Are places generally adding more than the recommended level of fluoride in their water? How much water do you have to ingest to reach the maximum recommended exposure? Given how bad people are at drinking the recommended level of water, I'm curious how they accurately assessed outcomes based on what I assume are relatively few data points
Health officials delayed report linking fluoride to brain harm
201–210 of 468 posts
Re: Health officials delayed report linking fluoride to brain harm
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Omg, no wonder my teeth are getting worse after moving to Amsterdam. I drink a ton of water and use Maldon salt. I didn’t realize there wasn’t fluoride in the water. (All the Nutella isn’t helping either, but… ooh, maybe that’s a reasonable vector for Europeans)
Don't you brush your teeth?!
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Re: Health officials delayed report linking fluoride to brain harm
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
None of the studies I have seen properly account for the lifetime effect, and instead only deduce lack of harm from flawed isolated studies. It’s in the entire water supply. You were gestated in a womb of a woman consuming highly fluoridated water. You were fed formula made with fluoridated water tuned to dose a 200lb man when you were 8lbs. The water you drank as your bones were growing was similarly overdosed The f…
> You were fed formula made with fluoridated water tuned to dose a 200lb man when you were 8lbs. Er, no. A baby only consumes 4-8oz of water per day while an adult is consuming 125oz. The concentration is the same in both cases so the adult is getting 30X more. > Then factor in the bell distribution and you are massively overexposing huge numbers of people a few standard deviations out. How are you defining 'overexpo…
Its kind of hilarious to picture what a new born baby taking in the amount of water a 200 lb man would in a day.
And of course "overexposed" is exactly the dose that fits their narrative.
I'm suspect they'd also have an opinion about not showering as much to not absorb the flouride through their skin.
Re: Health officials delayed report linking fluoride to brain harm
#204Twenty years ago, I moved from Michigan (a state that uses fluoride) to Mississippi (a state that doesn't use fluoride). My dentist at the time told me that I was going to end up with tooth decay if I stayed down there for more than a few years. Sure enough, five years later I moved back to Michigan and ended up with a cavity in an unusual place. My (new) dentist in Michigan was completely unsurprised. He said there…
That is funny. However Ill postulate this: Why wouldn't someone go to where the most interesting work is to be found though? You don't become a military doctor if you don't find it interesting stitching up bullet holes. And vice versa, you don't become a military doctor if you're not interested in working on the same.
Thats a very HN opinion. Sometimes people pick careers for factors other than how interesting they are.
Re: Health officials delayed report linking fluoride to brain harm
#205Health officials, believe it or not, are like any other human beings - in that they also have their own agendas and sometimes those agendas may be in direct opposition to the well being of others. I am surprised that anyone is surprised when news like this comes out.
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Re: Health officials delayed report linking fluoride to brain harm
#206Adding fluoride to water has always seemed weird to me, since you can't control for how much water someone is drinking or account for different bodily factors like age and weight. I wonder why the European solution of adding it to salt isn't the default, especially given that iodized salt is already so popular and commonplace. As a general rule of thumb, I think it's interesting to scrutinize dosage recommendations a…
No, fluoride must not be added to any food or beverage, because it provides no benefits whatsoever when ingested.
Fluoride is beneficial only when applied externally on the dental enamel, so that the fluoride ions will passively substitute the hydroxide ions. There is no known biological process that uses actively fluoride in the human body and excessive ingested fluoride has bad effects, e.g. bone damage.
Therefore fluoride must be added only to tooth paste and mouth washes, which provides all the benefits and none of the risks.
Intentionally ingesting fluoride is incredibly stupid and it is beyond my power of understanding how this could be mandated by law in USA and in some other countries which imitated USA irrationally.
Re: Health officials delayed report linking fluoride to brain harm
#207Adding fluoride to water has always seemed weird to me, since you can't control for how much water someone is drinking or account for different bodily factors like age and weight. I wonder why the European solution of adding it to salt isn't the default, especially given that iodized salt is already so popular and commonplace. As a general rule of thumb, I think it's interesting to scrutinize dosage recommendations a…
No credible scientific evidence exists that ingesting fluoride is beneficial. Whenever you point this out, people respond with studies that focused on topical application. This topic is weird. Otherwise intelligent people shut down and begin quoting movies from the 1960’s, and are somehow incapable of distinguishing between a topical mouthwash and oral consumption. Might as well drink sunscreen and talk about the red…
Here you go: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/003335491012500507
We've been putting fluoride in water for a long time, and there are multiple studies that have looking in to it, I don't know why you think there aren't?
Re: Health officials delayed report linking fluoride to brain harm
#208Twenty years ago, I moved from Michigan (a state that uses fluoride) to Mississippi (a state that doesn't use fluoride). My dentist at the time told me that I was going to end up with tooth decay if I stayed down there for more than a few years. Sure enough, five years later I moved back to Michigan and ended up with a cavity in an unusual place. My (new) dentist in Michigan was completely unsurprised. He said there…
Not to refute your n=1, but reviews are a safer way of establishing whether something actually works. Eg here, from 2015:
> There is insufficient information to determine whether initiation of a water fluoridation programme results in a change in disparities in caries across socioeconomic status (SES) levels.
> No studies that aimed to determine the effectiveness of water fluoridation for preventing caries in adults met the review's inclusion criteria.
> Over 97% of the studies were at high risk of bias and there was substantial between‐study variation
From here: https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
TLDR: The existing research is low quality.
Re: Health officials delayed report linking fluoride to brain harm
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
And since oral hygiene seems to be linked to eg. Alzheimers ( https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/264164 ) and flouride seems to be indispensable oral hygiene thing the issue is not so straightforward...
The link you mention is from the mouth bacteria/plaques and their leakage into the blood stream near the brain. Fluoride is not an antibiotic, so there is no plausible mechanism for it’s known topical benefits to prevent bacterial growth that might lead to Alzheimer’s (itself a theory, but an interesting one)
Municipal water fluoridation is problematic for a range of reasons but as a toothpaste and mouthwash it has merit and it actually does demonstrate direct bacterial growth arrest effects in addition to indirect substrate permissiveness inhibition via mineralisation.
“Fluoride acts to enhance membrane permeabilities to protons and compromises the functioning of F-ATPases in exporting protons, thereby inducing cytoplasmic acidification and acid inhibition of glycolytic enzymes.Basically, fluoride acts to reduce the acid tolerance of the bacteria. It is most effective at acid pH values. In the acidic conditions of cariogenic plaque, fluoride at levels as low as 0.1 mM can cause complete arrest of glycolysis by intact cells ofStreptococcus mutans.Overall, the anticaries actions of fluoride appear to be complex, involving effects both on bacteria and on mineral phases. The antibacterial actions of fluoride appear themselves to be complex but to be dominated by weak-acid effects.” https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.1139/m95-133#:~:text=Basica....
Re: Health officials delayed report linking fluoride to brain harm
#210Twenty years ago, I moved from Michigan (a state that uses fluoride) to Mississippi (a state that doesn't use fluoride). My dentist at the time told me that I was going to end up with tooth decay if I stayed down there for more than a few years. Sure enough, five years later I moved back to Michigan and ended up with a cavity in an unusual place. My (new) dentist in Michigan was completely unsurprised. He said there…
I think the fact that fluoride is beneficial to your teeth is a settled fact. However, the issue being discussed is fluorides impact on brain health.
Fluoride is beneficial only when applied externally on the dental enamel, where it converts the hydroxyapatite synthesized by the human cells into fluorapatite, which is less soluble in the acids contained in food or excreted by bacteria.
On the other hand, ingested fluoride has no benefits, because it cannot reach the tooth enamel and when in too large quantities it has bad effects, e.g. it may cause bone damage.
Brushing the teeth or washing the mouth with something containing fluoride is very good, drinking water with fluoride is very stupid.