331–340 of 1001 posts
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"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."
More like "there are pros and cons but there doesn't have to be a big political fight about it".
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 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 calc…
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.
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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 argument works fine for high-speed rail, not so well for insurance and healthcare.
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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.
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.
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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)
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.
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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.
Are the levels in water consistently checked?
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Fluoride stays in your body, should be some way to measure it?
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.
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/
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It sounds like people who have time to pay attention to this have a better chance of discerning a methodology of assay.
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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.
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.