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

561–570 of 1001 posts

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

#561

Post by stavros »

impossiblefork wrote: post #553
bell-cot wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But you will brush your teeth anyway, and then you apply fluoride topically. It works. Relatively few of the poor have the disposable income, time, education, and long-term worldview needed to reliably do that. EDIT: This comment is about America's poor. Though the same applies in much of the world.

Your GDP per capita is 50% higher than ours. You have money for this. If there's no will to raise up the poor, you it should be straightforward to use the state directly to ensure that everyone is taught how to brush their teeth and ensured to have access to brushes and toothpaste.

I agree with you, but GDP per capita isn't the correct measure here when the bottom 8% in the US has no health insurance compared to Sweden's 0%, which I have to assume because I didn't even find this measured anywhere due to universal healthcare.

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

#562

Post by pclmulqdq »

karparov wrote: post #476
hayst4ck wrote: post #347

Putting fluoride in water promotes freedom. That sounds crazy, but let me justify it. If you are poor you can't go anywhere or buy anything. You're not free if you're poor. If you are sick, you may be confined to a hospital bed or not feel good enough to do anything. If you are sick you're not free. Putting fluoride in water reduces dental costs and incidence of cavities and therefore tooth infections, particularly a…

It's also restricting the freedom of communities if you ban them from adding fluoride to their water if they like to. This ban is anti-freedom. (Just like forcing them could be argued to be, even though that's what you argued against.) So, this ban is arguably reducing freedoms on multiple levels.

In the political philosophy of the US, the unit whose freedoms matter is the individual, not the community. Freedoms for individuals necessarily come from reducing the freedom of "the community."

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

#563

Post by maxnoe »

krisoft wrote: post #544
atesti wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it also added to salt?

Isn’t that iodine and not fluoride?

Both. You get untreated, just with iodine and iodine + fluoride.

https://www.bad-reichenhaller.de/de/produkte/alpensalze/alpe...

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

#564

Post by quitit »

adrian_b wrote: post #389
quitit wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The missing context here is that the science and established benefits of fluoride aren’t a culture war political football in those countries. These countries largely publicly recognise the benefits of fluoride, but don’t add it because: - Some countries opt for intake via supplementation. - Some have a naturally sufficient supply in drinking water via natural processes. - Some even need to reduce the abundance of flu…

[flagged]

>The problem is that fluoridation of the drinking water is not supported by any science.

Yet it is supported by science.

Indeed even the discovery of this property of fluoride came about from the observation of people who naturally consumed fluoride had fewer dental caries and tooth decay.

Further studies cemented the benefits of the passive inclusion of fluoride in drinking water versus control groups. So no, the science you speak of is almost certainly politics dressed up as science.

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

#565

Post by NomDePlum »

ost-ing wrote: post #536
hayst4ck wrote: post #347

Putting fluoride in water promotes freedom. That sounds crazy, but let me justify it. If you are poor you can't go anywhere or buy anything. You're not free if you're poor. If you are sick, you may be confined to a hospital bed or not feel good enough to do anything. If you are sick you're not free. Putting fluoride in water reduces dental costs and incidence of cavities and therefore tooth infections, particularly a…

Rather than taking choice away, we should be educating people on what the best choice is and letting them make it themselves. Brush your teeth in the morning and in the evening. Standard dental hygiene - If a person can be an obedient worker they can probably brush their teeth twice a day. If they cant, they have bigger problems to sort out.

Is that not just a passive form of putting fluoride in the water though? Government is still spending money but without the desired outcome of having a healthier fitter population.

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

#566

Post by gorgoiler »

heavyset_go wrote: post #530
hayst4ck wrote: post #347

Putting fluoride in water promotes freedom. That sounds crazy, but let me justify it. If you are poor you can't go anywhere or buy anything. You're not free if you're poor. If you are sick, you may be confined to a hospital bed or not feel good enough to do anything. If you are sick you're not free. Putting fluoride in water reduces dental costs and incidence of cavities and therefore tooth infections, particularly a…

Fluoridated water, enriched flour, iodized salt, vaccines, etc. are why we don't see diseases and conditions that plagued us in the past and continue to plague people in places without these measures. Fluoridated water is the reason I've never had a cavity despite growing up poor with a terrible diet, dental hygiene and care.

Enriched flour is another good example that I was hoping someone would mention*.

It’s worth noting that it’s also slightly different in that processed flour is deficient in thiamin and calcium, so the fortification adds back these nutrients.

On the other hand, processing water to make it potable doesn’t remove fluoride and so fluoridation is not the process of adding back something that was there beforehand.

*I searched this page and found flouride and flouridation four times before your comment.

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

#567

Post by foldr »

Mistletoe wrote: post #301
jdminhbg wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What does the UK do? This will tell you what people should do because I’ve seen English teeth. > In England, approximately 10% of the population, or around 6 million people, receive fluoridated water, either naturally or through water fluoridation schemes, mainly in the West Midlands and the North East. Uh oh. I know it is better now but in 1978 a third of people in the UK didn’t have their natural teeth.

This perception is out of date. The UK population actually has very healthy teeth as a whole:

https://www.yongeeglintondental.com/blog/healthy-primary-tee...

That, of course, is not quite the same thing as perfectly white, perfectly aligned teeth.

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

#568

Post by impossiblefork »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #556
impossiblefork wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you will brush your teeth anyway, and then you apply fluoride topically. It works. Here in Sweden we decided against fluoride for this reason and the fact that it is in fact toxic. It isn't sensible to use systemic exposure when we can use topical exposure and can improve mouth health by education, so that people do what they're supposed to. The fluoride approach achieves a basic level of health, but you can do s…

> Here in Sweden we decided against fluoride for this reason and the fact that it is in fact toxic. How? Please don't express that it damages development. That's trivially refutable by statistics. We can compare Canada's and UK's IQs for example, or some other proxy to the G factor, said countries were chosen for their similar cultural demographics, we find then that the metrics are mostly identical, while the differ…

https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/EHP14534 is one study. We did earlier studies in the 50s when we made the decision to only use fluoride orally.

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

#569

Post by imacomputertoo »

impossiblefork wrote: post #529
hayst4ck wrote: post #347

Putting fluoride in water promotes freedom. That sounds crazy, but let me justify it. If you are poor you can't go anywhere or buy anything. You're not free if you're poor. If you are sick, you may be confined to a hospital bed or not feel good enough to do anything. If you are sick you're not free. Putting fluoride in water reduces dental costs and incidence of cavities and therefore tooth infections, particularly a…

But you will brush your teeth anyway, and then you apply fluoride topically. It works. Here in Sweden we decided against fluoride for this reason and the fact that it is in fact toxic. It isn't sensible to use systemic exposure when we can use topical exposure and can improve mouth health by education, so that people do what they're supposed to. The fluoride approach achieves a basic level of health, but you can do s…

Fluoride is not "in fact toxic". A substance becomes toxic in high amounts. Vitamin D becomes toxic in high amounts. The level of fluoride in drinking water is well below the toxic level.

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

#570

Post by pclmulqdq »

danparsonson wrote: post #379
verisimi wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, vitamins, micro doses of aspirin, and other low level medical treatments should also be added to water, for the benefit of the silent poor and sick.

The trouble with slippery slopes is that they carry you away from productive discussion.

The trouble with slippery slopes is that not all of them are fallacious, as you are suggesting. This is a reasonable point: if we are doing delivery of medicine through tap water, where's the line? A few people have seriously suggested putting low doses of lithium in the tap water as a societal antidepressant.
Post reply on HN