have to affect a meaningful number of people in a region. In the US, tea-induced fluorisis is extremely rare.
I'm not comparing it to tea that causes fluoridosis. Just normal tea sold in the US can have significantly more fluoride than is put into water supplies. I don't think it's a significant danger, like the amounts in the water supply aren't either.
I think it's worth reminding people of Occam's Razor, and the point of it is: a simple explanation is often better than a complicated one.
The US has had water fluoridation for 65 years, affecting 346 million people. That's a pretty big god damn sample size and long amount of time in which to observe effects. If we still have no proof of significant negative health effects, it's probably not bad for you.
That said: you can always lower the amount of fluoride if it turns out the local area already gets a lot of fluoride from other sources. You don't need to ban it, you can just lower the levels.
So please don't defend this decision by Utah. They're being children.
Using a prospective Canadian birth cohort, we found that estimated maternal exposure to higher fluoride levels during pregnancy was associated with lower IQ scores in children. This association was supported by converging findings from 2 measures of fluoride exposure during pregnancy. A difference in MUFSG spanning the interquartile range for the entire sample (ie, 0.33 mg/L), which is roughly the difference in MUFSG concentration for pregnant women living in a fluoridated vs a nonfluoridated community, was associated with a 1.5-point IQ decrement among boys. An increment of 0.70 mg/L in MUFSG concentration was associated with a 3-point IQ decrement in boys; about half of the women living in a fluoridated community have a MUFSG equal to or greater than 0.70 mg/L. These results did not change appreciably after controlling for other key exposures such as lead, arsenic, and mercury.
To our knowledge, this study is the first to estimate fluoride exposure in a large birth cohort receiving optimally fluoridated water. These findings are consistent with that of a Mexican birth cohort study that reported a 6.3 decrement in IQ in preschool-aged children compared with a 4.5 decrement for boys in our study for every 1 mg/L of MUF.10 The findings of the current study are also concordant with ecologic studies that have shown an association between higher levels of fluoride exposure and lower intellectual abilities in children.7,8,26 Collectively, these findings support that fluoride exposure during pregnancy may be associated with neurocognitive deficits.
1. IQ is not an objective measurement, it is inherently flawed
2. A 1.5-3 IQ level difference is not noticeable in any practical way. Things like birth order have a more significant impact on IQ.
3. Comparing Canadian children to Mexican is pretty dramatic, like comparing rich kids to poor kids; you will always see a marked difference between the two, in intelligence, in health, in crime, in all sorts of things. Mexican communities often over-fluoridate their water (I know because I grew up in Mexico and my teeth are stained because of it). Again, this is no reason to ban it, just lower it.
This finding is a suggestion of a link, it's not empirical proof. The methods and findings have many questionable aspects. You can always find some paper that suggests something random like vegetables are bad for you or something. One paper does not a water-tight case make.
> The US has had water fluoridation for 65 years, affecting 346 million people. That's a pretty big god damn sample size and long amount of time in which to observe effects. If we still have no proof of significant negative health effects, it's probably not bad for you.
The problem is there will have been a lot of confounders.
E.g. despite huge sample sizes, isolating the cause of the obesity crisis is too hard because so many different things changed at once.
Sure, it's not easy to find a smoking gun. That doesn't mean we go all in on whatever we think might be the issue (if there even is an issue).
The answer to the obesity crisis wasn't to ban Pizza. We don't we ban sodas and junk food at schools, which we know would have a positive impact on health. But we do ban fluoride, without proof that it will help? With actually the only scientific proof being that it would be detrimental to remove?
If people's concern is really that it might slightly lower IQ, consider that 1) IQ has been steadily increasing since the 40's, and 2) you can get better IQ by investing in education, something that we do an embarrassing job of already and need to improve on.
The other concern touted is that it might cause cancer. As we well know by now, nearly everything causes cancer.
Banning fluoride is just a move by politicians to take advantage of ignorant scared people to drum up more votes/support. It's like every other action they take to vilify something scary or unknown and then claim victory over the evil thing they purged. This isn't new, either - this clearly partisan stance was being pointed out in the 1950's when it was first being considered for nationwide use.
"After more than 70 years of investigation, there are still questions about how effective water fluoridation is at preventing dental decay and whether the possible risks are worth the benefits. Although water fluoridation undoubtedly did improve the dental health of many children in the 1960s and 1970s, fluoride proponents were perhaps too hasty in declaring that community water fluoridation was the best (or only) solution for dental decay. A less fractious debate might have encouraged a more open discussion in which the possible harms could have been more fully discussed and other options, such as providing fluoridated toothpaste, more fully considered." - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4504307/
Pretty much everyone I personally know, this in part to coming from a family of relative affluence in highly liberal areas, has religiously filtered their water to keep additives (such as fluoride) from going into their bodies. This same crowd has savvy towards dental hygiene, they're all into oil pulling, and brushing with Fennel oil and all that. Eliminating yeast (which is fungus, not bacteria) from the mouth prevents the biofilm that creates the necessary conditions for dental cavities.
Even the poorest Americans can afford coconut oil and Fennel oil.
There's no reason to drink that shit (fluoride), there's no reason to brush with it either.
Way past time. The link between fluoride ingestion by children and pregnant women to lower IQ in children has been known for years. It's incredible how the scientific community in the US is so ignorant of this fact.
Also, dentists have no neuroscience background! So let's take recommendations by dentists to ingest a neurotoxin with deep deep skepticism, shall we?
A low dose of this neurotoxin can still have smaller adverse effects on IQ, and in all likelihood do, especially for fetuses and small children. Lots of countries have banned fluoridation of the water supply. The US has one of the highest fluoride levels in the water supply. The default should be to not add neurotoxins into the water supply (I cannot believe I have to actually say this).
If that were true, nearly the entire state of California would have developmental issues.
Anyway, lots of things in this world that are bad for people in high doses are beneficial in smaller doses. Water is a great example, as are salt and sugar.
This logic is so flawed. We. know the biological mechanisms in the body that makes use of salt and sugar. And we know both are safe in relatively large amounts too.
With fluoride, relatively small amounts in the drinking water is known to cause lower IQ.
But somehow even smaller amounts are safer?
Do you just not see the problem here or are you purposely blinding yourself to the reality because of your political biases? Is it an unconscious thing for you?
You are simply not being rational. You are making excuses and excuses for holding a belief you have had and probably defended for years. And now you are too invested to left the belief go. Just let it go already.
Badgering people isn't an effective persuasive technique. If you want to convince people that you are right, support your argument with evidence and data.
> We know the biological mechanisms in the body that makes use of salt and sugar.
Yes, that's how nature works. Take a look at some typical prescription pharmaceutical doses sometime; many of them are awfully small. Like micrograms per kilogram.
The other thing to consider is that in life we balance risks and benefits with the aim of achieving a net positive. Most things that are good have some risks, and many things that are bad have some benefits. We know the benefit of water fluoridation, and the value to society is large. Meanwhile, we suspect there is a possible drawback of water fluoridation, though there is not a lot of data, and the risk is small at the amounts added to municipal water supplies. Nobody has been able to characterize the offsetting loss to any degree of certainty, so we cannot effectively recalculate the cost/benefit analysis.
The problem is that people have been characterizing the offsetting loss for decades while people blinded by political biases refuse to admit the evidence, however clear it is.
To a degree, it becomes impossible for them on a subconscious level because of the social costs involved.
This is a mass psychology problem, not a scientific evidence problem.
I would encourage you to speak with subject matter experts if you truly believe that this is a mass psychology problem.
It's too convenient to discount people who disagree with you as being "politically biased" and "blinded." A better explanation is that they observed the same input you do and concluded the benefit is still worth the risk.
And if it turns out that millions of Americans became stupid because of fluoride and not, say, bad parenting, phone addiction, and manipulative media, I won't be too proud to admit you were right.
The relationship appears to be linear down to zero, but it’s very hard to study near those levels. From what I’ve seen, the best current science is that the fluoridation levels in typical western countries are reducing average IQ by about 0.5-1.5 points.
For reference, adding lead to fuel was far, far worse.
I suspect it is hard to control for confounding correlations - specifically I would guess it is more likely that poorer areas are flouridated. HV electric power lines and nuclear stations have the issue that poorer people are more likely to live next to those, and poorer people have have worse health outcomes so it falsely appears that both of those cause the health problems.
I initially dismissed it as the same category of stupid as anti-vax beliefs, but it turns out that there are a decent amount of good studies showing a link between fluoride in water and (slightly) lower IQ when pregnant mothers ingest the fluoride. Note that there is no significant effect after birth.
The idea is to remove fluoride from water and advise pregnant women to use fluoride-free toothpaste.
Everyone else can get enough fluoride from modern toothpastes, or regular dentist treatments.
The logic is that fluoride in tap water made sense in the era before toothpaste had it, but now it is “overmedicating” a vulnerable fraction of the population.
The IQ link is very heavily lacking in evidence.
In the actual research the main "risk" posed by flouridated water is actually fluorosis. This causes minerals in your enamel to be replaced with flouride which can cause them to be brittle in the long term. It's pretty uncommon but the thought is that now that flouride toothpaste are commonplace, the benefit of flouridated water is also way less. Which changes the calculus.
A not insignificant number of researchers are advocating for the view that flouridating water just isn't worth it anymore and the (slight) risk of flourosis is more significant than the (slight) benefit of decreased dental caries.
Children are the main group that benefits from fluoride in water because the fluoride helps strengthen teeth as they form. Lack of fluoride increases childhood cavities, leading to decreased academic performance.
This was a real problem in the San Jose school district until recently. They started fluoridation of water in the last ten years, and were the biggest US city that didn’t fluoridate. The evidence of the above is clear according to SJ dentists I have talked to.
The National Toxicology Program recently completed a fairly substantial meta study and concluded that "for every 1 mg/L increase in urinary fluoride, there is a decrease of 1.63 IQ points in children.". [1] This is also relevant to OP since it's not just pregnant women at risk from excessive fluoridation but also children. For now it seems that adults are, somewhat oddly, unaffected.
[1] - https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/whatwestudy/assessments/noncancer/...
In bold from your source:
> 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.
Yeah, note the measurement is in urine. So there are two separate issues. Determining whether fluoride is damaging to IQ, and then whether the levels in water can drive this. The former is way easier to evaluate than the latter. The reason comes from that study's intro pargraphs:
---
"Since 1945, the use of fluoride has been a successful public health initiative for reducing dental cavities and improving general oral health of adults and children. There is a concern, however, that some pregnant women and children may be getting more fluoride than they need because they now get fluoride from many sources including treated public water, water-added foods and beverages, teas, toothpaste, floss, and mouthwash, and the combined total intake of fluoride may exceed safe amounts."
---
So the issue is trying to isolate the exact amount and source of fluoride people are getting. And that probably has no answer because it's going to vary dependent on how much fluoridated water somebody drinks, the rest of their diet, their other dental hygiene composition, and more. So levels that would be safe for one percent of the population, will be dangerous for another percent of it.
Here is a concise detailed analysis of the concerns with the metaanalysis provided by the NTP:
https://theunbiasedscipod.substack.com/p/the-well-runs-deep-...
The NTP report is flawed and likely biased.
Says the substack paper which takes everything it can and spins and misrepresents it to the point of absurdity, for clicks.
Which changes the calculus
Was that intentional? (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dental_calculus for those who didn't get the reference.)
The canonical form is "I see what you did there".
Fluorosis is very common afaik. My dentist told me I have it: slightly whiter patches on my teeth. Then he showed me his own fluorosis. It actually is stronger than the old enamel.
> The IQ link is very heavily lacking in evidence.
Not really: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
your study has been heavily criticized where you already posted it:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43523900
I can only assume once you see those very valid criticisms, you will update your references
Does the study not literally refute the claim that fluoride's negative impact on IQ is lacking in evidence, contrary to the original claim? What exactly do you think needs to be updated?
the original refutation was "fluoride in the drinking water concentrations is proven safe and it doesn't affect brains". Your study does not show that IQ is effected at concentrations that are being added to water supplies. Just because X can result from Y levels of some substance does't mean X results from Y-n concentrations.
> the original refutation was "fluoride in the drinking water concentrations is proven safe and it doesn't affect brains".
No, this is the original claim:
> but it turns out that there are a decent amount of good studies showing a link between fluoride in water and (slightly) lower IQ when pregnant mothers ingest the fluoride.
Then the parent replied that this IQ link is lacking evidence, which it's not, per the meta-analysis I cited.
The meta analysis you linked ( https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/... ) specifically denies any noticable associations with fluoride at the levels recommended in countries that add fluoride to water.
The meta analysis you linked gets the strongest results in areas of the world with outstandingly high levels of fluoride and other elements in the ground water .. water with so many additives it rings like a bell when tapped with a hammer (okay, that's an embellishment).> specifically denies any noticable associations with fluoride at the levels recommended in countries that add fluoride to water. (Emphasis added)
Which is not a claim that was being discussed in this subthread, since the original claim being refuted specify any such qualification.
> but now it is “overmedicating” a vulnerable fraction of the population.
Makes sense, but the intention also is that many people do not brush their teeth, or at least do not brush them as often as they should, and so fluoride is added to drinking water to compensate so people's teeth don't start to fall out at an alarming rate.
Sadly, an alarming percentage of Americans don't drink water. I’ve spoken to way too many people who think water tastes wrong because it’s not sweet enough.
I've heard this and it doesn't fit in my brain. They never drink water? Ever?
Time to buy Brawndo shares
Brawndo's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes. Water is for toilets, drink Brawndo! The Thirst Mutilator.
You know on a serious note, it occurred to me that Liquid Death's slogan "Murder your thirst" isn't far off. Wonder if it's a not-so-subtle nod.
Something like 10% of SNAP benefits go towards purchases of soda pop and other sugary drinks made by PepsiCo/etc.
It’s heartbreaking, but not surprising. When you’re dealing with limited resources, constant stress, and often living in areas where healthy options are harder to access or more expensive, sugary drinks can feel like an affordable comfort. Instead of judging SNAP recipients, we should be looking at the systems that make soda more accessible than clean, appealing , and fresh food.
Another take would also just be that it hardly proves they don't drink water, just that they also like something else.
But the "soda" category these days is also pretty overloaded: full sugar coke vs Coke zero is a very different calory intake.
Coke zero is still murder on your teeth, though. (And not fluoridated, of course.)
Are SNAP recipients not allowed to enjoy a soda at all? I really don't understand the problem with this. Society acts like signing up for SNAP involves signing a contract to lose 100 pounds and only eat iceberg lettuce or something.
Americans seem to love to gatekeep what the poor are allowed to have or not have. They have this image of the Welfare Queen driving a pink Cadillac to cash her welfare checks at the liquor store. It seems that no matter how desperately destitute someone might be, there's a person who will point at something they have, whether it's a tent to sleep in under a bridge (a gift from an organization providing assistance to the houseless), a bicycle that's their only means of transportation, or a garden planted on public property, and say "they can't be that poor if they have that!
When someone lives off of public benefit, there's a sense in which the public can have an interest in how the money is used -- its use should correlate with its intent.
That's why SNAP money is restricted to particular categories. So caring about how it's spent is already a foregone conclusion, and rightly so.
If someone wants to spend money however they like, they'll have to earn it themselves. Even inherited money carries a sense of obligation to honor the family with how it's used (like not blowing it all in a week of lavish partying in Vegas, as an extreme example).
No, but I think spending 10% of your food budget on soda is unfortunate regardless. Of course they have a right to it.
If an individual spends 10% of their SNAP benefits on soda, they’ve spent about ~$30 over a month on it, which is ten 20fl oz drinks. People drinking a bit more than a gallon of soda per month only supports the notion that they can subsist on that without any water if you believe that they categorically have some sort of exceptional unhuman biology.
I wouldn't find that unusual. I hardly ever drink water; if it's available, I drink milk. Why would you drink water?
If I replaced my water intake with milk it would probably make me sick.
Water has zero calories, is reasonably filling, neutral-tasting, and gives me what my body needs, without any other junk. What's not to like?
Well, it's true that water has zero calories and is neutral tasting. It's not filling to any degree, and milk will give you a lot more of what your body needs.
Milk is water sugar and fat. Hardly a good source of things your body needs (except the water, which you can get from water)
You're making me really curious what you think the purpose of eating is.
Also, what you think cheese consists of.
Cheese consists of milk mostly?
One can enjoy something without it being good for you. I like cheese. I'm under no illusion that it is healthy
- Along with extra enzymes that promote growing things kids need more than adults, and if all you drink is milk you will overdo it.
Water is great for hydration without filling you otherwise. Like, say you need to drink a lot of fluid because you are really active, you would probably get sick of milk pretty quickly.
> say you need to drink a lot of fluid because you are really active
If you're replacing sweat, wouldn't you want sports drinks?
https://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1969/03/27
But anyway, in most cases, the fact that drinking milk doubles as a source of food is clearly a benefit. It's hard to explain a common behavior by reference to a rare circumstance.
Sports drinks aren’t really good for you, but you definitely can drink a lot more of them than you can milk.
The idea of sports drinks is that you can drink them without getting water poisoning. This is only a concern if you need a lot of water because you've been sweating a lot, but I thought that was the scenario you were pointing to.
Particularly when traveling, I don't enjoy the taste of tap water. Filtered or (factory filtered then) bottled... and I'm not alone in that viewpoint.
Probably because the overwhelming majority of countries chlorinates their water to various degrees because they don't have the exceptional plumbing quality needed to otherwise guarantee potability.
Countries where the tap water is drinkable without chlorination have quality that exceeds bottled water, and it might even be sourced from the same aquifers.
The best tap water on earth is in Iceland. Volcanic filtered and so clean tasting... one of the joys of being in the country.
Once you get over the sulfur smell anyway... (or was that only the northern thing?)
When travelling where? The blanket statement here just doesn't work. Every major area has very different water in the tap. A lot of the bottled water is just tap water from another region.
This is one benefit of growing up with awful well water. Literally anywhere tastes pretty darn good by comparison!
When traveling by vehicle (pickup truck for me) I've thrown in a 5 gallon cooler of water from home. It was so nice to want to drink water because it was my own good well water that tastes like I'm used to.
When I had to fly to NY for work I felt like I couldn't get water anywhere that was worth drinking.
Where in New York? If NYC, this sounds insane to me, because New York municipal water is objectively speaking among the purest (if not the purest) in the country.
NYC tap water has spoiled all other tap water for me
San Francisco tap water is almost as good. It was better before they started mixing reclaimed water into it, though I’ve either gotten used to the new taste or they’ve fixed the treatment process.
Vancouver winter water (summer water tastes more off) >>>>>> NYC tap water and I will die on this hill
I question this as a bad take or a data-point of one, because NYC water is the best of Upstate water.
I’ve travelled and lived across the country during my high school and college years; and I’ve travelled my extensively within Upstate very (Adirondacks, Catskills, and Finger Lakes) and the taste of local water is the first thing I notice.
Bad building pipes aside, I have not tasted any water that exceeds NYC’s tap water in taste.
I’m not the only person who’s expressed this, and guests from other regions have also admitted the same consistently over the years.
Wisconsin tap water tastes fine. Waco, Texas tap water is really nasty.
It can vary much more closely than that. I moved from one town to another 12 miles away, and the tap water in the new town tasted horrible compared to my old town's tap.
I bet those people drink fountain drinks, cofee, tea, etc. made from tapwater.
Maybe instead of removing fluoride from the water they should add sweetener in there along with it /s
I'm pretty sure that no amount of fluoridated water is going to save you if you do not brush your teeth.
Even if the fluoride somehow manages to overcome all that and prevent you from getting cavities, the gum disease will eventually cause all your teeth to fall out.
> many people do not brush their teeth
many? (!!!)
Googling it all I found was one dentist website that said 2%, but didn't seem that reliable
If that figure is for the US, then that's ~7M people. Feels like "many" to me.
2% is definitely many
The levels of fluoridation in order to cause difference in IQ as I understand it, from the Chinese studies, suggest that basically the effect if true occurs at around 2x+ the concentration found in supplemented water supplies.
My understanding also is that if you’re a dentist wanting to get rich, move somewhere that has unfluoridated water.
So if your training and double your water intake your basically lowering you IQ? (according to the Chinese studies) I wonder the method this uses.. has anyone looked at dementia rates in high fluoride areas.. Particularly in people with high water intake?
There is also a host of things we use water for from cooking to preserving, distilling and cooling.. i wonder if any of these things could concentrate the fluoride.
Also since fluoride has a lower boiling point any studies tracked what breathing in fluoride gas over long periods cause?
2x is honestly pretty small. I would expect the amount required to drop IQ to be larger by an order of magnitude or more to conclude that fluoridating water is totally safe.
2x is basically no safe margin for something like water. Of course you can question the quality of the study, but if it's actually 2x, fluoride in tap water should be treated like lead pipes.
> I initially dismissed it as the same category of stupid as anti-vax beliefs
Dismissing things out of hand like this is a category of stupid in itself.
Look at the current research, listen to people who devoted their careers to studying this, make up your own mind. If you're on HN, then you're qualified enough to at least figure out who the genuine experts are and read what they recommend.
Putting any science-based debate into a "category" to dismiss is turning yourself into one of the stupid people.
This is bad advice that no one could possibly follow.
> Look at the current research, listen to people who devoted their careers to studying this, make up your own mind.
Do you honestly do this with every single belief you have? Even every single controversial belief? Have you looked, yourself, into whether the world is flat? Whether the 9/11 conspiracy theories are true? Whether crop circles were created by aliens? These are all absurd conspiracy theories, but I assume most people don't know the "up to date" research on any of them, or what people who have "devote their careers" to research them say.
And those are incredibly common and well known to be false theories.
You have to take some things on faith to at least some degree - though to be clear, by "on faith" I mean "on faith of people you trust", which should really start with professional scientists etc. Also, it's totally fine to just say "I have no actual idea" about most things, and just go with what your current understanding of the status-quo position is.
> Even every single controversial belief?
Yes.
> Have you looked, yourself, into whether the world is flat? Whether the 9/11 conspiracy theories are true? Whether crop circles were created by aliens?
Yes.
I think that link is only there when the fluoride levels are extremely high. See https://parentdata.org/fluoride-drinking-water/ for a good overview of the data
> Everyone else can get enough fluoride from modern toothpastes, or regular dentist treatments.
The advantage of putting it in water is that it ensures all children get it, not just the children whose parents can and do make sure they brush their teeth and go to the dentist.
So everyone else's kids have to have a lower IQ because of that?
Bad parents are gonna be bad parents.
Agree, my biggest issue is often where they source the fluoride and whether they test it. We found out in my (liberal) hometown that they were actually sourcing some derivative which has no human studies.
Given that everyone gets enough in toothpaste I just don’t see the reason to keep doing it, too much can go wrong. It’s kind of a strange mass medication that I’m not sure the government needs to be involved in.
What was the derivative?
> The idea is to remove fluoride from water and advise pregnant women to use fluoride-free toothpaste.
What most people don't understand here are the levels of fluoride being ingested. You can very easily remove all fluoride from your water with a relatively cheap RO system. But the recommendation to use "fluoride-free toothpaste" is just plain misinformation.
The reason is that you don't eat toothpaste. And even when adults ingest small amounts of toothpaste, again, the amount of fluoride is basically beyond negligible. Fluoride can both be applied to teeth as a varnish and/or consumed in drinking water. Using a flouride-free toothpaste can oftentimes do more damage than good because of SLS in those alternatives and because those alternatives often have abrasives that do far more harm than good. It's amazing people will recommend a product that may likely be worse because they have no domain expertise. So, yes, people should talk to their Dentist about these things and ask questions of them vs the Internet.
Really the downside to removing fluoride from city water is that low income families will be worse off with respect to dental related issues compared to more well off families that spend time instilling dental hygiene and preventative care for their kids. As you mentioned most people who have decent oral hygiene get enough flouride.
Where we live we have well water. Fluoride in the water isn't a concern, and if it was in our drinking water it generally wouldn't be consumed because of the water filtration anyway.
Source: spouse is a DDS.
My anecdotal experience says that using fluride-free biomine toothpaste makes my tooth highly sensitive than using a good ol' Colgate. Now, I use it only twice or thrice per month randomly.
Whether this is true or not, it's absolutely not why they banned it.
They banned it as part of the culture war. That's 100% of the reason. "The libs" want it, so it must be banned.
It is trivial today to get whatever level of fluoride is recommended for dental health, via toothpaste. So there is no compelling need to fluoridate as there exist viable alternatives to achieve the same that fluoridation is for any other purpose than dental health.
In the USA, dental care is not covered by public insurance, and is an optional add-on to insurance through one’s employer.
So without addressing at all whether fluoridation is effective or safe, there doesn’t seem to be any compelling need to fluoridate public water, and there’s no economic down side for the public if governments choose not to do so.
Given this, why not just leave people alone to make their own choices? If the citizens in a city or state want to fluoridate the public water supply, then do so; if they choose not to, then leave them alone. It’s a free country and voters are grownups; let them choose for themselves.
If you live in a place that chooses the choice you dislike but for some reason fluoridated public water supply is a critical issue for you, either campaign to change it or vote with your feet.
This issue just doesn’t seem important enough to me to spend any effort arguing either way.
> This issue just doesn’t seem important enough to me to spend any effort arguing either way.
Your comment is well-stated, and in the spirit of a free and liberal society. The problem—not with your argument, but with the world—is that today there seems to be literally no issue unimportant enough not to argue about, or use as the battlefield for an unending ideological proxy war. My guess is that few of the people arguing this issue on HN have strong feelings about flouride qua flouride, but have strong feelings about the kinds of people they believe oppose or support the use of flouride in water, and this notion is what they're really railing against.
This rings true for my gut reaction. The family and acquaintances in my life who have been up in arms against fluoride for years now are actual neo nzs (like “deport all non whites”, “you-know-who controls america”, “superiority of the white race” level).
So my instinct is to really be afraid of this anti-fluoride wave, even tho practically I don’t care one way or another.
I think one thing you're not considering (especially when you say we should vote with our feet) is poverty. It’s true that fluoride toothpaste is widely available, but for people in poverty, of which there are millions in our country, basic hygiene items like toothpaste and a toothbrush aren’t guaranteed. Neither is it guaranteed that everyone has a perfect daily brushing habit like the dentist tells us; there are people who don't brush every day, or even every week.
You talked about dental care not being covered by public insurance — is it not worth considering that some basic level of dental care is already being applied to the country via fluoridation? It's a minimal, cost-effective way to prevent tooth decay at scale. Fluoridated water is one of the few dental protections available to everyone regardless of their income.
If you're not brushing your teeth, periodontitis will get you; the resulting bone decay will cause your teeth will fall out. But sure, great, the water was fluoridated, so I guess it's nice that those now-missing teeth are free of caries?
there are people who own a toothbrush but do not purchase toothpaste. money is not something everyone has and when you start having to choose between certain things, tough choices get made.
I really don't feel like you're interpreting my comment in good faith. Do you really think I was arguing that poor people literally never brush their teeth, and every single poor person in the country will eventually suffer from periodontitis? If you read my comment again, I'm sure you could find a way to engage in better faith.
I don't believe there's a single person in the USA that's so poor they can't pay $3 for toothpaste every 3 months. I also believe that having such a low personal hygiene where you don't brush your teeth altogether, even if you drink water with fluoride, will have terrible results anyway for your teeth anyway.
I'm completely sure that any people that don't brush their teeth is just because they are too lazy to even bother.
This trope of justifying everything with "but there are millions of poor people in the USA" is really tiresome.
It's not that they can't afford a $3 toothpaste, it is the environment they are in that makes it hard to prioritize things like this. It is the education and the overall life quality (or the lack there of) that causes this problem.
Trivial is what we have now. Taking fluoride from the water means people will have to spend extra time and money on fluoride and dental treatments. When I viewed it, your comment appeared directly after this one (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43524171), which talks about a town in Canada that voted to abandon fluoride , saw worse health outcomes, and then voted to reinstate it. This tells us that fluoride is not trivially available to people, and taking it away from them enriches corporations while making people less healthy.
So you’re saying that forcing a treatment on people that don’t want it, is a fair price to pay to reduce inconvenience for others?
I’m not sure what your anecdote proves because I’m wholly in support of a polity being able to make that decision.
I was responding to this point:
I also agree that people should be able to make decisions like this, but they should be aware that one of the results of these kinds of efforts could be that everyone gets less healthy, rather than everyone stays at the same level of health with less cost.Presumably when they voted to get rid of fluoride in the water in Calgary, they didn't do so expecting the outcome would be that people in their town would be less healthy overall. Nonetheless, that was the outcome of their vote.
The anecdote shows that it's not trivial, because when the fluoride in the water went away, people were not able to trivially replace it, leading to worse health outcomes. Ultimately people found too high of a cost, seeing as that they reversed the decision.
Sadly it took a decade for them to realize their mistake. I worry people today are making the same mistake, and we will reverse it in a decade after health outcomes are shown to have worsened.
> via toothpaste.
I wonder how many people really brush their teeth on a regular basis.
> either campaign to change it or vote with your feet.
I imagine that campaigning to change it requires notifying people there is a problem, and getting it into the news and spreading that news.
> I wonder how many people really brush their teeth on a regular basis.
Whatever the number is it's not appropriate for the state to medically intervene on their behalf.
Why not?
Perhaps, sadly, because if the State doesn't have to pick up the costs in health care, as in large parts of the developed world, then they lose their incentive to be proactive in addressing health issues.
In countries with some form of universal health care, simple proactive health interventions can save the State large amounts of money.
In theory health insurance in the US has the same incentive. But it's cheaper to deny preventative care and then deny or minimize or cap coverage later on.
Why is a one-size-fits-all state intervention that assumes or targets the least responsible people appropriate?
Why is it appropriate especially in light of many people actively opposing the intervention?
These are questions about what is the proper relationship between the state and the citizen.
And they are a litmus test for current political belief bifurcation in the US.
Sadly people that don’t brush are probably not drinking plain water either.
I was thinking the same thought- maybe we should fluoridate Brawndo :-)
Thats not really true. I had problems brushing during my childhood, because most toothpastes triggered my gag reflex, but I mostly drank tap water.
Your indifference is based on some core assumptions that are false. In reality, 1) Fluoride in water works in addition to fluoride in toothpaste to protect our teeth - rather than two highly concentrated events of reminieralization, fluoriated water reminieralizes the teeth throughout the day. 2) There is a strong economic downside to ceasing fluoridation: Fluoridation saves millions of dollars that otherwise would be spent on dental bills by the public - https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/abs/10.1377/hlthaff.2016.0... - shows cost savings ratio of twenty dollars for every. dollar invested in reduced treament costs. This remains apt: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7164347/ 3) The best way to preserve choice is to maintain fluoridation. People cannot choose to fluoridated their own water system - they can choose to live in unfluoridated areas, use filters that remove fluoride, or otherwise avoid the tap water. 4) Removing fluoridation means acces to fluoride becomes much more difficult and expensive. The reason fluoridation is so cost effective is that it is delivered through the public water system - a community resource. Bottled fluoridated water is more expensive than gasoline. It is also less regulated and less available in the U.S.A.
In general it's some weird relic of medieval view on dentists not being medical professionals but someone akin to barbers. It shouldn't exits but it persists.
That’s going to go poorly. A Canadian city removed fluoride from water in 2011 and reversed that decision 10 years later. There’s hard data on the effects and they’re not good [0].
[0] https://www.npr.org/2024/12/13/nx-s1-5224138/calgary-removed...
The study [1] that's based on seems pretty typical, and is precisely what drives skepticism towards these policies. The differences for permanent teeth were not significant. The paper claimed this may be because "7-year-olds have not had the time to accumulate enough permanent dentition caries experience for differences to have become apparent." The differences in temporary teeth had a deft (decay, extracted, filled teeth) of 66.1% in Calgary (no fluoride) and 54.3% in Edmonton (fluoridated).
So you're looking at a small positive improvements in dental outcomes, for what may be a permanent decline to IQ. That's obviously not a trade I think anybody would make, so the real issue is not whether or not it improves dental outcomes but whether it's having measurable effects on IQ as we have seen in other studies. [2] I don't understand why a study operating in good faith wouldn't also pursue this question in unison, or in fact as the primary question. I think relatively few people outright doubt the dental benefits of fluoride, but rather are concerned about the cost we may pay for such.
[1] - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cdoe.12685
[2] - https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/whatwestudy/assessments/noncancer/...
In the 2nd study that shows correlation between fluoride and lower IQ in children, the water had twice as much fluoride as the recommended amount in the US (1.5 mg/L vs 0.7 mg/L).
The only reason for lack of concrete statements on the 0.7 level was a lack of data, owing largely to US political culture (1.5 is the World Health Organization 'safe' limit). Not long ago fluoride stuff was considered a 'conspiracy theory' which greatly deters meaningful scientific research on the topic. This is in part because of social reasons (most people don't want to be perceived as 'fringe') and in part because it results in funding for such research drying up. For that matter even IQ studies themselves are borderline given the US political culture.
So for instance of the 19 low risk-of-bias studies, exactly 0 came from the US. 10 were in China, 3 were in Mexico, 2 in Canada, 3 in India, and 1 in Iran. 18 of those 19 studies found a significant reduction in IQ that corresponds strongly with increases in fluoride (the outlier was in Mexico). With the current administration we'll certainly be seeing funding for such studies in the US and so there should be much more high quality data on the 0.7 level forthcoming. But in general this is a major problem that needs solving. Exploring the breadths of science, including the fringes, should not require an activist political administration.
There are natural experiments where the correlation between IQ and lower amounts of fluoride can be studied. For example in Israel, until 2014, the fluoride level was 0.8-1.0 mg/L depending on the region but starting in 2014 water is no longer fluoridated (naturally occurring fluoride level is in the 0.1-0.3 mg/L range for the vast majority of the population) so the data should be there, it's just a matter of collecting it. Some countries can provide data for the opposite natural experiment (adding fluoride in recent years).
To me, using the 1.5 mg/L doesn't tell anything about lower levels but it does make me interested in seeing such study whereas before I'd have just dismissed it.
For that matter even IQ studies themselves are borderline given the US political culture.
This isn't remotely true; it's just something people say on message boards.
This might have been a viable argument a decade ago because these rules were implicit and not explicit. But as of 2022 they've become explicit. [1] IQ is distributed dramatically differently in different groups, which makes it difficult to meaningfully study in the US because, as Nature now puts it, "Although academic freedom is fundamental, it is not unbounded... Science has for too long been complicit in perpetuating structural inequalities and discrimination in society..."
This is why meaningful studies on IQ are basically dead in the US and similarly why we were one of last countries to confirm the absolutely critical reversal of the Flynn Effect. I think the political tide started to turn really hard after the decades long Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study ended up definitively proving the opposite of what it intended. [2]
[1] - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01443-2
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption...
You should tell that to all the researchers publishing work in this field!
Most working in the field in the US are doing so only due to an effort to undermine it, not study it. Otherwise - they aren't getting published, at least not by the traditionally prestigious journals. Here [1] is a search in reverse chronological order from Nature for studies with the terms IQ and intelligence. The exact demarcation mark is difficult to find, but I do think 1996 is a reasonable indicator. In any case the difference is plainly visible.
I particularly like their trend of publishing editorials with ledes like, "We are leading Nature on a journey to help decolonize research and forge a path towards restorative justice and reconciliation." How can that not make you cringe? People are going to look back at this as the equal but opposite of phrenology. Or perhaps we've had our own Al-Ghazali [2] moment and people will look back at this era as an inflection point in science shifting from one culture to another.
[1] - https://www.nature.com/search?q=iq+intelligence&journal=natu...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ghazali
So the problem isn't that the science is being done, it's that the results are challenging conclusions you've already drawn? At least we're clear on what the issue is. The work I'm talking about has nothing about "decolonization" in it, but lots on GWAS and population stratification statistics.
On the contrary, I think the one and only thing that really enabled such widespread advances in science over the past few centuries was the same thing that initially enabled such for the Greeks - people were able to pursue things with near to no limitations, no taboo, no dogma. And it seems that perhaps such things are inherently liminal in nature. The Greeks would then go to on to execute perhaps the greatest thinker in humanity's history for wrongthink, and we ourselves are already well into the times of where not only is there taboo and dogma, but it's even overtly stated.
When you get into population stratification issues you're already again flirting with taboo depending on what is being studied. So yeah - low sample sized, poorly controlled, correlation exclusive GWAS studies are the gold standard in genetics publications. I'm so completely surprised that such, alongside the rusty hacksaw that's CRISPR, failed to live up to even a zillionth of their 'potential'.
Explain the point you just tried to make re: stratification.
Any characteristic being studied whose presence or absence would be seen as socially negative sense is going to be walking a very fine line if it turns out to be associated (or not) with certain subgroups because then you're right back to, in Nature's terms "[being] complicit in perpetuating structural inequalities and discrimination in society."
The most ridiculous part is that we have an alternative way to apply fluoride without intaking it. It's called toothpaste. But for some reason people act like Utah is banning vaccine.
Using toothpaste with fluoride can be effective when used regularly as part of dental hygiene. What percentage of the population is going to do this? I've encountered grade school children who have never owned a toothbrush.
Can you answer your own question?
Unfortunately, hard data is not acceptable. This is how it works for the current administration:
All previous data is ignored because of political reasons.
Teeth to slowly rot in heads.
Sometime in the 2030s, local voters will notice they have very bad teeth.
Locals will debate if adding fluoride is going to make teeth great again.
I don't think it's about hard data and optimization of health, but rather bodily autonomy.
I'm sure there are plenty of chemicals that could be forcibly put in the drinking supply that, based on current scient, would be beneficial for the public. But I would still be skeptical. Sell me these substances in my food or toothpaste, but don't put it in my drinking water by default.
It's also worth noting about 3% of western Europe has fluorinated so let's not pretend like this is unprecedented
Many places in Europe have high levels of fluoride in their water naturally. In fact many of them are likely getting far too much fluoride.
Also realistically, if people cared about bodily autonomy cars would've been banned immediately thanks to the amount of particulates and local pollution produced causing far more adverse health effects.
If a state wants to ban cars it should be free to do so. I think the benefits outweigh the costs and no one would choose to live there.
Also important to note no one is banning flouride. They're preventing it from being put in the drinking water. The equivalent would be if cars were distributed upon arriving to the state.
The state is taking the rights away from the municipalities. Why not leave it up to the local people? No one was forcing local towns to fluoridate their water.
But municipalities that chose to do so would be taking the choice away from each individual.
I don't know enough to form an opinion about whether Utah's new policy is good or bad, but it is clearly on the side of individual freedom. (of course that's not the only concern)
I would say that it's not on the side of individual freedom but the will of the state. It's easier to build a local coalition than a state wide one. Democracy has costs but they're usually lessened when you're going down to the local levels. Sure an individual may not get to choose everything (such as zoning laws) but zoning laws are best managed by the municipality and not at the state nor federal level.
Imagine if 70% of Salt Lake City wants this but can't because of people living hundreds of miles away. Not sure if that's a huge win.
> Imagine if 70% of Salt Lake City wants this but can't because of people living hundreds of miles away. Not sure if that's a huge win.
That 70% can use floride toothpaste or mouthwash. What happens to the 30% who don't want it in your scenario?
Democracies have costs. Unless you expect 100% of people to agree on everything, then you have to accept that the minority should accept certain outcomes. The smaller the group that chooses, the better the majority. The more likely that you personally will be able to make a change.
Local is better than State. State is better than Federal. If this was going from the federal level to the state, I would agree that it's a win for personal liberty. Unfortunately it's local going to the state level. If a water district of 100,000 people all want this, they simply can't do it. It doesn't seem fair that people who won't be impacted get to decide.
> Local is better than State. State is better than Federal.
I agree. When issues require collective action, it should be decided at the smallest capable level.
In this case, the smallest capable level is the individual. To extend your comparison: individual is better than local.
This _isn't_ an issue that requires collective action; people can treat their own teeth with fluoride or take fluoride supplements.
I assume you hold the same consistent viewpoint on say, Abortion, correct?
Yes, municipality is better than state which is better than federal government. The same viewpoint with gun laws, taxation, regulation, etc. It's easier for me to move a few miles to find like minded people than it is for me to move hundreds of miles to leave a state or thousands to leave the my country.
Personally I see states as an artifact of the 20th century. Why can't municipalities govern themselves? Why shouldn't my city be able to leave my state and join another. States made sense before the internet and communication was difficult. Now they're just a middle man without a lot of value.
If eastern towns of California don't want to be grouped together with San Francisco or Los Angeles: why should they be forced to be? Because someone in the 18th or 19th century determined it?
The equivalent would be if I'm forced to have a government funded road with cars just past my front yard.
Is one due the right to potable water at a tap at their home? Or is purified water a service offered by the government as one source of many available to the us population?
Are you not allowed to pay for bottled water instead of paying your local utility for drinking water?
The bodily autonomy argument seems bad to me because you are buying water from the government when you could buy water from any other source instead.
Is the argument that the government water is too convenient and so it should be unfiltered? Who is to say that filtering out poop is not infringing on my right to consume unfiltered water?
Fluoride was introduced late enough in Zimbabwe that many of my childhood adults easily remembered life before it. There were many horror stories about the general state of teeth prior.
That being said, your dentist can apply fluoride to your teeth (boggles the mind why insurance won't pay the $50), and flouride toothpaste is still much more common than not. It's probably not needed in the water supply for dental purposes.
That being said, what are the other fringe benefits: such as microbe control?
The city of Houston has stopped adding fluoride to water but allows natural fluoride levels to exist[0]. We are going on year 6 and the only thing we have noticed is harder water.
There is probably more nuance to both stories tho.
[0] https://houstonherald.com/2018/11/lindsey-and-long-win-count...
All the evidence in that article is based on what a politician thinks. "And I think another meta study came out also".
The actual high quality evidence shows that water fluorination has minimal impact on tooth health in 2025: https://www.cochrane.org/news/water-fluoridation-less-effect...
I was thinking of this study:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cdoe.12215
Perhaps more could be done. The situation is complex because of several compounding factors for sure. There are European countries that have no water fluoridation and better oral health outcomes than in North America.
Regardless, there’s 10 years where a city in North America turned off water fluoridation and we have results of that decision to study.
I'm skimming the results, but it looks like adult teeth had less cavities when they turned the fluoride off...and that was not observed in Edmonton where they left the fluoride on the whole time.
"For all tooth surfaces among permanent teeth (Table 1a), there was a statistically significant decrease in Calgary, for the overall mean DMFS, which was not observed in Edmonton."
Based on their data, you could argue that fluoride increases cavities in adults... I'm not making that argument. I agree with you in that I think confounders are at play and the difference attributed to fluorinated water isn't as large.
People will use this study to take about the rampant tooth decay in Calgary, ignoring that there is roughly as much decay in Edmonton which had the fluoride on the whole time.
Hawaii does not add fluoride to their water. Utah may be the first to out-right ban it, but there are quite a few local communities and cities that opt-out of adding it to their drinking water.
https://chatgpt.com/share/67e8572d-c5f4-8000-9393-c2e894c922...
The US is, according to Wikipedia, among a small minority of countries in which a majority of people drink fluoridated water. Various European countries have discontinued doing so. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation>
Fluoridation, imperial measurement, 20% tips, taxes added at the register, and circumcision are the weirdest things Americans think everyone does.
They're doing both tipping and untipping.
> 20% tips
Is this real?
Yep. My favorite thing is when I am not even at a restaurant and I'm being asked to tip a retail worker making well above minimum wage. As a former bartender who made $2.65US an hour and relied on tips for my "paycheck" each week, seeing this new "tipping everyone" trend is like a slap in the face.
Bottom line, if your business can't afford to pay its people a living wage, then it can't afford to operate.
Two of the most hilarious things I've seen are tips at self-serve kiosks, and tips where you carry the food to the person behind the counter. Tipping them for ringing up an item..
At a corner store I frequent, they recently changed POS systems, and the new ones show a tipping screen. The person there always quickly dismisses it; I think they haven't figured out how to disable it, and are a little embarrassed that the machine is asking you to tip for just ringing up your items.
(Well, they also make espresso drinks and made-to-order deli sandwiches, so I guess it's appropriate to tip if you order those.)
>(Well, they also make espresso drinks and made-to-order deli sandwiches, so I guess it's appropriate to tip if you order those.)
I disagree. I tip for delivery, and for table service. Not for a service that does not require leaving the counter.
Sorry for the late reply, but I'm wondering if you can explain why you tip for delivery?
In my area, pizza delivery drivers (read: not DoorDashers, etc. I am not sure what they make since I refuse to use those services) make about $12 - $15/hour and get paid for mileage (usually between $0.50 - $0.62 per mile.) I'm not seeing a reason to tip them. They are making well above minimum wage in my State, unlike the restaurant servers/bartenders that only just barely crested $4/hour as of 2025. The latter is in a position to rely on tips, the former is far from it.
I ask because we don't seem to have an established "hard line" on when tipping is appropriate in the United States, and when it is not. This extremely fuzzy understanding is allowing companies like DoorDash, coffee shops, etc to under pay their staff by off-loading part of the cost to the customer, which makes your $7 latte cost $10, or whatever. It's steamy bullshit and needs to be shoveled into the bin.
If we had a hard line on when tipping is justified, we'd quickly see a change in the other direction. I've always felt that the hard line should be "if you are making less than minimum wage, then tipping is justified." That's it. No soft maybes, no washy-washy justifications.
That being the case, if a barista (avg $15/hour in the US) is not happy _without_ the tips, then they have two options: demand more from their employer, or find a different job that pays better. Either way, the employer is left to consider either raising wages to keep people satisfied, or doing the same just to keep people in the door and stay in business. The barista is, in essence, the face of the company. They do the work the customer sees, which makes them important to the sustainability of the company. Ergo, the company needs to put more resources in the barista's pocket to ensure quality work.
It sort of blows my mind why everyone else in the US does not think this way, but I have tried to dissect my own stance on tipping (from the standpoint of having spent nearly a decade working front-of-the-house in restaurants), and I'm really having trouble poking holes in my own logic. So, I'm always interested to hear other people's takes on why they tip the way they do.
Imagine it’s raining, or they come really fast. Even if not so, it is always expected to tip the person doing delivery. That’s just the custom, like tipping in restaurant or tipping the bartender is the custom.
> it's always expected/that's just the custom
This is the problem. You basically said "we do it like this because that's the way we've always done it," which is the weakest form of justification for anything.
Rain, snow, etc...do you tip the person who delivers your mail? They do it in an LLV (a rather treacherous vehicle with little to no climate control) or on foot, but nobody tips them. When the pizza delivery person applied for the job, they did so knowing they would have to deliver in bad weather, but somehow we reach the conclusion that the responsibility of making sure that driver is being paid adequately for their risk and efforts is shifted to the customer, rather than than their employer.
Now, I should clarify that despite my years of restaurant service where my $2.65/hour paycheck existed nominally for the sole purpose of covering taxes (hence, my "take home" pay coming directly from the customers to my pocket), that I am in the camp of abolishing tipping altogether. Raise the wages of all service workers to a livable wage, which all these companies can certainly afford, and we'd be done with it. But I know that's a huge leap, so we need to take baby steps to get there.
Having a well-defined notion of which positions should be tip-based and which should not is the first baby step.
You'll probably enjoy this scene from Reservoir Dogs: https://youtu.be/M4sTSIYzDIk
Great film, but bad scene, honestly. The arguments it makes are intended to make Mr Pink look like the pseudo-intellectual a-hole of the group, rather than be the social commentary on capitalism, labor relations and whose responsibility employee compensation actually is or should be, which is at the crux of any good discussion about the appropriateness of tipping.
I guess what I am getting at with my other comments is that we do not have a clear understanding of said appropriateness, and thus, we, the consumer, along side the food service worker, are generally taken advantage of by the companies that perpetuate the idea while said companies are off the hook for labor costs.
Now, before someone (if anyone is still following this thread) chimes in with "but if the restaurants pay the bartenders/servers a full wage, the food and drinks would be way more expensive!" I am here to tell you "travel more." I have been to many other countries where tipping is not at all a thing, and the food costs about the same as it does in the US.
When you walk into a restaurant in the US, you're getting ripped off. The dish you just paid $16US for cost them about $3 to make, including wage. It's not like the cooks are prepping one dish at a time, or the servers are only taking one table at a time...not to mention most restaurants in the US are using frozen, prepared ingredients that they are really just heating up or re-hydrating. Overhead costs like electricity and rent? A drop in the bucket compared to what small businesses have to deal with. The staff is making bare-minimum wages as it is while the parent companies and investors are making bank. That money from your $16US meal goes up, but very little of it actually comes back down.
Tipping exists because greed at the top exists and its unfair to both food service workers and the customers, but we've been at it so long that it's been normalized. And now it's spreading to other industries, like retail and online sales.
Yes, it's pretty common. It's also common for businesses where customers tip to underpay their employees on the expectation that they'll make it up with tips. It's legal to do this in many jurisdictions.
As an American, I wish we didn't do this, but it's a collective action problem that's very hard to solve.
What exactly is the definition of "underpay" here? Back when my wife was a server, it seemed like a cheat code to the service industry - she was making way more money waiting tables for $2.65/hr + tips than she had made at any other job she'd had (something like $18-20/hr 15 years ago)
In college I worked at a Chili's and made anywhere from $15-20 an hour in a busy location, which was decent wages for a college student at the time.
> What exactly is the definition of "underpay" here?
> $2.65/hr+
Are they agreeing to pay employees one amount, then underpaying them? Why would an employee keep working if they don't get paid the agreed-on salary?
The restaurant pays them tipped wage which is a lot lower, but the employee more than makes up for it from all the tips
Correct. bruckie has never actually worked as a server; otherwise he would know that tipping in the US is hugely beneficial to waiters, bartenders, etc., even with the legally allowed lower minimum wage. This is why tipping has never gone away through legislative means despite no shortage of waiters and bartenders in the populace, and why the occasional restaurant that proudly announces that it is a "no-tipping" establishment, and gets the requisite amount of slavering coverage in the usual virtue-signaling subreddits, never stays open long.
My dislike of tipping isn't to help the "poor servers" (and other employees partially compensated via tips). You're correct that I've never been a server, but I've had several friends and roommates who have been, and I'm aware of how it works. The good ones make (relatively) a lot of money; the bad ones sometimes don't, and usually find a different job pretty quickly. (I totally see how mentioning the lower minimum wage muddled my point, though.)
The reason I wish we didn't tip is because I think the list price should reflect the true cost of whatever I'm buying. I think that is more honest, encourages healthy competition, and is a pleasant consumer experience.
I was really glad when the DOT forced airlines to include taxes and fees in ticket prices in 2012, and wish there were a similar law/regulation that applied to all commerce. (And yes, I realize this is hard, given the incredible complexity of U.S. tax laws in a bazillion different—and often overlapping—jurisdictions.)
One thing that annoys me is that some states, like California, don't have a tipped minimum wage. (Well, we do, it's just set to the same number as the non-tipped minimum.) And yet we're still expected to tip. I guess the real problem is that it's expensive to live in CA, and our minimum wage needs to be hiked up quite a bit.
One of the many reasons I left the USA. Too bad US-Americans are so used to tipping 20% they even do it when traveling... giving the rest of us a reputation as being suckers.
Tipping is why you left the US? Really?
Yes, one of the MANY cultural reasons. One less thing I have to think about when paying for food. There's honestly too many reasons to list: cost, safety, food, transportation, work life balance, education, being near family, and to see more of the world.
Sounds like the “one of” is doing a lot of work there
You said one of the main reasons which is really silly.
Tipping isn't the reason I left, but after some years away, it's in the top 10 or so reasons I'm unlikely to move back.
It's pretty nice to go to a cafe, pay a fair price, and not be guilted into 20% extra by a PoS machine.
> It's pretty nice to go to a cafe, pay a fair price, and not be guilted into 20% extra by a PoS machine.
Are you worried the machine will think less of you if you don't tip? Where does guilt come into it?
"Guilt" is an exaggeration, but the human behind the machine might care. It's a tiny inconvenience all things considered, and more of a principal than a practical issue. It helps tip the scale of where I'd rather live.
That is very silly.
Yes, for nearly any restaurant this is the unspoken recommendation, and sometimes enforced automatically if your group is larger than 6-8. Source: I am an American.
When i read it now it is ridiculous how high the tip rate is. Yes 18-25% a lot of them tip on the taxed total bill which is bananas
I kid you not, majority of Americans (myself included) feel some level of guilt pushing the 15% button.
depends on where it's at. Sit down? I will always tip. Pickup up at the restaurant? nope.
Yes, at least in NYC. And you get to tip in coffee places too, even when your coffee is to go. The card payment device (whatever they are called) gives you options such as 20%, 40%, 60% when you try to pay.
for some people it is. Maybe you'll become a believer when you realize that waiters wages are only around $2.35 an hour plus tips. Some states require that wait staff make -at least- federal minimum wage ($7.50? or so). Most do quite a bit better than that in all but the worst restaurant jobs. Not really a living wage tho. Some people do well on tips in upper crust restaurants, and often bartenders have enough turnover to do pretty well too.
In Canada, these days, even Subway expects a tip. It is insane.
Yeah the lowest option on some point of sale systems now is 20.
Yeah, this is one of those places where because RFK Jr took the anti- stand there's an understandable assumption that it's more nutty anti-science stuff, but it's much less clear cut when it comes to fluoridation. Europe has much lower rates than the US, which is an outlier on these stats only approached by Australia, and before Utah the major high profile anti-fluoride stance was made by Portland:
https://www.wweek.com/portland/blog-30229-portland-voters-so...
To the extent this is a polarized left-right issue, it's only recently and only because everything is polarized right now.
I'd be happier if that broken-but-correct-2x-a-day guy banned HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup) instead. It is my personal hypothesis that it is the cause of 'sugar cancer' (general cases of bad sugars / imbalances of sugars in the body), including Diabetes.
Sucrose is 50% fructose, 50% glucose. HFCS has from 42-55% fructose (there are grades), the rest being glucose (well some 25% of HFCS is water, but simplifying to the nutritive parts)
In the body it's literally all the same with minor variations in ratios. Indeed, the revered Mexican coke with cane sugar...the sucrose is broken down to component glucose and fructose in the acidic environment [1], exactly as happens with HFCS variants, and it would have been the moment it hit your digestive tract anyways.
There is zero scientific justification for the weird focus on HFCS. Yes, glucose and grossly excessive amounts of fructose are a serious problem. Especially in forms that rapidly get absorbed and go off like a glucose bomb -- our bodies are not adapted to the extremely rapid intake of glucose forms of food we eat now, including ultra-processed foods fill with refined carbs.
The #1 source of glucose in most diets is white breads, rices and so on. White flour is 60-80% starch, while white rice pushes 90% starch. Starch is strings of glucose molecules, and indeed enzymes turn that starch to free glucose almost immediately when eaten. So from a glucose perspective flour is much worse than an equal amount of sugar.
And of course nutritive sweeteners in all their forms should be avoided. But table sugar isn't more wholesome or better than HFCS.
[1] - Fun video about the sucrose in Mexican coke - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY66qpMFOYo
Interesting hypothesis, is it based on anything specific? I think refined/added sugars in general are probably something best avoided, but admittedly still eat plenty. The idea that one sugar is materially worse than another feels off, but I can't quite put my finger on why.
Some sugars ingress faster than others to the bloodstream, causing higher insulin spikes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycemic_index
AFAIK, HFCS is one of the worst offenders.
The GI of sugar (sucrose) and HFCS is largely the same. Indeed, the HFCS-55 used in colas actually has less glucose and more fructose, and fructose actually doesn't lead to a blood sugar spike (or, more correctly, a much lower impact), leading to HFCS-55 having a lower glycemic index. HFCS and sugar are both just combinations of glucose and fructose molecules.
HFCS is not worse than sugar unless you're consuming such an outrageous amount that the fructose leads to a fatty liver (which does happen). But if you're consuming that much HFCS, it's only a small amount more of sucrose to yield the same outcome, as of course both have loads of fructose.
The one viable argument to vilify HFCS is simply that it's so convenient and inexpensive (courtesy of massively subsidized corn production) that it led to many more products having added sugars. But people who carefully pour over ingredients looking for HFCS, but treat sugar as wholesome, are usually operating on ignorance.
Not a chance that will happen, given the corn production of America. We have the most productive land in the world for growing maize, and Lord knows we’ll find shit to do with it.
We grow lots of corn because it is very heavily subsidized and insured by the US government. At scale you are guaranteed to make a profit, even during bad weather years.
You can avoid HFCS without any cost. Avoiding fluoridated city water is costly.
Have you ever tried to purchase things in a US supermarket that lack HFCS? Chances are good you're looking at raw meats and vegetables and the like for a high effort meal made out of relatively high cost components.
I don't buy anything with HFCS at US supermarkets. I get all sorts of prepared foods: bread, yogurt, crackers, sweets, cereals (and a lot of more basic things to make meals with).
sugar is as bad for you as HFCS, avoid both except in small amounts. Your taste buds will adjust
Fluoridated water was already a plot point in Kubrick's Strangelove from 1964.
Using certain family members as a personal rubric, fluoridated water has been a right-left issue for at least 2.5 decades. I think it’s been pretty polarized for longer, though it may have taken a long time to gain steam in mainstream “discourse”.
I'm not sure you can use personal anecdotes to come to any conclusions about broad trends. To look at some actual data, I took the 2008 and 2024 election results and compared them with fluoridation rates. The split is pretty even:
The top 10 most fluoridated states went 5/5 Rep/Dem in 2008 and 6/4 Rep/Dem in 2024. These were Kentucky, Minnesota, Illinois, North Dakota, Virginia, Georgia, South Dakota, Maryland, Ohio, and South Carolina. Hardly a blue wall.
The bottom 10 least fluoridated states with 6/4 Rep/Dem in 2008 and 6/4 Rep/Dem in 2024. These were Hawaii, New Jersey, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Louisiana, Alaska, Utah, New Hampshire, and Mississippi. Hardly a red wall.
The bottom three least fluoridated states are all hardcore blue: Hawaii, New Jersey, and Oregon.
I just don't see any evidence here that this has been a left-right polarized issue until this year. The distribution of fluoride by political leanings is just too random.
It's a great demonstration of the granola-to-libertarian pipeline. Jumping the gap in the horseshoe, so to speak.
I was surprised to learn this. "Worldwide, the Irish Republic, Singapore and New Zealand are the only countries which implement mandatory water fluoridation."
I live in New Zealand and my town doesn't put fluoride in the water but it seems like they'll be made to do so fairly soon. I don't really care one way or the other from the point of view of ingesting the stuff, but I do consider it a bit of a waste of money. People who brush with toothpaste don't need this and people who don't are probably drinking too much soda. A more useful thing to do might be to subsidize toothpaste for people who can't / won't buy it for their kids.
> People who brush with toothpaste don't need this and people who don't are probably drinking too much soda
I think every person in my social circles with any kind of illness or disability would be incredibly grateful for fluoridation, and it's not because of drinking too much soda
Yeah fair call. There's always some edge cases which is why I'm not the one making public policy. Although I don't think they sell the policy very well. There would be other ways to spend money for better dental health, NZ really doesn't subsidize dental care much compared to European countries.
Many other places fluoridate salt. There’s many ways to get flourish (toothpaste being the best if you can get people to use it correctly) but the evidence that mass fluoridation of some kind is good for dental health is enormous.
It seems like they could compare states/countries/cities while controlling for other factors (age, income level, etc) to see how well fluoridation works. I'm pretty sure you'll find that fluoridation helps lower the number of cavities, but it's not going to be a slam dunk.
People who want to remove fluoride from the water should visit countries where fluoride is not added and look at people's teeth.
I live in France and it's just so obvious that people grew up without fluoride — even celebrities try to talk without showing their teeth when they're on TV!
I'm all for getting consent in most cases, but sometimes you'd have to be an idiot not to take the obvious win.
It's like we were delivering flakes of gold with the mail and people complained — that's not what mailboxes are for!
You're misattributing: the U.S. has a perfect white teeth culture that doesn't exist elsewhere. Many people outside of the U.S. have healthier but uglier teeth. Fluoride isn't the reason for good/bad teeth inside/outside of the U.S, it's cultural. Many places outside of the U.S. do put fluoride in their water (nationally or regionally) and have "bad" teeth (e.g: England).
People in the U.S. don't have perfect white teeth, they have are cosmetic procedures on their teeth equivalent to liposuction, silicone, botox, hair plugs and/or laminated face.
I think that's exactly what the GP meant when they said "perfect white teeth culture".
Perfect white teeth doesn't mean they're healthy.
What does a white-tooth culture look like specifically? People brush their teeth in France, they have modern dentristy etc.
People don't bleach their teeth much outside the US as far as I know. You can see it especially well with US actors, their teeth looking like the someone photoshopped them to #FFFFFF
Those are actually veneers. They grind down their real teeth into basically fence posts to use as a structure to glue fake teeth on them.
https://davidfisherdds.com/how-long-does-it-take-for-porcela...
Others note the bleaching, which is relatively low cost, but the (purely cosmetic) straightening is probably the more interesting example.
People in the US pay a lot of money to have very straight teeth. You can see this clearly with American celebrities and actors (versus European counterparts), but the culture of cosmetically modifying teeth is very strong all across "middle class" and up America as well.
Way more people having their teeth whitened? Braces being more popular.
Bleaching your teeth, specifically.
US people wear facades to hide their teeth.
*A significant minority of...
While tooth whiteness in the US is often divorced from tooth health, fluoride does add a yellowish tint to your teeth, so the healthiest teeth — those imbued with fluoride — are slightly yellow. (In fact when they first decided to add fluoride to water, one of the questions was just how much they could add before your teeth would turn completely yellow. Health-wise the yellowing was fine, but it was obviously visually unappealing.) Ugly teeth may be due to poor/lack of orthodontia, but it's probably not due to better dental care.
But flakes of gold are not associated with a lower IQ in children.
"The NTP monograph concluded, with moderate confidence, that higher levels of fluoride exposure, such as drinking water containing more than 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter, are associated with lower IQ in children."
https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/whatwestudy/assessments/noncancer/...
So it is also not clear, if the lower concentration typically found also has this effect.
"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."
But the solution of just using (cheap) Fluor in toothpaste to apply the Flour where it should go - to the teeth and not the stomach, sounds smarter to me.
So in other words, 0.7mg/L fluoridated water is also not associated with lower IQ in children. That study did not prove it safe, but it did prove it unsafe, either.
That study did prove, that too much flouride is not good for intelligence.
And there are other sources besides water from the tap, so I don't think it is intelligent to raise the base level, when the option of local applying exists. What is wrong with toothpaste?
Where I live, dental health is good and we don’t have fluorides in the water (we have free, mandatory dental care for children). We recently banned the use of fluorides to make our skis go fast because of the environmental impact.
> even celebrities try to talk without showing their teeth
So fluoride would somehow magically replace braces or teeth whiteners?
Interesting how France does add fluoride to the water (according to Wikipedia) while many other countries aren't.
US is an outlier there, so there is that.
> I live in France and it's just so obvious that people grew up without fluoride
And yet France does not have a dental health crisis so it's just for cosmetic reasons we don't need fluoride
Good thing we have fluoride toothpaste then
Utah has naturally occurring fluoride in their water and some water systems its more than double(2.0mg/l) what they add to prevent dental issues. Why were they fluorinating their water?
https://cascadefamily.com/images/WaterFluoridationLevelsUtah...
Most places in Utah already don't add flouride to water. So why pass a law to ban it?
Virtue signaling.
this is it exactly. See west virginia recently banning artificial coloring. Because MAGA said so, is basically the reason, they were completely unworried about it before it became important to MAGA world by way of RFK
Ok, but then you just say, we have enough naturally occurring fluoride. Adding more is just a waste of money.
Or, toothpaste has enough extra fluoride, adding it to water is just a waste of money.
This is not that. This is the US health system being lead by a bunch of woo-woo people who don’t understand how research works.
I am saying it’s weird to fluoridate water in areas with high levels of naturally occurring fluoride. Also to point out that there is naturally occurring fluoride. If Utah believed fluoride was a health risk, why aren’t they spending tens of millions to filter it out. Or is it just virtue signaling.
> This is the US health system being lead by a bunch of woo-woo people who don’t understand how research works.
The majority of the developed world does not fluoridate their water supply. The US has one of the highest rates of fluoridation in the developed world. Within America, fluoridation rates are highest on the East Coast and in the South, and lowest on the Left Coast.
There’s also fluoride salt added to table salt that is widely used to accomplish the same thing as fluoridating water.
https://www.acffglobal.org/salt-fluoridation/
The people leading the health system are highly credentialed. Moreover, highly credentialed people, in medicine as in all fields, frequently disagree on what studies show, how valid a study is, what it's flaws and limits are, how conclusive it is, and so forth. And the consensus has a long, time honored tradition of being wrong from time to time.
Ultimately, the woo woo people are the ones who rely on someone in a labcoat to tell them whether ingesting government approved (there's your first red flag) synthetic fluoride from industrial byproducts is "necessary".
If it's useful, brushing it onto your teeth and into your gums 56,000 times in your life is probably sufficient, particularly given that we don't know with absolute certainty beyond any shadow of a doubt that the industrial waste options are totally without health consequences. I'll literally just take care of my teeth and cross my fingers over listening to modern medical consensus on a range of topics where I simply trust intuition and common sense more.
That's not how it works. There is an ideal amount of fluoride. If the natural amount is lower more is added. If it's higher the extra is removed.
For me as a European, adding fluoride to water for your teeth is as ridiculous as cutting the foreskin of babies' penis in name of (dubious) "hygienic reasons".
But people get used to it. Specially when they don't get to experience the alternative. Most people rationalise it is a good thing. Stockholm syndrome.
Which part of Europe are you in? Countries in Europe add fluoride to water, salt, milk, and Italy has naturally fluoridated water.
> The European Academy of Pediatric Dentistry (EAPD) recently called water fluoridation "a core component of oral health policy" and adds that salt fluoridation "is suggested when water fluoridation cannot be implemented" due to technical, logistical or political reasons.
https://static.spokanecity.org/documents/citycouncil/interes...
I was thinking exactly the same thing, down to the circumcision thing. This whole discourse gives me the vibe of something the American society has randomly walked on and now is an "it has always been like this".
They also keep passing laws to specifically support burning coal, which is (slightly more credibly) shown to reduce IQ in children exposed to its pollution.
Tremendous boon for the dental industry. Congratulations for everyone involved in getting this through.
The fluoride toothpaste they recommend is far more effective in fighting cavities, but ok
Note that while this may be first state to ban fluoride, it's not the first state to not have fluoride in the water. That would be Hawaii (effectively).
all states were "the first to not have flouride". In 1945 Grand Rapids, MI became the first city in the world to flouridate its water
Strangely, I never see the people demanding we ban fluoride also demand we ban cars, considering the amount of particulates and rubber wheels we inhale as a result of policy, road design and car design. And I can almost guarantee you that's resulting in an actual meaningful drop in IQ and health outcomes as opposed to fluoridating water.
But I guess freedom to pollute matters more than bodily autonomy in terms of mental priority.
>I never see the people demanding we ban fluoride also demand we ban cars,
Perhaps you could take a dive into the youtubes, and find "crash detectives" (Welsh-based, so you may have to put captions on), but none of those professionals check for mouthwash.
Haha, some [police forces] do.
Preventing cavities is far more effective with topical application of fluoride on the teeth, rather than ingestion.
I personally don’t buy the passive health benefit. Even if it’s true, there’s no proof that fluoridated water is superior to topical application.
Not to mention that if we’re going to just roll over and accept stuff in the water for public health reasons, what really should be added are more vitamins, not fluoride. In particular vitamin D
For children developing their “adult teeth” fluoride ingestion strengthens those teeth before they pop out. Topical has no effect obviously since they haven’t surfaced yet.
And for that there is fluoride mouthwash, which again isn’t ingested and would be more effective.
> Regular use of fluoride mouthrinse under supervision results in a large reduction in tooth decay in children's permanent teeth.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6457869/#:~:text=Be...
That doesn’t work because it’s topical. You give kids vitamins to get fluoride into their system to strengthen their developing adult teeth.
Great - so why do we need it in the water then? Not to mention that caries in kids teeth isn't really that relevant anyway since they fall out. Fact is, adult teeth is what matters and topical fluoridation is the most effective way, in addition to brushing and flossing to maintain dental health.
Would love to see evidence to the contrary (ingestion is superior to topical application w.r.t. fluoride).
Where did I say it had to be put in water? I literally said kids should consume vitamins with fluoride. You’re the one making up things about a topic you don’t understand.
You really want to strengthen teeth as they’re developing. It’s critical. Your “fact is” is wrong although you want to do that too. Continue to fortify after they grow in.
May I ask what motivates you to post things here where you clearly have 0 knowledge about a subject and you just write things that sound logically right in your head but are wrong?
My original post says this:
> Preventing cavities is far more effective with topical application of fluoride on the teeth, rather than ingestion.
Since you don't seem to disagree, there's nothing to discuss then. Cheers! Also, it is a fact that fluoride is most effective towards preventing cavities topically. You can Google Scholar this and see for yourself. There's a reason dentists prescribe high-fluoride toothpaste or gel, instead of just saying drink more fluoridated water.
Putting fluoride in water promotes freedom. That sounds crazy, but let me justify it.
If you are poor you can't go anywhere or buy anything. You're not free if you're poor. If you are sick, you may be confined to a hospital bed or not feel good enough to do anything. If you are sick you're not free.
Putting fluoride in water reduces dental costs and incidence of cavities and therefore tooth infections, particularly among societies poorest. Therefore, due to fluoridation in water some people are less sick and have more money and therefore are more free.
The contrasting view is that putting fluoride in water is literally medicating people without their affirmative consent. It is the government forcing you to take a medication. It is coercive and therefore an attack on your freedom to not take medication. It is the government interfering in your life.
The contrast between positive freedom, the freedom to do something, and negative freedom, the freedom from interference in your life, is the core political argument in America right now. Negative freedom, freedom from government interference, is being promoted by those seeking to weaken the government enough to supplant it. People who are poor and sick are likely unable to stand up for themselves or participate in solidarity against authority. This individual issue is relatively small, but you take 100's of issues like this, and the effect is to create a class of people who aren't able to do anything but be obedient workers.
This take has a few problems: Poor people in the US are capable of using fluoride toothpaste and flossing. At least at homeless shelters at outreach things I’ve been to, toothpaste and toothbrushes are freely available. Your argument hinges on them being incapable on the whole and needing a Benevolent But Superior Intelligence to provide an alternative for them.
Second, it completely ignores any debate over effectiveness or side effects. It could well be that fluoride in water is great for teeth but bad for brains. The objections to fluoride in water I’ve seen are more along those lines. Im not clear the validity of those claims but for example anti fluoride advocates don’t typically object to chlorine in water to kill germs. That seems the core issue- without bias from stakeholders, is the benefit of fluoride proven and the risks disproven? It’s hard to answer because a study needs to span many years and exclude many variables.
And in general I think that is what needs to happen with these type debates. Take them _out_ of the sphere of charged political opinion and focus on getting to the objective truth of risks and benefits, then be transparent. People can handle “here are the known pros and cons and what we think that means” over “there are only pros and no cons and if you disagree you hate poor people”
> Second, it completely ignores any debate over effectiveness or side effects. It could well be that fluoride in water is great for teeth but bad for brains.
Except it's not—fluoride in the drinking water concentrations is proven safe and it doesn't affect brains.
> Im not clear the validity of those claims
Thoroughly scientifically debunked. Repeatedly, over decades.
> That seems the core issue- without bias from stakeholders, is the benefit of fluoride proven and the risks disproven? It’s hard to answer because a study needs to span many years and exclude many variables.
No, it's not hard to answer, because all those studies have been done and the results were that fluoride is safe.
> And in general I think that is what needs to happen with these type debates.
What needs to stop happening is people ignoring objective reality just because the results happen to align with the other "team's" position on something.
What needs to stop happening is people ignoring objective reality just because the results happen to align with the other "team's" position on something.
"Out of a population of about three-quarters of a billion, under 14 million people (approximately 2%) in Europe receive artificially-fluoridated water."
The problem I continually see in the USA is the ascription of differences of opinion on [any topic] to America's Great Divide between enlightenment and barbarism. I find it often helpful to just check, what do these policies look like outside of America? It doesn't mean Europe got it right on fluoride, it just suggests against adopting the framing that your POV is 100% objective reality proven beyond doubt by Science™ and no rational person not in the throes of "own the [other team]" bad faith might disagree.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_by_country#...
Fluorinated table salt. Naturally fluorinated water sources. Public healthcare that covers dental
European policy isn't based on modern fluoridation being dangerous, it's based on having alternative systems in place (which vary by country)
In Windsor Ontario, across from Detroit, they took fluoride out of water for nearly a decade before reversing that decision based on results: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/fluoride-water-system...
Maybe Utah will be a place with alternative systems, based on another thread it sounds like they have an interesting Mormon safety net. But I would hope states do pilot tests first at least. If studies show that the historic gap in dental health between fluorinated & unfluorinated communities no longer apply, then that would be data driven policy
But it seems like this policy is based on someone's common sense that you shouldn't put minerals in water
> based on another thread it sounds like they have an interesting Mormon safety net
as long as you're Mormon. Approximately 60% of the state.
It’s iodine in table salt not fluoride. In the US.
Never knew that France fluoridated their salt.
"In Switzerland 85% of domestic salt consumed is fluoridated and 67% in Germany. Salt fluoridation schemes are reaching more than one hundred million in Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Cuba. The cost of salt fluoridation is very low, within 0.02 and 0.05 € per year and capita. Children and adults of the low socio-economic strata tend to have substantially more untreated caries than higher strata. Salt fluoridation is by far the cheapest method for improving oral health. "
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24308394/
(Sea salt and Kosher salt are the salts that aren't fluoridated and iodated in those countries, fancy, more expensive salts, regular table salt- and the salt added in commercial/restaurants has both.)
So sure, you don't need to fluoridate the water, if you fluoridate the salt instead. But you have to do it some way or another. And the US and Canada doesn't, at present fluoridate the salt because we have it in the water. Remove it from some people's water but don't add it to the salt because everyone else has it in the water? Bad combination.
“Dual fortification” is mandatory in Mexico.
>Public healthcare that covers dental
laughts nerviously in Dutch
heh, I feel it, I'm in Canada where oral healthcare is deemed cosmetic. Giving us some 22minutes satire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZsUp-DHMZ4 "do people really need to see & chew?"
That said, WHO does profiles of dental health, providing comparison:
https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/country-profil...
https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/country-profil...
& for my own interest, Canada: https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/country-profil...
Didn't the NDP and Liberals recently pass universal government payer dental coverage in Canada?
It never made sense that dentistry somehow is considered a separate form of healthcare from the rest of your body.
Especially considering researchers are increasingly finding links between oral health and other conditions such as Alzheimer's heart disease. And that preventative dental care is so much cheaper and less invasive than treating major decay when care is delayed.
It’s not universal, but yes there is some coverage for young, old, and disabled people.
https://www.canada.ca/en/services/benefits/dental/dental-car...
Ah yeah with our yearly widening own risk insurance too. Great system… for health insurance companies
yeah what EU country does that? Not Denmark...
Neither Spain apart from under 18 and pulling teeth.
In many US states, Medicaid covers dental. CHIPs, for kids, covers dental in every state.
Look - all for whatever science says is best, but wouldn’t countries with public healthcare also be incentivised to have fluoride in the water to reduce costs/public efficiency of public dental healthcare?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7546136 over half the table salt in France has fluoride
This Nevada health info has an in depth response on page 5 https://dpbh.nv.gov/uploadedFiles/dpbhnvgov/content/Programs...
this is a red herring. Who cares what other people are doing - we should look at the evidence and make decisions based on that.
the evidence can clme from seeing the results of what other people are doing
seeing the results of what other people doing is different from making decisions just because other people are doing it.
themgt quoted the 2% figure to show that the europoors reject fluoride in water, but neglects to mention that tap water often naturally contains significant levels of fluoride already, nevermind other fluoride-fortified foodstuffs.
When you watch any British tv the first thing you notice is teeth indeed.
Indeed. While the UK and the USA have comparable levels of dental health, in US television actors typically require very good (or rather, cosmetically appealing according to local norms) teeth in order to succeed. In the UK, it's less important.
Not just comparable, UK is actually a bit higher. The difference is the NHS doesn't cover anything cosmetic, so they are very healthy teeth but they look rubbish unless you're lucky.
in better condition than American teeth, studies find: https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20150602-do-the-british...
I'm not saying you're wrong, but you made multiple strong claims without a single citation or study link. We could have a better conversation with data to look at. There's a decent (though somewhat biased) review of the debate in [1]. It's worth noting that if you read the linked studies there closely you'll find the truth is, as usual, nuanced. Specifically, that "fluoridation is a population-level caries preventive strategy" [which may or may not be effective at the individual or small community level due to other factors]. I.e., good at the national level for statistically significant reduction of tooth disease incidence, but at less-aggregated levels the confounding factors like diet and how often/well people brush their teeth are going to be bigger determinants of efficacy.
It's also worth nothing that 1) over-fluoridation is pretty bad and can affect poor or malnourished communities (ex, [2]); and 2) there are alternatives to fluoride that may be equally effective with fewer risks at higher concentrations (ex. nano hydroxyapatite).
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2222595/
[2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1064338060067811...
That's a whole lot of words for you acknowledging that I'm right. Fluoridated drinking water, at the appropriate levels, has no effect on IQ.
Would you like to debate the reality of anthropogenic climate change next? This will be another area where any links you dig up will only point to a single conclusion.
> Fluoridated drinking water, at the appropriate levels
Going to hijack this comment to ask about something I've always wondered: how robust are "appropriate" drinking levels to the different things you can reasonably expect people to do with the water? Not all water is simply drunk as is.
For example, I like to make beans in my slow cooker. This involves simmering them for 9 or 10 hours, periodically adding more water. In theory, this will increase the concentration of fluoride because the fluoride doesn't boil off while the water does. I assume, based on how much water I need to keep adding, this could double the fluoride concentration. Is that still appropriate levels? What about a cup that has been left out such that a lot of the water evaporates? That won't increase the amount of fluoride, but will increase its concentration.
I have to assume the "wiggle room" they build into the fluoridation rate handles these cases, but it's been hard to find any details on it since most of the results are about stuff like boiling water removing fluoride or turning it into poison fluorine gas and stuff.
Nevertheless, every time I see discussion where people talk about safe levels, I wonder how that works with all the things people do with water other than just drinking it as is.
And how does the fluoride get in the water? Our water tastes strongly of chlorine because we are near the treatment plant and they put in enough so that it’s still effective at the edges of the system. I don’t know if fluoride works the same way, but what makes people think it’s always added at exactly the right levels?
The chlorine you are tasting in your water is an active, reacting compound. It has to be because it literally reacts with cells to kill them and keep the water (relatively) free from living organisms. It's great as a cheap way to keep living things out of the water but at the end of the pipe it should be removed - a simple Brita filter is fine.
Flouride added is in a chemical state that makes it stable, like the chlorine in table salt. It will stay at the same concentration as it travels in the pipe.
I remember this from a water chemistry course at university.
If there were issues, they’d appear at population level studies. Lots of people boil coffee, tea, potatoes, rice, etc. and, as far as I know, are not suffering brain damage as a result.
You missed the point. It’s not objectively true in all situations that if you don’t believe fluorinating water is necessary that you’re an a-scientific bad faith actor. One can argue the opposite position in good faith, reasonably. Your statements very strongly supposed that this is a solved case closed topic and any challenges are not supported by evidence. The response was that there is nuance and a better conversation would acknowledge it.
> You missed the point. It’s not objectively true in all situations that if you don’t believe fluorinating water is necessary that you’re an a-scientific bad faith actor.
That's not what was being debated. What was asserted was that fluoride in water lowers IQ, a position that has been so thoroughly debunked at this point, that if, much like being anti-vax or thinking climate change doesn't exist, any continued movement reinforcing it is almost by definition bad faith. The information exists and short of purposely going out and looking for contrarian nonsense relative to the established position of science on the subject, you and everyone else can find it.
As frustrating as it is that "do your own research" has been basically ruined as a phrase by the professional internet bullshitter industrial complex, you really should, with a nod to the need for critical analysis of sources, an important part of that that frequently gets left to the side.
> Your statements very strongly supposed that this is a solved case closed topic
Because it is, and we need more of that and less endless citation. Not because citation is impossible or bad, but because we don't need to keep arguing every last point. If you think certain things, like fluoride lowers IQ, or that climate change doesn't exist, you are not needing an intellectual rebuke, you're needing enough people making fun of you that you stop spouting horseshit and go learn about things. All of humanity's knowledge is at your fingertips. It is not the responsibility of reasonable people to educate you against your will.
I've never thought much about it as tap water tastes nasty to me, but it does seem like legit scientists are still studying the issue, as of 2023.[0] Course we over produce scientists and so much of science is low efficiency, but they're getting funding and being published none-the-less.
0 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089203622...
I’m actually now much less certain that fluoride is unequivocally safe and newly skeptical of anybody arguing that anybody else questioning it, including effects on the brain, is a whacko. Thanks to down-thread links to the meta analysis from this year by the national toxicology program, it is crystal clear that high levels of fluoride ARE linked to lower IQ. It begs the question about working to better understand the effects of lower levels. Absolutely nothing presented thus far draws the conclusion that low levels of fluoride are safe, full stop. Thank you for changing my mind and making me look deeper, fervent fluoride supporters.
Maybe time to start making fun of the associated press then?
https://apnews.com/article/fluoride-water-brain-neurology-iq...
There are also other harmful side effects of fluoride, such as fluorosis, which I have. It’s not a huge deal, and I personally still think it’s a huge net positive, but people should be allowed to make their own decisions, and the science is far less settled than you claim, and not comparable at all to the debate over climate change.
I guess I (and probably the GGP) understood the response to be more general, picking out the IQ point as easily refutable therefore a short-circuit way to dismiss the broader narrative.
The "let's have a nuanced debate and use reason and intellect" bias is useful in most contexts. Bold claims, hot takes, that's the future. Citations can be ai'd now.
Please define appropriate levels and then cite some evidence that proves with high certainty that level is safe.
For the sake of argument, assume that only 1% of the US has levels that harm IQ. Would it not be worth it to remove fluoride from the water to improve the intelligence of 1% of the population? Especially when you consider we can get fluoride from toothpaste?
> Thoroughly scientifically debunked. Repeatedly, over decades.
"The NTP monograph concluded, with moderate confidence, that higher levels of fluoride exposure, such as drinking water containing more than 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter, are associated with lower IQ in children"
This is from an NIH meta-analysis. Its a pretty rigorous study.
https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/whatwestudy/assessments/noncancer/...
"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"
This is why there's such a fierce debate. Based on the most recent scientific literature there seems to be evidence of a dose-dependent effect of fluorine levels in water and lowered IQ in children, meaning it has some kind of neurotoxic effect. But we don't have robust evidence to say 0.7 mg/L has a similar effect. That doesn't mean it is DEFINITELY safe, it just means more research needs to be done and the current research that does cover the 0.7 mg/L range may not reach statistical significance.
The fact though the NIH suggests 1.5mg/L is likely unsafe, which is only 2x what America's tap water contains, I would not blame people for being uneasy about. It is often the case the that the FDA regulates food additives that have potential negative side effects to be limited to concentrations 10x lower than what is seen as unsafe.
I am not suggesting it's a straightforward choice to defluorinate water, but I see people often repeating claims like you have that dangers of fluoride are "thoroughly debunked" and that's simply not true. I don't blame people for having that sentiment either, because 0.7mg/L is seemingly still considered safe, and some of the loudest advocates of defluorination have no shortage of thoroughly debunked crazy views on things (possibly due to brains half eaten by worms). It makes it very easy to brush off the skepticism.
But it's also important to keep in mind science is built on the premise that one must be ready to re-evaluate past assumptions when new data arises, and generally speaking the new data around fluoride I hate to say seems to show there is indeed smoke.
It's also the case that when the US initially fluorinated water supplies it was a massive public health success, but these days it seems to make a much lower impact now that fluoride toothpaste use is ubiquitous (plus the levels were lowered from 1.0mg/L in the 70s, likely reducing its overall effectiveness). It is IMO both very reasonable to fund more research into this to know conclusively if 0.7mg/L is indeed safe, and also consider public health policy that focuses on promoting dental hygiene through other means in places that do defluorinate.
I do not agree with Utah's decision here mostly because it seems to neglect that defluorination will create a void that requires other public health policy efforts to fill it, poorer and less educated communities will suffer unless government led efforts to promote and make dental hygine affordable are not also undertaken.
> It is IMO both very reasonable to fund more research into this to know conclusively if 0.7mg/L is indeed safe
How exactly do you propose we do this? It's tough to prove absence of harm.
The meta-analysis put together tons of research under different situations, and found a weak and relatively small dose-response relationship above 1.0 mg/L and failed to find a relationship below. The evidence between 1.0mg/L and 1.5mg/L is particularly weak. And, of course, most dose-response curves are sigmoidal, so the failure to find a response under 1.0 mg/L is most easily explained by the inflection point being above that level.
If you're not satisfied when combining 74 studies fails to find a relationship, will you be happy with 75? 76? 100?
(Sure, a big proportion of the studies and study power focused on higher levels of fluorination-- and I always support filling gaps in research; but it's not like we have an absence of research below 1.5 mg/L).
Well I mean the flip side is... does community water fluorination at its current levels actually help?
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
The Cochrane Collaboration's research is near the gold standard, and yet they find surprisingly limited evidence of benefit for CWF in the modern research:
"These low‐certainty findings (a 4 percentage point difference and 3 percentage point difference for primary and permanent dentition, respectively) favoured CWF."
3-4% reduction in cavities is not nothing, but it's a far cry from the 60% drop observed in the 1940s and certainly much less than what I think most strong proponents of water fluoridation would have you believe. The ongoing discussion I find quite legitimate given we're no longer living in the 1940s and CWF seems to have a substantially lower benefit than it once did, and likewise we do notice a concerning trend with fluorine neurotoxicity that has only emerged in the last few decades of research.
Public health policy is all about a risk/benefit analysis, and CWF is one of those topics that I feel legitimately should be discussed because much has changed over the many decades since the US first introduced it and since then the risks seemingly have gone up and the benefit has astronomically gone down.
Again, I do not think there'd be much discussion if current water fluorination was at 0.15mg/L, and we started seeing a negative trend at 1.5mg/L. But I don't think its actually at all unreasonable for public health officials to be worried and possibly start considering alternatives to CWF out of an abundance of caution.
3-4% of your teeth is an entire tooth.
> but it's not like we have an absence of research below 1.5 mg/L).
But it is?
>> "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"
Yes you would need a higher powered study to rule out the potentially smaller effect, but when your treatment can affect tens of millions of children, it doesn't seem crazy to ask for more funding.
> > but it's not like we have an absence of research below 1.5 mg/L).
> But it is?
But it isn't. There's 7 studies included in that meta-analysis looking at levels below 1.5mg/L, covering 2832 children. The effect measured so far across all of the studies is a statistically insignificant increase in IQ.
I'm in favor of additional research; I just don't think getting to n=10,000 showing little or no effect is going to convince anyone. I also don't think that these possible modest effects are going to be in the top 5 most important environmental stressors to measure the effects of.
While I would like to think that I have gotten a lot smarter in the last 20 years it seems more likely that other people have on average gotten a lot dumber.
While I’m sure there are many causes I’m of the opinion that no stone should remain unturned when looking for answers. Fluorine in water has a viable alternative (toothpaste that is spit out) so out of an abundance of caution my preference is for unflurinated water. In my past life as an applied researcher I have learned to be rather distrustful of academia and the ‘science’ that is produced, ‘fruit from a poisonous tree’.
The conclusion from the largest and strongest studyies is that there is a certain level of fluoride that harms IQ: https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/whatwestudy/assessments/noncancer/....
"The NTP monograph concluded, with moderate confidence, that higher levels of fluoride exposure, such as drinking water containing more than 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter, are associated with lower IQ in children"
They found fluoride in drinking water concentrations was associated with lower IQ, the opposite of your claim of "proven safe".
Show us some evidence that is proven safe, so far as I can tell all evidence points to unsafe or "we're not sure".
> What needs to stop happening is people ignoring objective reality just because the results happen to align with the other "team's" position on something.
I couldn't agree more. The study that is cited above started when Obama was president by the way.
Why did you omit the sentence immediately after the one you quoted?
> The NTP review was designed to evaluate total fluoride exposure from all sources and was not designed to evaluate the health effects of fluoridated drinking water alone.
…or the following sentence, which they bolded to ensure the reader wouldn't miss it?
> 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.
So no, they very explicitly did not find that fluoride in drinking water concentrations was associated with lower IQ.
The study and my quote literally say " drinking water containing more than 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter".
It did not find it lowered IQ in all drinking water concentrations, but it definitely found it in some drinking water concentrations.
So yes, they did explicitly find fluoride in drinking water at certain concentrations was associated with lower IQ.
Are you defining "drinking water concentrations" as "concentrations that have not been shown to be associated with lower IQ."?
I see the goalposts are moving from "fluoride in drinking water concentrations" (implication: concentrations commonly found in municipal drinking water) to "fluoride in drinking water at certain concentrations" (i.e. any arbitrary number that could support your position).
Anyway, there's a pretty obvious definition of "drinking water concentrations": the recommended amount for US drinking water. Again, the authors of the study bolded this sentence to ensure you wouldn't miss it:
> 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.
My first sentence in my original post was " The conclusion from the largest and strongest studies is that there is a certain level of fluoride that harms IQ." I did not move the goal posts from there.
I was replying to a comment that said "fluoride in the drinking water concentrations is proven safe" (there is actually no proof of this).
I never claimed that all fluoride levels harm IQ.
It's great that the US recommends that fluoride doesn't exceed levels that are proven to harm children's IQ, instead they only recommend levels for which there is "insufficient data".
I suppose we will ignore the people who are still drinking water with levels above what is known to be harmful.
To be clear, about whom exactly are we talking here? Who are the actual people drinking water with known harmful levels of fluoride that we’re ignoring?
Anyone who talks about who was President when a study was done is immediately clarifying for you that they have a political agenda.
If there’s a problem with a study, or a study is particularly strong, that should be due to something about the study itself (methodology, significance of results, etc), not its political environment.
I know why! I know why! Pick me!
It's because it doesn't help prove their incorrect point.
> Except it's not—fluoride in the drinking water concentrations is proven safe and it doesn't affect brains.
What's amazing is these anti-science wackos are rejecting the largest-scale experiment of all time, with the best evidence that anyone is ever going to have on the subject. We have both temporal and spatial boundary conditions with and without community water fluoridation, where a large population has it and another large population doesn't have it. There is no evidence that the without-fluoridation population has higher intelligence! There is a huge body of evidence that the people without fluoridation have more decayed teeth.
Before calling them "anti science wackos", why not review the evidence or cite some of your own. Ironic that the "wackos" seem to be the only ones providing any evidence for their claims.
There is high quality evidence that fluoride at levels contained in some US water supplies is associated with lower childhood intelligence. For lower levels, the conclusion is "we don't know", not that there is no harm.
https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/whatwestudy/assessments/noncancer/...
There is also high quality evidence that in the age of fluorinated toothpaste, fluorinated water "may slightly" improve dental health.
“The evidence suggests that water fluoridation may slightly reduce tooth decay in children,” says co-author Dr Lucy O’Malley, Senior Lecturer in Health Services Research at the University of Manchester. “Given that the benefit has reduced over time, before introducing a new fluoridation scheme, careful thought needs to be given to costs, acceptability, feasibility and ongoing monitoring."
https://www.cochrane.org/news/water-fluoridation-less-effect...
The literally bold-faced conclusion of your article is that no evidence exists that community water fluoridation affects childhood IQ.
We have a natural experiment running for 80 years where each arm of the experiment has N > 100e6. If there was going to be evidence of community water fluoridation lowering IQ, it would have emerged by now.
"The NTP monograph concluded, with moderate confidence, that higher levels of fluoride exposure, such as drinking water containing more than 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter, are associated with lower IQ in children".
They found drinking water with levels that lowered IQ. The actual conclusion was that higher levels (that were found in drinking water) lower IQ.
For lower levels the conclusion is we don't know how it effects IQ. The actual bold face conclusion is "More research is needed to better understand if there are health risks associated with low fluoride exposures".
The National Toxicology Program’s monograph failed peer review by the prestigious and independent National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine. In fact, the document failed peer review twice:
in 2020: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK555056/
and again in 2021: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/26030/chapter/1
Why was this substandard draft even published?!
It seems that this team found what they wanted to find. Are they scientists or ideologues? Were they creating the 'evidence' for the San Francisco trail?
> fluoride in the drinking water concentrations is proven safe and it doesn't affect brains.
We can never be sure who funded the studies and whether or not the results can be trusted. Studies have shown that studies cannot be trusted. I err on the side of caution.
You're welcome to put it in your own drinking water if you trust the studies.
> What needs to stop happening is people ignoring objective reality just because the results happen to align with the other "team's" position on something.
Nobody can perceive objective reality. Everyone is delusional concerning just about everything. The people who think they know what's going on, are most delusional of all.
Dark times are ahead, I'm afraid, and people's trust-meters are going to be valuable again.
> We can never be sure who funded the studies and whether or not the results can be trusted. Studies have shown that studies cannot be trusted. I err on the side of caution.
What does this mean for you in practice? Do you see just fluoride studies this way, or "studies" in general? If the former, what makes those different? If the latter, what is your stance on science-backed decision-making and policymaking in general?
Just listen to the dear leader, they use common sense and need no science to see obvious
> Studies have shown that studies cannot be trusted.
Well, that's basically the end of the debate, isn't it? Before we can have reasonable discourse, everyone has to agree on some points. Sure, individual studies have problems. That's why we make them reproducible and aggregate the results. So yeah, don't trust some individual paper; but if you're distrusting the aggregate, well, you're distrusting all of science.
> Nobody can perceive objective reality. Everyone is delusional concerning just about everything.
This is the entire point of the scientific method. It's why we make sure tests are reproducible by other people in other teams in other countries. Each with their own funding and biases. What remains after all of that is as close to objective reality as possible without decompiling the universe.
> Dark times are ahead, I'm afraid, and people's trust-meters are going to be valuable again.
You know what else has been shown to be unequivocal bullshit? People making decisions based on their "gut". Your personal "trust-meter" is just another form of that. Dark times are indeed ahead, but it's because there are people out there who want to do whatever the hell they want- and it's easier for them to get away with it if they discredit science and get the population to do so as well. This is what you're helping by spreading such things. Please stop.
> We can never be sure who funded the studies and whether or not the results can be trusted
> Nobody can perceive objective reality. Everyone is delusional concerning just about everything
This is just hyper-cynical fear mongering. An excuse to reject inconvenient things you see and substitute them with your own alternative reality.
The people who sell fear and things like alternative medicine love to push this angle: They want you to distrust everything. Everything except what they tell you, of course.
> We can never be sure who funded the studies and whether or not the results can be trusted. Studies have shown that studies cannot be trusted
the growing prevalence of anti science thinking like this has been a disaster for humanity. There's so much time and good faith effort put into trying to better understand our reality then people like you come along and handwave it all away because "well can we really know anything"
How does one live or even function with no trust? You’re going to do your own experiments on everything in your life? Do you purchase any food, take any medicines, travel in any vehicles, or use any technology? You’re relying on products that are the outcome of studies if you do. Sure people are fallible and sometimes have agendas or are wrong, but approaching objectivity is not impossible, it just takes a little work. Science is the best thing we’ve got, it has brought humanity further and faster than anything else ever. There’s nothing else to even compare it to. If we throw our hands up and insist on trusting no one, dismantle public health and public education and public trust, then yeah we could go back to the dark ages. If instead we trust that science works over time, and we are diligent about electing leaders who stop stoking fears and using pseudoscience and intentionally eroding trust in science and education, then we might have the chance to be able to trust each other and make forward progress.
> Except it's not—fluoride in the drinking water concentrations is proven safe and it doesn't affect brains.
You mean like this: Fluoride Exposure and Children’s IQ Scores A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
"Findings: Despite differences in exposure and outcome measures and risk of bias across studies, and when using group-level and individual-level exposure estimates, this systematic review and meta-analysis of 74 cross-sectional and prospective cohort studies found significant inverse associations between fluoride exposure and children’s IQ scores. [...]"
Maybe you should reconsider that what you heard once was the definite truth.
Isn't this talking about naturally-occurring fluoridation, not added? The concentrations they describe as having an inverse affect are far higher than what gets added to water on purpose:
What the study measured:
"For fluoride measured in water, associations remained inverse when exposed groups were restricted to less than 4 mg/L or less than 2 mg/L but not when restricted to less than 1.5 mg/L"
And what the US federal government recommends (or I guess soon, previously recommended):
"Through this final recommendation, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) updates and replaces its 1962 Drinking Water Standards related to community water fluoridation—the controlled addition of a fluoride compound to a community water supply to achieve a concentration optimal for dental caries prevention.1 For these community water systems that add fluoride, PHS now recommends an optimal fluoride concentration of 0.7 milligrams/liter (mg/L)" [1]
Note, too, the study's section on Study sample;
"No studies were conducted in the United States."
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4547570/
The source of fluoride is irrelevant, the effect of fluoride is cumulative. If you're getting half of the "harmful dosage" just from your water, you're much more likely to pass that threshold than if the water had no fluoride. In nations with easy access to fluoridated toothpaste and where dental hygiene is common, the cost-benefit is not at all clear.
If the source of fluoride is irrelevant, then shouldn't fluoridated toothpaste also be banned as a result of harmful dosages? Even assuming someone spits out said toothpaste, they are still increasing the fluoride levels in their body.
The US government isn't forcing people to use fluoridated toothpaste. There's plenty of non-fluoridated toothpaste available if people want it.
Also: fluoride works topically, not when ingested. That implies we should try to deliver fluoride to teeth in a way that is focused on topical application (toothpaste), not ingestion (water supply).
> Also: fluoride works topically, not when ingested.
wrong[1]
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/oral-health/data-research/facts-stats/fa...
When I say "fluoride works topically, not when ingested", I mean there's no benefit to teeth from swallowing fluoride, the only benefit to teeth is from it touching teeth directly. That link doesn't say that there's a tooth health benefit from swallowing fluoride.
Both toothpaste and water supply cause some fluoride to touch the teeth (topical) and some fluoride to be swallowed (ingestion). However, toothpaste has a higher ratio of topical application to swallowing, vs water supply which has a lower ratio of topical application to swallowing. That's why I said toothpaste is focused on topical application and water supply is focused on ingestion.
Nobody is banning fluoride. They’re just deciding not to include it by default in the drinking water.
"The bill, signed by Cox on Thursday, prohibits communities from adding fluoride to their public water supplies.
The law does not mention any public health concerns related to the mineral, but Republican state lawmaker Stephanie Gricius - who introduced the bill in the state legislature - has argued that there is research suggesting fluoride could have possible cognitive effects in children."
You're lying through some linguistic convolution. What you said is wrong on a factual level. Communities cannot decide to include fluoride in their water, as that is banned, so fluoride is banned from Utah water. This is what words mean
If people getting under 2mg/L were getting harmed, doesn't it seem logical that people getting 0.7 mg/L would also get harmed, just by a smaller amount?
Not necessarily. For instance, if you take enough ibuprofen you'll suffer liver damage, but it doesn't follow that a smaller dose you'll still suffer damage.
I only really have enough general understanding of chemistry and biology to note that dosage generally is pretty important and often non-linear in its effects -- I write JavaScript, not drug formulations -- but "dosage makes the poison" has always struck me a good general purpose aphorism to keep in mind.
> For fluoride measured in water, associations remained inverse when exposed groups were restricted to less than 4 mg/L or less than 2 mg/L but not when restricted to less than 1.5 mg/L;
So this study found no negative effects on IQ when the fluoride concentration is less than 1.5mg/L
The U.S. Public Health Service recommends 0.7mg/L of fluoride[1]. This study supports the idea that the amount of fluoride used in the US drinking water is safe.
I couldn't find any information on how much fluoride is in utah drinking water as a whole, but a report from Davis County shows that they stay between 0.6mg/L and 0.8mg/L [2]. I'd say its fair to assume basically all the water in Utah doesn't have too much fluoride, and if it did, lowering the amount to 0.7mg/L would be enough to address the health concerns.
1: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4547570 2: https://www.utah.gov/pmn/files/962361.pdf
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43525098
Hah. Maybe, as noted by others, you should read the study cited before assuming its conclusions support your argument. Which they do not.
I think you should read it. It literally says fluoride in higher concentrations is linked to lower IQ. It says there is insufficient evidence to draw any conclusions in lower concentrations. NOT that fluoride in lower concentrations is definitely without a doubt safe. It leaves open the question. And, it studied fluoride in urine, which means even if the drinking water levels in the US are in the “insufficient data” range, the cumulative effect of multiple sources of fluoride is still a factor.
Also note that in reality 0.7 mg/L is the “low” value and 1.5 mg/L is the high water mark from the study. That’s not a huge window by any means…
Maybe apply some critical thinking and notice that the water levels from fluoridation add on top of any other sources of fluoride people ingest, eg. toothpaste, food, etc.
That is not a study of drinking water concentrations, but much higher naturally occurring levels. Its also has pretty poor confidence intervals:
https://journalistsresource.org/home/how-to-read-this-study-...
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abst...
I would be careful throwing a single study around as proof of anything, here is one with a different conclusion:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00220345241299...
The source of fluoride is irrelevant, the effect of fluoride is cumulative. If you get 0.7mg/L from drinking water and then add toothpaste and other sources, you could easily surmount the level where harmful effects occur.
You are making a lot of assumptions to fit your narrative, the higher natural source would also be cumulative with toothpaste etc.
There is no conclusive data to support your assertion and there is a lot of data to support the benefits of fluoridation.
Did you actually read any of what I posted to understand it or is your mind already made up?
Truth and even the idea that there is objective truth is a fundamentally political concept. Authoritarians are opposed to the idea of objective truth because objective truth gives a person a foundation on which to criticize and dissent from those in power. Truth is threatening to authoritarians. Truth is an alternative source of legitimacy.
We are experiencing an assault on objective truth in the US in order to get scientific institutions to submit to political authority rather than the authority of reason.
So I agree with you, it is policy that should not be handled by politicians but by experts, which none of us are. Unfortunately science is being politicized.
The problem is science challenges those who derive power from means other than reason.
Defending scientific consensus is seen as an equally political act as denying it.
"The problem is science challenges those who derive power from means other than reason."
There's been a fundamental shift away from science in the last fifty years or so. Some is understandable—chemical pollution, etc. which is unreasonably blamed on science instead of industry's bad behavior—but there's another thread running here and it's an anti-establishment one.
The question I can't fully put a measure on is why nowadays so many people automatically reject anything that's mandated by government even when they'll benefit from that mandate. The fluoride debate is somewhat akin to the vaccination one, rather than weighing up the comparatively minor risks versus overwhelmingly beneficial outcomes of those mandates they'll simply reject them outright.
That doesn't make much sense to me.
It's pretty easy actually. Rejecting the mandate gives people political platform. If the issue at hand isnt directly affecting you in the meaningfull way, it works like a charm every single time.
Not to stir the pot even more however when a vaccine does go bad, it goes really bad
The narrative around vaccines has been completely strong armed in different ways by both sides. Which has left legitimate cases of bad reactions to be largely ignored, underreported and/or not believed, and carries a negative stigma.
My wife has had a medically verified bad reaction to vaccine it was extremely severe. It took multiple doctors before it was recognized and by that point she progressed to having permanent disability
"Not to stir the pot even more however when a vaccine does go bad, it goes really bad"
I'm frightfully aware of that. I'm old enough to remember the polio epidemic in the 1950s and the bad batch of polio vaccine that killed kids.
I wasn't in the US and the Salk vaccine wasn't available where I was living and it was another five or so years before we were vaccinated. Before that one kid in my school class died and another ended up in calipers.
Despite everyone knowing about the bad batch and the deaths I cannot tell you how relieved everyone was when the vaccine finally arrived. No one—not one single kid—at my school skipped the vaccine. To not have it would have been unthinkable, it wasn't even a consideration.
Frankly, it horrifies me how risk averse and timid people have become these days. How thinking has changed since that time is frightening.
That's not to say things don't go wrong—they do and all too often as you are aware, and even at this distance I can't help but feel sorry for both you and your wife.
Right, that Salk vaccine killed people but saved millions of others, even now the live attenuated Sabin vaccine occasionally goes rogue mutates and gives people polio but both of those vaccines have almost eradicated that fucking horrible disease from the face of the planet, it's only politics and misinformation that have stopped that from happening.
What are we to do when things are beneficial on a large scale yet are nevertheless responsible for a small number of tragedies? For instance, almost everyone on the planet loves their smartphone yet they kill innocent people—albeit indirectly when irresponsible drivers who are driving and texting at the same time hit and kill pedestrians.
When that happens we don't call for smartphones to be banned, same when a passenger jet clashes. But it's a different story with vaccines, fluoride in water, chemicals in foods. For some illogical reason suddenly all hell breaks loose and people become quite irrational.
BTW, over the years I've had many, many dozen vaccine shots for many different diseases and I've never had a negative reaction. That's not to say it won't happen on my next visit to the doctor or, say, to next person who's next in line in the doctor's surgery.
Unfortunately, life's dangerous and it's eventually fatal. As I see it, these scientific discoveries—whilst imperfect—ameliorate that condition somewhat.
I think there should be such a thing as just compensation when anyone effectively takes one for the team for the rest of humanity. There is one way to help significantly once something bad does happen.
Awareness too, and more testing never hurts. One thing we learned about post incident is that a test of her immune system would have likely shown she shouldn’t be vaccinated at all, due to potential reactions. Why not work on making such tests cheaper and faster so we can prevent needless harm?
"I think there should be such a thing as just compensation when anyone effectively takes one for the team for the rest of humanity."
I agree absolutely. What really pisses me off is how governments seemingly everywhere become misers—miserable bastards—and either deny responsibility or when cornered screw compensation down as far as possible.
It's not only in matters such as vaccine failures, or Flint's lead-in-water crisis but you see this miserly attitude with war veterans, and so on.
Trouble is, we the citizenry are ultimately responsible. For some reason we see someone getting something from government that we are not getting and that brings out the worst in us—we seem to forget too easily that the injured or those disadvantaged through no fault of their own deserve fair and reasonable compensation.
In my opinion that all-too-common attitude is a blight on the human character.
Awareness, that goes back to proper schooling. That that's lacking is another tragedy.
Edit: both government and the companies responsible for vaccines, pharmaceuticals, etc. ought to take much greater responsibly to inform people of the risks even if they are minor. One way of achieving this would be to hold those employees (both in government and in those companies) directly responsible for providing the necessary information. This would go a long way in stopping pharmaceutical companies hiding the unsatisfactory results of drug trials etc.
Don't hold your breath though, I can't see that happening anytime soon.
Tolerating this slippery slope that “theres always the other side” is how we got to a place where I have to vaccinate again for measles at 40 because there are people out there saying the measles vaccine isn’t safe.
I don’t agree with the framing of “we are experiencing an assault on objective truth…”.
We are experiencing a challenge to some existing status quo practices, some of which have come out of science in the past.
But nowhere in any conversation has the dialog been “we must question status quo institutional knowledge, and objective truth, to dismantle the institution”. (That’s left speak, actually, and I am acutely aware of leftist circles where that is the conversation.)
Look at RFK Jr. This guy doesn't need power and control. He’s a whacko with some different beliefs about health—who fundamentally believes he’s making humans safer because of his negative lived experience with health policy in the US.
Occam's razor points to there being a credible benign reason for him to be motivated to challenge existing policy. (And if there is one area of science ripe for iteration, it’s nutritional health.) We don’t need to grab for more extreme alarmist narratives to explain what’s happening.
It simply doesn't take some autocratic utopian agenda to question whether fluoride is worth it and advocate for political change.
It’s honestly really disingenuous and disheartening to hear people towing this “the right is trying to dismantle the fabric of western liberal democracy and install fascism” line.
RFK Jr brought roadkill home to cook and eat multiple times.
Occam's Razor says he is a crank.
He is a dangerous crank, but fresh roadkill is a perfectly fine practice.
You have to cook it thoroughly, same as any other game meat. Do not eat the central nervous system, again same as game. But dead is dead, and a car is no worse than a bullet.
That does not alter that we have a dangerous idiot running out health care policy.
Dead is dead but for how long? If you hunt, you know when the animal died and presumably cleaned it promptly. It didn't bake on the pavement with all its guts inside for hours or days.
Sure! Which means he’s either a really effective covert operative, or just a crank. To be clear I’m not arguing in support of crack science. I’m arguing against him being plugged into some broader insidious agenda.
If you've got a broader insidious agenda, installing useful idiots is definitely a way to enact it.
Zoom out and you’ll see that there is a broad attack against science institutions going on right now. RFK is just one aspect.
NIH funding down 60% compared with one year ago: https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/03/report-us-scientists-...
UMass disbands its entering biomed graduate class over Trump funding chaos: https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/03/umass-disbands-its-en...
Not to mention the defunding of anything to do with climate change.
The Republican party has been trying to squash inconvenient science for a long time.
One of the signature pieces of Gingrich's "Contract With America" in 1995 was the elimination of the Office of Technology Assessment. The office had the unfortunate duty to communicate well researched facts, and these facts contradicted conservative policy positions. (OTA: The planet is warming. R: No it's not. Exxon says it's not.) So the OTA had to go.
There are a nearly endless list of these things over the last 30 years.
The fluoride thing alone wouldn't even move the needle or be too worth talking about on its own, but when you see everything that is happening and you know it's just the public things, it gives a distinctly different context around what is happening. You know we are overtly threatening Canadian sovereignty right? Countries are setting up travel warnings. Plain clothes officers have abducted people in public. People have been robbed of due process. The head of the office of management and budget said he wants to put government workers in trauma. Deleting public data sets... At least two second in commands to the entire US military have said he is unfit. A chief of staff said the president said "I wish I had Hitler's generals." At least 4 prominent republicans have Sieg Heiled in front of a crowd, including Bannon who did not put his hand over his heart first.
> question status quo institutional knowledge
I am in favor of this when its done in good faith, but good faith hasn't been established.
> It’s honestly really disingenuous and disheartening to hear people towing this “the right is trying to take over the world and install fascism” line.
I find it disheartening that people are in denial about it.
What does Canadian sovereignty have to do with even a broader picture argument that the right is using illiberal science to undermine and dismantle political institutions?
“Anybody who wants to debate me must first demonstrate good faith by espousing my political stance before we can continue.” Really now…
People can’t be in denial about something that isn't happening. That’s called crazy.
It’s being premised on tariffs being good for the economy, contra to a century of demonstrated proof they aren’t.
Tariffs aren’t a binary good/bad. They’re a tool in the policy toolbox, one that Canada has no problem using, by the way.
If you're alluding to the tariffs on things like dairy and egg products, those are only applicable beyond a set quota which the US has not exceeded.
This is a direct quote from the guy running the Office of Management and Budget, Russel Vought:
We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.
We want to put them in trauma.
Edit: Sieg Heil from Trump's ex Chief strategist in a speech to CPAC (Tea Party/GOP conference): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E9pXCuJnbc&t=10s
I think equating poor people to homeless people is non sequitur.
What about the vast population of “barely making it” people?
But have it your way. I’ve given up on American people (I exist as a 54 year old one amongst them). Decades of wealth have created a society so “me” centric it makes me nauseous sick. Never have I respected those older than me so little. It makes me so sad what we’ve done for those younger.
It’s even worse than that. People aren’t even voting for their own self interest. The people in the poorest states and in poor counties in richer states in the United States are consistently voting against universal healthcare, affordable post high school education and are cheering the government taking away services that they depend on the most.
There are two basic categories of causes.
The first is being pure anti science - anti vaccine, anti fluoride, etc
The second is they are more concerned about “God and guns”, immigrants, and the demographic shifts in the US than their own interest.
Oh and the third is the cult of MAGA.
I’m 50, Native born American and on a meta level it concerns me. On a micro level, me and mine will be okay.
While I am not one of these shrill people saying I’m leaving the US tomorrow, my wife and I are definitely putting plans in place to have a dual residency (not citizenship) in Costa Rica closer to when I get ready to retire.
> Poor people in the US are capable of using fluoride toothpaste and flossing. At least at homeless shelters at outreach things I’ve been to, toothpaste and toothbrushes are freely available. Your argument hinges on them being incapable on the whole and needing a Benevolent But Superior Intelligence to provide an alternative for them.
This is so incurious. Obviously most people, poor or not, have access to fluoridated toothpaste and toothbrushes, and can brush.
Yet OP cites data (not explicitly, but you can start here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6974062/, there are many like it).
Fluoridated water makes the most impact on poor and undeserved communities: Why?
Is it because poor people are less capable of brushing or have less access to fluoridated toothpaste?
Is it because poor people are poor because they have poor self control, which prevents them from regular brushing?
Does it matter? Nothing hinges on them being incapable at all - your conjecture can be as uncharitable - poor people are dirty and incapable - or charitable - poor people have less money and time to seek dental care, have higher rates of untreated mental and physical illness i.e. ADHD, disabilities that interrupt daily tooth-brushing routine - as you want.
But the result is still that if we want children from poor families to have less cavities by the time they reach adulthood - we should fluoridate the water! If you trust the western medical establishment, it's broadly safe. If you don't, then none of the evidence above matters to you anyways.
You're close but still a bit strawmanny. If we want poor kids to have better dental outcomes we should do more than just flouridate. We should find out why the poor have worse dental outcomes and address the root problem(s), which I would imagine in the US is something like soda consumption or lack of dentists in poor areas.
What is strawman in my comment? I'm genuinely interested.
> We should find out why the poor have worse dental outcomes and address the root problem
The root problem is that parents that are absent, either for noble reasons (working multiple low-wage jobs) or less noble reasons (addiction, abandonment) will not have the presence to enforce good dental hygiene.
There will always be some subset of parents that are more or less absent, and the main solution that exists for that in the US currently i.e. the foster care system has measurably terrible outcomes, and so it is only applied in the most egregious cases.
Why should we let perfect be the enemy of good here? I'm all for removing fluoride from the water, once it has no benefit on the population. But currently, it has a huge benefit, just on people who are least likely to advocate for it.
"You're just pushing your "Benevolent But Superior Intelligence" onto people" is an appeal to emotion, not a solution to real problems that real children face.
More emotionally: it's fucking embarrassing we let bullshit arguments like this hurt people in real life.
See this is the problem today. Just because some one doesn’t know doesn’t make it non existent. We have decades of studies and evidence that fluoride is good and has no side effects, but the detractors ignore all of it and keep nullifying all that knowledge. Now they are successful too. In a society where everyone wants the whole boat to rise up, we need a certain amount of honesty and integrity and sadly these arguments don’t have it
> Poor people in the US are capable of using fluoride toothpaste and flossing
This is absolutely not a substitute for fluoride in drinking water, which is most important for kids. When your teeth are forming below the gumline, the fluoride you ingest strengthens them. Brushing gums with fluoride doesn’t help.
“Objective truth” - I’d love to know how one goes about this, feels like a Nietzsche reading here would be helpful
Objective truth isn't something you can know, but it's a destination that must exist for pursuit of knowledge/curiosity to have any meaning.
With contradictions you know what is not true, and through knowing what is not true, you can approach what is true. Truth is expressed in consistency, not completeness.
That's why anyone should be extremely suspicious of anyone who is not, or doesn't care about, being internally consistent.
You're getting downvoted because you're retreating into philosophical nihilism rather than actually addressing the points. If you disagree with how people interpret the studies, the studies themselves, or how science measures reality - just say that.
I also love SMBC's explanation of this: https://smbc-wiki.com/index.php/2010-09-23
Adding fluoride to water was revolutionary in the 1940s, but its benefits have significantly declined since fluoride toothpaste became common in the 1970s. While fluoridation made sense when products containing fluoride weren't widely available, it is much less effective and necessary now. Sure, some countries and communities may still see benefits from it, but widespread fluoridation doesn't seem necessary in many parts of the world.
Not true. Every time I see a dentist here in Queensland (non-fluoridated water) he asks me where else I lived as my teeth are so much better than what he usually sees, and if drilling my teeth are much harder than most Queenslanders.
My early years were spent in Melbourne, where fluoridation was introduced around 1970. That's the only time I lived with fluoridated water, for about 3 years. yet dentists can see the effects 50+ years later.
I don't use a toothbrush or toothpaste, and haven't ever really, as my ASD makes it unbearable.
You're refuting a statment based on studies and statistics by anecdotal evedince. Also, GP never denied that flouridation is still helpful for non-brushing residents.
Poster claimed fluoridation was unnessecary in many parts of the world. This is true of places with natural fluoridation. But not everyone has access to fluoridated toothpaste, or even toothpaste. To assume otherwise is assuming everyone is neurotypical in a developed country.
And you're assuming that every neurodivergent person can't tolerate brushing their teeth.
I also don't see what access to toothpaste has anything to do with neurodivergent conditions.
No, he’s assuming some neurodivergent people can’t tolerate brushing.
The real question is, fluoridated water in the past or not, how is any non-brushing patient being told they're teeth are top tier?
Brushing is much less important for your teeth than your genetics and/or nutrition.
Anything to back that up? And even if it's true, the person would logically still not be to tier as the people with good nutrition and genetics who also brush would likely be better.
True. Part of the reason is aggressive saliva that just doesn't let some bacteria live and thus keeps the teeth healthy for longer. Dry mouth is literally damaging your teeth as well.
A dentist sees thousands of patients -a big sample size! Calling it anecdotal evidence is reductive.
This isn't an opinion or take given by a dentist, it was given by a patient.
It was a patient reporting their dentist's opinion.
> I don't use a toothbrush or toothpaste, and haven't ever really, as my ASD makes it unbearable.
99% of the world does brush their teeth, so I don't see how this is relevant to their health.
25% of the world population do not have access to drinkable water[0], brushing their teeth is a luxury for them.
[0]: https://toronto.citynews.ca/2023/03/22/un-26-of-world-lacks-...
You see there's a difference between world and Utah/USA. In Utah nearly 100% of the population has access to drinking water.
You need zero water to brush your teeth with toothpaste. Many dentists even say it’s preferable to not rinse your brush before and not rinse your mouth after.
So when you go to brush your teeth you don't wet the toothpaste and toothbrush from the tap? Is it the fear of tap water that centers around this? I am curious about this as it seems the answers carry some cultural significance.
No - toothpaste is in part an abrasive. If it's wetter, the abrasive is less effective at removing biofilm/plaque, and the chemical components are diluted in situ. Your mouth is plenty wet enough as-is.
That implies toothpaste isn't designed with this water dilution in mind, as that is common practice. If I don't wet it beforehand it's too thick and doesn't get distributed as easily.
They can also just move where water is, right?
When you do so, which I do too, is the amount of fluoride you potentially swallow more than that in fluoridated water?
do they live in Utah?
No, no they do not. Where do you make up these statistics?
Black Tea has an astounding amount of fluoride. You dentist is stupid for only asking where you live and not what you eat and drink.
As a recent QLD convert thanks for this. I had been wondering why the water up here was so hard.
Hi. Check where you actually are located in Qld, because chances are you are fluoridated just fine. https://www.health.qld.gov.au/public-health/industry-environ...
Are you in FNQ? Around Brissie and the Goldie we're all flouridated.
I've heard similar rumours about army recruitment in the 80s though.
There's a huge difference between "no longer as necessary" and "let's ban it".
There is difference between banning and just deciding putting fluoride in public drinking water too. Who are they banning? Themselves?
Water treatment is usually done at the municipal or regional level. The state government is declaring that towns and cities may not do this. The alternative would be each and every municipal water authority deciding on its own.
The horror.
Not really when it comes to government initiatives. They'd like the water plants to stop adding fluoride, so they make a policy that the plants should not add fluoride.
That wouldn’t require a ban. The state banned it because some towns wanted to add it to their water supply. It’s literally big government stopping the will of the people.
Of course it does. Their goal was to stop it from being added, including in said towns.
Policy makers make things happen by passing laws that make it a requirement or provide financial incentives to do it, and make things stop by outlawing it or taxing it. It is what they are elected to do.
This is not "big government" - democracy does not mean that small groups that disagree should be allowed to do whatever they want, and water additives is a quite signficant thing to mess with.
Democracy and big government aren’t in opposition. Social Security for example is extremely popular.
Letting small groups that disagree do what they want is the definition of small government. Outlawing water additives is a significant thing to mess with, it’s a meaningful intrusion on people’s heath and general welfare.
What makes this entire thing silly is many areas of the US ~11% naturally have fluoride levels high enough not to need supplementation, but nobody seems to want to drop that to some ultra low level when they argue for outlawing adding fluoride. It’s not an argument that these levels are unhealthy, just the naturalist fallacy in action. https://www.usgs.gov/publications/fluoride-occurrence-united...
Yeah but anyone can buy fluoride toothpaste so not really banned.
You can add fluoride in your own water if you want to. Nobody is preventing your own freedom to drink fluoride.
That argument works both ways. You can also source your own water if you don't want municipal water.
Except that I am already paying for the water coming out from my tab, so I expect it to be free of extra chemicals since I pay for it.
Nobody's preventing you from going and finding your own water source either. The government is too much of a nanny state for putting flouride in water for public health, but it's just fine for providing water to you in the first place?
In the USA it’s generally illegal to collect rain.
That’s definitely true for some places but how are you measuring that? By population or perhaps state and territory?
Where I live the city subsidizes rain collection barrels.
Where do you live where you can collect rain at a quantity that would allow you to forgo central water?
I’m not talking about having a barrel. Most states don’t care about that quantity. I’m talking about storing on the order of 10k gallons. A rain barrel is nothing. An average family in the USA uses hundreds of gallons a day. It doesn’t rain daily so you’d need thousands of gallons. Most states do not allow this, nor is it actually feasible for everyone to do this due to space constraints, which is why it’s generally not allowed.
My state provides rainwater collection guidance in the plumbing code. We also have wells. I use a well.
Which state is this? Some states such as Massachusetts and Maine, will allow you to have a well, but then you cannot have central water. Thus, the dichotomy is irrelevant since it's not like someone actually has a choose, since it's done on the municipal level.
In fact, generally the places in Connecticut, and New England that have well water are because they specifically cannot have the other.
I don't know much about western USA, but I suspect it's similar.
You're being actively misleading. Like on a scale of normal people to politicians to liars you're at least in the politicians range.
The only states with restrictive surface water policies, generally, are the western ones, because every drop of water is allocated according to interstate agreements and letting peasants take what falls on their land is like the toddler version of letting privateers crap on a treaty.
In New England and the east generally, you can either have a well or municipal water, not both, because they don't want to worry about back flows and contamination of the municipal water supply, etc. It's not the big deal you're making it out to be.
> In New England and the east generally, you can either have a well or municipal water, not both, because they don't want to worry about back flows and contamination of the municipal water supply, etc. It's not the big deal you're making it out to be.
this just isn't true. Can you have private well water in Boston, Hartford or Portsmouth? The answer is no. In general in the northeast, those who have well water have it explicitly because they're not served by the municipality. Feel free to give counter examples with specific cities or towns that serve both and actively let you switch between both for a given address that supports both.
There are some towns in New Hampshire for example where the town has municipal water but a given house does not (it has well water), but usually that’s due to specific characteristics of the lot that forbid it from having a municipal without a large cost, so the developer sets up well water instead.
What you're saying doesn't even make sense - municipal water is routed to a treatment plant, so it wouldn't matter anyway.
> Can you have private well water in Boston, Hartford or Portsmouth? The answer is no
Why do you think that is?
Well you wrote that in the US it’s generally illegal to collect rain water and I don’t think that is true.
But if your point was that it’s illegal to collect enough rain water for XYZ purpose or scale I think that’s a bit different.
that's fair - I should've said that it's illegal to collect enough rain to not need municipal water.
> Most states do not allow this, nor is it actually feasible for everyone to do this due to space constraints, which is why it’s generally not allowed.
You are getting into something there. You understand the necessity of municipal water collection mandates due to space constraints, but when it comes to public health (e.g vaccines) or public dental health (e.g fluoride in water), that's beyond comprehension and an infringement on your right (to have bad teeth)?
Also, in the real world, most (emphasis on most) states don't have any restrictions on collecting rainwater, and some actively encourage people to do so.
- https://todayshomeowner.com/gutters/guides/states-where-it-i...
- https://sfyl.ifas.ufl.edu/lawn-and-garden/saving-and-using-r... (Florida highly encourages people to collect rainwater)
We are talking about drinking, e.g potable. Your links explicitly say don’t collect to drink.
That's not true in general especially if you weight it with population in mind, such as the wet states of NJ, PA, MD etc. that have more population; though there are areas where the states have passed laws concerning water rights where it is true(CO, WY).
Yes, why don't the poor just eat cake when they can't get bread?
Defaults matter. Most people won't care or know about the change.
Yes that's where the freedom of citizens comes into play.
Nobody is preventing the citizens from digging their own well and ensuring their own water supply and having bad teeth.
I like it how when it comes to fluoride in water, that's the nanny state pushing things on people, but when it comes to municipal water, said people can't bother to use their freedom and get their own water supply. It's the same that parents refuse to vaccinate their children for measles and then hurry to the doctors when the child inevitably gets sick. The freedom to die of preventable diseases is a great thing!
You can also remove fluoride from your own water if you want to. Although I don't know if there are any filters that can distinguish between naturally occurring fluoride (ok) and fluoride added by the government (evil).
This requires a Reverse-Osmosis filter which is super expensive. So if you really want to give fluoride, I'd be happy for the government to hand out free sodium fluoride tabs for whoever wants it, in exchange to not force the water to have fluoride by default. See, we get the best of both worlds?
How much of your water treatment do you want to do yourself? I assume you don’t want the ‘government’ to send you completely untreated water. So what is the problem with fluoridation as compared to all the other uncontroversial ways in which your tap water has been treated? All kinds of stuff gets added to and removed from the water.
Also, there are simple (and cheap) water filters that are quite effective at removing fluoride. As fluoride is often naturally present in water anyway, it is only really necessary to remove the majority of the added fluoride to get the water back into a ‘natural’ state.
No, they're banning communities from making the decision for themselves. Government so small it fits right into your drinking tap!
Local governments are prohibited from adding fluoride to their drinking water, even if their community wants it.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cdoe.12685
It’s still necessary. It is crucial when kids teeth are forming, and brushing does not achieve the same effect.
I find the lack of science in this thread disturbing.
Kids really suck at brushing their teeth
But you will brush your teeth anyway, and then you apply fluoride topically. It works.
Here in Sweden we decided against fluoride for this reason and the fact that it is in fact toxic. It isn't sensible to use systemic exposure when we can use topical exposure and can improve mouth health by education, so that people do what they're supposed to.
The fluoride approach achieves a basic level of health, but you can do so much better.
Fluoride is not "in fact toxic". A substance becomes toxic in high amounts. Vitamin D becomes toxic in high amounts. The level of fluoride in drinking water is well below the toxic level.
I really don't agree with that Paracelsian view. Some substances are Paracelsian, other are like lead, and I'd place fluorides in-between these two, a neither fully Paracelsian or non-Paracelsian poison.
Fluoride exposure beyond a small amount has a statistically significant effect on childhood IQ: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
I can't believe so many people would downvote a peer-reviewed paper just because it doesn't sit well with their politics, it really shows how cult-like science discourse in the US has become.
Somewhat related, as a teen in the 90s I worked at McDonald’s in The Netherlands. Because of the diet in the US, the bread used for hamburgers contained extra calcium to be more ‘healthy’, because many people did not get enough calcium intake. In The Netherlands, where people drink much more dairy products, especially back in the 90s, people would get plenty of calcium so there was no need to put extra in the bread. But because a hamburger should be a hamburger no matter where you buy it worldwide, the Dutch McDonald’s hamburger bread still had the added calcium
You have to drink 32 ounces of milk per day to get enough daily calcium.
I was surprised when I realized that milk didn’t have that much calcium by volume, relative to how it was promoted to me as a kid.
I found that almond milk had a good bit more by volume and the US dairy industry probably just had some good marketing in the 2000s with the Got Milk campaign.
Too much calcium is a bad thing. I had enormous amounts of milk as a child, a multivitamin containing calcium and a calcium supplement. I probably had 2 to 3 people’s recommended daily amount of calcium per day. Now as an adult, the calcium is in my muscles and it occasionally causes me to feel like my arm has been dislocated from my socket for days whenever there is a flare up. Moving my arm during a flare up makes it worse. It occurs in my dominant arm and the pain is so bad that during flare ups, I sometimes contemplate amputation. There is no cure for this condition. The “get enough calcium” stuff really backfired in my case since I clearly overdosed on calcium because of it. On the bright side, I have excellent bone health.
They drink A LOT of milk! I went to a business meeting in the Netherlands and the cafeteria had buttermilk machine on tap like an elementary school in the US. They set the meeting table with pitchers of milk and buttermilk. And breakfast / lunch always has cheese.
Which is also happens to be the average daily milk consumption in the Netherlands. They drink 340 kg per year on average which is 33 oz per day. And people used to drink more milk back then.
That's assuming you don't eat or drink anything else containing calcium, which is silly.
For the rest of the world: 32 ounces is almost one litre of milk.
It has a lot of calories and other things in it. If you don't have access to a lot of food, milk supplements well
In the UK at least some areas have fluoridated water, despite almost all toothpaste being fluoridated. I suppose it most benefits the minority of people who do not brush their teeth. That benefit has to be balanced[1] against some evidence of risk.
IMO the right fix is better dental hygiene, and a better (less sugary) diet. These are in turn are in part symptomatic of other problems (poverty, long working hours with regards to lack of supervision of children).
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/water-fluoridatio...
Good link.
There a really unfortunate use of "significant" in that document. The scientific meaning and the general meaning will cause very different interpretations from laymen.
"Here in Sweden we decided against fluoride for this reason and the fact that it is in fact toxic."
All water collected from natural sources contains some level of fluoride and other salts (which varies greatly from place to place). Does then your local water authority remove these naturally-acquired chemicals?
Generally not, but we choose where we take our from water from.
If there's too much fluoride in the rock water we take soil or surface water instead, for example. If there's too much fluoride in the water we do not supply it to people's taps, but this is for values like 4 mg/L.
So we mostly don't take any measures. In Stockholm it's apparently less than 0.2 mg/L though.
Is 0.2 mg/L the upper limit in Stockholm?
Just an FYI, water is also toxic.
Yes, I was going to mention this. Had a friend who went down the coast for a day trip with a bunch of mates. On the way back on the train (1.5 hour ride) they had a competition to see who could drink the most water and most of them had several litres, a few of them managed a bit more. My mate also had a bunch of chips/snacks, but not everyone did.
Later that night, he got a desperate phone from his friends mum, screaming at him "What did you take! What drugs did you take!!!", he replied that they hadn't taken anything, but wasn't really believed. His friend was rushed to hospital with severe seizures and convulsions. The doctors eventually put him on a saline drip and he recovered.
Basically his friend lowered the salt content in his body so much that his body could not pass electrical signals. My friend was fine because he had consumed a bit of salt in his snacks. Kinda crazy.
Three DJs and 7 other employees got fired for running a contest where whoever could hold their pee for the longest after drinking too much water would win a prize and someone died.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna16660273
Is this why after a day on the beach you want both drinks and salty snacks?
It’s why electrolyte drinks are a thing for sports.
You know what has electrolytes?
Indeed: "Water Intoxication" - https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/water-intoxic...
There was an infamous death in Australia when a young girl drank too much water after taking MDMA. It's blamed on the drug, but the thing that actually killed her was water intoxication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Wood_(born_1980)
It happened to a Swedish girl too. Not sure if it was after taking MDMA but it was after drug use.
> But you will brush your teeth anyway, and then you apply fluoride topically. It works.
Relatively few of the poor have the disposable income, time, education, and long-term worldview needed to reliably do that.
EDIT: This comment is about America's poor. Though the same applies in much of the world.
Your GDP per capita is 50% higher than ours. You have money for this.
If there's no will to raise up the poor, you it should be straightforward to use the state directly to ensure that everyone is taught how to brush their teeth and ensured to have access to brushes and toothpaste.
I agree with you, but GDP per capita isn't the correct measure here when the bottom 8% in the US has no health insurance compared to Sweden's 0%, which I have to assume because I didn't even find this measured anywhere due to universal healthcare.
While Sweden has free health care, it does not completely include dental care. It's free until you turn 20, after that you pay out of your own pocket. This is to incentivize people to take care of their teeth, instead of not caring and then expecting free replacement of your teeth. One you're 20, you only get a very tiny deductible on your dental care which equates to almost the exactly the cost of a single basic check-up once a year.
It may not completely include dental, but poor teeth health shortens your life span and they cover that at least.
It's a systemic issue that can be solved with one unanimous vote in Congress, that will NEVER happen in the foreseeable future.
That's because Americans believe that poor people are poor because they just didn't care enough to be rich.
This might have been true 200 years ago, when there was a whole unexplored continent to exploit, but it's less true now.
Poor people are voting for policies that directly harm them because they don’t want other poor people and the “illegals” to benefit.
I think that's the same mentality, "yes I'm poor now, but I'll get the break I deserve soon enough, and I don't want all these undesirables to benefit when I do".
Welcome to the USA, where using the stare to help with dental care would be communism, or socialism, or big government, or violations of freedoms.
I agree with this in an American context. In Sweden, it will be much less true. This difference can also however be attributed to government "interference" with higher taxation supporting better social care for those at the poorer end of the scale.
Freedom comes at a cost, the US and Sweden are paying that cost in different ways.
Water is also toxic.
> Here in Sweden we decided against fluoride for this reason and the fact that it is in fact toxic.
How?
Please don't express that it damages development. That's trivially refutable by statistics. We can compare Canada's and UK's IQs for example, or some other proxy to the G factor, said countries were chosen for their similar cultural demographics, we find then that the metrics are mostly identical, while the difference in consumption of fluoride is staggering.
https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/EHP14534 is one study. We did earlier studies in the 50s when we made the decision to only use fluoride orally.
doesn't discuss any confounding variables that may also correlate with the use/disuse of flouride.
So anyone willing to tell me how this constitutes a low quality comment that warrants this reception?
Freedom from is the American way.
Freedom to is the Canadian way.
That's why Canada becoming an American anything is ridiculous and pisses off Canada so much that, for example, we've reduced our flights to America by +70% over the coming months.
Not when it comes to religion though: the European way (and I feel very much like considering Canadians something like honorary Europeans these days) was forged in painful wars stemming from and fueled by influence of religion on politics, and abuse of religion by politics. Both on the collective level, not so much on the individual level. The European way is all about having a strong firewall between religion and politics, to keep the former out of the later. Freedom from.
The American way is completely devoid of that concept. It's all built on that Pilgrim Fathers founding myth and only ever cares about keeping the state from getting in the way of individual beliefs. It's so focused on that part and only that part that even an almost-all-out theocracy would be fine as long as it did not mess with individual beliefs. "Freedom to" without the tiniest trace of "freedom from".
This is factually incorrect. Even though in most European countries there is a formal separation of religion and state, there is nothing that "forbids" any political party from having a strong religious affiliation. In fact, in nearly every European country there are major political parties with a strong Christian affiliation. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_democracy
There are even countries which have political parties that are Islamic affiliated.
The separation between religion and state refers to two things: the state not being able to enforce any religious aspects on citizens (freedom TO exercise any religion without interference from government), and religious entities not being able to influence or pressure the government outside the electoral process (freedom TO govern without interference from religious entities). Neither of these things prevents a political party founded on religious beliefs to participate in the electoral process.
Parent never said that political parties were forbidden from having a religious affiliation. Yet, the 'Christian' in European 'Christian democracy' is not remotely comparable to the role of religion in the society of the USA.
The USA is overtly and intentionally Christian: American banknotes have "In God We Trust" emblazoned on one side, and schoolchildren (usually) recite an oath pledging allegiance to "one nation under God". Christian democracy, on the other hand, usually stands for a loosely defined, mildly conservative political ideology in a strictly secular system of governance.
> The European way is all about having a strong firewall between religion and politics
I find this quite contrary to my experience of e.g. modern Germany, Spain, Poland, Italy where many politicians are explicitly religious, laws are written with majority religious affiliation in mind, religious taxes may still be levied. Even France still feels in many ways like a "catholic country", even if they do have good explicit separation of church and state.
I would have said that government and (Christian) religion are completely inextricable for most Europeans, even if the majority of the population isn't seriously devout or even practicing.
Things like church taxes handled by the state in Germany (entirely opt-in, even when it's effectively opt-out for individuals opted in by their parents) have the opposite effect though, they make the churches boring institutions (except for the occasional child abuse wtf that haunts them just like any other church) far from any radicalization.
When you dig deeper in Germany it gets surprisingly murky, e.g. bishops not paid out of those church taxes but out of regular state taxes, e.g. those paid by atheists and Muslims, which dates back to Napoleonic age secularization when those payments were introduced as a (meager) compensation for the enormous income the (catholic) church had from being worldly lords of enormous realms. But this as well contribute to keeping the churches out of politics. They know pretty well what is their place and what isn't.
Canada does the opposite of America even if it hurts Canada - it’s a part of its identity.
Redefining freedom as “forcing something on people for their own good” is not how anyone actually defines freedom.
It’s like saying children have the most freedom because their parents force them to do things that will benefit them.
> Canada does the opposite of America even if it hurts Canada - it’s a part of its identity.
As a duel citizen of the US and another Commonwealth nation, I have to say that this is exactly the ridiculous self-caricature perspective that gives foreign nationals a sort of combination of pity and contempt for the average US citizen.
While it's true that your cartoonish portrayal of freedom is one possible interpretation, there are most certainly others, many of which present citizens with actual measurable freedoms that they would not enjoy in the US.
For instance, Australians have, since the late 1990s, been relatively free of mass shootings, especially in schools or other public areas. Because the police are allowed to force you to take a random breathalyser test without probable cause, we are generally substantially freer of drunk driving. Because we have a social safety net, people are free from the need to opt out of life saving surgery because they fear the abject economic violence that the US visits upon the "uninsured".
On the other hand, the US has substantially more sensible libel laws than most Commonwealth countries. These things can cut both ways, but it would be a mistake to interpret other countries as attempting a childish breath holding exercise just to differentiate themselves from the hip and cool nation.
> As a duel citizen of the US and another Commonwealth nation, I have to say that this is exactly the ridiculous self-caricature perspective that gives foreign nationals a sort of combination of pity and contempt for the average US citizen.
Ahh, you see there you made a mistake. I'm not American.
And your examples of "this is better" don't address the point I made - how Canadians identify themselves.
"freedom from", you will not be given a prevention from some horrible disease. You can buy it if you can afford it, but a significant portion of the population can't, and some of them will not be able to enjoy life because of it.
"freedom to", a prevention will be provided. You can always decide to take alternatives, if you can afford it. A significant portion of the population can't. They will be able to enjoy life.
Equating freedom with the liberties the rich have is absurd. In any society, the rich will have the most freedom, even in the most oppressive ones. The true litmus test for freedom is seeing the freedoms the poor can enjoy. By that standard, the US doesn't score very well.
How free a country is can be determined by this question.
Would you choose to be a randomly chosen citizen? You could be anyone in that country with all the rights, privileges - or lack thereof - that that random person has.
I think I'd rather be a random Canadian with healthcare and education than a random American.
It's an interesting thought experiment.
This is an actual thought experiment by John Rawls: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position
I like to take it one step further.
Which country would you choose if you had to be poor?
I’d probably choose Cuba.
Wouldn’t the question better be “would you be happy with the freedoms of a random person” otherwise you’re including all kinds of other factors?
As a random US citizen, chances are high though that you voted Trump and are ok with all this nonsense. So, should be ok?
Fortunately for everyone, even some of the people who voted for trump are having second thoughts now they are living it.
Only a few. American Republican voters consistently show a pattern of not regretting their vote because bad things happen to other people, but only because bad things happen to themselves.
As a European who has lived in both countries I can only laugh at this. From our perspective, US and Canada are 99% identical, culturally.
It doesn't appear to be that way. If that 1% difference lies in how each country _fundamentally_ defines freedom, then I’d argue that’s more than enough to say Americans and Canadians are not alike. When the core values differ at such a foundational level, the rest of the cultural similarities become irrelevant.
It's also restricting the freedom of communities if you ban them from adding fluoride to their water if they like to.
This ban is anti-freedom. (Just like forcing them could be argued to be, even though that's what you argued against.)
So, this ban is arguably reducing freedoms on multiple levels.
Personal freedom ≠ "freedom of communities"—there is no such thing. Freedom applies to individuals, not collectives. When a community makes a decision that affects all its members, that’s democracy, but democracy is not unlimited authority. A majority vote does not grant the right to infringe on individual autonomy, which is why safeguards exist against the tyranny of the majority.
Banning fluoride does not restrict freedom—it prevents government overreach. In contrast, forcing fluoride on everyone would violate personal autonomy. Protecting individual choice is a fundamental principle, backed by real-world safeguards like constitutional rights, judicial review, and bodily autonomy laws. The burden of proof is always on those seeking to impose a policy, not on those defending individual freedom.
> Freedom applies to individuals, not collectives.
In the US, it most certainly does. We have freedom to associate, and associations also have freedoms. Were it not so, we wouldn't have even been able to arrive at the conclusion we have with regard to corporate money in politics.
But nobody is forced to drink municipal water. You can go to the grocery and pallets of gallon jugs if you prefer.
Then the community is exactly forcing people to seek other, and way more expensive and way more inconvenient, sources of water. That's the opposite of a freedom.
Why is the city required to provide water in the first place?
Please go away, libertarian troll.
Really? 'Why is the government providing potable water'? Because that's the point of governments: to provide a framework and the bare essentials of civilization.
And well, libertarian led governments are TERRIBLE.
https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-int...
I think they're saying that the logical conclusion of kebman's libertarian line of argument is that no-one is entitled to municipal water anyway, so it is moot whether or not municipal authorities decide to add a particular substance to the water or not. After all, if you trace things back far enough, the municipal water supply depends on the government 'forcing' lots of people to do things (such as paying taxes and following various regulations).
The whole argument gets weirdly metaphysical. Not many people have a problem with local authorities removing things from the water. That is, I don't see many Americans demanding that their local authority provide them with completely untreated water. But apparently modifying the water by adding something to it is importantly different. You'd think that a more interesting discussion would be a practical one (about the pros of cons of treating water in different ways). But a certain current of American discourse would rather return again and again to essentially theological arguments. We must locate the original sin against freedom in our local water infrastructure!
The opposite is true. If there was no municipal water supply, then you would in theory have a freer market where there would be multiple suppliers and consumers could theoretically make this decision themselves- assuming it doesn't result in a natural monopoly.
Because there is a government monopoly on water, you need these protections to prevent government overreach, because this is the only way for the consumer to express their preferences.
Some people would prefer there to be fluoride added to the water and some people would prefer there not to be. There's one set of pipes (in a given municipality), so you can't please everyone. You might as well complain that the government doesn't offer you a choice of voltage or frequency for your electrical supply.
Looking around the thread, the idea seems to be that there is some kind of important metaphysical distinction between the government "adding" something to the water that people could in principle add themselves or merely "filtering out" bad stuff like pathogens — and that this metaphysical distinction is somehow linked to the difference between positive and negative liberties. As an aside, I think this probably makes no sense on a chemical level, as you generally can't remove stuff without also adding something else. But in any case, this strikes me as a uniquely American perspective. I think a more common perspective is the following:
* Essentially no-one wants raw untreated water supplied to their homes.
* The local government therefore needs to decide in which ways the water is going to be treated.
* This has to involve some compromises (because there's one set of pipes).
* These compromises are boring practical issues of municipal infrastructure and have no interesting philosophical or political implications.
> I think they're saying that the logical conclusion of kebman's libertarian line of argument is that no-one is entitled to municipal water anyway
Oh, I very much understand the libertarian 'argument', and I dismiss it as childish anarcho-primativist horseshit.
Almost all (aside the rare Lefty libertarian types) libertarians utterly leave out the fact that helping each other and coming together collectively can fix problems in what amounts exponentiation, compared to the collective action problem of individualism.
If everyone generated their own power, then grids would be mismatched and slow everyone down.
If water grids were individual wells, we would tap out natural aquifers in short notice. By collectively coming together, desalination plants and mass water purification is doable.
Libertarian types will demand absolute indepenendence for everything, but also want the spoils of a framework of governance. But even when they get their own community, as I linked, they so overwhelmingly fucked it up.
Communism is a better idea than rugged right-wing libertarianism (the common one in the USA). Turns out, none of the richies want to pay for anything.
But adding fluoride WAS everybody coming together to solve a problem (poor dental health). We could have a reasonable argument about whether or not fluorine in the water continues to serve that goal. Instead we’ve got this weird quasi-debate about types of freedoms.
In the political philosophy of the US, the unit whose freedoms matter is the individual, not the community. Freedoms for individuals necessarily come from reducing the freedom of "the community."
yes, and i think that’s a pretty recent reading of the US comprehension of freedom. my sense is that the collective individualistic tendencies have ballooned.
even as recently as the early 90s, my civics classes emphasized the importance of other people’s rights and that of the expression of your individual rights infringed on the rights of others then it was an irresponsible and improper use of individual rights.
it seems like this has devolved into people whose perspective on individual rights loosely aligns enough to coalesce and shout the loudest to create policy. until someone in the in-group’s individual freedom is impacted and the group fractures into smaller coalitions. rinse. lather. repeat.
I disagree with you that this is a recent idea. It goes back to Locke, Hobbes, and the social contract theorists. The "collective freedoms" idea is more recent, if anything, coming from the subsequent generation of philosophers.
i can agree with the theory behind what you’re saying, but also sense that the practical application of individual freedoms has become increasingly prevalent and acute
In some ways, though, this is a reaction to the move in the other direction. The US in the 1800's was very much in favor of individual freedoms, but by the 1920's-1960's things swung heavily towards the idea of "positive freedom" and "community freedom."
Why are the remaining individuals in the community forced to include your individual in their decisions?
(I'm not being serious, I'm pointing out that you may not have found your first principle just yet)
AKA as the spoiled brat kind of freedom.
But, taking the individual freedom argument to its ultimate implications, the Free individual is also Free to not drink tap water in a community that decided to add fluoride to their water supply, and is also Free to move to a community that decided against it.
It's not a "freedom" to be forced to move away from a community just because you want pure water. Moral philosophy: A democracy should not act as the tyranny of the majority, and governments (local or otherwise) should not overreach their mandate with monopolistic policies that negatively affect individual freedoms.
Use the same argument on air and it falls apart. "The Free individual is also Free to not breathe air in a community that decided to add lead to their air supply." This was a big debate in the 70's btw due to car emissions.
the point was good until you tried to compare it to lead in the air. there are a few factors that make it impossible to use the same argument between lead in the air and fluoride in the water
>A democracy should not act as the tyranny of the majority, and governments (local or otherwise) should not overreach their mandate with monopolistic policies that negatively affect individual freedoms.
Then it shouldn't ban fluoridation when it could instead simply not mandate it.
In reality though, the freedom of the companies, which is just the freedom of the super rich ~100 - 1000 people (proxied via companies without taking direct responsibility: The sacred duty of company is to maximize shareholder returns!)
10,000 food additives that are banned in Europe are perfectly fine in US.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-food-additives-banned-europe...
https://isitclean.org/the-ingredients-banned-in-the-eu-but-l...
>This ban is anti-freedom. (Just like forcing them could be argued to be, even though that's what you argued against.)
By that logic is the first amendment "anti-freedom", because it prevents communities from instituting censorship laws, even if they actually want them?
I heard they were going to mandate seatbelts next! Where are our freedoms?!?!?
You joke, but a lot of these freedom-rah-rah-rah people absolutely cried like babies and resisted seatbelt laws back in the 80s and 90s, too. Half my family believed it was evidence a communist takeover, and they all had those little defeat devices that you plugged into the latch, which silenced the car's seatbelt-off indicator.
"You can't tell me what to do" has been a religion in the USA for a long, long time.
So then, you'd also be against adding folate/folic acid to bread for the same reason?
For those who don't know many countries including the US mandate the inclusion of folic acid in bread and certain other foods to ensure pregnant women get enough. A deficiency of folic acid during pregnancy causes birth defects in infants. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folate
I never heard of that supplement (not a father) and was very surprised to find 80 countries mandate it. I checked the list (below) and it turns out the 80 countries are a bunch of poor nations plus USA, UAE, Qatar, Canada and Australia. I guess our medicare system supports the EU mothers fine enough so we don’t need to put that in the staple of food.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5809909/ (Table 1)
Or you have just been sweeping preventable birth defects under the rug. The UK determined that had been happening and are going to start doing it.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c206d60xe7no
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8264257/
2023 Study:
"Despite Public Health Initiatives across Europe recommending that women take 0.4 mg folic acid before becoming pregnant and during the first trimester, the prevalence of NTD pregnancies has not materially decreased in the EU since 1998, in contrast to the dramatic fall observed in the USA. This study aimed to estimate the number of NTD pregnancies that would have been prevented if flour had been fortified with folic acid in Europe from 1998 as it had been in the USA."
"Conclusions: This study suggests that failure to implement mandatory folic acid fortification in the 28 European countries has caused, and continues to cause, neural tube defects to occur in almost 1,000 pregnancies every year."
The most famous NTD is Spina Bifida, and most of them aren't really fixable by modern health care. So this is 1000 babies a year who are either born with severe birth defects, or, in what I'm guessing is many cases, terminated when they could have been born healthy with a flour enrichment mandate.
It would be interesting to know why EU countries chose not to mandate it. Also, I wonder if EU flour millers/producers add it voluntarily, and whether flour produced in Canada destined for EU markets leaves out the folate that's mandated for inclusion in the Canadian market.
I am against adding anything to a whole population to treat a few, folate included. Here is why. Folate is a known stimulant of some cancers.
https://aacrjournals.org/cebp/article/17/9/2220/169762/Folic...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13668-018-0237-y
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1463-1318....
(And you know that the first line cancer treatments, like methotrexate, are anti-folates.)
So while we are lowering birth defects, are we increasing cancers at the same time? Has this ever been studied?
We are not a homogeneous population.
The same is true for fluoride. Some people have a fluoride allergy:
https://www.aaaai.org/allergist-resources/ask-the-expert/ans...
And while fluoride is known to prevent cavities, it also makes tooth enamel brittle:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43246-024-00709-8
https://www.medindia.net/news/healthwatch/fluoride-strengthe...
So I prefer to medicate myself, according to my own needs and my own genetics, thank you.
Anti-folates (similarly with magnesium and a few other things) are closer to chemotherapy than anything else. They promote cancers because they promote nearly every human cell, and the logic behind removing them is that since cancer cells divide so comparatively rapidly they'll be selectively targeted by a lack of division-enabling nutrients. Most people absolutely shouldn't be restricting their folate intake.
If we take your claim to its logical conclusion (that we shouldn't add those vitamins and minerals to our foods because they might hurt a small percentage of people), the other side of the coin is that we should _remove_ extra vitamins and minerals. If we don't, we're just implicitly medicating a whole population rather than proactively medicating them. Peanuts hurt some people; let's ban them everywhere. End-stage kidney patients without full renal failure often can't tolerate salt or phosphorus; let's not salt any of our food and ban the sale of eggs and meats. Diabetics can't easily tolerate a high glycemic load; let's be extra safe and not use any sugars or alcohols.
Or...make reasonable population-level interventions and let people with special needs handle their own special needs. There are gluten-free breads, no-excess-folate flours, and all sorts of things on the market.
While we're talking about baseline levels of B vitamins (folate), did you know that most bakers are also dumping a rich, broad-spectrum source of most B vitamins and trace minerals into your bread? It's not just folate. They then let that yeast further multiply for 2hr+ just to bump the vitamin levels up (or, worse, add extra yeast at the start to speed up the baking cycle).
Presumably, if you're in the US or any of those countries that mandate folate then you don't eat bread or anything containing flour—or you have to get special flour without it.
I'd imagine that must be very difficult for you.
BTW, that fluoride reference refers to excessive fluoride in water whether natural or added. I've not entered the fluoride debate here except to ask a question. I'd certainly object if fluoride levels were excessive in my water supply.
It is difficult, but not impossible. Many bakeries do not add them to their dough and Whole Foods has some brands without them.
Do not get me started on the IMP and GMP they are adding to foods now...excitatory purine flavor enhancers in the form of things like "Malted Barely Flour"
https://www.eurofins.com/media-centre/newsletters/food-newsl...
https://www.cspinet.org/article/guanosine-monophosphate-gmp-...
https://www.cspinet.org/article/inosine-monophosphate-imp-di...
"Folate is an essential water-soluble B vitamin found in foods, including dark-green leafy vegetables and legumes."
The above quote from that Springer reference reminds me of plant toxins in common foods especially in dark-green leafy ones, spinach, rhubarb, etc. Oxalic acid is one of the main ones but there are many others.
If you worry about what you eat you ought to be concerned about these. It's understandable that these toxins exist in these plants as they use them as protection against insects etc. Incidentally, I use oxalic acid industrially and I'm very careful how I handle it.
So instead of the niche individuals and groups working around society to meet their needs—because this absolutely can be done today—-those with an anti-flouridation belief are mandating that the majority give up economy of scale for something that it still wants and needs.
It’s doubtful that this stance is being promoting in good faith.
How is fluoridating water better than giving out free toothpaste and toothbrushes? Has the latter been tried?
"Not keeping people trapped in poverty" would be nice too but for some reason that one seems off the table.
We've been trying for the history of mankind to figure out how to "not keep people trapped in poverty". No one has solved that problem yet, despite the best of intentions with monumental effort. I'll agree with Milton Friedman on this, Capitalism, as bad as it is, has been the most successful system to alleviate poverty.
This is getting wildly off topic, but I firmly believe that "we tried everything and free market capitalism is the best we have" is a myth.
It's incontrovertible that, under certain conditions, an unrestricted price system (a "market") is the most efficient allocation mechanism possible. There's a lot of research on that kind of thing.
The myth is that we have ever tried anything resembling that on a nationwide scale, or maybe even that it is achievable at all. There is a fundamental "paradox of tolerance" in economics, where market participants have strong and persistent incentives to distort or damage the market. This is why business interests so often align with free-market liberalism or conservatism.
Most of the so-called deregulation under the current Trump administration for example as little to do with improving the efficiency of market allocation. It's much more about making sure very large and powerful corporations can get even larger and more powerful, and removing the regulatory apparatus to prevent them from distorting and damaging markets to suppress competition, or to suppress labor costs.
Rather than taking choice away, we should be educating people on what the best choice is and letting them make it themselves.
Brush your teeth in the morning and in the evening. Standard dental hygiene - If a person can be an obedient worker they can probably brush their teeth twice a day. If they cant, they have bigger problems to sort out.
> educating people on what the best choice is and letting them make it themselves.
If we go that way, we should have some sort of Department, to make sure Of the Education being consistent.
This is a fair point, and in modern times, where we have good public health education it makes more sense to take this approach.
However this comes with the weighty caveat that there are public groups that actively agitate against public health campaigns.
On balance I think defluoridation makes sense where you have good public health communication.
Is that not just a passive form of putting fluoride in the water though? Government is still spending money but without the desired outcome of having a healthier fitter population.
I lived in Germany for a while. There, the water that comes out of your tab doesn't get fluorized. Instead, they add fluoride to tooth paste.
So, is Germany less free or more free?
> So, is Germany less free or more free?
Can communities choose to fluoridate their water at the utility level or are they banned from doing so by legislation like they are in Utah?
Can communities choose to permit murder or ban people of certain races? Is America not free because they cannot choose to vote for a government that would prohibit women from voting or jail people for expressing political opinions?
You're using an extreme definition of freedom that I suspect is not quite the trump card you think it is. No, "communities" can't just do whatever they want because they "choose" to, and nobody ouside the lunatic fringe thinks that's a prerequisite for freedom.
Federal limit is 1.5 mg/l. All water suppliers have to regularly chemically/biologically analyse their water and publish fairly detailed reports. Example: https://www.bwb.de/de/assets/downloads/analysewerte-wasserwe... Some states add extra reporting requirements.
While they don't add fluoride, the natural levels in German tap water can reach 0.3 mg/L. Compared to the US recommended level of 0.7 mg/L in fluoridated water, that's not an insignificant amount.
I think you missed the point of "positive" versus "negative" freedoms.
They have more of one, less of the other.
Sorry if you read my post as snarky - I don't think I missed that point, I meant the question at the end more as food for thought.
The OP contrasts adding fluroide to water vs. not adding fluoride to water and brings up the freedom question. I find that very interesting. But he omits that there's also the variant I sketched, namely that fluoride could still be made available to the population, but not through water.
Now, how does this factoid relate to the freedom (positive or negative) question?
So, please don't read my post as negative, my intent was to bring an additional perspective to the table.
America has that too so it’s irrelevant to the question?
Isn't it also added to salt?
Isn’t that iodine and not fluoride?
Both. You get untreated, just with iodine and iodine + fluoride.
https://www.bad-reichenhaller.de/de/produkte/alpensalze/alpe...
That is not a very good reason. An absurd version of that would be putting antibiotics into the water because a lot of people don't have health insurance and can get infections.
Comparing Fluoride and Antibiotics is absurd. At least one of these things is supported by public health officials and isn’t unequivocally stupid.
So if the Science™ said it was good to add antibiotics (reduces illness!) and anti-psychotics (reduces violence!) to the water supply, you'd be for it?
That’s an even stupider comparison than the antibiotics one.
Let’s dismantle what you did here that you think is so clever.
You took an absurd comparison of a tried and tested naturally occurring substance with a substance that public health professionals are trying to get us to use less of.
You took that, and replaced it with an even more far-fetched and even more generalised hypothetical.
At least, given your ignorance around antibiotics you might be forgiven for thinking it would be a good thing to give antibiotics for all. I mean if it’s good enough for your food supply it should be good enough for humans right? Ignore egg prices going through the roof cause your flock has no innate immune system.
So then you replace that reasonable sounding but stupid supposition and you replace it with “a word” that you pulled out of the air that sounds like it might be a thing and then wowed us with your abuse of glyphs™
You are nothing but a depressing waste of time and whoever is putting you up to this I’d suggest you go back to them with your cap in hand and admit you’re not up to it.
I enjoyed that. Thanks for the run-out.
>You took an absurd comparison of a tried and tested naturally occurring substance
It's ironic that you assert this, and then go on to claim that I'm ignorant, when you seem to be the ignorant one. Penicillin was originally derived from a mold and is one of the popular antibiotics out there, so it's arguably "tried and tested naturally occurring". The same is true of lithium. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_(medication)
>with a substance that public health professionals are trying to get us to use less of.
Under the hypothetical of "if the Science™ said it was good", this would not be a problem. If you can't understand how hypotheticals work, I suggest you stop wasting my time.
You seem to be saying that because Lithium and Flouride are both naturally occurring minerals, that would make it okay to put Lithium in the water supply.
Please go on, the sun is out and I’m enjoying this.
>You seem to be saying that because Lithium and Flouride are both naturally occurring minerals, that would make it okay to put Lithium in the water supply.
1. If you do a quick skim of the comment section, you'll find no shortage of people unironically making such argument.
2. It might seem I'm making such claim if you're rushed or have reading comprehension issues, but if you read my comments more carefully you'd see I'm not making no such claims, only posing it as a hypothetical.
And, unlike penicillin, lithium doesn't cause resistant strains of bacteria to evolve. A solid win all around.
Perhaps, vitamins, micro doses of aspirin, and other low level medical treatments should also be added to water, for the benefit of the silent poor and sick.
Or even crazier, hear me out, maybe we can just let people have healthcare without cost-gating it? Like oh idk, every other even semi-wealthy nation in the world except the one where measles is making a comeback?
What do you mean by "without cost-gating"?
Public healthcare systems in other countries have procedures they don't cover, and significant wait periods (i.e., shortages) to see doctors and specialists and have procedures done. Because of the cost.
I'm not saying they aren't better than America's, but the idea you can just let people have it and not worry about costs isn't true. Health is like around quarter of entire government expenditure, it's fantastically expensive. Around the same amount of welfare expenditure, so you could double the number of people receiving welfare or double the amount that welfare recipients get for the same price, for example, which would be lifechanging for millions of the poorest and most disadvantaged people.
> except the one where measles is making a comeback?
Measles is growing globally. In the "European region" there were double the number of measles cases in 2024 as there were in 2023. https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/european-region-report...
>what do you mean by that
I mean, raise taxes on businesses (wanna guess how many walmart employees are on government aid, i.e how much we tax payers are directly subsidizing their exorbitant profits while they pay their employees below a living wage?)Tax the rich, (3 individuals hoard more wealth than 50% of the country combined) + Cut some large percentage of insurance jobs, military spending, and use that money to provide healthcare to every american, without spending time and money making sure they're poor before we deign them able to receive help. really, it's quite simple.
>Public healthcare systems in other countries have procedures they don't cover, and significant wait periods (i.e., shortages) to see doctors and specialists and have procedures done.
Agreed there. Ever wonder why?
Taking your point earnestly for a moment, can you earnestly tell me that's not still miles better than America, with more expensive outcomes, worse care outcomes, lowering life expectancy compared to poorer nations, record maternal mortality rates, and tons of medical bankruptcies?[2]
Cmon, be serious. Go fund me is one of the bigger health insurance systems in the country.[3] Btw, medicare for all saves tremendous amounts of money vs our current system.[1] Much like ubi, the science is clear, but the rich and the naive are too brainwashed or dumb by the propaganda of the oligarchy owned media to think American's deserve healthcare, housing, a dignified life.
Seriously, Compare your "worst case" to america, where people simply can't afford to see the specialists, or get the procedures at ALL. I know which one I would have and my opinion is backed by the sentiment, and empirical data of, like I said, literally every even half developed nation in the world. Your can offer nothing against this. It's simply fact.
That's not even to speak about women dying from things like birth complications because their draconian state let the theocratic fascists dictate what a women and their doctor can and can't do with their own body.[0]
>because of the cost
Drastic, brazen or glib misunderstanding of history and politics. Throughout conservative governments, from reagan to thatcher to bush to trump, the objective of these ayn rand reading dummies, (read, austerity politicians) are as follows:
1. cut funding to vital social agency.
2. point to resulting difficulties as proof it's a silly system.
3. sell it off to private corporations and get hefty kickbacks.
THAT is what causes all of the (still lesser than ours) problems you lament.
>the idea you can just let people have it and not worry about costs isn't true
Where did I say that again?
Man, if only someone had thought of that. If only we had a 1% that controls almost 40% of the wealth in this country. We could raise taxes to pay for such a program. Btw, I reiterate, every study, (even from neocon think tanks) recognize it would save us hundreds of billions.) But austerity/conservative politicians don't want to improve the lives of us, they want to enrich their fellow oligarchs.
Even thinking about this for a second will validate the notion. Instead of hundreds and thousands of employees whose job it is to give the least care to the least people for profit, maybe spend that money oh, idk, giving people healthcare? How much healthcare could've been provided from Luigi's cough victim's salary? If instead of getting paid millions to use AI to deny healthcare to those in need, that money was oh idk, spent on healthcare?
>Health is like around quarter of entire government expenditure, it's fantastically expensive.
Gee, I wonder what the cause of that is. Oh wait, I know this one too. Pretty common conservative talking point. Have you heard of the phrase "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure?"
Do you think a system where people are afraid to go to the dr for economic reasons contribute at all to the drastic healthcare expenses? I know someone that works as an ER nurse, people do not come in til they're at deaths door, with an issue that would have been remedied for a 100th the cost had they simply been able to see a doctor when first troubled. And again, all studies point to medicare for all saving hundreds of billions vs our current system.[1]
>Around the same amount of welfare expenditure, so you could double the number of people receiving welfare or double the amount that welfare recipients get for the same price, for example, which would be lifechanging for millions of the poorest and most disadvantaged people.
Or we could idk, just stop wasting money on evil "who deserves help" jobs and just you know, give that money directly to the people our government is supposed to improve the lives of? This goes for welfare, healthcare, unemployment, etc, too. How much of our social safety nets' budgets are spent in bureaucrats meant to make it difficult to get those benefits? To subsidize billion $ corporations? To bail out banks who speculated on subprime mortgages? To fund a $9T war on terror that did nothing but make us more enemies?
[0] https://steady.substack.com/p/women-in-texas-are-dying
[1]https://www.commondreams.org/news/medicare-for-all-introduce...
[2] https://www.pnhp.org/docs/AJPHBankruptcy2019.pdf
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/02/gofundme-...
This is a fairly unhinged reply to my quite specific question and comment. Pretty rude saying things like this
> Drastic, brazen or glib misunderstanding of history and politics
while pretending you weren't just spouting on about measels htat you had no idea about.
Healthcare is extremely expensive and taxing more won't magically make costs irrelevant or the cost of healthcare having to be weighed against other important and worthwhile government expenditure like welfare. That's just the reality of it no matter how much you're going to prattle on.
Apparently the US spends twice on healthcare for the same outcomes compared to comparable nations with universal healthcare. Therefore the concern about costs does not add up.
> Apparently the US spends twice on healthcare for the same outcomes compared to comparable nations with universal healthcare.
Sure, but I was talking about costs in other developed countries, not USA. Healthcare in Australia is about 1/4 of government expenditure with welfare being another 1/4, for example.
> Therefore the concern about costs does not add up.
Non-sequitur. Costs obviously do and I explained in very simple terms why (e.g., you could double welfare payments for about the same cost). Please explain your reasoning if you want to support the claim that cost is not a concern.
What's your point equating welfare spending to healthcare spending? To suggest that we fund welfare more instead of putting more money in to healthcare? Why??? Are you simply stating that giving x money to one social program is the same as giving x money to another? What is your point, your policy proscription?
Giving $x to healthcare is almost always better than giving $x to welfare, as well funded universal healthcare reduces OOP costs for citizens, which reduces their need to consume other welfare services.[0,1]
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10733771/
[1] https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/214481/a...
> What's your point equating welfare spending to healthcare spending?
I'm not equating the spending, only the costs.
> To suggest that we fund welfare more instead of putting more money in to healthcare?
I'm not suggesting that, I'm explaining what the cost of healthcare is in terms of another enormous government programe.
> Why??? Are you simply stating that giving x money to one social program is the same as giving x money to another?
No.
> What is your point, your policy proscription?
To try to give you some perspective about the enormous cost of universal healthcare.
> Giving $x to healthcare is almost always better than giving $x to welfare, as well funded universal healthcare reduces OOP costs for citizens, which reduces their need to consume other welfare services.[0,1]
Calm down and take a breath and try re-reading what I wrote in my first comment. It's extremely simple, maybe the fact I pointed out you were wrong about measles set you off badly. I'm not saying healthcare expenditure is bad or worse than other welfare or that America has a good healthcare system. I said that healthcare is cost gated in countries with universal healthcare systems. Which it is. In your hypothetical fairy land of unicorns and pixies where corporations and billionaires pay for everything, sure it's not cost gated, and neither is your government issued pony. But that is not an answer to my point that healthcare in countries with universal healthcare systems (and America, if it were to adopt one), is cost gated. Cost gated meaning people who need or want treatment will not be able to receive it in a timely manner in all cases.
>calm down and take a breath...
Yeah, I was a little heated, because I misunderstood what you meant by cost-gated, and thought you were being rhetorical and bad faith. My bad there.
We simply had different definitions of cost-gated, and talked past each other because of it.
>my point that healthcare in countries with universal healthcare systems (and America, if it were to adopt one), is cost gated
Sure, but... who cares? It still produces better outcomes, better coverage, better in nearly every measurable way. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
>Cost gated meaning people who need or want treatment will not be able to receive it in a timely manner in all cases.
Yeah, sure, but that really isn't the point. The point was that free at point of service (what I meant by not cost-gated) healthcare produces better outcomes, covers a larger % of citizens, and is generally simply a better way to do healthcare. Not receiving in a timely manner is miles better than not receiving at all because you can't afford it. That's a pretty worthy delineation to make, even if you could in the abstract call both "cost-gated".
The overall point is socialized medicine costs less, provides better outcomes, covers more people. All the rest is besides the point I was trying to make. Sorry again for coming in so hot, I'm clearly much too used to arguing with much more dishonest people than yourself.
Yeah, almost like he's a dishonest fool at best, or propagandist who will do anything to avoid acknowledging the simple, universally backed by data assertion that healthcare for all is cheaper, provides better outcomes, and the source of the problems of universal systems - austerity politicians who's m.o i laid out plainly. Defund, claim it doesn't work, privatize.
Complains I didn't answer every one of his points AND that my response was too long. Clearly a dishonest propagandist or a fool.
Being kind and civil with your words would strengthen your message.
Disagreed, If you need soft kind words to believe the guy telling you the sky is blue over the guy speaking softer but telling you the sky is red, you're the problem, not me.
I respond in good faith until the other party shows themselves not to be, and his glib rhetoric of "what do you mean, cost-gated?" while in the next sentence demonstrating he knows exactly what I'm speaking of - a public healthcare option - made it clear what type of person I was dealing with, and it wasn't a good faith commenter.
I've heard every argument that guy made and can make 1000 times over from fox news talking heads or an equivalent level person.
What strengthens my positions are, well, the truthfulness of them. All of the facts and studies support my message, playing nice with a bad faith commenter has no bearing on any of the facts I presented.
Not to mention he calls a thought out, four citation response "unhinged prattle" because he refuses to engage with any of my responses (he knows i'm right) to his dishonest comment. It's the conservative m.o, I've seen it a thousand times.
If you can't/won't accept reality because there was some extremely mild condescension, that's on you. Plus that guy deserved no good faith, I've heard his exact comment from every conservative talking head for a decade+, I know guys like him backwards to forwards (politically)
> I respond in good faith until the other party shows themselves not to be,
That was my first comment.
> and his glib rhetoric of "what do you mean, cost-gated?" while in the next sentence demonstrating he knows exactly what I'm speaking of - a public healthcare option
Public healthcare is cost-gated though. The recipient doesn't see the cost, but they see wait lists and procedures and medications and devices that are not covered. It is cost-gated. Prattling on about taxing the rich doesn't change that, it's just deflecting and changing the subject. If governments had unlimited money then healthcare would not be cost gated. Great. Astounding deduction. Now back to reality...
I think your attempt to spread disinformation about measles -- or worse, simply being willfully uninformed about simple facts yet trying to make statements of authority about them -- shows exactly what kind of person I'm dealing with.
>Public healthcare is cost-gated though.
Ok, I see where the misunderstanding arose. Cost-gating in this context meant, to me, preventing access to healthcare based on if the individual can pay at point of service, not if the state program can pay to see people quickly or whatever. Apologies for not giving the best faith interpretation to your comment, but you can hopefully see why I misunderstood your use of the term.
Sure, as a byproduct of systematically underfunded social health programs, you see a similar effect in countries with social healthcare, but I refuted the importance of that point pretty completely by explaining the m.o of austerity politicians and worse than gilded-age levels of wealth inequality[0] as the sources of social healthcare systems' ails and the clear fact that it's still a much better system by any measure.
The outcomes are still better, cheaper, and more have access to healthcare. So, not really relevant to the point that public healthcare > privatized healthcare? The rest is semantic word games. We're talking about which system provides better outcomes to more people for less money. And there is no question as to the answer of that.
>Disinformation about the measles
Sure, I was unaware how severe the anti vaccination rhetoric has taken root in europe too. My tongue in cheek dig at measles being back in the US was not meant to be taken that seriously, but more like a "point and laugh at the us" addendum.
But you are right, though it's besides the point completely. That we're the only country suffering from anti vax idiots is incorrect, sure. But it is not even really part of the argument here, more just a dig on the US. Idk why that tiny part of the discussion was fixated on. Probably because it's the only point I wasn't correct about.
[0] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/03/02/trump-musk...
Here in the U.K. at least, vitamins are added to many of the basic foods: like breakfast cereal and bread.
Putting aspirin in the water would be incredibly dangerous: brain bleeds and stomach ulcers would quickly knock out any other health benefits.
Like the vitamins and minerals added to cereals/milk or the iodine added to salt?
Or the iron that I wish they wouldn't add as it means I can't eat them due to my medical condition.
Those don’t have a monopoly.
The trouble with slippery slopes is that they carry you away from productive discussion.
One man's slippery slope, is another man's exploration of an idea. I don't think exploring widely is unproductive.
I could also say, that discussing slippery slopes (a linguistic discussion) is itself what moves the discussion too far from the original topic. You protest too much.
The trouble with slippery slopes is that not all of them are fallacious, as you are suggesting. This is a reasonable point: if we are doing delivery of medicine through tap water, where's the line? A few people have seriously suggested putting low doses of lithium in the tap water as a societal antidepressant.
The line is where we've drawn it now - nothing has changed in decades. A few people suggest all kinds of things, that doesn't make them at imminent risk of happening.
The difference is that fluoride is effectively an industrial waste product and thus it benefits multiple parties to use it. If vitamins were also an industrial waste product, we would indeed be adding them to lots of things.
>The difference is that fluoride is effectively an industrial waste product and thus it benefits multiple parties to use it
Source? Moreover, how much of a market can municipal water fluoridation create that companies would bother lobbying for it?
Are they silent, or just not being represented by the American press?
Same question but for giardia. Natural water from the river doesn't pass through filters that Science built.
Should we not treat water at all? Should we instead all like off ground water or rivers and lakes?
Do you think there's a difference between a/ treating water to make it clean and b/ adding minerals and vitamins for the benefit of others, whether they want it or not?
Not really. I'm sure some people want distilled water to come out of their tap. You can't provide any service to a large group of people without giving some of them something they don't want in some way or another.
That's exactly what I was trying to convey with my hyperbolic statement. I remember when I first moved to the city after being on well water for the first 25 years of my life and being put off by the chlorinated smell of the water. Now when I go back to visit family I'm put off by the well water... Especially when taking a shower.
I can't help but come away from this conversation with the impression that you people are talking about livestock and not human individuals with rights to their own body and bodily autonomy. This to me is straight out of the nazi/communist/fascist type of mindset.
> The contrast between positive freedom, the freedom to do something, and negative freedom, the freedom from interference in your life, is the core political argument in America right now.
True.
> Negative freedom, freedom from government interference, is being promoted by those seeking to weaken the government enough to supplant it.
Tenuous. Then again, like you, all of my political opponents are either stupid or evil or both.
> People who are poor and sick are likely unable to stand up for themselves or participate in solidarity against authority.
Contentious. Sometimes this is true, sometimes it is not - giving negative liberty rights (e.g. first amendment speech protections) to individuals has proven an incredibly effective tool to protect the individual against the state. Not perfect, but incredibly effective all the same.
> This individual issue is relatively small, but you take 100's of issues like this, and the effect is to create a class of people who aren't able to do anything but be obedient workers.
Any supporter of negative liberty (i.e. someone who is for small government) would tell you, that is what government does, which is a big reason why they want small government.
What in the Berkeley kind of logic is this? You have a pretty solid core logical structure. But, the conclusion is weak. The argument’s weakness lies in its simplifications and the final political assertion, which, although plausible within certain ideological frameworks, isn't logically proven by the earlier premise.
The American view of "freedom" is all messed up. You're "free" if the government doesn't tell you to do stuff. Even if corporations make you do stuff, even if they make you do more stuff the government did, that's somehow "free". And "stuff" somehow only includes trivial things like water fluoridation. No freedom-loving American patriot ever said America isn't free because cops can just murder you if they don't like you.
> the government forcing you to take a medication.
You're free to drink water that's not from the tap. Companies sell this legally. The government doesn't force anything
> The contrasting view is that putting fluoride in water is literally medicating people without their affirmative consent.
Is that the contrasting view, or the contrasting view that is preferred, because it is more easily demolished?
The stronger contrasting view isn't that the government is medicating people without their affirmative consent. It's that it's poisoning people, and no amount of consent by laymen to be poisoned would be acceptable.
I think his view is much stronger, since the intent is obviously to medicate even if it may indeed be inadvertently poisoning people in practice. So it doesn't assume one truth (poison or not) one way or the other, but still argues that it should be unlawful. While your view is much more narrow and suggests it should only be unlawful because it's poisoning people, which then begs the question of whether it is or not.
Fluoride occurs naturally in water, that’s literally how we discovered the effects of fluoride. People in areas where water naturally contained more fluoride had less cavities.
Anything, including water itself, is toxic (not poisonous, but I’m guessing you meant toxic, since fluoride is definitely not poisonous) in high enough doses. So you could say that about ANY mineral we may add to water to adjust its taste or health effects.
I happen to think adding fluoride isn’t worth the effort. But the hysteria against it is also really dumb.
>> fluoridation in water some people are less sick and have more money and therefore are more free
This is the real problem. That dental care, or any medical care, is costly.
> If you are poor you can't go anywhere or buy anything. You're not free if you're poor.
The solution is lifting people out of poverty not papering over the cracks with fluoride.
There is no fluoride in the water here in Norway yet dental health is good because of good education, free dental care for children, students pregnant women, and little absolute poverty.
Well said. Being poor charges interest.
I think it's a reductionist word game to reduce everything to a single dimension ("freedom") and then say "I think my policy is better, and since everything can reduce to a single variable it means there is more freedom".
If a right-wing voter thinks banning gay marriage is good for society, it is also positive freedom? If your counter-argument is "no, because while it would be positive freedom if it was good for society, it's not" then maybe I'm just disareeing on your terminology, but I suspect you would say "heck no, telling people what they can't do is not freedom, that's an abuse of the English language as well as being bad for society".
Governments exist to take away some freedoms, it's the whole point of them. People vote for governmets to take away freedoms (with laws and taxes) and get things like public services, justice systems and infrastructure in return. Ideally, they lean towards things that give you a lot of bang for your buck (like flourine), because taking away freedom is not good for creating a dynamic society, and they should be accountable to voters.
Just say that anyone who objects is an anarchist if you want to take the moral high ground from the right in terms they understand.
The issue is not the fluoride in the water, it's all the sugar that poor people eat and drink (especially sodas). And we actively fund the corn syrup industry at both ends via the farm bill (production and consumption via SNAP).
Also tariffs on cane sugar.
Forgot about that one, yup.
Always question whenever a highly educated and thoughtful (and likely wealthy) person like this commenter is telling you poor people are too stupid for their own good and can’t make decisions for themselves.
This is the definition of the principal-agent problem.
Also, “positive freedom” is a hilarious rebranding of dictatorial decision making.
Why not grant more “positive freedom” to the people by deciding exactly what these poor people should do for a living, how they should live, and how they should spend their money. The experts know best, after all.
I’m not even particularly against fluoride in water, but this kind of reasoning is insidious. If the people have voted for representatives that are against it, we should follow the will of the people. This is the definition of democracy.
Fluoridated water, enriched flour, iodized salt, vaccines, etc. are why we don't see diseases and conditions that plagued us in the past and continue to plague people in places without these measures.
Fluoridated water is the reason I've never had a cavity despite growing up poor with a terrible diet, dental hygiene and care.
> Fluoridated water is the reason I've never had a cavity despite growing up poor with a terrible diet, dental hygiene and care.
I don’t follow the leap here. You could just be blessed with a good oral microbiome, proper calcium, D3 (sunlight exposure?), K2 etc.
Going by your logic, there should be no dentists in the US.
There is no leap, when I finally got good access to dental care, I've had dentists tell me water fluoridation is what kept me from tooth decay in the chronic absence of dental care and basic hygiene.
Enriched flour is another good example that I was hoping someone would mention*.
It’s worth noting that it’s also slightly different in that processed flour is deficient in thiamin and calcium, so the fortification adds back these nutrients.
On the other hand, processing water to make it potable doesn’t remove fluoride and so fluoridation is not the process of adding back something that was there beforehand.
*I searched this page and found flouride and flouridation four times before your comment.
I've seen the enriched flour brought up a few times in this thread, and not with the important caveat: This is a poor substitute for the micronutrients that occur naturally in the bran and endosperm; parts of the grain that we've been stripping out for dubious reasons or 50-100 years. (In ~100% of restaurant and bakery food; ~90% of grocery food)
According to that logic, why not distribute fluoride water freely for those who want it? That would serve boths camps, not?
There's no such thing as "free" when something is "given" by a public entity. It always costs the people that actually work and are forcibly taxed, something.
> The contrast between positive freedom, the freedom to do something, and negative freedom, the freedom from interference in your life, is the core political argument in America right now.
Interesing take but I don't buy this part at all. The core political argument in the US is epistemological. What's real and what counts as true? There are some axiological differences but I think they are minor in comparison to not being able to agree on how the world is in the first place.
It seems to be that the battleground is epistemological, but not so much the argument. The difference being that Trump uses 'claims of truth' without any care of how true they are.
I feel the majority of epistemological disagreement is the result of propaganda (not exclusively from MAGA). With only a small bit that is actually a disagreement on core values. Suchs true disagreement does exist, but it is no longer what the political discourse is about.
That sounds like what I meant.
How many Americans consume enough tap water for this to be beneficial?
About 60% of bottled water in the US is sourced from municipal tap water systems:
https://www.nyruralwater.org/news/study-shows-nearly-64-bott...
74.6% of Americans get fluoridated tap water; https://jada.ada.org/article/S0002-8177(24)00204-6/fulltext shows that even with instructions to brush and floss and instructions to use it, water flouridation reduces cavities in a community by at least 20%.
"freedom from government interference, is being promoted by those seeking to weaken the government enough to supplant it"
That is a very big generalisation. There are many legitimate reasons for reducing government interference and reducing the size of government.
Currently, there is a very effective push by people who want to weaken the government enough to supplant it. They are giving themselves ideological coverage by claiming they protecting people from interference.
Is that a rephrasing you could live with?
No it isn't - OP didn't say everyone who promotes that idea wants to weaken the government, but rather those who wish to weaken the government are promoting that idea.
Fluoride has to be applied to the surface at a high concentration for brief contact time to be effective. What is the freedom to sell industrial waste to the government to pointlessly add to the water supply for profit called?
> Putting fluoride in water promotes freedom. That sounds crazy, but let me justify it.
> If you are poor you can't go anywhere or buy anything. You're not free if you're poor. If you are sick, you may be confined to a hospital bed or not feel good enough to do anything. If you are sick you're not free.
or, you know, you could avoid the problem in the first place and allow "even poors" to go somewhere or buy something... at least base items, and medicines...
this way they could afford dental costs, and you could spare the need to add fluoride in the water
This is the same reasonning with vaccine (only worse because you can die faster from not being vaccinated than from cavities -- although in some cases they can be lethal too).
People who want to be free from government interference should be prevented from using public roads, or public infrastructure of any kind. Want to mail something? Hire a courrier to deliver it for you. Etc.
I should pay 0 taxes then too
Sure, go ahead, no taxes! But along with OP's rules against using public roads, or public infrastructure: You also can't use the public's air, because regulation keeps it clean. You can't eat at any restaurants, because the government regulates them and make sure they are serving safe food. No access to medicine, either, for the same reason. No airline travel, which is heavily regulated and safe, No working for any company subject to OSHA and other workplace safety regulations. No calling the police or fire department if you need help. Just you in your homestead in the woods--oh, and if someone robs your homestead, you don't have access to the courts to get your money back, either, money that you can't use anyway because it's issued by the government.
No taxes in exchange for you not benefiting from anything taxpayer-funded. How does that libertarian paradise sound?
That’s a very American perspective (which is fine, given that we are talking about America). Most countries would view this as a non-partisan public health policy issue which has nothing to do with the abstract philosophical debates about freedom beloved of 90s internet libertarians.
Isaiah Berlin wrote about the two concepts of liberty[0] in 1958 and the constitution of the US is based on negative liberty, so it goes back a bit further than the 90s.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Concepts_of_Liberty
I'm aware of the history (I said "beloved of", not "invented by"). My point is that it's idiosyncratically American to think of decisions about municipal water treatment as being fundamentally questions of political liberty.
I think it's nice that they consider liberty at all, it's rare where I come from.
> Putting fluoride in water promotes freedom.
I rather define freedom by the government not deciding what's good for me
> I rather define freedom by the government not deciding what's good for me
Does that mean you are against this bill?
Before the bill, your community could either use your own water system, without fluoride, or use the wider system, which has fluoride.
After this bill, your community no longer can use your own water system with fluoride, and the wider system also does not have fluoride.
On a first read, this bill makes the government remove a choice for you, deciding what is good for you.
(I don’t have a horse in this race honestly. Assuming everyone can get toothpaste and toothbrushes, the effect is the same. But the wording of the bill is strange: “may not add fluoride” rather than just “is allowed not to add”.)
Source: https://archive.is/Nustz
"Your community could decide" is not freedom in the American political sense. In US political theory, the unit of freedom is the individual, full stop.
I've seen this retort elsewhere. It's not true. It's why corporations are persons with first amendment and other freedoms.
Corporations are not actually persons. You should read the Citizens United opinion if that's what you think it meant.
Corporate owners are people engaging in voluntary transactions. Their freedom was essentially the question in Citizens United. "Corporations are people" emerged from the media as an oversimplified version.
They are not natural persons, but they are juridical persons and were so before Citizens United.
Exactly this. But remember that "legal personhood" basically just means "able to enter contracts" and does not imply any sort of human rights or humanity. It does not mean anything like what "personhood" normally means.
This has also been the case for the entire history of corporations, which is longer than the history of the US.
You're free to get your water straight from the ground, then.
Or just not consume any water.
Are we also "free" to not pay "voluntary" taxes then? We have to understand that we're N-levels deep into this spaghetti mess, and as a consequence of that it's very hard to argue anything from first-principles or absolutes.
The UK government is really big on doing things for our own good, but they don't seem to do much water flouridation. Which I think is some evidence that it's not a clearcut health benefit.
Exactly the opposite.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/health-and-care-b...
> We believe that water fluoridation is the single most effective public health measure there is for reducing oral health inequalities and tooth decay rates, especially amongst children. We welcome these proposals and believe they represent an opportunity to take a big step forward in not only improving this generation’s oral health, but those for decades to come.
Do they do much floridation though?
Uk is one of the unhealthiest countries
UK: 34th
USA: 69th
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/healthies...
Excessive fluoride exposure is associated with reduced childhood IQ: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/... . Giving poor people (the ones who can't afford to drink bottles water or buy a fancy filter) means to moderate their fluoride intake this risk is creating lower-iq, more obedient workers.
This started out as an interesting and fair take until “…enough to supplant it”. Freedom from the government is the original vision and one of the core principles of America assuming that anybody that wants smaller government just wants to supplant it is a massive misunderstanding of most Americans today and certainly the founding principles.
We can read this country's founding philosophy directly:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
It's not freedom from government but freedom from tyranny. They believed that governments existed to promote the protection of rights.
Yeah, that’s just the start.
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
This demonstrates an intentional effort by the founders to strictly limit federal authority by explicitly enumerating government powers and leaving everything else beyond federal reach. It underscores that their conception of freedom involved a government that was deliberately restrained, designed primarily to safeguard individual liberties by minimizing governmental interference, rather than merely protecting from outright tyranny.
They were anti tyranny. Governments tend to be tyrannical, but they weren't against governments, they were against tyranny.
Timothy Snyder is the modern embodiment of founding father ideology/enlightenment philosophy and my original post was almost directly lifted from his talks/books.
Yes they may have been in favor of small government, but we have the tyranny of corporate power now. When healthcare is tied to a job, women are working instead of doing child care, the combined wages are not enough/barely enough to afford rent and necessities, and there are no savings for emergencies, that leads to the tyranny of business and wage slavery.
It leads to individuals without the means to withdrawal consent from a tyrannical government. It structurally disables acts of disobedience. Jefferson said rebellion unto tyranny is obedience to god, not rebellion unto governments. They were not subject to the levels of concentrated corporate power that grew out of industrialization. Robber Barrons were also tyrants who acted tyrannically.
There's probably something to be said about self reliance and protestant work ethic which can result in obedient workers willing to work under poor conditions for cultural reasons, but thinking that government is the only entity capable of unchecked power when we have businesses with a higher revenue than some entire countries/states shows a dogmatic chasing of a justification for a belief, rather than following the principles towards an assessment the principles themselves would lead to. It's a kind of originalism. The appearance of their beliefs, but not the substance of them.
A republic... If we can keep it.
Well good luck keeping it if the average citizen is too weak to project any kind of political power. Good luck having strong citizens (or a cohesive society) without strong social programs like public education.
> rather than merely protecting from outright tyranny.
Enlightenment ideology at it's core, the very central point of it, which our documents were written into respect to, says you give up some rights in order to have other rights protected [from tyranny]. That is why man leaves the state of nature... Greater protection from tyranny.
The constitution was a document meant to be adapted. The goal of the implementation is plainly stated:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
No, it’s very accurate about republicans today. “Supplant” might be the wrong word: traditionally the saying is “drown it in a bathtub”.
The government can give out toothpaste in school, it doesn't need to add things to water.
The inviolability or integrity of one's own body to me is more important than any of this. You have the right to decide what medication to be given to you with informed consent always, or you have no freedom. Otherwise the freedom argument collapses and you stop having reasons to allow abortions, or a bunch of other informed consent situations.
And "knowing better" than poor people "for their own good" usually doesn't go well (for the people).
Except schools handing out toothpaste will get brought up at thousands of board meetings across the country with sensitive or bored parents claiming government overreach and misuse of budgets.
Would you also ban iron in wheat flour?
You can presumably buy a different brand of flour or find a different source quite easily? Same applies to most other “fortified” products. With water your’e basically forced to waste money on bottled water or very expensive filtration systems.
But yes, adding additional vitamins or minerals to food products is generally unnecessary when supplements are generally cheap and highly available these days.
The knowledge about the supplements we need also cheap and highly available and yet lots of people don't have it. I myself don't know all the supplements I need.
I feel like for better or worse we are being forced into an era of individual responsibilities where the safeguards that we used to rely on without having to think are being actively dismantled.
> myself don't know all the supplements I need.
That certainly doesn’t mean that whoever decided to put extra iron into flour knows that you need it.
IIRC iron deficiency is pretty rare in men.
Also it might have made sense 100 years ago when most people had very similar diets and lacked similar nutrients, not these days though.
I support the language here: https://fra.europa.eu/en/eu-charter/article/3-right-integrit...
Article 3 - Right to integrity of the person
1. Everyone has the right to respect for his or her physical and mental integrity.
2. In the fields of medicine and biology, the following must be respected in particular:
(a) the free and informed consent of the person concerned, according to the procedures laid down by law;
(b) the prohibition of eugenic practices, in particular those aiming at the selection of persons;
(c) the prohibition on making the human body and its parts as such a source of financial gain;
(d) the prohibition of the reproductive cloning of human beings.
the debate in this thread is a reflection of the politico-scientific standing of the united states. it seems as though fluoridated water has come to be treated as a synechdoche for the role of science (and public health) in society. both sides are trying in earnest to defend their meta-position (“freedom” vs “society”) but slip into logic errors (usually cherry picking and straw man). i think this is because of the context switching between the part (fluoridation) and the whole (freedom/society).
Fluoride in toothpaste already covers most people today. So, if there are legitimate concerns about adding it to the water supply due to fluorosis, even if those concerns are small, removing it seems reasonable to me. Are the number of people who don't brush their teeth really high enough to justify it?
Decades of science show it’s beneficial, and we keep seeing the outcomes validated in practice. Calgary removed fluoride from drinking water, saw a significant increase in dental carries in children, and is adding it back. [1]
Hawaii does not fluoridate and has high rates of children’s tooth decay [2]
[1] https://www.npr.org/2024/12/13/nx-s1-5224138/calgary-removed...
[2] https://www.civilbeat.org/2016/10/hawaii-children-have-highe...
Thanks, that changes my view on this :)
All i know is my parents generation grew up without it and saw they dentists for fillings, every year, for years. Seemed like their childhoods played a part here because half their life they had toothpaste at the same rates as me.
I on the other then havnt seen a dentist in 25yrs, have no fillings after 40, and wouldnt say i brush my teeth twice a day, everyday, as recommended. I do however consume water tainted with fluoride.
So maybe there are more factors at play here then simply washing our teeth. I cant fathom how dirty our parents generations teeth must have been before toothpaste to result in the amount of fillings they have compared to people my age (unless your a meth head).
These American experts who are “disheartened” — do they not pay attention to Europe? Or do they only get upset when Republicans do something?
Europe (and many parts of Asia,) is objectively healthier than most of the residents of the USA; so maybe rather than knee-jerking against anything RFK Jr., perhaps the so-called experts should start doing their jobs and looking at what healthier places in the rest of the world are doing. The status quo in the USA is default fat and unhealthy. Why aren’t the fluoride cheerleaders not using their “expert” status to shout against high fructose corn syrup, artificial coloring, or the fact that most American food tastes like sugar?
Do you seriously think that dental and health experts don’t rail against those things? They do, and they consider those things far more important than fluoridated water. Their opinions on fluoride are being shared because there is notable news about fluoridated water.
Americans do not want to hear about how they should eat healthier.
So, Finland gave fluoride a shot in a few cities back in the '60s through the '90s, but they didn’t see much point to it and dropped it. Now, some spots there are even filtering it out of the water. You can still get it in toothpaste and mouthwash, though.
There’s this study I read that says the top five countries for dental health are Denmark, Germany, Finland, Sweden, and the UK. The US? It’s lagging at ninth. Funny thing is, out of those top five, only the UK messes with fluoride in their water, and even then, it’s just for like 5% of folks.
Honestly, it kinda feels like skipping the fluoride in water might be the smarter move.
Anyone else gets reminded of General Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove?
First thing I thought too.
The solution to ALL of this is a very simple randomised controlled trial. Identify 1000 pregnant women in a fluorinated area, give half of them free unfluorinated bottled water for their pregnancy and first 2 years of babies life, and let the other half drink tap water, then measure all of the kids’ iqs at 5 years.
Sadly noone has done this because the topic is too radioactive for most researchers or science funders to touch.
Does filtering your water with a whole house filter take the fluoride out?
Because I live in a small township that delivers well water to you tap. It tastes horrible, shortens the life of pipes and appliances, and smells like sulfur.
Every year they mail a flyer that explains how the lead levels are dangerously above the national standard and you should run the tap before you drink from it.
Like, sorry there's nothing we can do about it. =(
> Because I live in a small township that delivers well water to you tap. It tastes horrible, shortens the life of pipes and appliances, and smells like sulfur.
Oh man, I used to live in a place like this. You could smell if a restaurant served filtered water (lots filter for the soda machine, to keep mineralization in it down I assume, and use the same water to serve) or straight from the tap, without taking a drink. Like with your nose six inches above the cup, you could smell it. Luckily, almost all served filtered.
I looked in to this recently.
Turns out that carbon filters do filter fluoride, but only on the first few X litres of water, where X is in the first 0.01% or so of their expected lifespan. So, they do, but not really usefully in any sense.
My filter that I wanted to know about (so that my kid is getting fluoride) is a 2-stage filter, with the other stage being a particle filter, but fluoride is very small and unaffected.
Your filter might be different of course.
FWIW, in my city, the water has essentially zero fluoride if it isn't added, and it has been a great intervention.
If it's reverse osmosis based, yes. If it's some other kind of filter, likely no, and you should buy a TDS meter and use it, because in all likelihood it's not really filtering anything. I did exactly this. It turned out that my carbon based filter had more TDS than completely unfiltered water from a tap in the garden. RO water, even re-mineralized, had 1/15th the TDS IIRC.
TDS is just Total Dissolved Solids. What solids though you don't know and you could be adding carbon while removing others which is likely the case.
Also those dinky little TDS meters don't even measure TDS. They measure electrical conductivity and with a little math they use the EC as a proxy for TDS. It's typically only calibrated to one specific ion, others will be off by some factor. Also keep in mind TDS is expressed in PPM as CaCO3.
Yes, but be that as it may, at least it shows whether _any_ filtering is occurring at all. Which in the case of even a somewhat spent carbon filter is not a thing. RO does the job so well, you have to remineralize afterwards or the water doesn't taste like anything. You could literally pee into a jar and get fresh water on the other end. That's sort of what happens on sailing vessels that are equipped with water makers - they simply run sea water through RO.
If thats your water quality, worrying about flouride seems misplaced.
Fluorinating all of the water just to deliver some milligrams to the teeth is incredibly inefficient. Especially when less and less of the stuff people people drink comes out of the tap.
We have toothpastes and fluorinated mouthwash that both get the job done.
Probably there are some people that are unable to afford those and unaware how to use them, but probably are tiny percentage of the state population, especially with the cult of teeth care that the US has.
I also see the fortified flours as example (or iodine in salt) - but the US is different now than in the 30s. The US diet is more varied. Very few people get 80% of their calories from a single starchy staple so developing a severe deficiency of something requires some serious effort from the persons affected.
So who is this policy of fluorination for - the people that are too poor to afford toothpaste, but still have access to municipality treated water and don't drink copious amounts of soda or bottled drinks.
Taking compounds of the most electronegative element, and treating people with them systemically—drink it, bathe in it, cook with it—when local administration directly to the teeth is cheap, easy, & effective makes no sense at all.
Meanwhile, mining industries produce—and must dispose of—a steady stream of fluoride compounds that would otherwise have to be dealt with as toxic waste (i.e. very expensive) if they ever lost the green light to dump them into the water supply.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Hodge
or per Google:
Three chemicals are used to fluoridate drinking water in the U.S: sodium fluoride (NaF); sodium fluorosilicate (Na2SiF6); and fluorosilicic acid (H2SiF6). Fluorosilicic acid is a byproduct of the manufacture of phosphate fertilizer.
I feel like we are so privileged in the US that there’s little to no personal consequences for being so wrong about a topic. Eventually there’s needs to be a correction, whether it’s because we regain our senses or we stray so far that the majority of people start to be majorly affected. I’m fearing it’s the latter.
There’s a tendency to backwards rationalize anything that is established in the US, that comes from a place of identity.
The current shape of the US is already the best and people consider it a part of who they are, so suggesting a course correction may be seen as both wrong think and a personal attack and wanting radical change would be outright treason.
There’s an array of standard stencils for defense against change: this is the only thing that can work here, this is the only thing that guarantees freedom, this is actually not that bad, I actually prefer it like this, anything else would be expensive/impossible/unamerican.
It’s not even unique to the US, but who cares about other places.
That's because drinking non-fluoridated water is very cheap (a minimal disadvantage). Vs. opposing fluoridated water can be very valuable (give the current culture wars).
Notice that nobody is arguing about keeping water-born pathogens out of the drinking water.
What is the best evidence in favor of this?
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
“ 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/...
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.
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 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.
> It matters because your statement of "Here’s a list of the most convincing studies or meta analyses." assumes some kind of curating.
Agreed
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.
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.
> 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."
> 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 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.
> 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
> 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.
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)?
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.
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.
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.
I didn’t say anything remotely like that, pretty much the opposite actually.
> 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.
Why does the “little c” conservative look to Europe when convenient, hmm?
> 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.
Thanks for sharing the link. Learned something new today.
Nobody tell him what chemicals were put in his drinking water to produce it. This might be the dumbest sentence uttered yet.
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.
> 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.
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?
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/
---
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.
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?
Thanks. I guess then my next question is, why are they doing this? Whom is it benefiting? Big Water?
It doesn’t always have to monetarily benefit anyone. It’s just fringe leaders playing to fringe ideas in this case
Is there scope to believe they just think it may be better not to have it in the water?
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.
> 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?
Dentists are going to make a lot of money filling so many more cavities.
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.
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.
Pretty sure I read that fluoridation is a communist plot to undermine American public health [1].
Sorry, that was the John Birch Society from the 1960's.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_to_water_fluoridati...
(I'm having some fun, but it is in fact the first thing that comes to mind when I hear objections to fluoridated water. Since we're talking about RFK and Utah, I kind of assume it more or less stems from the same fears.)
> Fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face.
Ice cream, Mandrake. Children's ice cream.
It’s just sublime to me the cadence and intonation Sterling Hayden uses pronouncing Mandrake.
Question: is there something I can do in the office to improve tooth health? E.g. after drinking a cup of coffee, maybe neutralize the pH with some antacid? Or, I don't know, chew some gum? Are there products that are relatively convenient and don't require a brush and water?
You can buy a bottle of it, swish it around your mouth and spit it out.
https://www.actoralcare.com/en-us/products/mouthwash/anticav...
Yes, I considered that, and I appreciate the suggestion, but I think it's not very office-friendly to spit out liquids.
Spit in the bathroom, not the office?
Well, then it's not an office solution anymore. Might as well brush my teeth ...
Anyway, an llm suggested that eating some almonds can help neutralize pH. This is the type of solution I can work with.
A dentist once recommended Xylitol gum to me for this purpose. It's been too long to remember the details, but you can do some research on it.
I think I'm more interested to know if the fluoride also helps keeps bacteria down in the water. That is, if it's doing anything useful other than dealing with teeth.
A quick search didn't seem to turn up anything related, so maybe not (the concentrations might be too low to be relevant)?
Water fluoridation conspiracy theories were a thing old enough to be a plot point in 1964 Dr. Strangelove. When there's an entire grift or political career to be a "Fluoride truther", it's really hard to take seriously any of these claims. Given it's naturally occurring and often in higher doses and there'd been so much time to control for any side effects, I'd need extraordinary evidence to be swayed on this.
Fluoride in Toothpaste: Do not ingest.
Flouride in Water: Ingest away.
I do not understand how these two can co-exist.
Radioactive isotopes in nuclear fuel: do not ingest.
Radioactive isotopes in banana: consume away.
Understand now? I'm not even defending anything other than how two things that vaguely appear contradictory, are in fact, not.
I don’t.
Because your banana example doesn’t have additives meant to be reactive — so is unlike adding fluoride to water at levels which impact dental health.
It's the concentration that matters. Toothpaste has over 1000x the concentration of fluoride vs 0.7mg/L as tap water. Many well water sources have naturally occurring fluoride that exceeds the additive levels.
Very low concentrations of medicine are usually ineffective at its stated purpose outside of pseudo scientific theories, so even if it is safe to ingest, it is not clear it is able to do anything for people’s teeth.
That is why I do not understand how the two can co-exist. Either the concentration is so low that drinking it for dental health is pointless, or it is not something people should be drinking. If there was a middle ground, we would have a 1 a day pill for this and not bother brushing our teeth or putting fluoride in water.
> If there was a middle ground, we would have a 1 a day pill for this
We do; fluoride tablets are common.
> and not bother brushing our teeth
Brushing your teeth does a lot of things besides applying fluoride to the surface. It's mostly about getting stuff that's already there off the surface.
My initial searches suggest that these are by prescription only. Do you have any information to the contrary? I did find toothpaste tablets, but those are meant to be used as toothpaste from what I can tell.
> My initial searches suggest that these are by prescription only. Do you have any information to the contrary?
No, I don't. Does that matter?
This is not a one a day pill then. If ingesting it is regulated, that would be consistent with it not being something regular people should ingest regularly.
It is exactly a one a day pill. What are you imagining?
Maybe another example will help?
Chlorine for water treatment in the backcountry when applied to a liter of water: Ingest.
Chlorine straight from a household bleach bottle: Do not ingest.
Fluorine is a dietary mineral.
At higher dosages, every dietary mineral becomes harmful, then (generally) lethal.
Without iron, humans die. Yet accidental (over-)ingestion of iron supplements is a leading cause of poisoning in small children.
Concentrations.
The studies in 20-30 years of the consequences of this will be fun.
I hope they will ban it everywhere. If my pineal gland gets any more calcified, I'll probably end up getting a full-chest tattoo and dye my hair pink.
maybe if we consumed less processed sugars and had normal diets, putting fluoride in the water would serve no purpose.
This is one of these US-specific polarised debates I find really bizarre, around some kind of issue that the rest of the world has by large solved but without any acknowledgement of this fact. Maybe the US should look into how other countries have solved it? It is completely bizarre witnessing both sides getting so polarised around a basically non-issue.
What I love about this comment is that one person thought "of course every other country just does the right thing when the US doesn't" and posted it, and then a bunch of other people thought "of course every other country just does the right thing when the US doesn't" and upvoted it, and not a single one of them thought to check what the "right thing" is.
Meanwhile, back here on Earth-1, there's no right thing, and countries all over the world have "by and large solved" the issue by doing completely different things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_by_country
> Water fluoridation is considered very common in the United States, Canada, Ireland, Chile and Australia where over 50% of the population drinks fluoridated water.
> Most European countries including Italy, France, Finland, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Hungary and Switzerland do not fluoridate water.
The missing context here is that the science and established benefits of fluoride aren’t a culture war political football in those countries.
These countries largely publicly recognise the benefits of fluoride, but don’t add it because:
- Some countries opt for intake via supplementation.
- Some have a naturally sufficient supply in drinking water via natural processes.
- Some even need to reduce the abundance of fluoride in their water due to over supply.
Why is that missing context? I don't think anybody who is against fluoridated tap water rejects the benefits of fluoride, they just think the harms of adding it to tap water outweigh the benefits.
Might I introduce you to the US’ head of antivax and conspiracy theories: https://x.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1852907832884285708
I don't see a statement of his opinion on fluoridated toothpaste, which is the real test.
> dangerous neurotoxin
I think you can pretty easily infer his opinion about toothpaste containing a "dangerous neurotoxin".
The lethal dose of fluoride is in the 5-10g range for an adult [1] with immediate gastrointestinal effects at 15-20x lower. While those levels are quite obviously far above the recommended level of 0.7mg/l, it's very reasonable to call anything that's lethal at 5g, to a human adult, as dangerous.
The latest report from the National Toxicology Program has found a causal reduction of ~1.63 IQ per additional mg/L concentration of fluoride in their urine [2], which would seem sufficient to also call it a neurotoxin, though the NTP under extensive pressure chose to avoid any particular label after having previously declared it a "presumed neurotoxin."
Notably the study from NTP also mentioned something most people here seem to be missing: "There is a concern, however, that some pregnant women and children may be getting more fluoride than they need because they now get fluoride from many sources including treated public water, water-added foods and beverages, teas, toothpaste, floss, and mouthwash, and the combined total intake of fluoride may exceed safe amounts."
Fluoride being seen as desirable at safe levels, may have drove excessive multi-domain inputs of it, which can combine to drive it to unsafe levels.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoride_toxicity
[2] - https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/whatwestudy/assessments/noncancer/...
> it's very reasonable to call anything that's lethal at 5g, to a human adult, as dangerous.
No it is not. It is sensational and intentionally inflammatory. It is especially damming coming from someone in his position.
Vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin B, iron, and caffeine are all deadly at that level. The first 4 are mandatory for life, shall we call them dangerous too? Or perhaps we have some nuance and acknowledge the co spirit oriel background (and other beliefs) of the people pushing the anti-fluoride message.
Obviously. In looking up the LD50/lethal dose for vitamin A, I ended up here. [1] You might notice the big red symbol "Health Hazard" at the top. And the LD50 for vitamin A ranges from 1500-3700mg/kg, contrasted against fluoride's 26-94! But really one of the biggest issues here is that unless you're actively trying to kill yourself with vitamins, an overdose generally has no major effects beyond some gastrointestinal issues. I've experienced it myself by supplementing with vitamins while body building and consuming an already extremely high nutrient diet.
But with fluoride we're talking about extremely low doses, well below the lethal level, being able to potentially permanently damage the mind's of children. Such an extreme risk justifies an abundance of caution, especially when the reason we're doing it is for some relatively modest dental gains, which are likely increasingly obsolete with fluoride being in tooth paste and many other sources besides water. In fact, as per the study I linked to up above, this is precisely the problem!
"Since 1945, the use of fluoride has been a successful public health initiative for reducing dental cavities and improving general oral health of adults and children. There is a concern, however, that some pregnant women and children may be getting more fluoride than they need because they now get fluoride from many sources including treated public water, water-added foods and beverages, teas, toothpaste, floss, and mouthwash, and the combined total intake of fluoride may exceed safe amounts."
[1] - https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Retinol
> which are likely increasingly obsolete with fluoride being in tooth paste and many other sources besides water.
See the rest of this thread. If you think the group (at RFK doing so in an official government capacity) using such inflammatory language is going to stop at removing fluoride from just water I don't know what to tell you.
I disagree there. When you actually listen to what RFK says instead of the media's spin on the most extreme cuts taken out of context, it's nowhere near as sensational. In particular RFK has consistently and repeatedly stressed an opt-in view on all things health/pharmaceutical related. If you want it, you can have it. But when you do things like fluoridate public water supplies, you turn it into an opt-out system where unless you go out of your way - you're going to get it.
Tooth paste, and other commercial products, are opt-in systems. And indeed there are already numerous unfluoridated options available.
Fluoride does have neurotoxic effects though.
Never let the truth get in the way of a good grift.
Generally speaking I see fluoridation as a ridiciulous idea, on the grounds that the vast majority of tap water ends up being used for things other than brushing your teeth. It is wasteful and damaging to the environment, that excess flouride that has no business being there ends up in the drain, or the water you use for your plants.
Flouride should be put in the toothpaste. Then people can make a choice on whether they want it, but most importantly, its in the only product that is actually used for brushing teeth
Fluoridation for public health is done at lower levels than fluoride is found naturally in water in other areas.
If it's harmful as you imply, lots of water would need defluoridation.
https://www.npr.org/2024/08/23/nx-s1-5086886/fluoride-and-iq
A useful thing to note, thanks. A link to the actual inconclusive report would have been better fwiw.
Sounds like it's not important to address fluorine reduction if a casual relationship can be established.
I do wonder how they compensated properly for fluoride being added in poorer areas. Will dig it out when I get chance.
> It is wasteful and damaging to the environment
It's basically a waste product and water naturally has fluoride in it at the same levels, or more, that fluoridated water has, and the environment has been just fine in those places.
While I acknowledge it is not a "solved" issue, I find it bizarre nonetheless, simply because it is so disproportionately low-stakes compared to the amount of controversy around it. Increased risk of cavities versus tentative evidence of losing 1-2 IQ points at 1.5 mg/L? Sounds like a Monty Python sketch to me that people would get so worked up over this.
The risk of cavities is reduced by using toothpaste or mouth washes with fluoride, not by drinking fluoridated water.
Almost all fluoride from the drinking water does not have any effect on tooth enamel, because it has contact with it only for a few seconds, except for an infinitesimal fraction that may exit again the body in saliva.
On the other hand, the harmful effects of fluoride in drinking water are certain and it cannot be predicted exactly how much water will be ingested by someone, i.e. which will be the harmful dose of ingested fluoride.
The only argument of those who support water fluoridation is that most people must be morons who cannot be taught to wash their teeth. I do not believe that this theory can be right.
> The risk of cavities is reduced by using toothpaste or mouth washes with fluoride, not by drinking fluoridated water.
it always surprises me how willing people are to just make something up and be confident in doing so. We've know for almost 75 years that water fluoridation reduces tooth decay[1] and yet here you are straight up denying that.
Do you just not care if you are correct? or do you know you aren't but are driven by the beliefs you already hold?
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/oral-health/data-research/facts-stats/fa...
> Almost all fluoride from the drinking water does not have any effect on tooth enamel, because it has contact with it only for a few seconds
The contact via toothpaste or mouth wash isn’t all that much longer, so why would they be effective if fluoridated water isn’t? People intentionally wash out toothpaste and mouthwash after this short contact.
Im sorry, but I think it’s ridiculous that thinking something that knows off an IQ point or two isn’t a big deal.
For one, we’re literally making everyone slightly less intelligent. While it’s a very small factor, I sure as hell wouldn’t want that for my daughters.
For two, IQ is easy to measure. Through that, we know it’s affecting the brain during development. How else is it affecting it? We don’t know.
Weighed against potentially higher risk of cavities pretty much only during childhood and the math seems incredibly clear to me. I feel like the only reason we haven’t banned adding it to water supplies is because people have a knee jerk reaction to anything that sounds even vaguely anti-vax nowadays.
The fact that until 10 years ago the US allowed significantly higher levels should be a really big deal to people.
I’m on reverse osmosis well water so it doesn’t matter to me personally, for what it’s worth.
IQ points is just an indicator that could be measured consistently. Who knows what else is going on.. and statistically (especially depending on the distribution) 2 IQ points is quite a lot. After all 50% of the population fall into the 20 point range in the middle..
Of course it comes down to whether the relationship actually exists. But picking a slightly higher risk of cavities when the other option is potential mental impairment (however mild) seems like a no-brainer..
Has this link been found to not exist in fluoride supplements or fluoride toothpastes?
I don't think it's such a no brainer if every health org is recommending fluoride, and some people think it's scary.
Nobody did any studies or experiments?
Also you are not supposed to eat toothpaste…
> don't think it's such a no brainer
Well obviously only if the relationship actually exists and there is enough evidence for it. How else could you interpret my comment?
> brainer if every health org is recommending fluoride
Is that true? e.g. throughout entire Europe for instance?
you're really genuinely shocked that people would get worked up over chemicals being added to their drinking water without their consent? chemicals which have not been conclusively proven to be non-toxic? chemicals which are already in toothpaste giving people the choice to use them anyway?
flouride naturally occurs in water all over the world, and if you don't want any chemicals in your water you should be drinking distilled water. Almost nobody does, because "chemicals in the water reeeeeee!!!" is just a mindless idiotic shreak, not anything insightful or debatable
>"chemicals in the water reeeeeee!!!"
having to resort to childish attempts like this essentially invalidates anything "insightful" you might want to say. if you can't see that manually adding safety-unproven chemicals to water without people's consent is a weird and unethical thing to do, then that's fine, but don't embarrass yourself and everyone else like this
> if you can't see that manually adding safety-unproven
Nobody is doing that, so maybe don't embarrass yourself like that?
> without people's consent
Also not happening. Consent was established when it was voted on, and if people want to change their local policies they are always free to do so. People that object against majority are also free to drink alternative water from the free market instead of relying on socialist handouts
If you want to have an actual, good faith debate about the pros/cons of a specific additive that's wonderful. But you didn't, you reduced the entire thing to "chemicals bad because chemicals". But, more significantly, so too has the US's administration which Utah is following suit on. The US is full on "feels not reals" government mode.
my friend at this point you are just wildly throwing whatever pops into your mind into the air and hoping it sticks somewhere
when was it voted on and by who? tell me.
you're also aware that people pay for water, it's not free? quite an odd thing for an adult to not know
"good faith debate". from someone who started making mocking autism noises in the middle of a normal conversation? that's what I suggested was embarrassing, you simply didn't read my comment because you yourself have no interest in having a good faith discussion and you're just blindly throwing terms like that as a way of dismissing an opinion you disagree with.
"chemicals bad because chemicals" I never said anything of the sort, this is a strawman you invented to strengthen your struggling argument. there have quite literally been studies linking increased fluoride to toxicity. it's not "chemicals bad because chemicals" it's "there have been studies suggesting this chemical may be toxic so why are we putting it in drinking water without a public consultation in the last 70 years?"
>The US is full on "feels not reals" government mode.
okay and here we have your real motivation. 90% likely you quite obviously don't give a fuck about fluoridated water or human rights, you are pissed about the current executive branch and you're looking to take it out somewhere. this "debate" is over.
To straw man, you could argue that 1-2 IQ extra might have a large affect on the salary as everything is relative. If you are on the lower IQ scale, a ten point reduction would double your likelihood of doing crime.
I put in a spelling error in the above paragraph of 215 characters, you still understand it but what was your perception of me from this very small error?
Agree, it's a little bit like child Covid vaccinations. Not much evidence for either benefit or harm, recommended in the US but not most of Europe.
It’s not at all the same, that’s a terrible example. Child vaccinations help reduce the Rt, regardless of whether the benefit to the individual is significant. Statements to the contrary have just confused the public. (biochemist)
Not necessarily, because excessive boosting is associated with increased infection rate/RTlt: https://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S0163-4453(25)000...
Tell that to the European health agencies, I guess, they seem to be confused too.
Nothing new there.
What Rt are you worried about in 2025?
Rt is just basic science, and basic science doesn’t change depending on the year.
The specifics of fluoride are low stakes.
The general idea of the government medicating the people writ large isn't low stakes.
In the US there are a lot of people who are of the opinion the government should just let people be.
Are those the people voting for the "have the government put restrictions on trans people" party?
I have a feeling it's not about "letting people be". It's about "let me be and screw over those I don't like"
If you live in the US, you'll meet a lot of genuinely good people on both sides of the more/less government debate.
Anyone who thinks this is a straightforward issue is dumb, frankly.
I'm just confused how parties that advocate for small government(in the US and Canada) seem to simultaneously target the rights of minorities.
How can the issue people are concerned with be government overreach if they don't care about the government overreaching into others backyards?
What rights of minorities have been targeted? If the only example is trans rights, it's dumb to think it's a simple issue of trampled rights. There are two competing sets of rights, you grant one set you take away from the other. There isn't a good solution.
If you think all the people advocating for small government must be fools or hypocrites, you don't understand the issues an any depth.
Why do trans people not count as a minority being targetted?
I'm curious, what rights are "granted" by making it illegal for doctors to prescribe puberty blocks when they as a medical professional and a child's parents as their guardian agree they're the best medical course of action for a child?
Saying "it's about granting and taking away" like rights are some zero-sum game feels like it's ignoring the complexity of these issues more than what I'm saying.
Nobody said "doesn't count". You are disingenuous.
> What rights of minorities have been targeted? If the only example is trans rights, it's dumb to think it's a simple issue of trampled rights
So it's not an issue of trampled rights if it's just trans rights, yet you can't come up with a reason that trans rights need to be restricted to ensure freedom of others. And it's being disingenuous to call you out for saying trans rights don't matter when you say this...
Example: trans rights in sports. You let them play, you take away the rights to a fair playing field for women born women. You don't let them play, you take away their right to play sport. There isn't a good solution.
You knew the example. You know why society restricts people below 18 from all kinds of things. You are the very definition of disingenuous.
Trans people playing on the sporting team they want to is not "rights", and your focus on it to deflect from the very real issue I brought up is telling...
I don't mind being called "the very definition of disingenuous" by you.
Once you start trying to cross-reference a public health campaign with something related to peoples' diets, it becomes difficult to make super broad and conclusive statements.
Here's some interesting data (2003 I believe, so pretty old) [1]: It reports that most of Europe, Canada, Australia, and South America experiences cavities at rates higher than the United States. However: Many of these countries have public health care; the US does not. Is the US under-reporting? (I didn't dig much deeper into the underlying data; may not be a relevant concern).
Three things I think are likely to be true: (1) Fluoridated toothpaste is widely available and cheap. (2) Cavity rates are significant even in countries with high rates of fluoridation. (3) Fluoridating the water supply carries with it a non-zero monetary cost. I tend to believe that these three realities, at the very least, justify the conversation as being one we should have. It could be the case that water fluoridation made a ton of sense in a world where people didn't have as much access to fluoridated toothpaste, but nowadays the typical person has hit the limit on what it can do for them, and ingesting more is, at best, doing nothing.
Here's another way I like to think about it: Put the science aside for a second (I know, hard, not ideal, but bear with me). You've got two people who are low income. Person A believes, for their own health and in the expression of their own personal liberties, they want access to fluoride; but the Government is not fluoridating their water. They can spend $5 a month to buy fluoridated toothpaste; possibly not even more expensive than the toothpaste they were already buying. Person B is living in the opposite world: They believe that they do not want to ingest fluoride, but the government is fluoridating their water. They would have to spend many dozens to hundreds of dollars a month buying water bottled somewhere more natural. From a personal liberty and economics perspective: Its pretty clear-cut.
[1] https://smile-365.com/what-countries-have-the-lowest-prevale...
Using your "person a" "person b" story, what about "persons c-z" that also want fluoride because they trust doctors?
If one out of a hundred people don't want fluoride, can't they can spend slightly more on bottled water? Why require the other 99 to be up-to-date on research to get the best personal medical outcome?
> a non-zero monetary cost
Direct monetary cost is entirely insignificant, though. Potential risk of mental impairment (of course there is no conclusive evidence of that) seems like a much bigger issue.
IIRC _some_ of the European countries that “do not fluoridate their water” have naturally occurring fluoride levels in their water, obviating the need for them to do it.
In fact, many countries even have a maximum permissible limit for fluoride in tap and bottled water.
In France, for example, the limit is 1.5 mg/L in tap water. https://www.anses.fr/en/system/files/NUT2007sa0315q.pdf
Supplementation mainly concerns iodine for non-marine salts. Sea salt naturally contains iodine and fluorine. Salt from salt mines contains much less. For this reason, iodine deficiency was relatively common in the Alps until the beginning of the twentieth century.
To my knowledge, there is no debate or controversy on the subject. Endemic goiters are exceedingly rare and are linked to behavioral and eating disorders.
In Germany having salt with added fluoride is very common. There is salt without it if you don’t want it though.
That is not true. You are probably thinking of iodine. Actually fluoride is prohibited in children's toothpaste in Germany because of its suspected neurotoxicity.
EDIT: I checked. It is possible to buy salt with added fluoride in Germany but it comes with the health note "Zusätzliche fluoridhaltige Präparate sollten nur auf ärztliche Empfehlung eingenommen werden.", which means you should only use it on recommendation by your MD.
> Actually fluoride is prohibited in children's toothpaste in Germany because of its suspected neurotoxicity.
I can't find any information on this, do you have a source? According to Wikipedia fluoride toothpaste is recommended by health officials in Germany for children(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_by_countr...)
Thanks for pointing that out. I wrote "prohibited" from what I remembered when my child was little and the discrepancy to the info you provided made me research the topic, so here is a summary of what the law (1223/2009 Cosmetic Products Regulation Annex III) has to say:
Tooth paste with more than one per mille of fluoride has either to be marked as unsuitable for children or has to have a note that children have to be supervised using it and a doctor or dentist has to be consulted in case the child swallows more than a pea-sized amount.
So, not quite prohibited, but far from recommended.
You are right, iodine is the more common one. Fluoride is a less common additive.
Are the levels in water consistently checked?
of course they are. tap water is continually monitored for the chemical composition. there are aprooved norms that need to be met. (LT)
At least in Germany, tap water is subject to higher standards than bottled water.
In most European countries, tap water is one of the most tested food products, and the standards are often stricter than for bottled water.
Germany and France don't fluoridate water, but they add fluorine compounds to table salt.
Meanwhile growing up in Poland in the 90s as kids we had these fluoridation sessions in school, for which everyone had to bring their toothbrush and brush their teeth with some kind of sour tasting fluid that contained fluorine.
> we had these fluoridation sessions in school
We had the same in Sweden up until the early 90s, and it's apparently doing sort of a revival in some schools.
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluortant
In Germany, you can buy salt with or without fluorine. Both options are available at my local Lidl. It's clearly marked on the front of the box.
The world map is hilarious. Germany sure does not look like this anymore (and this is not the GDR split but goes further back). Maybe they should update this. Draws into the question, the whole data.
The map is drawing Germany and Czechia both with the same white color as the border.
Unfortunate that the color scheme is confusing, but not any weird borders.
You can see the uncolored map here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BlankMap-World6-Equirec...
Both non-fluoridating countries and country borders are white, so it's not that Germany is drawn wrong, but that that countries near Germany (Czechia, Netherlands, Luxembourg) look like they're part of the same white blob.
The point is basically no one else has politicised this to the extent the US did. Pointing to how different countries solve it differently is missing the point completely.
"Well, whether it's better to fluoridate the water or not, ~half the world got the answer wrong. But the important thing is they didn't argue about it."
They do have a point. If you look at history, Americans do seem to have a bizarre habit of turning everything into a great controversy.
The British abolished slavery with a vote of parliament. The Russian emperor signed a decree, and freed the serfs. Compromised were made, compensation provided and people were made free. But for some reason, Americans felt the matter is important enough to start a civil war around it.
People complain about America being divided and both sides there being unable to compromise, but if anything, that's been the defining feature of the nation since it's creation. "Y'all should take a chill pill, this ain't that important" is a perfectly valid position to have.
> Americans felt the matter is important enough to start a civil war around it.
The answer was the same then as it is now: big business. Slave labor cash crops were central to the economy of the South. Great Britain was not dependent on it in the same way.
>Slave labor cash crops were central to the economy of the South.
Even more so the economy of Wall Street.
> The British abolished slavery with a vote of parliament
The situation was fundamentally different. Colonies that allowed slavery had no representation in parliament and the slave owners received massive “compensation” that the British people had to spend decades paying off..
Also AFAIK most slaveholders were living in Britain and just viewed their plantations as just another investment. There was very little ideological/“way of life”/racial supremacy stuff involved. So if some Liberals wanted to buyout their not necessarily very liquid “property” with cash they didn’t really have much reason to oppose it.
And then there were 5x more slaves in the US in 1864 while the population was only ~30% higher than that of Britain in 1830 (only if we don’t count the colonies).
Not sure how excited would the inhabitants of New England and other free states would have been if they were forced to buy out all the slaves in the country (if that was even an option).
Slavery for the British was a side note at that point while it was a fundamental component of the US economy.
Serfdom was fundamental to the Russian economy, but was abolished nonetheless. Alexander II forced the serfs to pay for their own freedom.
The idea that no compromise was possible sounds somewhat absurd since America did end the civil war with a compromise. "You can free the slaves, but then we oppress them for 100 or so years." Not that it was a good compromise or anything, but it does show that the civil war was fundamentally pointless.
Russia was a centralized absolutist empire. The Tsar could more or less do whatever he wanted as long as the army and some other elements of the bureaucracy supported him.
So it’s hardly applicable to the US (or Britain)
> end the civil war with a compromise
I’m not sure it’s was a compromise per se.
Most people in the north didn’t really actively support country wide abolition before the war (neither did Lincoln) nor were they necessarily particularly concerned about the treatment of the African-American population.
Opposing slavery is a very low bar. Most people in the free states were still deeply racist and segregation was effectively (while not necessarily legally) still a thing there. It only became a major issue in the mid 1900s.
> If you look at history, Americans do seem to have a bizarre habit of turning everything into a great controversy.
It sure is bizarre for the parts of the world where people are born to do as they're told and shut up.
England has 3 or 4 civil wars in it's history entirely focused on the matter of whether people should do as they're told and shut up. The usual result in those conflicts was a resounding victory for the "No" side.
What's rare is for a nation to have a civil war between sides that agree on almost everything, from the structure of the government to the economic system.
More like "there are pros and cons but there doesn't have to be a big political fight about it".
The "big political fight" here is that one out of fifty US states changed its mind, to be clear.
I'm not in the US but doesn't that downplay it a bit? Hasn't this been a contentious topic for some time? It's not like no one's been talking about it and Utah suddenly decided out of the blue.
> I'm not in the US but doesn't that downplay it a bit?
No, not really. There are a couple municipalities (Portland, OR, e.g.) that have famously not fluoridated their water forever, but for the most part this is not something most places argue about. UT is an exception.
The irony is that people on the Left will claim that red Utah is ignorantly making public health policy, while deep deep blue Portland is considered “progressive.” The public health “experts” are ripping into Utah but haven’t seemed to care about Portland. Perhaps because the public health people are mostly Democrat and care more about politics than actual health? I would love to be wrong — but why is Portland (and much of Europe) getting a free pass from the controversy, but a (relatively low population) red U.S. state isn’t?
Portland, Oregon is a city so the effects of their policies are a little more limited in scope. IMO if it really is a contentious health issue (well-founded or not, I guess people really do disagree about this issue) it is better to make the decision at the lowest level practical.
I think most cities manage their own utilities. So, Portland has to make some decision on this issue. Utah doesn’t, it was an active choice to intervene.
recently they managed to bring this to a court, and the judge was convinced by the evidence, and ruled that water fluoridation is harmful.
downplayed? you judge.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. What I meant was that it was my impression that the argument over fluoride has been going on for longer and is bigger than this one case. How and why the judge ruled and what the ruling was is tangential to that.
The issue, to my eyes at least, is much less of water, and much more of fluoride itself. That is what seems mostly a settled and non controversial topic elsewhere such that it is not perennially raised anew with tone of fans quoting Dr. Strangelove except meaning it.
I thought the comment was about resolving the issue one way or the other without it becoming yet another polarization topic . It probably matters less in either resolution than the cost due schisms and distrust the "debate" causes.
Regardless of whether the water is fluoridated or not, the main guideline is "brush your teeth with fluoridated toothpaste". No policy maker elsewhere is pushing narratives against fluoride at large like in the US. These narratives there are even dangerous. One can easily look at dental associations reviews, or official state guidelines and see that more or less they say very similar things. It is very easy to find these policy-informing reviews online.
And regardless of whether the water is fluoridated or not, there is no big debate elsewhere about it, nobody cares that much about it, because all the evidence is that in smaller amounts prob it is does not matter much either way, in the presence of people brushing their teeth. A lot of countries stopped it due to logistic purposes. In netherlands they tried fluoride in the water, a court said they should actually pass a law in order to be able to do it, and they did not even bother with that and dropped it. The fact that some countries may not use fluoride in the water is not due to some deeply-held conviction about how destructive fluoride is for the iq of the kids. In terms of risks of fluoride, fluorosis is what is mostly discussed anyway, and to a degree, unless it is too serious, this may just be an aesthetic issue.
From the perspective of one that watches this craziness from outside, the whole debate is non-sense, and whether some european countries use water fluoridation or not is not very important, it does not cause any heated debate in the EU. The debate in the US is not because the US considers some things that others do not consider. There is no actual truthseeking mentality from the current administration or anybody on this to actually find for sure if fluoride decreases iq, or if fluoride in the water is absolutely essential for dental health even if people are brushing their teeth.
Sure, but they are also not fighting about it, this seems crucial.
Incisive comment, thanks for questioning the assumptions here.
How much natural fluoride does Europe have in their water?
The map accounts for that
What does the UK do? This will tell you what people should do because I’ve seen English teeth.
> In England, approximately 10% of the population, or around 6 million people, receive fluoridated water, either naturally or through water fluoridation schemes, mainly in the West Midlands and the North East.
Uh oh. I know it is better now but in 1978 a third of people in the UK didn’t have their natural teeth.
This was not much different everywhere else. Public dental care campaigns helped a lot, the same with affordable dental care products. Looking at my parents generation there are lots of false teeth going around. (Not uk)
I was reading a while ago about populations that moved to England, and within 2 generations their teeth are messed up (the first gen of kids born is usually raised on the food of their original culture).
You saw it too in Canada when the Inuit went on food stamps and went from eating mostly meat to mostly plants: their teeth went all over the place and full of holes within a single generation.
We also saw that with the advent of agriculture in general, along with a massive decline in average height.
You’re right that dietary changes can impact health, but there are other factors at play. Stress from moving to a new country or experiencing forced dislocation can have serious effects on physical health, weakening the immune system and disrupting overall well-being. Along with this, shifting away from nature-based vocations to more sedentary lifestyles contributes to health decline. The increased consumption of sugar and alcohol also exacerbates dental and general health issues. So, it’s not just diet but a combination of stress, lifestyle changes, and modern substances that contribute to health problems in these populations.
This perception is out of date. The UK population actually has very healthy teeth as a whole:
https://www.yongeeglintondental.com/blog/healthy-primary-tee...
That, of course, is not quite the same thing as perfectly white, perfectly aligned teeth.
My grandfather, who was still alive in 1978, had all his teeth removed and was given a set of dentures when conscripted into WWII. From what I can gather this was pretty common - the service dentist would check you over on arrival and if you had at least one cavity they'd whip the lot out so that they wouldn't need to do anything else to them for the rest of your service.
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake. The whole "everyone else agrees on X" bit is such a reliable tell.
Most developed countries have stopped using fluoride. I think that’s the commenter’s point. The US and Australia are outliers here for sure.
The US rarely looks into how other countries solve problems. (i.e. Universal Healthcare, High Speed Trains and so), this is the sad part of "American Exceptionalism"
Those are two odd examples. The Affordable Care Act is similar to the Netherlands health insurance system: https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2011/lessons-abroad-du... (“These similarities are not entirely coincidental. American public officials, health industry leaders, and scholars made frequent visits to the Netherlands in the run-up to the debate over U.S. health care reform, borrowing ideas and, on occasion, citing the Dutch system as a model for what the U.S. might achieve.”).
As to rail, both the first-gen and second-gen Acela is based on the French TGV.
The U.S. has a pitiful amount of high speed rail. It serves no point to mention that this pitiful amount of high speed rail is based off of TGV.
The comparison to the Dutch healthcare system is not apt. While the Heritage foundation may used ideas from the Dutch system our system is quite a bit more Byzantine and inefficient. We spend twice as much per capita on healthcare and have worse outcomes and fewer people covered. Our citizens have far more per capita medical debt than the Dutch.
We didn’t really implement the Dutch system and we didn’t really learn from the French how to build and maintain high speed rail. Saying we learned healthcare from the Dutch because we have doctors like they do makes as much sense as your argument.
The original claim was "The US rarely looks into how other countries solve problems". That claim appears to be false.
Why does the US execution not match that of the countries it looks into? I think it's because talented people in the US disproportionately go into the private sector, leading to an incompetent public sector. American distrust of their government is arguably justified.
You're also twice as fat so I think spending twice makes perfect sense
> The Affordable Care Act is similar to the Netherlands health insurance systemh
> The average Obamacare plan costs $483 monthly for a 30-year-old, $544 for a 40-year-old and $760 for a 50-year-old.
> The bronze plan covers 60% of the costs associated with care.
I feel like they missed the most important parts of the Dutch health insurance system…
The Dutch system also requires payment of monthly premiums. The US premiums reflect the cost to insure the US’s significantly less healthy population.
I very much doubt that is true. Medical care is much cheaper when you don’t have to wait until it’s life threatening to get it.
I thought the ACA was based on the Swiss system of mandatory insurance? The heritage foundation copied the Swiss, Romney took that proposal to Mass, and Obama thought going with a Conservative initiated plan would make it more bipartisan (it didn’t, but mainly because republicans hated Obama).
Definitely not.
IMO the most distinct parts of the Swiss health insurance system is that (1) copay is obligatory but limited (i.e. healthcare isn’t free but it’s not expensive either), and (2) it’s individual, companies cannot pay for it, so there’s no US-like extreme benefit of having a good job.
In the Netherlands we have those two as well, but it is also regulated: - the cheapest plan must not cost more than 115 eur (dont know exactly), and it has mandatory coverage (‘basisverzekering’) - there is a maximum copay of 850eur per year (‘eigen risico’) - some services are not allowed to have copay - low income people can have extra subsidies to pay for insurance - insurance is mandatory - insurance is a personal thing, not a work-thing. Your work absollutely knows nothing about your health insurance
Due to the regulations it is not a big run to the bottom
Yes, having lived in Switzerland I experienced that, and it was the personal buy rather than having group plans was the feature missing from the ACA the most.
aca di. implement a market, it's just that most people buy through their job, because if that's legal you obviously want to be part of a larger bargaining pool for buying.
Group plans suck away cream of crop risk pools. People with good stable high paying jobs tend to be a lot healthier than people working part time crap jobs or working in the trades for themselves.
It isn’t really bargaining power of the pool, but the risk assessment of the pool you are in. Being in a hodge lodge personal pool means you are sharing risk with people who will have more expenses. That’s why Switzerland throws everyone into the same pool, so no crème low risk can be siphoned away.
A less cynical framing is that the US is a much different culture from European countries, and is massively larger in scale. Depending on the problem, some of their solutions simply can't or don't apply.
The scale argument is thrown around a lot as a justification for why the US couldn't possibly implement universal healthcare. The elephant in the room that I'm always surprises at how rarely it's mentioned in these discussions is Brazil, which is a huge country of comparable size (both territory and population wise), and it manages to make UHC work even though it's also a much poorer country.
It's not perfect by any means, but it's definitely much better than nothing. So the US should absolutely be able to at the very least match that, but really most likely it should be able to do much better. That it doesn't is very much a choice.
The elephant in the room is that in every other sphere, scale is the solution, not the problem. The US should find it easier to implement UHC just because of its scale. More tax dollars, more average outcomes, more resources for outliers, more incremental money for research into rarer conditions. That 10x smaller countries like Canada do it effectively is an indictment of America's inability to do it.
America doesn’t do it for political and cultural reasons. It has absolutely nothing to do with scale, economics, or America’s “inability” to do it. Americans (unfortunately imo) have consistently chosen not to do it by not electing politicians who have pledged to do it.
Let’s face it, America can’t do it for corruption reasons.
The current healthcare system is working perfectly (and by that I mean lucratively) for the 0.01% in control of the political system.
Did Brazil start with a Byzantine kluge of private and public providers and intermediaries? Genuine question, not snark.
I think the US would prefer a UHC if we were starting from a blank slate. The difficulty is mapping a path from what we have now to that.
> I think the US would prefer a UHC if we were starting from a blank slate. The difficulty is mapping a path from what we have now to that.
Do you remember when Republicans went on and on about how "Democrats rammed through the ACA without a single Republican vote"? As if that represented a problem on the Democratic Party side, and not the Republican one? Despite the similarities to models proposed by Republicans in the past, and the relative conservative step it represented from "Byzantine kludge of often poor-to-no-coverage" to "something with a higher floor"? That's how hard it would be to find a Republican to "prefer a UHC if we were starting from a blank slate."
It's important not to underestimate the distrust of government services and regulation of any sort of the Republican base. The conservative media - talk-radio, then cable, then social/podcasts - has been intentionally undermining the credibility of government services at every opportunity for 40 years. And the politicians hamstring and sabotage whenever they get a chance to try to make sure that services offered in the US are sub-par compared to elsewhere.
It's a well-oiled machine running a cycle that keeps people focused on anything else but the services they actually use all the time so that cognitive dissonance can't creep in. (Granted, sometimes, when necessary to acknowledge those things, they'll fall back to making it clear that YOU earned/paid for the things you use, but those other gross poor people are just freeloaders.)
It's like with abortion - for decades "overturning Roe V Wade" was what Republicans said they wanted to do. And people kept trying to convince themselves "oh they don't really mean that, they wouldn't do that actually anymore." Take their word on it about wanting to tear down government services.
> It's important not to underestimate the distrust of government services and regulation of any sort of the Republican base. The conservative media - talk-radio, then cable, then social/podcasts - has been intentionally undermining the credibility of government services at every opportunity for 40 years. And the politicians hamstring and sabotage whenever they get a chance to try to make sure that services offered in the US are sub-par compared to elsewhere.
This is partly what I was getting at when I said the culture of the US is different and the scale is much larger than European countries. It's not just geographically larger, but it's politically and ideologically broader too. If you have a wonderful idea like UHC, you need to make it work with liberals, conservatives, and everyone in between. Like it or not, a universal healthcare or Medicare for all plan is either going to be DoA in Congress, or a considerably watered-down and Americanized version if it has any hope at all of getting enough senators to pass it without first seeing massive electoral college reform in this country first.
That is the scale of the US. You can't assume that an idea that's well-liked and popular in another country is going to be popular and well-liked here.
Considering that Europe is composed of many countries with massively different histories, cultures, economies and languages I find that a very unconvincing argument. The US are much more culturualy homogeneous than Europe. I mean just go across the country and look at the patriotic displays of flags which also transcends political differences. In contrast in Europe you first would be seeing different flags, but also displaying flags has very different acceptance rates in different countries.
Right, but we're not talking about "Europe", we're talking about each individual country. I don't think it's reasonable to say that France, for example, is more culturally diverse than the US.
And the various countries in Europe do have different healthcare systems, sometimes significantly different.
> The difficulty is mapping a path from what we have now to that.
It's difficult, but not as difficult as it's often presented to be, as long as you're okay with giving the finger to a relatively small number of wealthy health industry executives.
That depends on who "you" is. Quite a few people in Congress are ok with doing that, but not anywhere near enough to get anything passed. Look at the GOP side of the aisle and you'll essentially find no one willing to do that. Not to mention they are just simply ideologically opposed to the concept of government-provided universal health care.
And that, is the difficulty. Sure, I agree that it wouldn't be too logistically difficult to implement universal healthcare in the US. But that doesn't matter when more than half the country has been propaganda'd into not even wanting it in the first place.
Hell, I expect that there are a ton of Medicaid and Medicare recipients in the US who would tell you that they think government-provided, single-payer healthcare is a bad idea, when that's essentially what they have, to some degree.
> Did Brazil start with a Byzantine kluge of private and public providers and intermediaries? Genuine question, not snark.
That's what it still has.
I got a Master's Degree in Education and spent 2 years in Educational Psychology Ph.D. program and absolutely 0 time was spent looking at how other countries do education.
It's baffling how despite numerous other countries outperforming the US in educational outcomes we do not even look at other approaches!
Maybe it's better not to look...
https://www.tiktok.com/@guinnessworldrecords/video/747057742...
ha-ha f....
cause we are the best and when you are the best you simply do not look back :)
Best enough to even sing about it :)
Is national pride a problem now? I'd expect any country to have something like a national anthem and patriotic songs.
Sure, but kids don't sing them in schools and there's definitely nothing even remotely comparable to the Pledge of Allegiance.
Hell, in some countries even the national anthem has no lyrics but is purely an instrumental track (Spain being a notable example).
> there's definitely nothing even remotely comparable
Mexico's Pledge of Allegiance celebrated every Monday in schools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pledge_of_Allegiance_to_the_Me...
My parents had to do something similar, so I'm not too unfamiliar with the concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_of_Pioneers_of_Yugoslavi...
But even that was once-in-a-lifetime event to emphasise the importance of the first day at school at age 7, it did not happen every Monday.
Needless to say, it wasn't very effective. As evidenced by history, some of our parents definitely broke that pledge later in their life.
Yes, in the Netherlands we have a culture of moaning about everthing. Youd beter not dare suggest sonething is good enough! This complaining is the only thing we are proud of. lol
(If we had patriotic songs worth remembering im sure i would have)
The problem is this, hoe do you fix something you are proud of? It seems a contradiction?
Agreed, I lives in the Netherlands for a couple years and can agree there isn't much patriotism so much as pragmatism! (I actually mean that as a good thing, I was a very fond of NL and the friends I made there).
Speaking as an American, though, I can both be proud of something and recognize its faults. I'm proud of the core principles that America was based upon, for example, but very much recognize how far we've deviated from them and how much we need to fix.
> I'm proud of the core principles that America was based upon
I think there's never much to gain in being proud of things you have nothing to do with or control over. If you like some principles you would be proud when you uphold them personally. It is when we start feeling proud in the abstract that we start having issues.
Can't help but agree. I would go even further and say that pride itself is problematic. Sure, it can perhaps have some good effects, but pride usually blinds people to faults, even if the do acknowledge there are faults.
"Pride goeth before a fall" is a time-worn saying for good reason.
I'm not a big fan of patriotism in general, but something I noticed about the US patriotism is the tendency to call the US "the best country in the world". This crosses all political differences, e.g. I recall being surprised how Michael Moore was saying it in an interview or movie (when justifying criticising policy, he said he does it because he knows that America is the best country in the world). Even the most patriotic friends I have in other countries would typically not say this.
Yeah, as an American I've always found this cringe-worthy, even kinda icky.
Claiming to be the best (at anything) is just tacky and arrogant. Especially with something as impossible to quantify as "best country". There's no such thing as the best country in the world. Every one has strengths and weaknesses, and you can't really balance and rank them.
Nationalism is by far the most successful leftist project.
It’s kind of amazing that the left has forgotten that fact.
What does leftist mean in this context? Sure you could say the "nationalist" movements against monarchies and for more democratic processes were progressive at the time, i.e. they wanted to change the status quo. Calling them leftist in the modern sense (again with a huge caveat about what leftist even mean), doesn't make much sense IMO. Also it's important not to forget that the internationalist movements (which I'd argue fit modern definitions of "left" much more closely) developed quite quickly (in historical timeframes) after, e.g. it was only 50 odd years between the Warburg festival in Germany (generally considered the birth of German nationalism) and the Paris commune.
The only thing America is best in the world is number of incarcerated people per capita :)
Is there a source for this claim? It appears to be untrue.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/262962/countries-with-th...
I was 1/2 joking ( https://youtu.be/wTjMqda19wk )
most countries anthems celebrate how they are the best, if that's what you're referring to.
I doubt it. In my experience, most national anthems highlight their nations struggle for independence.
Poland,
https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/national-anthem/...
Netherlands,
https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/periods-genres/nati...
I guess "the best" is doing a lot of work there, for example the most sung anthem for Denmark "Der er et yndigt land" - there is a lovely land does not explicitly say that Denmark is the best ever, there may indeed be other lovely lands, and in comparison with say America the Beautiful it is downright humble, but on the other hand it is my experience that anthems talk up their country, and if they are talking up their struggle for independence or freedom, like say Il Canto degli Italiani, it will be talking up the martial valor of the people so freed and probably talking about how they aren't going to be put down again, another aspect that America the Beautiful goes into.
The difference between America the Beautiful and other anthems is how much it does, for how long, and making sure it gets everything it can possibly cram in there. It's like a bunch of people standing on a stand at a sporting match shouting "America, America, America" unremittingly, whereas most people might be satisfied to shout "Go {my country}" and be done with it.
America the Beautiful is not the national anthem.
The anthem of my country claim us to be free, silent and green.
And oh, that people used to talk about us and that despite they don't anymore we are still a pretty nice place to live.
Which part here exactly cannot work in the US? I am talking about brushing one's teeth with toothpaste containing fluoride, which sounds as plain simple as possible to me. Is it regular brushing teeth that fails in the US for cultural reasons? Fluoride in the toothpaste? Supervising kids while brushing their teeth to make sure they do not swallow? It is an honest question.
In a word: poverty. People do not have free dental care, and poor people aren't guaranteed to have a toothbrush, toothpaste or sometimes even a sink to brush their teeth in. Fluoridated water is one of the few dental protections available to everyone regardless of their income. It's cheap, minimal and cost-effective cavity protection at scale for the entire country.
> poor people aren't guaranteed to have a toothbrush, toothpaste
There is no person in the world who cannot have a toothbrush and toothpaste if they want to. And if you find one such person, they won't have access to any centrally treated water.
> and poor people aren't guaranteed to have a toothbrush, toothpaste
Considering that the number of such people is very low it would be very cheap to solve this issue.
Your less cynical explanation boils down to people being too poor to afford tooth paste (really?). So why are they poor?
Assuming the "less cynical explanation" you're referring to was my original response talking about the cultural and scale differences between America and most countries, that was not in reference to fluoride or dental care. I was specifically referring to the OP's assertion that "American exceptionalism" is the reason that America doesn't just copy things like universal healthcare and gun control policies from other countries.
> really?
Yes, really.
> So why are they poor?
Why is anything the way that it is?
> Assuming the "less cynical explanation" you're referring to
It was referring to the comment where you said “less cynical”.
> Why is anything the way that it is?
America big? America different?
It’s more challenging to find non-cynical reasons for people being poor and suffering.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here, I think we may have lost the plot. Are you simply implying that you find the cynical answer more appealing and believable than the non-cynical answer? In my opinion, the internet and today's modern zeitgeist has instilled a sense in everyone that if it's cynical, or dark, or depressing, it must be the correct answer. That's usually the laziest and easiest answer too.
AFAICT most US toothpaste has flouride in it already.
(For now, at least? How long until that gets cracked down on as dangerous?)
You can get fluoride free toothpaste, mainly for babies/young toddlers.
This is exactly the framing. "What worked there can't work here", whether it's firearm control, socialized medicine or education, whatever.
We're either bigger, or denser, or less dense, or ... essentially whatever suits the argument.
The other weird thing in US discourse about other countries is that when it does enter the conversation, the "rest of the world", or at least other developed countries, are often treated as some kind of monolithic entity culturally and politically. For example, a lot of people on both left and right in US believe that the rest of the world is single payer, and generally that "single payer" is synonymous to "public healthcare". Similarly with gun control, there's no recognition of the fact that there are countries in Europe where you can own an AR-15 just fine, and countries (different ones!) where silencers are over the counter items not requiring any special registration.
Most Americans would be shocked to know that in Thailand there are signs at the airport advising you on the correct firearms procedures
https://www.airportthai.co.th/en/aot-reiterates-the-guidelin...
edit: But I will say it works both ways. Most countries do not know what it takes to keep hundreds of millions of people of various backgrounds together under a common way of life with a certain risk vs entitlement balance. Americans as a whole are more risk tolerant AND accepting of failure and reinventing yourself. In most cultures it's a great shame to quit your job with benefits, start a business and not succeed. In the states it's not shameful. You tried? Awesome.
A lot of people are uncomfortable having an opinion without being able to rationalize it.
I have to assume many, maybe most, people that give reasons like you mention just flat out don't want the policy and reach for a reason to justify it.
I can say I don't want gun control laws. Not because it doesn't work elsewhere or couldn't work here. I just fundamentally disagree with it and don't want to live in a place where the only ones with guns are state officials.
Yes, that's my point. We are literally different people with different cultures, values and problems. Case in point: the firearm control you mentioned. I won't get in a gun control debate here, I have my own complicated views on the matter, but it's an undisputed fact that Americans have a right to own guns (maybe with limitations, maybe not) and many Americans deeply cherish that right. There is no gun control solution we can take from Europe that you could apply to the US, it's simply not compatible with our culture, not to mention our own Bill of Rights. It's not a bad thing to recognize that.
Scale is a scapegoat. Take the US region by region and you can find analogs around the world.
The US isn't several countries put together, region by region. It's one big ass country. I really don't see how taking it region by region somehow eliminates scale issues when you still have to apply it to the entire country.
It's a federal country of many states though. The original design of the US is fairly similar to the design of the EU today, US states used to be offered much more independence.
Sure, I don't disagree that in a vague sense the EU and US are kinda similar in terms of countries and states.
> US states used to be offered much more independence.
But even in your own example with the EU, the EU still mandates many health policies for its member countries: food safety; air and water quality; tobacco, sugar and alcohol regulations; and so on. That's not at all dissimilar to what the federal government does in the US, except our states don't implement those policies/directives themselves because the feds enforce it all.
Sure, but you're making my point.
The comment I was replying to pointed out that the US isn't several countries put together. As you describe, the EU is several countries put together and yet the US actually pushes more power to the states.
> yet the US actually pushes more power to the states.
Doesn’t their comment claim the opposite?
Unlike the US Federal government EU has very limited direct means of imposing any if its laws or regulations on member states of they chose not to comply with them.
There shouldn't be a scale issue with regards to fluoride in the water. It is either scientifically shown to be beneficial or it isn't, scale and geography likely have nothing to do with it.
Does it not depend on the chemical composition of local water? The US is vast, geologically diverse, and water quality varies hugely across it. Denmark can likely make a decision that's good for the entire country.
Actually, what most countries seem to do (according to other comments I’ve seen here), is just delegate to local bodies, so country size is a complete non-issue.
It could, what do you have in mind with regards to chemical composition that may require fluoride in some circumstances?
And are those conditions manmade? If so, would we be better off reversing the proximal issues rather than adding fluoride to try to fix it?
a decades long study with a gazillion of potential confounders is never "either scientifically shown to be beneficial or it isn't"...
let alone the precautionary principle in a complex system with a gazillion variables... (i.e. things we don't know we don't know)
You're not wrong in that our culture is different, but that cultural difference is chiefly a self fulfilling prophecy of "the government can't do it," promoted by billionaire owned media, so that those same billionaires can run for-profit industries like healthcare and transportation.
The cultural difference is that our rich people are too rich, our media is too centralized, and none of those in power want to enrich and empower the country, when they could enrich and empower themselves.
This is the excuse all American use about literally every single issue anytime anybody points out that other do things better. Most often without actually having thought about it beyond 'muhuhu US BIGGG! USA! USA! USA!'.
If you want to make that argument, actually make it, because if you try, 99% of the time its not actually true, its simply ignorance.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here except that you take a dim view of Americans.
The point is that flouride has the same effect on your teeth no matter how many hectares of lifeless desert happen to be controlled by your government.
Interesting, though I think you may have missed a good deal of my own point. Regardless, I wasn't actually commenting on the fluoride situation, I was commenting on the belief that American exceptionalism is the reason we don't look at Europe and other countries for a slew of solutions that won't work here. It had nothing to do with fluoride, so I think your comment and hostility are a bit off the mark.
My point is that those that continually point out 'but some things don't apply to the US because X and Y' are mostly themselves just falling into the same trap and almost never actually explain why X and Y change anything, making their 'defense' just more of the same.
I feel like this always comes up in these sorts of arguments, that the US is so unique that solutions that work elsewhere can't work here. And yet this point is always hand-waved in, without and specifics discussed, and is just presented as a given.
I really don't buy it, at least not as a general statement.
This argument works fine for high-speed rail, not so well for insurance and healthcare.
If you focus only on the scale part of my argument, sure. But I think the culture part of my argument is more than enough of an answer for insurance and healthcare:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43521734
Why is it less cynical, what does the scale of the US have to do with it?
Maybe it's just me, but I find the argument that "Americans won't do X cool thing that Europeans/the rest of the world do because they [are dumb/are corrupt/love money/hate each other/believe in American exceptionalism]" to be a very cynical and lazy argument. Note that the person I was replying to was talking about policies and goals like UHC and High Speed Rail, not specifically about fluoridated water – that was the context in which I was replying.
The simply reality is, culture matters. And if your culture has a strong believe in exceptionalism pointing out how others are better at something often creates backlash and an increase in opposition rather then a decrease.
And this is known by people who do professional advocacy work, on topic I am familiarly with, such as city design and transportation. They take great care to make sure all the examples are from the US, even if those examples aren't nearly as good as others. Because they know, when speaking to American audiences, you lose the audience if you suggest in X town, they should do Y that is done in Europe. In the US selling something as domestic innovation is usually the best, "if people in Indiana can do it, you can do it even better".
To just ignore any explanation that points out that culture matters, and believing that only 'hard' factors matter, is incredibly foolish. Cultural believes, such as exceptionalism absolutely do a play a huge role in determining what happens in the real world. To point that out, is not cynical or lazy.
And this does not just apply to the US, it many countries have different forms of that.
When I was a kid the schools taught us the metric system, telling us it was the world standard, and would become the standard is the US by the time I was an adult. That was over 40 years ago. And that pretty much sums it all up.
The US legally switched to metric when England did. It is taught in all schools and used for international trade. But, just like in England there is a mix of imperial and metric units used domestically. If you dont travel internationally, like many Americans, there is little need to use metric. Another generation and there won't be many people left in the US that didn't at least learn metric.
It's not like England in that respect at all. Yes, there is a mix of usage in the UK but it is very limited. People use metric for everything except miles in cars, pints in pubs, and height and weight of people.
From what I have read about metrication, England required all industries to change. The US government doesn't have authority to do that and US industry wasn't going to change all their tooling at great cost if they didn't need to.
At least they were right about one thing. It definitely is the world standard.
see that proves it - the U.S can't adopt the metric system, it's too big, you don't want to have to break out the megameters! /s
How has the debate been solved by the rest of the world? My understanding is that many countries in Europe don't fluoridate the water supply.
I'm skeptical of results showing IQ loss but I also think fluoridation should be phased out as fluoride toothpaste and mouthwash are now widely available. Banning it seems like the wrong move to me...states should simply decide to continue adding it or not.
> How has the debate been solved by the rest of the world?
By having official country-level guidelines by the health ministries or similar for people to brush their teeth with toothpaste containing fluoride, and specific guidelines around it for kids, as trivial as it may sound. Along with experts' reviews providing more details on these decisions, and explaining tradeoffs properly.
Fluoride containing toothpaste is the main recommendation, even in places that fluoridate the water (which are the minority). There is not much to add to this apart from refining these guidelines. Eg in the EU where some countries fluoridate water, most don't, there is no huge debate about it overall. Most eu countries that fluoridated the water stopped doing it some point mostly because it was no longer needed in preventing cavities, and prob largely due to logistics/costs than possible risks.
Your second paragraph reflects my personal views on it, too. The "banning" is weird, esp since, according to the article, it comes from people that seem to advocate against use of fluoride in general in toothpastes etc. The discussion should be around best policies to prevent cavities etc, but it does not seem to be around that. I see nothing wrong with local communities deciding if they want to put fluoride or not in their water, based on their own opinions but also general situation. Maybe in some much poorer areas fluoridation of water could be beneficial until some other measures take place, for example.
> Banning it seems like the wrong move to me...states should simply decide to continue adding it or not.
Isn't that exactly what's happening here? A state deciding to not continue adding it?
Nope, the bill as written prevents local municipalities from making that decision.
Right. The state made the decision to stop it from being added, which is what OP proposed.
Did OP mean that municipalities should simply decide to keep adding or not? If so, how do we decide (from our various armchairs in most cases far away from Utah) what the appropriate level of government for making this call is?
The state’s Department of Health can issue a guidance explaining the states’ experts’ analysis of the available data and tradeoffs of the decision, and let the municipalities sort it out.
I think the bigger complication though is going to be - depending on the state - how water districts are apportioned. I think even many counties (let alone municipalities) will share water infrastructure so it’s not really clear who has the jurisdiction to make that decision other than the state.
It also makes it easier for the consumer: don’t want fluoride, move to Utah. Rather than having to figure out what random water district is doing what.
Banning its addition is a step beyond — but in Queensland, Australia for example, the state government no longer mandates its inclusion, and thus the local councils are able to set their own policy.
> While more than 90 per cent of Australians have access to fluoridated water, that figure is significantly lagging in the sunshine state, where local councils have ultimate authority over whether it is adopted.
> A decade after the Newman government handed responsibility for fluoridated drinking water to local governments, 51 out of 77 have opted out. That means about 28 per cent of Queenslanders do not have fluoridated drinking water
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-24/fluoride-dental-care-...
So how does their dental conditions and IQs compare? Sounds like a nice little AB test.
How has it been “solved?” There’s just tradeoffs.
There’s evidence that despite widespread availability of fluoride toothpaste and mouthwash, fluoridated drinking water improves dental outcomes at the population level.
There’s also evidence that at high levels (not the normal levels it is added at, but at higher levels which can happen on accident) fluoride may reduce IQ.
I’m ok with either trade off but the “solved” phrasing makes it sound like there is an obviously superior choice.
The same discussion happened in Netherlands in the 70s, and water in NL is no longer fluoridated since the 70s for that reason. So it's not that "US-specific". I don't know about other countries from the top of my head.
Funny thing you mention that. Since it is now monitored and maintained by natural source. There is fluoride, just not added anymore. (It is at lower levels than when added obviously)
>(It is at lower levels than when added obviously)
This is not obvious. Some water has high levels of fluoride, which can cause harm (fluoride added for public health reasons is not the highest level of fluoride you will find [in the UK]).
Fluoridation could be done by mixing of naturally high fluoride water sources into other water.
I’d agree that Europe has solved this issue by removing fluoride from drinking water.
But beyond Europe there’s still no global consensus.
I do agree that the US is an outlier with fluoride being nearly universal.
Which European countries _remove_ fluoride from water generally? UK adds it in naturally low fluoride areas.
Some countries no longer add it (but their water still has naturally occurring fluoride that they don't remove).
No no, in the US we figure out the worst way to do something, and then do that, and invent reasons why the US is unique such that the reasonable solutions that other countries employ just couldn't possibly work here.
(To be fair, though, many [most?] Western countries do not fluoridate their water. The US is actually not doing the common thing here.)
It's honestly not clear if water fluoridation in the US is necessary or all that useful here anymore, as we started doing it when fluoride toothpaste wasn't really a thing. Now pretty much all(?) toothpaste in the US has fluoride in it. If someone can't afford toothpaste, then they probably can't afford regular dental care either, and fluoridated water isn't going to make much of an impact anyway.
> Maybe the US should look into how other countries have solved it?
How have other countries solved it?
By not adding fluoride into the tap water and let people choose whether to buy toothpaste with fluoride themselves. a.k.a. the European way.
Adding fluoride into tap water always sounds borderline insane to me. The only benefit is to protect your teeth, which, to me, strongly suggests that the correct approach is to put it into toothpaste or other oral hygiene products instead of water.
I remember the first time I went to a German dentist and he told me how amazing my teeth looked and that he could tell I must be American. Fluoride may have some downsides but it definitely has upsides.
Is it good for teeth because it's "applied" when drinking it, or is it due to ingesting it? I think ingesting is the issue.
Food often has much higher levels of fluoride than water, but the fluoride isn’t as bioavailable to teeth when it is in food, hence putting it in water. Fluorine in food may become more bioavailable further down the digestive tract where it does much less good.
Here in England, there's some areas that put fluoride into the water and other areas already have sufficient fluoride levels. People complaining about the side effects of fluoridation often forget that water can naturally contain high levels of fluoride - it's really not an issue.
https://www.uk-water-filters.co.uk/pages/areas-with-fluoride...
If you look at the US as a simulation that branched of the mother tree of Europe in the 15th century, you won't find it odd that it is rediscovering what Europe has already figured out. Just in it's own way and time. (No chemicals/colors in foods and adequate drinking water) Wait till they figure out mass transit, that will be a shocker.
Has Europe figured out mass transit? In Barcelona, a trip that takes me 1.5 hours of total time using “transit” takes me 28 minutes on my motor scooter. I think there is still some figuring out that needs to happen before I’ll add 2 hours to my daily commute.
These people have been around forever but the pivotal point in my opinion is when the Lancet retracted the article on the link between MMR and autism.
Suddenly everything was up for debate.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_MMR_autism_fraud
1. Its a fringe issue in Australia 2. The US doesnt believe in other countries so why check.
Even in Europe Fluoridation is not uniform.
Some place do it. Others partially, many not at all.
Think slightly more broadly about the issue.
For context... some people think statins should be put in the water. Maybe they should. But were does mass medication of the people stop?
It stops when we run out of easy things that can be done to improve the lives of people. It's not that hard.
And when you get a tyrant at the top? Every capability you give the government needs to be viewed through the lens of "what happens when we get a really really bad leader?". If you haven't been paying attention, the majority of countries have had at least one really really bad leader over the past few hundred years. Many have one right now.
If you're always looking at things through that lens, the government can never do anything at all, and you'll be left with "complete freedom" to just die from easily preventable issues.
There's absolutely no need to resort to a slippery slope here. We have plenty of examples around the world for things that work without anyone invoking a boogeyman.
They can, you just have to look at each issue and it's costs and benefits and risks over time. You desperately want to world to be simple. It isn't. There is a slippery slope, you can stand on it but you want to have some concept of what happens when you slip.
There are examples of the boogeyman existing in real life - just 80 years ago we had one of the worst. Right now we have some boogeymen although not Hitler level. Get a little historical perspective.
> This is one of these US-specific polarised debates I find really bizarre, around some kind of issue that the rest of the world has by large solved but without any acknowledgement of this fact.
> Maybe the US should look into how other countries have solved it?
I mean Utah is trying, sorry it took a while. I know Germany and Sweden don't fluoridate its water, I assume you mean Western Europe by the "world" (sorry if I am interpreting too much here, but that's usually what's popular to compare US to and bash US on how bad it is), so US is getting "with the program", finally I suppose. States having individual laws here is a benefit, one state doesn't have to wait for the Federal Government to act.
> This is one of these US-specific polarised debates I find really bizarre,
I don't think it's that polarizing? Unless 1) you're listening to US media more and 2) you're not getting many non-polarizing issues in the news, because those are well are just boring and don't sell ads.
There are a few studies out which say fluoride is bad. But as is often the case with these health idiots, the studies actually refer to places where fluoride is naturally way too high in the water. The entire debate is dumb.
It’s far more than a few, and the level does not need to be that high:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
This was my perspective for awhile — recommend you look into more recent studies if you haven’t in the past 2y or so. I don’t think it’s the worst thing in our water but do think it’s objectively a bad idea.
completely bizarre witnessing both sides getting so polarised around a basically non-issue
This isn't a sensible way to think about it. Every contentious conversation I've ever had has gone this way:
It's irrational to complain about 'both sides' when only one side is insisting on making it into an issue. I generally just try to disegnage from people as soon as they start freaking out about fluoride/ chemtrails/ vaccinations etc, but people like this frequently treat skepticism as a personal attack. Increasingly they occupy positions of political power (see eg RFK) having acquired them by public displays of conviction rather than any objective criteria.There is not real debate, just some people who don't understand how chemistry works.
What they're referring to is the fact that very few countries in the rest of the world even consider the possibility of adding fluoride to the water supply. It's basically just the US, Australia, and to a much lesser extent Canada.
It's not a debate everywhere else because adding fluoride to the water is objectively an unusual thing to do that they just... don't. Presumably they get fluoride other ways.
How many countries actually drink their tap water as their main source of water?
Pretty much the entire Europe, for starters.
AFAIK all (former) USSR does that.
I'd really like to hear your take
Talk to your dentist.
They are experts in this field, and, unlike “random person on the internet who spent 2 minutes on google”, have informed opinions on this topic.
If you want a serious discussion on why fluoride is good or bad, that’s where you need to go.
Random person on the internet is very easy to disagree with, because we’re all idiots right? It’s a very easy lazy way of self confirmation.
…but if you are serious about critically considering the issue and facing your own biases, talk to an actual topic expert.
My dentist told me he had carefully reviewed the literature and determined to his satisfaction that public fluoridated water was in the best interests of public health, currently. He offered to share some reading that he was convinced by.
You can’t really ask for more that that.
Discussing this here is a bit like protesting by posting on social media; yes, I suppose it’s better than doing nothing and not engaging with the topic at all… but only barely, and not in any meaningful way.
Are teeth the only thing affected by water fluoridation?
Why do almost no other countries fluoridate drinking water?
Even if it does turn out to be unambiguously good, people have a basic right to make their own medical decisions.
Recent systematic reviews suggest an association between higher fluoride exposure and lower IQ in children. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation
That study is taken grossly out of context. It doesn’t claim what people claim it does and even the study states that the quality of the data on which the weaker claim was made is suspect.
The bigger issue is that we have vast amounts of scientific data and empirical evidence around fluoride toxicity. People are injured and die due to fluorine exposure, we understand how it interacts with biology. Any mechanism of action that can support the hypothesis that fluorine causes brain damage necessarily invalidates all of this evidence and is difficult to explain as a matter of basic chemistry.
And then we have to explain why fluoride in water has this effect but the much higher levels of fluoride in food does not.
Fluoridating municipal water may not offer much benefit but there is no credible science that it is actually harmful. Large regions of the world have water that naturally has far higher fluorine content than municipal water and there is no evidence of IQ reduction in these regions either.
If you're not prepared to listen to an expert, and that's what your dentist is on this topic, then nothing I, or anyone else can say, makes any difference to you.
At some point, you have to accept that your random wikipedia page and 5 minutes on google is not a convincing argument.
This is right up there in the conspiracy theory territory.
Rational discussion means listening to experts and admitting that you are not an expert.
What do you want me to say?
You aren't a qualified expert on this topic. If you want an expert opinion, talk to an expert, not some dubious fucking provenance wikipedia page.
Your dentist is not an expert in this — that’s like saying the guy implementing your frontend is an expert in design. Yes, they’re working in the space, but their job isn’t understanding the whole system.
If you’re this deep on the appeal to authority train, the NIH released a report in the last year linking fluoride exposure to moderate drops in IQ with moderate confidence.
It’s probably not the worst thing in the world, but is definitely not inert.
I am competent on this particular subject matter, I have worked in fluorine chemistry and am familiar with the biology and medical literature of fluorine toxicity. The report made much weaker claims than people seem to think.
There is a very serious mechanism of action problem. Fluorine poisoning is a thing that happens. The observed effects and empirical evidence, as well as the mechanisms of action that cause them, are incompatible with any mechanism of action that supports the hypothesis that it causes brain damage. Basically, it would invalidate the entire history of actual fluoride exposure.
The other serious problem is that people are exposed to far more fluorine through what they eat than through water. What is special about trace levels in municipal water? And many parts of the world have far higher natural fluoride levels in their water than any municipal water supply with no evidence of adverse consequences. This has been studied many times in many countries! In fact, the only consistent correlation with naturally high fluoride levels is better cardiovascular health (for which there is a known mechanism of action).
This notion that trace levels of fluoride in some municipal water is adversely impacting IQ based on thin evidence from the developing world is just the public health version of “faster than light neutrinos”. Someone thinks they measured it but it contradicts everything we know about the subject. The rational approach isn’t to discard everything we know without a hell of a lot more evidence.
I don’t think adding fluoride to municipal water does much these days but it also isn’t harming anyone.
It also seems to mirror the rhyme with the vaccine "debate."
That debate is framed around being vaccinated vs the scare of "vaccine caused autism" (or myocarditis), but that frame is missing the risk of things like measles.
Likewise tooth decay is not only expensive, but it can have dreadful health consequences if left unaddressed. Missing teeth is also socially costly. Being poor or "ugly" or poor looking is a serious adverse health consequence. Imagine parents barely making ends meet or working multiple jobs. It's easy to imagine disadvantaged kids missing out on dental care.
I also explicitly remember reading multiple reports of poor tooth health correlating with dementia development. I've also read that serious infections of any sort can harm IQ.
Sure, but we need to look at this from the other side, too. Does fluoridating water provide benefits? I think it's safe to say it did way back when we started doing it. But we didn't have fluoride toothpaste back then. Putting fluoride in the water is presumably more costly than not doing it. If it's actually providing benefits, and the risk of harm is below some very low threshold, then sure, let's keep doing it. But is it actually providing benefits?
Dentists have to spend 8 years at school right? …and do various annual training to stay licensed?
I’d say that’s a reasonable sign of someone qualified to have an opinion.
I think you’re getting confused with a dental technician.
I would be really surprised if dentists had much expertise on the impact of fluorine on physiology or the mechanisms of action for its toxicity. They know what it does to your teeth, and maybe that it is known to have positive effects for cardiovascular health, but that is about the extent of it. The systematic effects on the rest of your body are outside their domain.
Chemists who work in fluorine chemistry on the other hand have to become experts on the biological effects of fluorine exposure. Small and seemingly innocuous exposures can do a lot of damage and kill you, though not in a way that lends any support to the idea that municipal fluoridation will harm you. If you do understand how it kills you (basically by being exceptionally narrowly focused on making free calcium ions and to a lesser extent magnesium ions biologically unavailable), it is hard to describe a chemically plausible scenario that somehow avoids this basic fact of chemistry. Fluoride behaves the same way outside the body.
Municipal water exposure is far below the noise floor for fluoride. Food has far higher levels of fluoride than municipal water and the body has ample excess calcium and magnesium to absorb the loss of bioavailability of a microscopic amount of those minerals. Humans consume calcium measured in grams per day, multiple orders of magnitude more than can be lost via municipal fluoridation. Natural dietary variation will have a far larger effect.
You don’t seem to understand the difference between public and private health.
Your dentist is well qualified to have an opinion on the effects of fluoride on your teeth.
They are poorly qualified to have an opinion on whether it should be added to the water supply at source.
> If you're not prepared to listen to an expert
Who do you think conducted those peer-reviewed systematic reviews? I'm sorry if I don't take the word of some random guy's dentist over multiple meta analyses in major medical journals.
And I don't need an expert to tell me people should have the right to make their own medical decisions.
And finally, I live in a country where public health experts have decided against water fluoridation. This is represents the vast majority of countries. What now? Should I pick some other experts to listen to?
Who do you think conducted those peer-reviewed systematic reviews? I'm sorry if I don't take the word of some random guy's dentist over multiple meta analyses in major medical journals.
I don’t understand what you mean here. Are you just wholly rejecting the concept of expert knowledge, trials, meta analyses, basically the foundations of science, just because in order to participate in it you have to have tainted yourself by rigorously studying it?
> Are you just wholly rejecting the concept of expert knowledge
I am embracing expert knowledge in trusting meta-analyses and the decisions of EU health experts.
You are not an expert in this field, and cherry-picking random articles in random journals does not make you an expert.
> Should I pick some other experts to listen to?
I think it's reasonably clear that you haven't spoken to an expert in this field.
> I'm sorry if I don't take the word of some random guy's dentist over multiple meta analyses in major medical journals.
Are you certain you're competent to review and understand the literature on the topic? It takes a lot of time and effort; that's what dentists do as a job. That's why they have to go to school. That's why random people on the internet do not do dentistry.
If you don't trust my dentist, then talk to your dentist.
This is literally my point: I'm not telling you how it is; I'm telling you, talk to someone who knows what they're talking about; and, don't believe that you are an expert because you put some trivial amount of effort into investigating it yourself.
You can't be an expert at everything. No one can.
As some point, you have to trust other people.
I'm also not convinced that a dentist is credibly an expert here. Sure, I would absolutely expect my dentist to understand what benefits fluoridated water might provide to my teeth. I would not, for example, expect my dentist to be an expert in whether or not fluoridated water could cause damage to other parts of my body.
My previous dentist pushed these $80 (not covered by insurance) fluoride treatments on every cleaning visit. There's no research that shows much of anything about their effectiveness (good or bad). Yet they push them anyway, because it (their words) might help and probably won't harm. That doesn't give me a good feeling about their competence to have an expert opinion on this sort of thing.
I would, however, trust the opinion of someone who is doing medical/dental research, and holds a doctorate in a relevant field.
Dentists are experts on neurology now? I don't think the debate here has anything to do with the effects of fluoride on teeth.
> Talk to your dentist. They are experts in this field
No they are not. The are experts are filling cavities and treatment. They have no additional knowledge of fluoride in water vs any other interested person.
For that you need to talk to someone in research, which is not someone seeing patients.
> Talk to your dentist
The vast majority of dentists are not public health experts, and will have little to offer other than “exposing your teeth to fluoride regularly is good”.
Right exactly. And I do that, twice a day, when I brush my teeth with fluoride toothpaste.
What do you mean? Florine creates a substance in human teeth that is much more resistant to decay than calcium.
fluoridated water drastically reduces dental cavities and has no evidence of being dangerous.
"Chemicals, man. They'll fuck you up." -Heroin Bob
A list of references for both sides of arguments.
Calgary removed fluoride from its water supply. A decade later, it's adding it back https://www.npr.org/2024/12/13/nx-s1-5224138/calgary-removed...
Toxic Treatment: Fluoride's Transformation from Industrial Waste to Public Health Miracle https://origins.osu.edu/article/toxic-treatment-fluorides-tr...
Portland has a divisive relationship with water fluoridation https://www.opb.org/news/article/portland-oregon-water-fluor...
Fluoride Exposure: Neurodevelopment and Cognition https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/whatwestudy/assessments/noncancer/...
Effect of fluoridated water on intelligence in 10-12-year-old school children https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5285601/
A tale of two cities finds that community water fluoridation prevents caries https://adanews.ada.org/ada-news/2021/august/community-water...
Children exposed to higher fluoride levels have lower IQs, a government study finds https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/06/health/children-higher-fl...
DRAFT NTP Monograph on the State of the Science Concerning Fluoride Exposure and Neurodevelopmental and Cognitive Health Effects: A Systematic Review https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/sites/default/files/ntp/about_ntp/...
The finding’s of the NTP’s 6-year fluoride neurotoxicity evaluation https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/sites/default/files/ntp/about_ntp/...
Fluoridation cessation and children's dental caries: A 7-year follow-up evaluation of Grade 2 schoolchildren in Calgary and Edmonton, Canada https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34309045/#:%7E:text=Results:....
Toxicity of fluoride: critical evaluation of evidence for human developmental neurotoxicity in epidemiological studies, animal experiments and in vitro analyses https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7261729/
Low-to-moderate fluoride exposure in relation to overweight and obesity among school-age children in China https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31509932/
What happens when you remove fluoride from tap water? https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/324086
Buffalo poised to resume fluoridation of city’s water supply https://adanews.ada.org/ada-news/2024/january/buffalo-poised...
I’m disappointed in the news media fails to mention the cascading effects of dental health. Yes, the primary and direct benefit of fluoride is to have a healthier mouth.
But having a healthy mouth is far from the end goal, imo. If your mouth is full of cavities you’re more likely to build up bacteria that cause downstream effects as serious as heart disease. Also if your mouth is routinely uncomfortable you may gravitate towards soft processed foods and away from healthy whole foods like fresh fruits and vegetables.
I know water is not the only way to get fluoride into people. But these politicians who are trying to take it out of the water are just saying basically “it’s fine, let’s do nothing”. They’re not going to fluoridate the salt. They’re not going to run public health campaigns stressing the importance of regular brushing. They’re just willing to let people’s teeth rot to score points.
It’s disgusting, and no matter how you feel about the water you should be able to see that these people are not on your side.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/in...
If I went to the store to grab a bottle of water, and they were selling fluoridated water and fluoridated water, I would choose the non-fluoridated water.
I drink tap water now with fluoride so its not like I care strongly, but its a bit weird that many people buy only non-fluoridated water themselves and are confused when other people show a preference for non-fluoridated water in their own taps.
> If your mouth is full of cavities you’re more likely to build up bacteria that cause downstream effects as serious as heart disease.
I don't know that you have the causality here correct.
https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/oral-health
> They’re not going to run public health campaigns stressing the importance of regular brushing. They’re just willing to let people’s teeth rot to score points.
Do you really think there are sizable native born populations that are not aware of tooth brushing?
There’s plenty of people that don’t bother with it, but I don’t see a PR campaign being particularly effective at changing that.
I think there are lots of kids who don’t know how bad their teeth can get and how that can impact their life in the future (and I mean kids like teens, not like four year olds).
I think there are lots of adults who don’t realize that poor dental health can cause heart failure and worsen basically every chronic condition.
I think there are lots of goobers who don’t realize that there’s no reason that United and Elevance and the rest couldn’t be forced to cover dental care via regulation.
I get your point, but big picture there are a lot of impactful education campaigns that should be possible.
So you're saying that dental health is essential for the rest of the body? Yet, Canada doesn't include it in its famous 'universal free healthcare'...
I'd actually just like to see more money put into public dental assistance. And education.
The Canadian Dental Care Plan (CDCP) was introduced to provide dental services to uninsured Canadians meeting specific criteria. Its rollout began in December 2023, starting with individuals aged 87 and above, and is set to expand to all eligible adults earning less than $90,000 annually by May 1, 2025.
This is actually a perfect example of how under-served dental needs have been. It was only passed via some interesting political wrangling and alliances. And it hasn’t been a smooth rollout with some dentists not getting on board. Starting with aged seniors is good from a compassion standpoint, but the emphasis should be on prevention at earlier ages.
> I'd actually just like to see more money put into public dental assistance. And education.
I would want to see that in anti fluoride campaigns and laws as well, but have not see that happen in the laws and campaigns I have followed. Or in the HN comments I have responded to on the subject, most focus on banning and provide no follow, or no structured follow up like - free toothpaste, required educations, and follow up studies, reassess in X years.
They should ban crash barriers. I've never crashed into one.
You can provide your own flouride (live in a house with well water).
You can provide lots of stuff yourself if the state abandons the whole idea of public health. Of course, be prepared for your taxes and/or insurance going up to cover your neighbors who don't pay for the same preventative care.
Pretty much-was told by an insurance broker one of the biggest factors past history of weather and the obvious things (flooding possibility, dry trees) is my neighbors. Didn't get into specifics but I suspect drugs and gangs.
>one of the biggest factors
One of the biggest factors of what?
Based on the context, I believe insurance prices
Public health is a conspiracy to attempt to get our young men prepared for war!
Assuming you're wealthy enough and well informed enough to know that you should.
Children can't, and a lifetime of dental issues they didn't have the knowledge or good fortune to have prevented is a serious issue.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_by_countr...
What does this have to do with childhood dental outcomes?
For example: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6169031/pdf/10.1177...
Which finds that fluoridated water likely conservatively prevents about 30% of childhood dental caries.
Fluoride in water wouldn't be necessary is sugary drinks were taxed heavily (or just banned altogether) and dental care was affordable. But obviously that's considered communism if you're a typical american.
Or you could just put fluoride in the sugary drinks.
Book by Christopher Bryson. Needed context
Cynical take: Now that studies have shown that bottled water is loaded with nanoplastics, upper class people want to start drinking tap water again. Now suddenly states don't want fluoride in the tap water...
According to these "it lowers kids IQ" people, is the average IQ of Hawaiian kids higher than other states?
There are latent variables there. You can't just compare the IQ of two areas and only isolate a single variable out of thousands.
Fluoridation is literally one of the most successful efforts at improving public health in history. Dental health is keystone to general health.
The idea that the conspiracy theorists are winning the public policy debate enrages me. There's rock solid proof of the benefits of fluoridation extending decades, and there is little to no proof of any adverse side effects.
Oh well, good luck Utah. I'm glad I don't live there, but if I were a young dentist, I know where I'd set up my new practice.
Well you can buy as much fluoride paste as you like and add it to your own water.
2012: https://fluoridealert.org/content/50-reasons/
Highly recommend visiting the link for details about each point and 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_to_water_fluoridati...
I draw your attention to the first sentence.
Also this is interesting:
Fluoridation may be useful in the U.S. because unlike most European countries, the U.S. does not have school-based dental care, many children do not visit a dentist regularly, and for many U.S. children water fluoridation is the prime source of exposure to fluoride.
“Do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk, ice cream? Ice cream, Mandrake? Children’s ice cream!...You know when fluoridation began?...1946. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hard-core Commie works. I first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love...Yes, a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I-I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence. I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women, er, women sense my power, and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women, Mandrake...but I do deny them my essence.”
Middle-aged human LLM here.
This debate is about evidence vs policy:
* Evidence: fluoride displaces iodine and other halogens, which disrupts thyroid function and possibly negatively impacts other organs and bones.
* Policy: wealth inequality in the US has created a situation where the poor struggle to such an extent that they don't have access to basic health services like fluoride treatments at the dentist every 6 months, while the rich have grown so greedy that they don't want to pay a fraction of a percent of their taxes for preventative care for children and the impoverished so they instead tolerate slightly more expensive fluoridated tap water at the expense of everyone's health.
This comment is about my subjective experience with a sample size of 1, meaning that it doesn't apply to you or the public:
* My father is a dentist and gave me fluoride treatments every 6 months while I was growing up in Idaho. I was raised mostly on well water which isn't fluoridated. I have never had a cavity, despite not going to the dentist for the decade of my 20s while he lived away from me. My thyroid function is not as high as I would like after a lifetime of acute stress from struggle, multiple insults to the body, drinking fluoridated water after the age of 18, and being exposed to radioactive iodine at 80 times the US drinking water standard for perhaps 1 year after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster (which potentially either gave me a lifetime dose or was insignificant).
This solution is as evidence-based and equitable as I can come up with:
* We should remove fluoride from drinking water and reimburse all dentists for free 6 month fluoride treatments of the general public, which represents some nominal fee of perhaps $15-$20 per person annually (probably less) which is not materially significant to the federal budget of roughly $15-20,000 per person annually.
This take is my personal subjective opinion followed by objective evidence supporting my claims:
* I don't think highly of Robert Kennedy Jr's health initiatives, because they don't ethically weigh evidence and policy, and we don't have enough epidemiological studies to predict outcomes. So they will certainly cause unintended consequences. That said, I believe there is merit to his concerns. So a way forward is not to be anti-vax for example, but to recognize that there are dozens of types of vaccines and to prioritize vaccines for illnesses like polio that have a high risk of negatively impacting quality of life. Health experts should continue advising elected officials on policy decisions. Public health is not a domain that can be left in the trust of individuals acting unilaterally. So removing fluoride from water without providing state or federal funding for fluoride treatments every 6 months will most likely negatively impact public health.
https://www.thyroid.org/patient-thyroid-information/ct-for-p...
https://thyroidpharmacist.com/articles/fluoride-and-your-thy...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11003687/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30316182/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38029816/
https://theworld.org/stories/2016/08/02/fukushima-radiation-...
It's interesting how the MAGA crowd keep looking for reasons why they dumb.
One time it was the covid vaccine, now it's the drinking water.
You just dumb, guys.
Sigh, another libtard completely divorced from reality, suckered by the fake news. Those are reasons why everyone except MAGA is dumb, duh. /s
I love the cognitive dissonance in people who say both: "Don't medicate me without permission.", "Masks are oppression.", and "We have to stop those people from dressing and calling themselves what they want."
Please don't be snarky in HN comments, and please don't take threads on generic flamewar tangents. Those are two of the worst things for the curious conversation we're trying to have here.
Both of these points are in the site guidelines.
And dentists rejoiced at their newfound source of income! /s
This is so dumb, and based on psudoscience at best, and straight up falsities at worst.
In 10 years we're going to hear about how cavities are so much higher in Utah than anywhere else.
Don't they sell toothpaste with flourid in Utah?
Generally kids don't use toothpaste with fluoride because of the risk of swollowing it. Yes, we know it's bad in high doses, which is why kids toothpaste often doesn't have it. You have to wait until they are old enough to spit when brushing.
In reality what will happen is that rich kids will be just fine because they will get their fluoride treatments at the dentist every six months.
It's the poor kids who will suffer because they don't see the dentist regularly because it's expensive, so they won't get their treatments.
There is a such thing as baby teeth. Presumably most children learn to brush properly while they still have them. If they do something wrong, they get a second chance when their adult teeth replace them. Why does this even need to be explained?
As for “fluoride treatments”, those are applied to the teeth, not drank. They are not a substitute for regular brushing.
You sound concerned about the kids. We are on the same side. There is evidence that fluoridation level is correlated (dose dependent) with sleep problems, lower IQ scores, early onset puberty and bone cancer in children. There are specific areas outside blood brain barrier that it accumulates to the degree of fluoridation (100x to 200x levels of other tissues), all postmortem tests verify this.
It is true that many studies were at higher doses(2x to 4x), but that should not mean that it is acceptable to intentionally raise fluoride levels to half of harmful levels, because we want to protect teeth.
If you don't want cavities decrease sucrose, brush and floss. Can I brush my teeth with use baking soda, use whatever? Arent they are OUR teeth? What if we find some additive might help some other health issue? Should we add that to everyone's drinking water?
Afaik these findings primarily involve populations exposed to fluoride levels above 1.5 mg/L, which is higher than the 0.7 mg/L recommended for U.S. water supplies. There is insufficient evidence to conclude that fluoride at recommended levels negatively impacts IQ.
At safe levels fluoridation is a public health measure akin to fortifying foods with vitamins (e.g., iodine in salt or folic acid in flour something we do all the time).
> insufficient evidence
That's a very high standard of evidence.
Toxicity testing is often carried out on mice, up to the dosage required for any observable effect. From that safe levels for humans are derived, e.g. the NOAEL (No Observed Adverse Effect Level).
To say that a study done in humans, got observable effects at only twice the intended dose (who knows what the s.d. of the dose is, but anyway) and we conclude there's simply not enough evidence?
Many chemicals have been banned on the basis of far less evidence.
the question is regardless of the stated benefit, dont I still have the right to opt out of this all or nothing additive?
You have the right not to drink tap water of course
Honestly 1.5mg is not that different than 0.7mg..is there some reason to believe a 2X factor makes a big deal? I was expecting to hear of 10x differences or something, but 2x is not much of a factor in these kind of gradient effects.
1.5mg is literally twice the recommended limit. I don't really understand the logic in saying 2x overdosed is negligible. If you consistently eat 2x your daily calories you'll see the results fast. If you drink twice what you can handle, it would be bad. Etc
> Should we add that to everyone's drinking water?
Consider the following: Many water sources have a ton of salts and such in them naturally. Fluoride being one of them. The reason why water fluoridation became a thing in the first place is because it was noticed that higher natural levels of fluoridation resulted in fewer caries.
Water treatment in order to make it safe to drink often involves processes that remove and filter out these minerals and chemicals. Which means said things need to be added back in, as part of the treatment process.
Yes, we should.
What additives am I missing? I want to stay healthy.
Well, we don’t have that many things that can be added to water and have health benefits with basically no downside. Fluoride is one of the few things where it makes sense to do this. (If you are willing to broaden your horizons, you can buy things like iodized salt or golden rice to get the benefits of those. But food, alas, is not a government service.)
Kids until which age? Ime somewhere between 4-5 seem to be perfectly able to spit their toothpaste without swallowing. Guidelines in the EU typically suggest normally fluoride toothpaste in increasing amounts after 4.
Also, fluoride helps with remineralisation when it is used pretty much regularly, not once per 6 months. Fluoride treatments once per 6 months are not gonna bring back the enamel lost.
I do not understand what is the big deal here. In many countries there are specific recommendations wrt to fluoride and kids brushing their teeth that seem to work fine. This seems to be a solved issue in many places in the world without fluoridating water.
The recommendation from doctors is to use a small amount of toothpaste with fluoride. Apparently even if they cant spit yet. I was surprised to be told that, even though there are a ton of fluoride free toothpastes available.
>This is so dumb, and based on psudoscience at best, and straight up falsities at worst.
I don't know whether water fluoridation is worthwhile. But I do know that various European countries have discontinued it. <https://web.archive.org/web/20160303202219/http://www.appgaf...> Are they also working off of pseudoscience and falsities?
I'm not following closely, but is this pseudoscience?
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/fluoride-childrens-health-gran...
https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/whatwestudy/assessments/noncancer/...
Fluoride is known to be problematic at high concentrations (hell, everything is). The problems of fluoride really start to come into play at concentrations of around 10-20mg/L, and some of the areas being studied are running well in excess of 100mg/L of fluoride.
The EPA limit for fluoride is 4mg/L. There's an argument to be made that it should be lowered to 2mg/L. When fluoride is added to drinking water, the target is around 0.9mg/L--no one's coming close to the EPA limit, and that exists because groundwater sources can end up being naturally high in fluoride. (I'm not sure what the typical natural occurrence of fluoride is in Utah, but I strongly suspect that they're not making any moves to actually remove fluoride from existing systems.)
Seems to cause problems at lower levels than that:
> The NTP monograph concluded, with moderate confidence, that higher levels of fluoride exposure, such as drinking water containing more than 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter, are associated with lower IQ in children.
https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/whatwestudy/assessments/noncancer/...
Those are based on countries with much higher levels of fluoride than the USA adds.
Follow up studies have found the levels in the USA to be perfectly safe and in fact beneficial since poor people don't get dental care like they do in other countries.
> levels in the USA to be perfectly safe
because everybody drinks the same amount of water right?
ridiculous position to argue from.
I think the argument they make is fair. The levels that the US aims to have fluorinated water concentrations. If theres a bad actor county well thats on them not the standard thats set.
Please share study that shows it is safe in the US for children. The EPA allows up to 2mg/L in water and we have some evident that 1.5mg/L has negative effects on children.
HN Comments were very credulous before the election. Shows how flexible belief in science is.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39235663
It doesn't take much to observe that we've been fluoridating municipal water for over half a century and children are doing mostly fine. It's the actions of children's parents that contribute the most to their IQ losses.
I didnt look too closely, but the concentration recommended by the FDA is much lower than many of the sample sets in that linked study. Some 10 times as much. One is a hundred times as much.
Not sure if that first link was to the Harvard summary intentionally but heres the actual study: https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/ehp.1104912
The second link showed a concentration as little 2x the US amount was impactful.
*The NTP monograph concluded, with moderate confidence, that higher levels of fluoride exposure, such as drinking water containing more than 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter, are associated with lower IQ in children. The NTP review was designed to evaluate total fluoride exposure from all sources and was not designed to evaluate the health effects of fluoridated drinking water alone. 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.*
> Republican state lawmaker Stephanie Gricius - who introduced the bill in the state legislature - has argued that there is research suggesting fluoride could have possible cognitive effects in children.
It's kind of amazing to say something like that then be so inconsistent on things that will have real outcomes that make life better for kids. They're all for cutting school support and social services.
Utah has among the best schools in the nation: https://www.reddit.com/r/Utah/comments/1idrt6j/utah_spends_t...
It also has among the happiest citizens: https://www.deseret.com/utah/2024/09/09/utah-mental-health-h...
It has the highest economic mobility in the country: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adammillsap/2023/12/22/utah-top...
Despite being filled with guns, it’s got a homicide rate only a little higher than Canada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
And it’s ranked in the top 10 states for life expectancy: https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2022/08/24/utah-t...
Utah and Massachusetts are basically the steel-man versions of their respective ideologies. But Utah doesn’t have the benefit of Harvard and MIT, major Pharma companies, etc. It’s surrounded by desert and has no natural resources to speak of.
A lot of that is due to the Mormons. While they tend to vote Republican, they are some of the biggest socialists out there. They believe in giving 10% of their income to the church (and enforce it!).
Then they redistribute to their poorest members in the form of free private education at all pre-college levels and highly subsidized college as well. And with food banks, free or subsidized medical services, and whole bunch of other things the government doesn't provide.
They've essentially traded one government for another, but theirs requires belief in their religion and only applies to their believers (who happen to concentrate in Utah).
That’s the steel-man version of (american) conservatism: civic institutions provide the safety net instead of the government.
And in terms of aggregate outcomes, Utah’s results are impressive. The LDS apparently does a better job teaching kids to read than the government here in Maryland.
> Utah achieves great aggregate outcomes even compared to states that spend a lot more money
That's because you're not counting the money the church spends to replace government programs, which in Utah is significant.
Utah has less money to start with, though. It doesn’t have big industries or things like that. Median income is $40,000 versus about $50,000 in Maryland and Massachusetts.
Yeah, but extremely regressive views on equality and women's rights come along with it....
You can get a lot done when you establish regressive control structures for enforcement. Generally speaking, most people usually don't want that trade-off.
>civic institutions provide the safety net instead of the government
Now that the internet has destroyed local community and trust in institutions, what will conservatism do?
> and only applies to their believers (who happen to concentrate in Utah)
Worth noting here that the church additionally spends north of $1 billion annually on humanitarian aid across the globe [1] (separate from the redistributions to the poor mentioned by OP). Aid is provided independent of religious affiliation.
[1] https://philanthropies.churchofjesuschrist.org/humanitarian-...
Al Capone ran soup kitchens. He seemed like a good dude. What percentage of their global wealth is $1 billion? I wish I knew but for some reason they keep that a secret. And don't leave or they'll expect your family to cut you off.
*: searches suggest the wealth of the church to be around $265 billion. So their members give 10% annually to the church and the church gives less than 0.5% of their total wealth to the poor (but mostly to other Mormons or prospective converts). If you're wondering why they keep this massive horde of wealth, it's because they think it'll be needed for the apocalypse. Yes, it's for the apocalypse.
> [The Mormons] believe in giving 10% of their income
Is that income before tax or after tax?
"After tax" seems like it should be obvious, but then wouldn't that require tax specialists to decide how to deal with tax exceptions (retirement taxation incentives, donations, etcetera).
If the 10% donation is tax deductible, doesn't that require some mathematics to work out the 10%?
Irrelevant aside: I think the efficient altruist 10% is "We're often asked how exactly to calculate income — should it be pre-tax or post-tax? Generally, we recommend choosing the option that makes most sense to you, though we think it makes sense to choose pre-tax if your donations are tax-deductible (for example, GiftAid counts towards your Pledge!) and post-tax if they're not.". https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/pledge
> Is that income before tax or after tax?
It’s up to personal interpretation. Some do before tax, some do after. Some only pay tithing on their regular income (i.e. from a normal job) but not on “already tithed” income (e.g. birthday money from parents), while others do it differently.
The church’s stance is that they say you should pay 10% tithing on your income. They don’t define income. And all they do is ask “do you pay a full tithe?” And it’s up to you to decide if you do or not based on how you view what “income” means.
It's pre-tax. It comes from the Bible where you set it aside "before anything else".
There are endless debates about gross vs net and as with many things in the CoJCoLDS it is left up to the members to decide/define and to self-certify their compliance. Welfare programs are financed via a separate donation program via a monthly fast where the skipped meals expenses are donated to the program.
What about capital appreciation? Business losses?
I presume there are guidelines that get complicated? Like Halakha or Sharia?
I'm not Mormon, so I don't know for sure, but what I hear from people are or were Mormon, the enforcement is a combination of social pressure and the Church demanding you provide them with a copy of your taxes to remain a member. I assume it's pretty loose from there.
I'm a Mormon, so I can answer these :)
I can't speak to how enforcement was in the past (I haven't researched it enough to say), but the way it currently stands is there is a yearly "tithing settlement". No tax documents are requested, all that our church has is the amount I donate. The bishop asks if I'm a full tithe payer, and accepts my answer.
Social pressure perhaps? But at least where I've been it's appeal to morality as taught in our canon.
Membership is not rescinded for not paying tithing, but a temple recommend requires being a full tithe payer (as reported by me).
EDIT: link to the official handbook: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/general-han...
Thanks for the info! Maybe the tax forms are on a per ward basis or per bishop?
No. I've been a member all my life in several U.S. states and internationally, and I've also been a volunteer finance clerk at church for many years. I've never been asked for tax forms, or even heard of anyone being asked for tax forms. It's not a thing.
Also, there's no prescriptive guidance on pre-tax vs. post-tax, or how to handle many edge cases, such as capital gains, tax deductions, etc. The church's stance is that it's between you and God to figure out how to apply the "pay 10%" guidance.
Old, but still observed: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1974/04/i-h...:
“...the simplest statement we know of is that statement of the Lord himself that the members of the Church should pay one-tenth of all their interest annually, which is understood to mean income. No one is justified in making any other statement than this. We feel that every member of the Church should be entitled to make his own decision as to what he thinks he owes the Lord, and to make payment accordingly.”
The quote you provide is grossly misleading, as that isn’t what tithing meant in the early days of the church. The church just says “which is understood to mean income” so causally that it’s essentially a lie. They say that to get more money. They hold peoples salvation at gun point to make sure it gets paid. And then they use their wealth and influence to drive state policy. It’s all very gross.
Not quite following your point? What about that is a lie?
At the beginning of The Church of Jesus Christ, saints were asked to consecrate all that they had to the bishop. Legally they signed away all rights to their property and the bishop leased it back to them.
They found that that wasn't sustainable (due to debts and disputes) and switched to 10% of interest (see Section 119 in D&C, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-test...). While tithing was paid in the past with animals, food, etc, that just doesn't scale beyond local communities.
Yes, our church does use funds for advocacy, but it's hard to ascribe pure malice to a church that spends $1 billion annually on humanitarian aid every year, and is expanding affordable education to tens of thousands of people in developing countries.
Not all of us agree with how much money is being held in reserve, but it's important to understand that we don't have a testimony in the church because of what we get from it, or even agree with all policies, but rather because of a personal witness of its truth. It is true that some stay in our church because of social pressure, and I'm not going to defend that practice. But, that's not what our core doctrine teaches.
I understand that it's easy to think that we are all a homogenous group that all thinks the same, but peek under the surface and you'll find many of us who find the core doctrine so compelling that we are willing to stick with the church and to enact change in constructive instead of destructive ways.
> it's hard to ascribe pure malice to a church that spends $1 billion annually on humanitarian aid
Where did your number come from? I've just read "Globally, the church boasted that it had spent US$40m on humanitarian aid in one year (2015)" from https://businessdesk.co.nz/article/full-page/behind-the-nz-m... (seems like a good article)
Bing says as of 2023, the church's net worth is estimated to be around $265 billion which would be income of $16 billion (assuming a conservative 6% annual ROI). I'm unsure how correct those numbers are since the article says (US$15.7b land and US$100b investment fund).
The Mormon church earns $7 billion a year from tithing. Even if humanistic aid were $1 billion - it is a relatively poor percentage.
Let's consider healthcare to be humanitarian aid (yeah, obviously not external). Governments spend 30% of taxes on healthcare, and people pay 30% in taxes so we might estimate that people are paying appromx 10% on humanitarian aid via their government. Although perhaps that is just a form of insurance you've paid in and you get paid out. I'm unsure of the statistics but my guess is that most people pay a lot in and get a little out due to skewed distribution of sickness costs. With health insurance the best deal is to never get sick and never claim (and your premiums help the poor bastards that do get sick - the best outcome a society could hope for). Note that health insurance in New Zealand is wildly different from the US model.
I've had a little experience watching how the Mormon church acts in Samoa which is definitely not a wealthy country. I would be interested to know how much of that humanitarian aid was paid for by countries that needed the humanitarian aid? The equivalent to paying in and getting paid out (with the church claiming doing good with the paying out, but not talking about what it keeps).
I'm a little cynical that there's some dissimulation by the LDS church - they are not well known for frank openness.
Hi! Yes, I believe that is correct for 2015. It's been fairly recent that the amount spent has ramped up a lot[1].
A lot of money also goes towards subsidizing education (All the BYUs, including the online classes that are targeted towards developing countries), building churches and temples, supporting local congregation budgets, and supporting church members who are financially insecure (I'm not sure if they counted that last part in the 2024 summary though).
> I've had a little experience watching how the Mormon church acts in Samoa which is definitely not a wealthy country.
Looks like they have a summary here: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/serve/caring/annual-summ...
> I'm a little cynical that there's some dissimulation by the LDS church - they are not well known for frank openness.
Yeah, it would be nice if they were more transparent here. I understand the legal reasoning--essentially security by obscurity--but it's frustrating to only get peeks and glimpses. I don't blame you for some healthy cynicism.
[1] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/serve/caring/annual-summ...
Not that I know of? I double-checked the handbook and there's nothing in there that mentions requesting tax forms, so it's certainly not official policy and if it did happen it should be reported. (We're very bureaucratic, lol)
The only tax form I can think of is a form they send me so I can deduct it from taxes (as it's legally a tax-deductible donation).
EDIT: Section 34.4, 34.5.2, and 34.5.6 are applicable.
34.4:
> Confidentiality of Tithing and Other Offerings
> The amount of tithing and other offerings paid by a donor is confidential. Only the bishop and those who are authorized to handle or view these contributions should have access to this information. Stake presidencies, bishoprics, and clerks should never inappropriately discuss a member’s tithing status. Nor should they discuss the total amount of tithing or other offerings received.
34.5.2:
> Receiving Tithing and Other Offerings
> The Lord has given bishops the sacred trust of receiving and accounting for the tithes and other offerings of the Saints (see Doctrine and Covenants 42:30–33; 119). Only the bishop and his counselors may receive tithes and other offerings. Under no circumstances should their wives, other members of their families, clerks, or other ward members receive these contributions. The only exception is when Aaronic Priesthood holders are assigned to collect fast offerings (see 34.3.2).
> Church leaders and members should not leave donations unattended.
34.5.6:
> Donation Statements
> Donor Statements of Contributions are available to all members at donations.ChurchofJesusChrist.org. Leaders should encourage members to regularly review their donor statements. Where applicable, official tax statements are also available at donations.ChurchofJesusChrist.org, from the local unit, or from the area office.
Calling Mormons socialist is inaccurate. Socialism is government-forced redistribution of wealth. A large majority of Mormons, at least in Utah, are very much opposed to that. You are correct that a large majority of Mormons voluntarily share their wealth with the poor and needy.
You are incorrect saying that you have to be a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the actual name of the "Mormon church") to receive these benefits. In some cases there will be conditions, like if you want to attend one of the church universities you will need to promise to abstain from alcohol (one example), but becoming a baptized member of the church is not required
> Calling Mormons socialist is inaccurate
I would say it's very accurate. They are forced to share their wealth to get into the Kingdom of God. The only choice they have is to not go to heaven. I'd say that's being forced, just by a different power.
> but becoming a baptized member of the church is not required
You don't get the BYU discount unless you're baptized.
That's pretty different than getting arrested and thrown in jail by government thugs for not paying up, whether you believe in the cause or not, but ok?
Even the non-member BYU tuition is subsidized and a much lower price than other comparable colleges. But really, BYU is not the best example of Mormon charity, it can only accommodate a limited number of students.
I think you are missing the key element, that socialism isnt just a structure or institution, but a government policy and applied to all people within a society.
It is neither optional or excludable.
This is why the monopoly man choosing to share caviar with his family or paying dues to a yacht club does not make them a socialist. The monopoly man retains full agency over who they share with.
Doesn’t that contradict the negative outcome of fluoride in the water?
is Utah cutting school support and social services?
Is there a reason to expect this republican to hold views that differ significantly from the rest of the party?
Fun anecdote: Utah's Republicans actually rejected the MAGA candidates in the Republican primary for both Senator and Governer by a wide margin, despite the MAGA candidates having Trump's endorsement. If nothing else, Utah doesn't vote MAGA-or-bust like some other states have been.
Interesting. Alright then maybe there is a possibility. Thanks for sharing!
I truly don't care one way or the other on the dental advantage that fluoride offers in drinking water, or the alleged risks it poses to the IQ of unborn children. I simply hate the fact that public policy is now being driven by what are essentially New World Order conspiracy theorists
Before someone tries to pin this as a decisively left-right political issue, Portland, Oregon has been virulently anti-fluoride for over 70 years (which is probably the last time Portland and Utah agreed on anything):
https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2013/05/portland_fluorid...
Portland is a bit odd when it comes to water; they drained an entire (uncovered, open to the elements) city reservoir because a guy peed in it. True story. I assume they have signs for the birds flying aloft to not defecate over the reservoir.
Edit: It appears many posts all over this thread are being brigaded with downvotes. Why? Is Big Fluoride in trouble? Grow up. You people are brain damaged (possibly from fluoride).
Funny, I watched Dr. Strangelove two weeks ago. POE!
I hear they're going to start adding electrolytes to the plant water though.
Why wouldn't they, it's what plants crave.
What I find fascinating about this debate is that only municipalities/cities add fluoride to water. If you are on well water, no fluoride. So any studies comparing the incidence of tooth decay between populations that are on well water and those that are on fluoridated city water?
I get that this was a great public health benefit before fluoride in toothpaste became widely available but is this still the case? Couldn't it be argued that most of the benefit comes from brushing your teeth?
Flouride incorporates into the tooth structure in developing teeth before they emerge, I'm not sure how effective that is but it is different than the more topical protection.
Tea has enormous amounts of flouride depending on where it is grown and they aren't banning that yet.
For what it's worth, very few locations and processing styles result in significant doses of fluoride in tea. Within the United States, these types of tea are not typically consumed. For example, Tibetan brick tea is consistently high in fluoride, to the extent that fluorosis is actually somewhat common in certain regions. But it's a bit tricky to even buy a brick (meant for consumption) within the US. Bagged tea, more commonly available, has to be drunk regularly in very significant volumes to have a deleterious effect.
Put another way, for issues to rise to the level of public policy, they have to affect a meaningful number of people in a region. In the US, tea-induced fluorisis is extremely rare.
I'm not comparing it to tea that causes fluoridosis. Just normal tea sold in the US can have significantly more fluoride than is put into water supplies. I don't think it's a significant danger, like the amounts in the water supply aren't either.
I think it's worth reminding people of Occam's Razor, and the point of it is: a simple explanation is often better than a complicated one.
The US has had water fluoridation for 65 years, affecting 346 million people. That's a pretty big god damn sample size and long amount of time in which to observe effects. If we still have no proof of significant negative health effects, it's probably not bad for you.
That said: you can always lower the amount of fluoride if it turns out the local area already gets a lot of fluoride from other sources. You don't need to ban it, you can just lower the levels.
So please don't defend this decision by Utah. They're being children.
1. IQ is not an objective measurement, it is inherently flawed
2. A 1.5-3 IQ level difference is not noticeable in any practical way. Things like birth order have a more significant impact on IQ.
3. Comparing Canadian children to Mexican is pretty dramatic, like comparing rich kids to poor kids; you will always see a marked difference between the two, in intelligence, in health, in crime, in all sorts of things. Mexican communities often over-fluoridate their water (I know because I grew up in Mexico and my teeth are stained because of it). Again, this is no reason to ban it, just lower it.
This finding is a suggestion of a link, it's not empirical proof. The methods and findings have many questionable aspects. You can always find some paper that suggests something random like vegetables are bad for you or something. One paper does not a water-tight case make.
> The US has had water fluoridation for 65 years, affecting 346 million people. That's a pretty big god damn sample size and long amount of time in which to observe effects. If we still have no proof of significant negative health effects, it's probably not bad for you.
The problem is there will have been a lot of confounders.
E.g. despite huge sample sizes, isolating the cause of the obesity crisis is too hard because so many different things changed at once.
Sure, it's not easy to find a smoking gun. That doesn't mean we go all in on whatever we think might be the issue (if there even is an issue).
The answer to the obesity crisis wasn't to ban Pizza. We don't we ban sodas and junk food at schools, which we know would have a positive impact on health. But we do ban fluoride, without proof that it will help? With actually the only scientific proof being that it would be detrimental to remove?
If people's concern is really that it might slightly lower IQ, consider that 1) IQ has been steadily increasing since the 40's, and 2) you can get better IQ by investing in education, something that we do an embarrassing job of already and need to improve on.
The other concern touted is that it might cause cancer. As we well know by now, nearly everything causes cancer.
Banning fluoride is just a move by politicians to take advantage of ignorant scared people to drum up more votes/support. It's like every other action they take to vilify something scary or unknown and then claim victory over the evil thing they purged. This isn't new, either - this clearly partisan stance was being pointed out in the 1950's when it was first being considered for nationwide use.
"After more than 70 years of investigation, there are still questions about how effective water fluoridation is at preventing dental decay and whether the possible risks are worth the benefits. Although water fluoridation undoubtedly did improve the dental health of many children in the 1960s and 1970s, fluoride proponents were perhaps too hasty in declaring that community water fluoridation was the best (or only) solution for dental decay. A less fractious debate might have encouraged a more open discussion in which the possible harms could have been more fully discussed and other options, such as providing fluoridated toothpaste, more fully considered." - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4504307/
> you can get better IQ by investing in education, something that we do an embarrassing job of already and need to improve on.
You got a cite for this? I keep hearing that the education interventions tried in the West have universally failed to raise IQ.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
Pretty much everyone I personally know, this in part to coming from a family of relative affluence in highly liberal areas, has religiously filtered their water to keep additives (such as fluoride) from going into their bodies. This same crowd has savvy towards dental hygiene, they're all into oil pulling, and brushing with Fennel oil and all that. Eliminating yeast (which is fungus, not bacteria) from the mouth prevents the biofilm that creates the necessary conditions for dental cavities.
Even the poorest Americans can afford coconut oil and Fennel oil.
There's no reason to drink that shit (fluoride), there's no reason to brush with it either.
Way past time. The link between fluoride ingestion by children and pregnant women to lower IQ in children has been known for years. It's incredible how the scientific community in the US is so ignorant of this fact.
Also, dentists have no neuroscience background! So let's take recommendations by dentists to ingest a neurotoxin with deep deep skepticism, shall we?
> The link between fluoride ingestion by children and pregnant women to lower IQ in children has been known for years
Not at the levels it is found in water in the USA. Those studies were done in countries with much higher levels of fluoride.
A low dose of this neurotoxin can still have smaller adverse effects on IQ, and in all likelihood do, especially for fetuses and small children. Lots of countries have banned fluoridation of the water supply. The US has one of the highest fluoride levels in the water supply. The default should be to not add neurotoxins into the water supply (I cannot believe I have to actually say this).
If that were true, nearly the entire state of California would have developmental issues.
Anyway, lots of things in this world that are bad for people in high doses are beneficial in smaller doses. Water is a great example, as are salt and sugar.
This logic is so flawed. We. know the biological mechanisms in the body that makes use of salt and sugar. And we know both are safe in relatively large amounts too.
With fluoride, relatively small amounts in the drinking water is known to cause lower IQ.
But somehow even smaller amounts are safer?
Do you just not see the problem here or are you purposely blinding yourself to the reality because of your political biases? Is it an unconscious thing for you?
You are simply not being rational. You are making excuses and excuses for holding a belief you have had and probably defended for years. And now you are too invested to left the belief go. Just let it go already.
Badgering people isn't an effective persuasive technique. If you want to convince people that you are right, support your argument with evidence and data.
> We know the biological mechanisms in the body that makes use of salt and sugar.
We also know it in fluoride: https://www.nidcr.nih.gov/health-info/fluoride/the-story-of-...
> But somehow even smaller amounts are safer
Yes, that's how nature works. Take a look at some typical prescription pharmaceutical doses sometime; many of them are awfully small. Like micrograms per kilogram.
The other thing to consider is that in life we balance risks and benefits with the aim of achieving a net positive. Most things that are good have some risks, and many things that are bad have some benefits. We know the benefit of water fluoridation, and the value to society is large. Meanwhile, we suspect there is a possible drawback of water fluoridation, though there is not a lot of data, and the risk is small at the amounts added to municipal water supplies. Nobody has been able to characterize the offsetting loss to any degree of certainty, so we cannot effectively recalculate the cost/benefit analysis.
The problem is that people have been characterizing the offsetting loss for decades while people blinded by political biases refuse to admit the evidence, however clear it is.
To a degree, it becomes impossible for them on a subconscious level because of the social costs involved.
This is a mass psychology problem, not a scientific evidence problem.
I would encourage you to speak with subject matter experts if you truly believe that this is a mass psychology problem.
It's too convenient to discount people who disagree with you as being "politically biased" and "blinded." A better explanation is that they observed the same input you do and concluded the benefit is still worth the risk.
And if it turns out that millions of Americans became stupid because of fluoride and not, say, bad parenting, phone addiction, and manipulative media, I won't be too proud to admit you were right.
The relationship appears to be linear down to zero, but it’s very hard to study near those levels. From what I’ve seen, the best current science is that the fluoridation levels in typical western countries are reducing average IQ by about 0.5-1.5 points.
For reference, adding lead to fuel was far, far worse.
Any citations?
I suspect it is hard to control for confounding correlations - specifically I would guess it is more likely that poorer areas are flouridated. HV electric power lines and nuclear stations have the issue that poorer people are more likely to live next to those, and poorer people have have worse health outcomes so it falsely appears that both of those cause the health problems.
Or where the people drink much more water
As the saying goes, it's the dose that makes the poison.
Vitamin D is also quite toxic, would you celebrate banning that as well?
Yes, there is no need to add vitamin D into the water supply.
Yeah, because it’s not water soluble.