A town employee lowered the fluoride in water for years (2022)
npr.org
npr.org
Some more discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33292353
Very interesting way of thinking about that. I understand the benefits of fluoride but I also understand this sentiment.
It is impossible to buy non-fluorinated drinking water that is not orders of magnitude more expensive than tap.
Then again, I don't consider tap water to be potable in the US so I guess its a wash.
That's a weird sentiment considering the US has some of the highest quality drinking water in the world.
Result? I dodged a mini-Flint that occurred in my tiny corner of the Midwest. Two if you include the aftermath of Bethlehem, OH.
Anyway "rest of the world" is a spurious comparison. Im interested in comparing with Switzerland's water quality, not Eritrea's .
Besides, I'm sure you can find independent studies verifying the water quality.
(Despite your assertion, the effects of fluoride, including their effects beyond safe levels in water, have been extremely well studied. Fluoride is well understood not to accumulate in soft tissue, and is present to some degree in much of the food you eat. If you drink a cup of tea a day, you’re already getting 6-8x as much fluoride as you’re getting from your municipal water supply.)
Yes, and the decision to put lithium in municipal water supplies would be based on its effect on mental health, not on a priori reasoning about elemental weights.
Do you remember the comment you made? If not, I'll quote it for you:
>It should not be especially astonishing that public health programs for dental health and public immunity are substantially less controversial than putting a mood stabilizer in the water would be.
Your comment was an attempt to differentiate the two policies on the grounds that one is "for dental health" and one is "for mental health". I was replying that "what they're intended for" has no causal power (and thus shouldn't affect how controversial it is) -- the chemical mechanisms that play out don't look at policymaker intent. I don't know what you find so objectionable about that point.
As a courtesy, if you switch to a different, better argument, you shouldn't conflate it with the bad argument I was just replying to. But sure, I'll reply to the different argument.
>Despite your assertion, the effects of fluoride, including their effects beyond safe levels in water, have been extremely well studied.
Its understood now, was less so at the time. Doing it at the time seemed just as reckless as the lithium intervention, because the water supply is a system with many different touch points and many different interactions, same as with lithium and brains.
It's not objectionable so much as it's backwards: policymakers can't control what a chemical or element does, but they can make policy decisions based on specific known properties of a chemical or element. It's not like we just YOLO'd fluoride into the water in the 1960s and have cargo-culted that practice into the present: the science on safe fluoride levels was sound back then, and continues to be substantiated by current research.
I think you read too much about "intent" into the original comment. The comment's whole point was that fluoride's value for dental health is incontrovertible, and was incontrovertible ~60 years ago. That's how it fits into the above. If there was any evidence either now or 60 years ago that municipal fluoridation at CDC levels did anything except improve the public's dental hygiene, then there would be a reasonable call for controversy here. But no such evidence exists.
Furthermore, as others mentioned, Huxley would like a word.
(You were told not to swallow the fluoride in school because it’s significantly more concentrated than contents in the water supply. The dose makes the medicine and the poison.)
(Saying that fluoride accumulates profoundly misses the point: it is supposed to accumulate. What fluoride doesn’t do is accumulate in soft tissues, which is why acute exposures to high doses of fluoride don’t guarantee intellectual forestallment like lead frequently does.)
That there are places around the world that have high with F doesn't make it safe. There are places in the world that had catastrophically high rates of cretinism. Turns out it was a natural factor in an otherwise idyllic natural setting.
I am aware that fluorine is supposed to accumulate in your teeth and doesnt in "soft" tissue; but it also accumulates in your bones and anywhere there is calcium.
Bones and teeth are not dead scaffolding, but an integral part of your body's biochemical system. I should know - they gnawed a hole into my hip to get at my marrow.
Again: it’s supposed to bioaccumulate there. Bioaccumulation is a part of homeostasis; the fact that iron (calcium, etc.) bioaccumulates is neither a reason to avoid it nor to exceed a healthy dietary quantity. And the evidence is overwhelmingly supportive of municipal fluoride levels being both safe and sufficient for dental health.
The whole thing with fluoridated water is that whilst small doses may be harmless for most people, the more you consume the worse it is, and plenty of people - based on official recommendations - drink a lot of tap water each day.
What figures can you point to on mg/L of fluoride in (commonly consumed) green tea vs tap water?
Even aside from that, it’s a specious argument: people who want to avoid fluoride can just avoid green tea; it’s much harder to avoid it in tap water.
As for “delusional panic”: it matters a lot for iodine absorption and thyroid function for some people, which is a both widespread and overlooked/diminished, at great harm and cost to those who are affected and unable to get help.
For what it’s worth I’m not advocating for removal of fluoride from tap water, but there does need to be more recognition of the harms to those affected and serious efforts made to develop treatment approaches for those with iodine deficiencies and thyroid dysfunction, as it really is a catastrophic problem for a lot of people.
Municipal tap water in the US is fluoridated between 0.7mg/L and 1.2mg/L, per the CDC's 1962 guidelines[1]. To my knowledge, most municipalities choose the lower end of that range (since the effects are diminishing and, well, it's cheaper).
By contrast, at least one survey of black tea infusions finds an average of 2.65mg/L[2]. So over twice the CDC's highest baseline for municipal fluoridation.
(Note: at that average for black tea, an adult would still need to drink ~4L of black tea a day to pass the CDC's tolerable upper limit. People grossly overestimate both how much fluoride is dangerous, and how much they actually consume.)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34343066/
General discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_of_tea#Fluoride...
Your relationship with cavities doesn't change anything about the statistics of cavities with and without flouride in people's diet.
I was merely pointing out that your anecdote is already part of the statistical evidence and not particularly useful to a discussion of whether it should be added to water
"I don't want it in my water" is actually a better and more relevant thing to say. As irrational as they are, peoples comfort levels, personal beliefs, and fears are rational to consider for policy decisions. (All people have irrational beliefs , fears, etc - its just a fact of people).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6923889/
Conclusion
The recent epidemiological results support the notion that elevated fluoride intake during early development can result in IQ deficits that may be considerable. Recognition of neurotoxic risks is necessary when determining the safety of fluoride-contaminated drinking water and fluoride uses for preventive dentistry purposes.
Environ Health. 2019; 18: 110. Published online 2019 Dec 19. doi: 10.1186/s12940-019-0551-x PMCID: PMC6923889PMID: 31856837 Developmental fluoride neurotoxicity: an updated review
Philippe Grandjeancorresponding author1,2 Author information Article notes Copyright and License information PMC Disclaimer 1Department of Environmental Health, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA 02115 USA 2Department of Public Health, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark Philippe Grandjean, Email: kd.uds.htlaeh@naejdnargp. corresponding authorCorresponding author
Fluoride meta studies, such as the one above, look at areas with extremely high levels of natural fluoridation, starting at least at one and half times the recommended dose and looking at areas with double, triple, and more that level.
There are issues in areas with high fluoridation levels, the fluoride and the other high metals levels in these regions in China and Mexico ...
But not basis for back propagating issues at high doses in multi metals areas to infer issues at the lower recommended dose rates.
> Fourteen recent cross-sectional studies from endemic areas with naturally high fluoride concentrations in groundwater supported the previous findings of cognitive deficits in children with elevated fluoride exposures. Three recent prospective studies from Mexico and Canada with individual exposure data showed that early-life exposures were negatively associated with children’s performance on cognitive tests. Neurotoxicity appeared to be dose-dependent, and tentative benchmark dose calculations suggest that safe exposures are likely to be below currently accepted or recommended fluoride concentrations in drinking water.
Having said that, the linked paper also notes that the benifits of flouridated water do not seem to be significant (likely do to the widespread use of flouridated toothpaste).
People can get conspiracy about this as much as they like, but at the end of the day, it's money. Diet is one of the largest factors in dental health and the average American diet is high in sugar. People can barely afford going to the hospital let alone a dentist. This is quite measurably the cheapest way of preventing millions of people becoming a burden to the healthcare system.
It doesn't imply anything about the relevancy of the content. Interesting older material is always welcome here!
Many countries across the world refuse to add fluoride. It's mainly a US and Australia thing. The fact that NPR is on board without even reporting the other side of the coin is just pure state propaganda.
What makes water fluoridation good public health policy isn’t that we do it blindly; it’s that it gets balanced against demographic and geographic factors that don’t necessary apply everywhere else in the world.
This seems to refute your claim about Europe:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-31940-x/figures/1
However, another study seems to indicate Germany is particularly at risk in Europe of high fluoride concentrations: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S167498712...
To my understanding, both Switzerland and Germany have around 1.0mg/L fluoride in much of their groundwater. This puts them firmly above municipal levels in the US, but below what your map shows.