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Health officials delayed report linking fluoride to brain harm

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Re: Health officials delayed report linking fluoride to brain harm

#451

Post by RC_ITR »

katbyte wrote: post #243
RC_ITR wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im interested in your take about how humans get water into their bodies without coating their teeth in it

I have sensitive teeth, when I drink water or any liquid really, it doesn’t touch my teeth. I’m more confused by how you would coat your teeth while drinking, do you swish it around in your mouth every sip?

>I’m more confused by how you would coat your teeth while drinking, do you swish it around in your mouth every sip?

I mean we are really going down a rabbit hole, but the water goes in my mouth, I swallow, my mouth remains wet with some residual water.

Unless you're opening your throat and pouring directly in, I guarantee water is touching your teeth, even with a straw.

Re: Health officials delayed report linking fluoride to brain harm

#452

Post by clintgriess »

napier wrote: post #209
newZWhoDis wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cytoplasm…

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Re: Health officials delayed report linking fluoride to brain harm

#453

Post by clintgriess »

zkms wrote: post #183
LispSporks22 wrote: post #131

I once found myself stuck in a biker bar west of Dallas. I had to listen to this old timer Hell’s Angel go on and on about fluoride conspiracies. Some of them are pretty wild - “fluoride is created by nuclear weapons construction as waste and the government has to get rid of it somehow, so in the water it goes” for example. The rest of the evening is a little hazy but I remember that. Incidentally, I used to think He…

> fluoride is created by nuclear weapons construction as waste and the government has to get rid of it somehow, so in the water it goes Like some wild conspiracy theories, there is a kernel of truth to this one. Namely, the fluoride used in water fluoridation is indeed an industrial byproduct -- except not from nuclear weapon manufacture, but from the production of phosphate fertilizer. From the CDC (which is definit…

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Re: Health officials delayed report linking fluoride to brain harm

#454

Post by Retric »

hef19898 wrote: post #406
8note wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside the US, it's added to water too

Africa: 400,000 people out of 1.1 billion get fluorides in there water. Asia: close to none in China (didn't find any hard numbers), none in India, less than 1% in Japan. Only Malaysia is doing it at any resonable scale. Europe: 2% of the population get it, roughly 14 million people with 10.5 million of those being in the UK and Ireland. So that leaves North America, with the exception of Mexico which jas high natura…

You left out Australia 70%, New Zealand 60%, Brazil 41%, Chile 70% etc.

Japan, China, India, and much of Europe have many areas with natural levels of fluoride in the water near or even above the recommended level. Which seriously distort their numbers as proponents of adding fluoride to water supplies don’t want to increase it arbitrarily only to safe and effective levels.

China has some really interesting data as in one location removing fluoride quickly resulted in “the incidence of dental caries among 4-year-old children had increased by 62%.”

Re: Health officials delayed report linking fluoride to brain harm

#455

Post by ben7799 »

jorvi wrote: post #95
ricardobeat wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can tell you that salt is not fluoridated in the Netherlands (most people who care about cooking use pure sea salt anyway). As for toothpaste, almost every toothpaste anywhere in the world has it. There is evidence both ways, the original reports were that children's dental health improved after they stopped fluoridation in the 70s.

We don’t fluoridate our water but from 12-18 we do “fluor happen” (loosely translated: “fluor biting”), where we are given an upper and a lower bit which are both filled with heavily fluoridated gel, you bite into it and after a couple of minutes you take the bits out, rinse your mouth and then spit out any left-overs.

I grew up in the US and remember this too, an absolute gag inducing gel that they put in a little mouthguard shaped thing and jammed in your mouth.

There have been various iterations of dentist office flouride treatments I remember.

As an adult the dentists I went to switched to a 2x 30 second rinse (60 second?) with a mouthwash at the end of the appoinment.

The last 10 years they eliminated that and I do a nightly flouride rinse.

I lived various places as a kid, from 10-18 I lived somewhere with no flouride in the water (rural with well water) and we did pills and dentist treatments instead.

Too much in this thread assumes everything is the same everywhere in a given country.

I have also probably never brushed my teeth with a non fluoride toothpaste living in the US. So it's not like that's different from the EU.

I have very little tooth decay in my mid 40s.

Re: Health officials delayed report linking fluoride to brain harm

#456

Post by Aerbil313 »

shlant wrote: post #352
spacephysics wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hot take: why don’t we stop the root cause of the problem, instead of the insestuous habit of layering on symptom management on top of symptom management. Stop giving kids these insanely high levels of sugar. No soda is a great start. Same thorn in my side is this completely crazy trend that this new life-long injection Ozempic/Wegovy is being suggested for kids 12 and up. Like what? It also atrophies muscle, tendons…

> why don’t we stop the root cause of the problem, instead of the insestuous habit of layering on symptom management on top of symptom management. Super simple answer: one requires everyone change their individual habits. Difficulty - very hard. The other requires no change at all on the individual level. Difficulty - very easy. Be careful with falling into the "public health initiatives are just a bandaid" trap. I w…

Banning all unhealthy factory-produced corn syrup food also doesn’t require people to change their habits. Just a legal ban, maybe a gradual one.

Re: Health officials delayed report linking fluoride to brain harm

#457

Post by mrguyorama »

jiggawatts wrote: post #428
Garvi wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it's worth asking why It's been a popular and wide spread conspiracy theory that the "shadow government" is either trying to lower the IQ or the total population numbers using fluoride in the water supply. And since politicians don't get chosen on a basis of competency, but rather popularity, you have the vast majority being relatively severely logically challenged and thus unable to read scientific papers and under…

Or any topic that involves more than one interacting decision, a graph, or any numbers at all. COVID made it pretty clear that neither the general population nor most politicians are remotely qualified to make decisions. Not just medical decisions, just… decisions.

I have a lot of very smart friends, like significantly higher than average in terms of degrees and technical jobs and standardized testing scores at least.

One of them purchased a game that is like Apples to Apples but the point is to provide labels or name the axis of a graph.

It was enlightening just how many of my friends that had a passing notion of calculus could not intuitively interpret what a graph actually means. For example, they would often misunderstand the relation between the dependent and independent variable, or not even understand what it meant for a variable to depend on another variable. Too bad too, because it was a really fun game for me.

Re: Health officials delayed report linking fluoride to brain harm

#458

Post by [deleted] »

adrian_b wrote: post #416
TeMPOraL wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not satire. It takes enough self-control/willpower that, for example, a lot of people suffering from ADHD have problems with it. There are a lot of people out there who just aren't capable of habituating the tasks of brushing their teeth to the point of being done on autopilot - they have to consciously make themselves do it every time. And that's after more than half a century of brushing teeth being a cultural…

I can imagine that there might exist people who cannot brush their teeth. However, for such people the solution is not to drink fluoridated water, but to use fluoridated water to wash their mouth and then spit it. If they cannot take water in mouth and spit it, then they certainly cannot feed themselves and they need permanent care. Whoever does that should also take care of their teeth. Regarding money, I cannot bel…

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Re: Health officials delayed report linking fluoride to brain harm

#459

Post by gymbeaux »

crackedbassoon wrote: post #442
gymbeaux wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read a few research papers that say essentially the opposite. I think you can find a study that supports your side most of the time.

The linked article is a meta analysis.

I think we should be skeptical of such articles especially when they go against what probably most articles say about a topic/hypothesis.

I don’t know enough about chemistry or dentistry to really say beyond that which side is the correct side

Re: Health officials delayed report linking fluoride to brain harm

#460

Post by kup0 »

adrian_b wrote: post #415
mihaaly wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am so very sorry stepping on something so sensitive.

It is not something sensitive, but I dislike the fact that the camp who has introduced water fluoridation does not have any rational or experimental argument in its favor, yet there are many who believe that water fluoridation is supported by "health scientists", so I believe that it is necessary to speak against such disinformation. Hardening the tooth enamel by fluoride is exactly like an anti-corrosive treatment o…

Since there are examples of locations having a more accelerated rise over time in tooth decay when water fluoridation is discontinued [1], I think one can extract from that, that possibly the explanation is that enough water is being drank/used in ways where it contacts teeth, that a difference is clearly seen in the dental statistics of a population monitored over time when fluoridation changes are made.

[1] Article/study discussing Calgary vs Edmonton in Canada, linked elsewhere in the comments here that has this snippet:

What’s happened since 2012? A study found that within a couple of years of ending fluoridation, decay in children’s baby teeth had risen by 65 per cent compared to 2005, while the increase was only 14 per cent in Edmonton, which continues to fluoridate its water.

--

I won't argue the fact that there may indeed be problems with ingestion, and additionally that contact to the teeth is the only way for the fluoridated water to help, but I'm not convinced that existing water fluoridation isn't having a positive effect on tooth decay. Whether it's worth other potential health trade-offs is certainly a valid concern.

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