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.
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…
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 commun…
> and lots of water has natural flouride? 100% the treatment plant is adjusting for the natural amount of flouride to meet specific target PPM
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.
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.
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…
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.
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…
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.
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.
Even in Europe Fluoridation is not uniform.
Some place do it. Others partially, many not at all.
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 b…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.