791–800 of 1001 posts
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…
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So then, you'd also be against adding folate/folic acid to bread for the same reason? For those who don't know many countries including the US mandate the inclusion of folic acid in bread and certain other foods to ensure pregnant women get enough. A deficiency of folic acid during pregnancy causes birth defects in infants. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folate
I never heard of that supplement (not a father) and was very surprised to find 80 countries mandate it. I checked the list (below) and it turns out the 80 countries are a bunch of poor nations plus USA, UAE, Qatar, Canada and Australia. I guess our medicare system supports the EU mothers fine enough so we don’t need to put that in the staple of food. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5809909/ (Table 1)
2023 Study:
"Despite Public Health Initiatives across Europe recommending that women take 0.4 mg folic acid before becoming pregnant and during the first trimester, the prevalence of NTD pregnancies has not materially decreased in the EU since 1998, in contrast to the dramatic fall observed in the USA. This study aimed to estimate the number of NTD pregnancies that would have been prevented if flour had been fortified with folic acid in Europe from 1998 as it had been in the USA."
"Conclusions: This study suggests that failure to implement mandatory folic acid fortification in the 28 European countries has caused, and continues to cause, neural tube defects to occur in almost 1,000 pregnancies every year."
The most famous NTD is Spina Bifida, and most of them aren't really fixable by modern health care. So this is 1000 babies a year who are either born with severe birth defects, or, in what I'm guessing is many cases, terminated when they could have been born healthy with a flour enrichment mandate.
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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…
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…
This take has a few problems: Poor people in the US are capable of using fluoride toothpaste and flossing. At least at homeless shelters at outreach things I’ve been to, toothpaste and toothbrushes are freely available. Your argument hinges on them being incapable on the whole and needing a Benevolent But Superior Intelligence to provide an alternative for them. Second, it completely ignores any debate over effective…
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…
Fluoride has to be applied to the surface at a high concentration for brief contact time to be effective. What is the freedom to sell industrial waste to the government to pointlessly add to the water supply for profit called?
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…
This take has a few problems: Poor people in the US are capable of using fluoride toothpaste and flossing. At least at homeless shelters at outreach things I’ve been to, toothpaste and toothbrushes are freely available. Your argument hinges on them being incapable on the whole and needing a Benevolent But Superior Intelligence to provide an alternative for them. Second, it completely ignores any debate over effective…
This is so incurious. Obviously most people, poor or not, have access to fluoridated toothpaste and toothbrushes, and can brush.
Yet OP cites data (not explicitly, but you can start here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6974062/, there are many like it).
Fluoridated water makes the most impact on poor and undeserved communities: Why?
Is it because poor people are less capable of brushing or have less access to fluoridated toothpaste?
Is it because poor people are poor because they have poor self control, which prevents them from regular brushing?
Does it matter? Nothing hinges on them being incapable at all - your conjecture can be as uncharitable - poor people are dirty and incapable - or charitable - poor people have less money and time to seek dental care, have higher rates of untreated mental and physical illness i.e. ADHD, disabilities that interrupt daily tooth-brushing routine - as you want.
But the result is still that if we want children from poor families to have less cavities by the time they reach adulthood - we should fluoridate the water! If you trust the western medical establishment, it's broadly safe. If you don't, then none of the evidence above matters to you anyways.
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This is the same reasonning with vaccine (only worse because you can die faster from not being vaccinated than from cavities -- although in some cases they can be lethal too). People who want to be free from government interference should be prevented from using public roads, or public infrastructure of any kind. Want to mail something? Hire a courrier to deliver it for you. Etc.
I should pay 0 taxes then too
No taxes in exchange for you not benefiting from anything taxpayer-funded. How does that libertarian paradise sound?
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There's a huge difference between "no longer as necessary" and "let's ban it".
You can add fluoride in your own water if you want to. Nobody is preventing your own freedom to drink fluoride.
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> 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.
What I find fascinating about this debate is that only municipalities/cities add fluoride to water. If you are on well water, no fluoride. So any studies comparing the incidence of tooth decay between populations that are on well water and those that are on fluoridated city water? I get that this was a great public health benefit before fluoride in toothpaste became widely available but is this still the case? Couldn…
Flouride incorporates into the tooth structure in developing teeth before they emerge, I'm not sure how effective that is but it is different than the more topical protection. Tea has enormous amounts of flouride depending on where it is grown and they aren't banning that yet.
Put another way, for issues to rise to the level of public policy, they have to affect a meaningful number of people in a region. In the US, tea-induced fluorisis is extremely rare.