I love the cognitive dissonance in people who say both: "Don't medicate me without permission.", "Masks are oppression.", and "We have to stop those people from dressing and calling themselves what they want."
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Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water
881–890 of 1001 posts
Re: Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water
#882Earlier quoted context omitted.
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What do you mean? There's literally tons of evidence. Do you think fluoride doesn't actually reduce cavities?
Fluorinated water minimally reduces cavities: https://www.cochrane.org/news/water-fluoridation-less-effect...
It was probably much more effective 50 years ago when fluoride was not in everyone's toothpaste.
Re: Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water
#883Earlier quoted context omitted.
The specifics of fluoride are low stakes. The general idea of the government medicating the people writ large isn't low stakes. In the US there are a lot of people who are of the opinion the government should just let people be.
Are those the people voting for the "have the government put restrictions on trans people" party? I have a feeling it's not about "letting people be". It's about "let me be and screw over those I don't like"
If you live in the US, you'll meet a lot of genuinely good people on both sides of the more/less government debate.
Anyone who thinks this is a straightforward issue is dumb, frankly.
Re: Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water
#884Earlier quoted context omitted.
> via toothpaste. I wonder how many people really brush their teeth on a regular basis. > either campaign to change it or vote with your feet. I imagine that campaigning to change it requires notifying people there is a problem, and getting it into the news and spreading that news.
Sadly people that don’t brush are probably not drinking plain water either.
Thats not really true. I had problems brushing during my childhood, because most toothpastes triggered my gag reflex, but I mostly drank tap water.
Re: Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water
#885Strangely, I never see the people demanding we ban fluoride also demand we ban cars, considering the amount of particulates and rubber wheels we inhale as a result of policy, road design and car design. And I can almost guarantee you that's resulting in an actual meaningful drop in IQ and health outcomes as opposed to fluoridating water.
But I guess freedom to pollute matters more than bodily autonomy in terms of mental priority.
Re: Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water
#886I 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…
Children are the main group that benefits from fluoride in water because the fluoride helps strengthen teeth as they form. Lack of fluoride increases childhood cavities, leading to decreased academic performance.
This was a real problem in the San Jose school district until recently. They started fluoridation of water in the last ten years, and were the biggest US city that didn’t fluoridate. The evidence of the above is clear according to SJ dentists I have talked to.
Re: Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water
#887It is trivial today to get whatever level of fluoride is recommended for dental health, via toothpaste. So there is no compelling need to fluoridate as there exist viable alternatives to achieve the same that fluoridation is for any other purpose than dental health. In the USA, dental care is not covered by public insurance, and is an optional add-on to insurance through one’s employer. So without addressing at all w…
I think one thing you're not considering (especially when you say we should vote with our feet) is poverty. It’s true that fluoride toothpaste is widely available, but for people in poverty, of which there are millions in our country, basic hygiene items like toothpaste and a toothbrush aren’t guaranteed. Neither is it guaranteed that everyone has a perfect daily brushing habit like the dentist tells us; there are pe…
I don't believe there's a single person in the USA that's so poor they can't pay $3 for toothpaste every 3 months. I also believe that having such a low personal hygiene where you don't brush your teeth altogether, even if you drink water with fluoride, will have terrible results anyway for your teeth anyway.
I'm completely sure that any people that don't brush their teeth is just because they are too lazy to even bother.
This trope of justifying everything with "but there are millions of poor people in the USA" is really tiresome.
Re: Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water
#888Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Except it's not—fluoride in the drinking water concentrations is proven safe and it doesn't affect brains. What's amazing is these anti-science wackos are rejecting the largest-scale experiment of all time, with the best evidence that anyone is ever going to have on the subject. We have both temporal and spatial boundary conditions with and without community water fluoridation, where a large population has it and a…
Before calling them "anti science wackos", why not review the evidence or cite some of your own. Ironic that the "wackos" seem to be the only ones providing any evidence for their claims. There is high quality evidence that fluoride at levels contained in some US water supplies is associated with lower childhood intelligence. For lower levels, the conclusion is "we don't know", not that there is no harm. https://ntp.…
The literally bold-faced conclusion of your article is that no evidence exists that community water fluoridation affects childhood IQ.
We have a natural experiment running for 80 years where each arm of the experiment has N > 100e6. If there was going to be evidence of community water fluoridation lowering IQ, it would have emerged by now.
Re: Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water
#889I 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…
The National Toxicology Program recently completed a fairly substantial meta study and concluded that "for every 1 mg/L increase in urinary fluoride, there is a decrease of 1.63 IQ points in children.". [1] This is also relevant to OP since it's not just pregnant women at risk from excessive fluoridation but also children. For now it seems that adults are, somewhat oddly, unaffected.
[1] - https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/whatwestudy/assessments/noncancer/...
Re: Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water
#890That’s going to go poorly. A Canadian city removed fluoride from water in 2011 and reversed that decision 10 years later. There’s hard data on the effects and they’re not good [0]. [0] https://www.npr.org/2024/12/13/nx-s1-5224138/calgary-removed...
All the evidence in that article is based on what a politician thinks. "And I think another meta study came out also".
The actual high quality evidence shows that water fluorination has minimal impact on tooth health in 2025: https://www.cochrane.org/news/water-fluoridation-less-effect...