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

731–740 of 1001 posts

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

#731

Post by draw_down »

nxpnsv wrote: post #696
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…

Sure, but they are also not fighting about it, this seems crucial.

[dead]

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

#732

Post by Clubber »

fungiblecog wrote: post #228

Fluoride in water wouldn't be necessary is sugary drinks were taxed heavily (or just banned altogether) and dental care was affordable. But obviously that's considered communism if you're a typical american.

Or you could just put fluoride in the sugary drinks.

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

#734

Post by shlant »

jongjong wrote: post #691
lee_ars wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Second, it completely ignores any debate over effectiveness or side effects. It could well be that fluoride in water is great for teeth but bad for brains. Except it's not—fluoride in the drinking water concentrations is proven safe and it doesn't affect brains. > Im not clear the validity of those claims Thoroughly scientifically debunked. Repeatedly, over decades. > That seems the core issue- without bias from st…

> fluoride in the drinking water concentrations is proven safe and it doesn't affect brains. We can never be sure who funded the studies and whether or not the results can be trusted. Studies have shown that studies cannot be trusted. I err on the side of caution. You're welcome to put it in your own drinking water if you trust the studies. > What needs to stop happening is people ignoring objective reality just beca…

> We can never be sure who funded the studies and whether or not the results can be trusted. Studies have shown that studies cannot be trusted

the growing prevalence of anti science thinking like this has been a disaster for humanity. There's so much time and good faith effort put into trying to better understand our reality then people like you come along and handwave it all away because "well can we really know anything"

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

#735

Post by usrusr »

Y_Y wrote: post #557
usrusr wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not when it comes to religion though: the European way (and I feel very much like considering Canadians something like honorary Europeans these days) was forged in painful wars stemming from and fueled by influence of religion on politics, and abuse of religion by politics. Both on the collective level, not so much on the individual level. The European way is all about having a strong firewall between religion and po…

> The European way is all about having a strong firewall between religion and politics I find this quite contrary to my experience of e.g. modern Germany, Spain, Poland, Italy where many politicians are explicitly religious, laws are written with majority religious affiliation in mind, religious taxes may still be levied. Even France still feels in many ways like a "catholic country", even if they do have good explic…

Things like church taxes handled by the state in Germany (entirely opt-in, even when it's effectively opt-out for individuals opted in by their parents) have the opposite effect though, they make the churches boring institutions (except for the occasional child abuse wtf that haunts them just like any other church) far from any radicalization.

When you dig deeper in Germany it gets surprisingly murky, e.g. bishops not paid out of those church taxes but out of regular state taxes, e.g. those paid by atheists and Muslims, which dates back to Napoleonic age secularization when those payments were introduced as a (meager) compensation for the enormous income the (catholic) church had from being worldly lords of enormous realms. But this as well contribute to keeping the churches out of politics. They know pretty well what is their place and what isn't.

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

#736

Post by lee_ars »

naasking wrote: post #677
lee_ars wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Second, it completely ignores any debate over effectiveness or side effects. It could well be that fluoride in water is great for teeth but bad for brains. Except it's not—fluoride in the drinking water concentrations is proven safe and it doesn't affect brains. > Im not clear the validity of those claims Thoroughly scientifically debunked. Repeatedly, over decades. > That seems the core issue- without bias from st…

> Except it's not—fluoride in the drinking water concentrations is proven safe and it doesn't affect brains. You mean like this: Fluoride Exposure and Children’s IQ Scores A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/... "Findings: Despite differences in exposure and outcome measures and risk of bias across studies, and when using group-level and individual-level…

Hah. Maybe, as noted by others, you should read the study cited before assuming its conclusions support your argument. Which they do not.

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

#737

Post by raincole »

lurk2 wrote: post #172
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.

> Maybe the US should look into how other countries have solved it? How have other countries solved it?

By not adding fluoride into the tap water and let people choose whether to buy toothpaste with fluoride themselves. a.k.a. the European way.

Adding fluoride into tap water always sounds borderline insane to me. The only benefit is to protect your teeth, which, to me, strongly suggests that the correct approach is to put it into toothpaste or other oral hygiene products instead of water.

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

#738

Post by fooqux »

jongjong wrote: post #691
lee_ars wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Second, it completely ignores any debate over effectiveness or side effects. It could well be that fluoride in water is great for teeth but bad for brains. Except it's not—fluoride in the drinking water concentrations is proven safe and it doesn't affect brains. > Im not clear the validity of those claims Thoroughly scientifically debunked. Repeatedly, over decades. > That seems the core issue- without bias from st…

> fluoride in the drinking water concentrations is proven safe and it doesn't affect brains. We can never be sure who funded the studies and whether or not the results can be trusted. Studies have shown that studies cannot be trusted. I err on the side of caution. You're welcome to put it in your own drinking water if you trust the studies. > What needs to stop happening is people ignoring objective reality just beca…

> Studies have shown that studies cannot be trusted.

Well, that's basically the end of the debate, isn't it? Before we can have reasonable discourse, everyone has to agree on some points. Sure, individual studies have problems. That's why we make them reproducible and aggregate the results. So yeah, don't trust some individual paper; but if you're distrusting the aggregate, well, you're distrusting all of science.

> Nobody can perceive objective reality. Everyone is delusional concerning just about everything.

This is the entire point of the scientific method. It's why we make sure tests are reproducible by other people in other teams in other countries. Each with their own funding and biases. What remains after all of that is as close to objective reality as possible without decompiling the universe.

> Dark times are ahead, I'm afraid, and people's trust-meters are going to be valuable again.

You know what else has been shown to be unequivocal bullshit? People making decisions based on their "gut". Your personal "trust-meter" is just another form of that. Dark times are indeed ahead, but it's because there are people out there who want to do whatever the hell they want- and it's easier for them to get away with it if they discredit science and get the population to do so as well. This is what you're helping by spreading such things. Please stop.

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

#739

Post by m-s-y »

__s wrote: post #703
themgt wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What needs to stop happening is people ignoring objective reality just because the results happen to align with the other "team's" position on something. "Out of a population of about three-quarters of a billion, under 14 million people (approximately 2%) in Europe receive artificially-fluoridated water." The problem I continually see in the USA is the ascription of differences of opinion on [any topic] to America's…

Fluorinated table salt. Naturally fluorinated water sources. Public healthcare that covers dental European policy isn't based on modern fluoridation being dangerous, it's based on having alternative systems in place (which vary by country) In Windsor Ontario, across from Detroit, they took fluoride out of water for nearly a decade before reversing that decision based on results: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor…

It’s iodine in table salt not fluoride. In the US.

Never knew that France fluoridated their salt.

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

#740

Post by lee_ars »

mdorazio wrote: post #710
lee_ars wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Second, it completely ignores any debate over effectiveness or side effects. It could well be that fluoride in water is great for teeth but bad for brains. Except it's not—fluoride in the drinking water concentrations is proven safe and it doesn't affect brains. > Im not clear the validity of those claims Thoroughly scientifically debunked. Repeatedly, over decades. > That seems the core issue- without bias from st…

I'm not saying you're wrong, but you made multiple strong claims without a single citation or study link. We could have a better conversation with data to look at. There's a decent (though somewhat biased) review of the debate in [1]. It's worth noting that if you read the linked studies there closely you'll find the truth is, as usual, nuanced. Specifically, that "fluoridation is a population-level caries preventive…

That's a whole lot of words for you acknowledging that I'm right. Fluoridated drinking water, at the appropriate levels, has no effect on IQ.

Would you like to debate the reality of anthropogenic climate change next? This will be another area where any links you dig up will only point to a single conclusion.

Post reply on HN