Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 1001 posts

Re: Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water

#251

Post by hayst4ck »

lolinder wrote: post #175
UltraSane wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Re: Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water

#252

Post by donnachangstein »

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).

Re: Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water

#253

Post by thakoppno »

cratermoon wrote: post #246
thakoppno wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Re: Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water

#254

Post by shortrounddev2 »

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

Re: Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water

#255

Post by bryanrasmussen »

jimt1234 wrote: post #215
ews wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

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.

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

Re: Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water

#256

Post by shmerl »

efitz wrote: post #164

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 w…

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.

Re: Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water

#257

Post by windexh8er »

jiggawatts wrote: post #44

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 ca…

> 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.

Re: Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water

#258

Post by int_19h »

FireBeyond wrote: post #199
nozzlegear wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water

#259

Post by [deleted] »

Spooky23 wrote: post #187
crazygringo wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? There's literally tons of evidence. Do you think fluoride doesn't actually reduce cavities?

You can’t win. Freedom, IQ, precious bodily fluids. There’s no end to the nonsense. My city started fluoridating a few years ago. The crazy was off the chart, they’re still active. NYC has fluoridated for 60 years, you’d think someone would have figured out that the entire city is dumber.

[deleted]

Re: Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water

#260

Post by ruph123 »

jdminhbg wrote: post #234
freehorse wrote: post #123

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…

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.
Post reply on HN