Toxicologist here. I think that take is dishonest or dumb.
Taking a lethal dose is almost never the concern with any substance in our drinking water.
Hormones, heavy metals, persistent organic chemicals, ammonia are all in our drinking water. But for all of them we can’t drink enough water to die from a high dose.
Some of them still have a large effect on our bodies.
It’s about the longterm effects. Which we need longterm studies to learn about. That makes them harder to study.
Still doesn’t mean flouride does anything bad longerm. But the argument is bad.
Yeah, by this argument lead in the water isn’t a concern.
Yeah but lead bioaccumulates where as fluoride/ine doesn’t
Are you sure fluoride doesn’t? It does accumulate in the soil, building up in crops. Considering fluoride exposure from all sources, many people are above upper safe limits, even from tea drinking alone
I don’t think fluoride should be added to water as it just pollutes the environment, where 99.99% of water isn’t coming in contact with teeth
It doesn’t. This is high-school chemistry.
Fluoride only “accumulates” up to the peak concentration of the environment (no further) on places where it is removed from contact with that environment.
You can only accumulate fluoride in the soil if you keep adding it and there is almost no rain to wash it away.
Like how crops are irrigated with town water, and in many areas with lowering rainfall? Accumulates in fruit, vegetables, leaves too
Yes, irrigation with the minimum possible amount of water is known to destroy land for millennia at this point. But sodium will be a problem way before you notice any change in fluoride.
Yup, same with PFAS and forever chemicals. Maybe I’m ignorant because I’m not a doctor, but I don’t know if this line of thinking holds water - pun not intended.
You just made me mad by helping me realize that the Trump bros are going to break water by removing fluoride long before they fix water by removing lead.
Removing fluoride won’t break the water. However, it may break our teeth.
never the concern
It is when you’re responding to people who think 5G is turning the frogs gay and activating hidden vaccine microchips.
Yeah, it seems to me like he got the right idea and wanted to convince people by making an extreme statement…
That might well be the case. I’m not sure if it is helpful to use those half truths which are simpler to convince certain people. Or if it weakens the point because it is in the end not really correct.
We probably have enough A/B data now to make some inferences yeah? Compare countries with fluoridated water to countries without.
You can get even more granular than that. CDC maintains a list of water systems and whether or not they add fluoride. CDC My Water System. To give you an idea of how granular that is, there are 78 different water systems in my county alone. For most of my life I assumed we had fluoridated water but apparently only 1/78 of our water systems are. I only checked when we had kids and I needed to know whether or not I needed to give them Fluoride Drops.
Fluoride does have long term effects though once you consider fluoride exposure through all sources like diet, which is mostly due to fluoride from water ending up in farmland. Tradesmen alone regularly exceed the upper limits due to high water consumption in hotter seasons
Citation needed
Also, isn’t it recommended to not give infants fluorided water, hence why you can buy it in virtually every grocery store?
Pretty much anything you can think of is recommended by someone, because different people have conflicting views. The key is to choose whose recommendations are based on the best reasoning & evidence aligning with your goals.
It’s so funny I was just having a similar conversation about neurotoxic venomous animals in another thread. Lethality is an obviously concerning threshold, but there are substances out there that can easily destroy your quality of life and livelihood that never reach the concern of being lethal.
I think for mostly rational people concerned about fluoride in their water is that it was a public health decision made with little to no actual science proving it’s safety or efficacy when it was first decided that they were going to add it to the public water supply. The proposed benefits of it weren’t even supported by scientific evidence, it was just supposed that exposure to sodium fluoride could potentially reduce tooth decay for some.
Personally, I’ve suffered from the cosmetic damage of dental fluorosis, and I’m not necessarily thrilled about fluoride. But I have way more issues with public mandates founded on pseudoscience than I am with sodium fluoride. Especially now that we can see evidence that for some people fluoride can be especially beneficial.
So what was wrong with giving people the option of using fluoride toothpaste or mouthwashes… Why did it have to go into the public water supply?
Mate, your entire second paragraph is completely false. Like, you need to just read this: https://www.nidcr.nih.gov/health-info/fluoride/the-story-of-fluoridation
It’s considered by the CDC as one of the greatest Public Health Achievements of the last Century. There have been dozens, if not hundreds of studies about fluoride affects in the water supply.
Yeah that proves my point entirely.
In 1945 they fluoridated the first public water supply.
In 1979 the first published research began to appear to show how fluoride might be able to remineralize dental enamel.
In 1945, Grand Rapids became the first city in the world to fluoridate its drinking water.The Grand Rapids water fluoridation study was originally sponsored by the U.S. Surgeon General, but was taken over by the NIDR shortly after the Institute’s inception in 1948. During the 15-year project, researchers monitored the rate of tooth decay among Grand Rapids’ almost 30,000 schoolchildren. After just 11 years, Dean- who was now director of the NIDR-announced an amazing finding. The caries rate among Grand Rapids children born after fluoride was added to the water supply dropped more than 60 percent. This finding, considering the thousands of participants in the study, amounted to a giant scientific breakthrough that promised to revolutionize dental care, making tooth decay for the first time in history a preventable disease for most people.
Yeah, I guess that somehow totes proves his point. Super easy to see the world wrong when they have the reading comprehension of a 6th grader.
In our area, the only water supply WITH Fluoride serves an area with a median HOUSEHOLD income of less than $40k with more than 25% living below the poverty line. For communities like these the fluoride is critical because there will be a lot of children that don’t have access to fluoride supplements, or regular care from a pediatric (or regular) dentist.
Also “because I’m an expert and I say so” is a good way to convince someone to let you poison them.
Oh yeah? And what if someone ignores that, simply lies and says it’s toxic? I’m convinced!
And both of these people telling me about fluoride in water are both experts in their field. One an expert toxicologist, and the other an expert liar. Now I don’t know what to believe.
It’s not about toxicity, it’s about mind control! Fluoride makes you passive. But you know this since you’re a tool of the government pushing poison.
Just bleach your teeth like normal people! You know, with the bleach under the kitchen sink.
(Don’t actually do this)
I mean, trump got reelected. I hope it’s the flouride.
Like the ol’ General said / s
We can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
Fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face.
Yikes 😬
This is the correct response from any line from Dr. Strangelove taken out of context.
In context, it takes some 15 to 30 minutes for you to understand that you are supposed to laugh.
Its from Dr. Strangeglove
And that’s why you should only drink grain alcohol and pure, natural rain water. To preserve the essence of your precious bodily fluids.
</s>
The real Chads use raw organic free-range non-GMO pesticide-free lemon juice with baking soda. It’ll leave your teeth as white as they’ll be sensitive! Keep it crunchy. You’re welcome.
Eating seeds as a pastime activity
So, once again, DHMO is the chemical we need to fear.
Any chemical that can exist as a solid, a liquid and a gas at the same time isn’t safe to put into our bodies!
The stuff also known as hydric acid. People just don’t talk enough about how corrosive it is. Plus, it gets in the air and gets in your lungs!
There was an incident involving it on April 14th 1912 that took over 1500 lives.
I heard that anyone who’s ever come into contact with it has later died
terrorists will drink vast amounts of it every day before an attack
Its a common component of all cancer cells, and trace amounts have been found in the blood of dead lab rats.
The people who need to hear this sadly would not believe that too much water can kill you even if you showed them someone die from it, I fear. I’d also be shocked if they read “water poisoning” and didn’t think of poisoned water.
i know this guy has a fancy degree and everything, but is he really as reliable a source as rfk junior? you don’t need fluoride when you have an army of worms ready to eat any kinds of bacteria that may enter your system.
“I can’t wait for RFK Jr to stop this, he knows all the chemicals!”
Overheard while at the polls on election day.
This is a better argument than the one in the post. No one is worried about acute toxicity of fluoride but rather long term. But it’s not long term toxic, doesn’t accumulate in the body, and is only present in very low amounts in water. However it should be enough to use fluoridated toothpaste to get the positive effects.
I don’t understand your point.
Nobody drinks the ocean. Fluoride is barely active topically. Most humans rarely if at all swim in the ocean.
Talking about the ocean is odd, but there are towns in the UK (and most countries I’d assume?) where the natural level of fluoride is higher than the concentration they aim for when adding fluoride. I think that’s a pretty good argument for it being safe - the people of Hartlepool have been drinking fluoride rich water for 13 centuries and don’t have any noticeable issues compared to the rest OF County Durham.
Yeah. It’s not an entirely salient point. It does, however, underline the ubiquitous nature of fluorine.
The biggest source of Flourine in the environment is just the normal weathering of rocks that contain it. The biggest of the anthropogenic sources include brick production, phosphate fertiliser application and coal burning.
The minor amount added to drinking water really wouldn’t be the biggest issue if it was as toxic as it’s made out to be.
I feel like I woke up in the movie Dr. Strangelove
I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
Second time I got to post this today, unfortunately because it’s almost ceased being satire.
Lemminologist here:
the fluoride levels vary because that’s how numbers do in reality
Agreed but can we turn down the chloramine valve? It tastes awful.
the people that need to hear this will never believe you.
But what about our precious bodily fluids?
I don’t avoid women, Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence.
Fluoridated water doesn’t seem to make a difference on cavities. It does have neurological effects. It’s simply not acutely fatal. It’s already in our toothpaste. We don’t need it in our municipal water supply and the majority of developed countries don’t.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/magazine/magazine_article/fluoridated-drinking-water/
This is a disingenuous take. This is a cherry-picked article that does not come to the conclusion you draw here. You also state “It does have neurological effects” but leave out the most important piece of information for that to be true: high doses.
Why should anyone trust what you say when you’re twisting the information to suit your narrative?
Only 3% of Quebec’s population has access to fluoridated water and we have way more dental issues than any other province in Canada.
The bad part about Rfk jr is he probably mixes in some science with quackery. I honestly assumed all his ideas are insane. That’s what’s so hard about being discerning right now, you have to be on one side or the other.
I appreciate that you put some reputable sources, rather than relying on a random tweet/post.
The source is not as reputable as it appears. The article in question is not from the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, and in fact was condemned by the HSDM. The actual dental experts at Harvard requested a formal retraction of the article: “Based on the significant flaws in the magazine article, we respectfully request that the article be rescinded, and a correction be published to clarify any misleading information that was provided.”
It’s an opinion piece by a geneticist (so not a chemist or biologist or a field that could be related) and she ignores all the direct evidence that every city and county that added fluoride started having fewer cavities than neighboring areas that hadn’t yet added it.
She then further points out that it only causes health issues in much higher concentrations than what the US was getting our water supply up to. You know, like literally anything that you get too much of is bad for you. You can literally die from drinking too much plain water. Too much of anything will kill you.
Interesting. The article doesn’t actually say that fluoridation in water supplies is dangerous but that some researchers are questioning. Generally code for lack of scientific evidence. It also finds that early studies may have had a flawed basis (pretty much all early studies have been found wanting by later scientists) but doesn’t refute the results.The study mentioned in the article talks about high levels of fluoridation which I assume is in lab tests however these levels are not the case in water supplies.
The correct way forward is more actual science based studies.
Your link is more or less an opinion piece from a geneticist, so this isn’t even her field of study.
All her health issues she points out are for fluoride concentrations over triple the amount that tap water is brought up to.
The reason it’s usage spread across the country was because while the entire country had access to things such as fluoridated toothpaste, counties and cities that started fluoridation of their water supplies consistently had fewer cavities than areas that didn’t fluoridate the water. This alone outlines the glaringly obvious flaw in her argument.
Further still, while the US adds fluoride to the tap water in a concentration to reach 0.5mg to 0.7mg per liter of water (a couple drops per 50 gallons), natural drinking water for over 20% of the world is in concentrations well over that (to be clear, being well over that can cause health issues. Too much of anything can cause health issues.)
In other words, there is no evidence that this low concentration of fluoride causes health issues. There is loads of direct evidence that it reduces cavities. Plus, this woman from your opinion piece is talking out of her field. Not to mention that 21% of the world’s drinking water supply naturally already falls within the recommended range of what the US takes theirs up to. It’s just that most of the US water supply naturally falls below that amount.
No, the reason fluoridation in water is widespread is because fluoride is produced far more than there is market to sell it otherwise.
By that reasoning, we should start putting all of our waste products in our water supply - since we weren’t able to sell them otherwise.
… Or perhaps there are other reasons to consider?
You seem to have confused me with someone that is for putting industrial waste, i.e. fluoride, in drinking water, I’m against it personally.
Sounds to me like municipalities are able and willing to use it because it’s cheap.
It’s cheap because it’s industrial waste that has significant cleanup and disposal costs. It was sold to municipalities after there was “research” that it helped tooth health, which it can in much higher concentrations than is in any water supply. But the reason it’s added to water is because the companies that otherwise would have to pay for clean up now make money off the waste product and can afford kickback funds.
Thank you for the link. It’s worth mentioning that there are response letters to the publication you linked from other experts, the majority of which are critical and point out misinterpretations and omissions by the author. It’s always good to question, but in this instance it looks like the consensus amongst experts evaluating that publication is still that fluoridation is safe and improves dental health. The response letters can be read here.
Edit to add: The responses include a letter from the dean of the Harvard School of Dental Medicine stating that the publication is deeply flawed and requesting a retraction, and a similar condemnation from the students of the Harvard School of Dental Medicine. The article was given greater weight by being linked to Harvard, but in fact Harvard dental experts explicitly disagree.
Counterpoint: I live in an area without fluoridated water, and I’m told that dentists can reliably identify people who didn’t grow up here by the state of their teeth.
Anecdote in scientific debate? Wild
It’s actually exactly in line with what the link above says.
In June 2015, the Cochrane Collaboration—a global independent network of researchers and health care professionals known for rigorous scientific reviews of public health policies—published an analysis of 20 key studies on water fluoridation. They found that while water fluoridation is effective at reducing tooth decay among children, “no studies that aimed to determine the effectiveness of water fluoridation for preventing caries [cavities] in adults met the review’s inclusion criteria.”
In other words, water fluoridation might not make much difference for adults, but it can for children.
Next headline will be how fluoride contributes to autism and it will have just as much evidence as the vaccine bit does. How is this even a thing? Is ground zero on this RFK?
Meanwhile, all the people who can’t afford dentists will have even worse teeth going forward. Make America’s teeth British again.
Well look at the statistics:
Fluoride:
- Water fluoridation in the United States began in the 1940s
- By 1949, nearly 1 million Americans were receiving fluoridated tap water
- In 1951, the number jumped dramatically to 4.85 million people
- By 1952, the number nearly tripled again to 13.3 million Americans
- In 1954, the number exceeded 20 million people
- In 1965 an additional 13.5 million Americans gained access to fluoridated water.
- By 1969, 43.7% of Americans had access to fluoridated tap water.
- In 2000, approximately 162 million Americans (65.8% of the population served by public water systems) received optimally fluoridated water
- 2006: 69.2% of people on public water systems (61.5% of total population)
- 2012: 74.6% of people on public water systems (67.1% of total population)
Autism:
- First recognised in the 1940s
- During the 1960s and 1970s, prevalence estimates were approximately 0.5 cases per 1,000 children.
- Prevalence rates increased to about 1 case per 1,000 children in the 1980s.
- 2000: 1 in 150 children
- 2006: 1 in 110 children
- 2014: 1 in 59 children
- 2016: 1 in 54 children
- 2020: 1 in 36 children
Seems pretty clear cut to me.
/s because people think I posted this in seriousness.
Not sure if you’re being sarcastic but if not, then I’m about to blow your fucking mind
STOP EATING RICE!
NAME YOUR DAUGHTER SARAH, IT’S THE ONLY WAY TO SAVE THE AMAZON! AND WHATEVER YOU DO…
…DO NOT NAME THEM TRISTEN
If we shut down flights to Antarctica, inflation would’ve been solved yesterday.
Great post… but where is the meme?
The meme is now this is not US policy.
Its like stating the world is not flat… when in fact NASA’s official stance is that the world is, indeed, flat.
Welcome to Science Memes, where the science isn’t memes and the memes aren’t about science.
