This is an area where the rampant scientism really bugs me... and everyone is polarized politically without looking at the actual evidence.
I looked into the peer reviewed evidence myself when deciding if I should give my kid fluoridated water, and it is pretty clear that high doses of fluoride do cause intellectual impairment, among other problems. The approximate dose where this effect likely just begins to occur is right around where municipal water systems that add fluoride target, but the data is unclear.
Dismissing this possibility as crazy (as it usually is) seems really ignorant. The most plausible explanation is that current levels likely do cause some small level of intellectual impairment in at least some portion people.
One wonders, therefore, whether the Victorian British (who consumed an annual average of 6 pounds of tea per person in 1900) suffered from hyperfluoridation, and what its downstream effects might have been... In fairness, and what needs to be noted, the intellectual output of that place and era was highly superior.
> Dismissing this possibility as crazy (as it usually is) seems really ignorant. The most plausible explanation is that current levels likely do cause some small level of intellectual impairment in at least some portion people.
If so it needs to be compared to the level of intellectual impairment caused by any increase in infection from tooth decay or the more tentatively researched links between mastication and cognitive decline.
Modern dental care to handle any an increase in tooth decay would need to be factored in. My main point is to make sure IQ changes on both sides of the equation are addressed.
Dental health can be controlled in other ways. Forcing a specific dental care method with (hypothetically) known negative effects is immoral; individuals should be allowed to choose their own dental care methods. Informed *choice* is (was?) a crucial tenant of medicine.
> Modern dental care to handle any an increase in tooth decay would need to be factored in. My main point is to make sure IQ changes on both sides of the equation are addressed.
But you’re not even supposed to drink it! It’s supposed to be absorbed on your teeth. Adding it to all drinking so that a tiny amount gets absorbed would sound crazy for another additive.
Fluoride for dental care should be replaced with vitamins D and K2, which will move calcium to the bones and teeth.
Diets could be adapted to be more tooth decay preventative.
No there does not need to be such a comparison. The question is whether fluoride affects intellectual development.
The problem of what to do once we know how much fluoride affects intellectual development is a policy problem that is entirely separate from the original question.
Not to mention forcing people into drinking a neurotoxin (from the recommendation of dentists who are very very far from being neurologists too lol). It looks absolutely insane from the outside.
I did the same thing with my kids when they were toddlers.
I also asked water delivery companies about specifying non-flouridated water and they charged more for it (alhambra)...
But here is my main kicker, think of all the various drinks you buy, from wine, beer, soda, coffee, energy drinks, bottled water, water at the restaurant to go with dinner... etc...
All of them, 100% of them, are a product made using flouridated water. Unless they specifically market that they are not (which I would still question).
My dad owned Timberland Water Company in Lake Tahoe, and we served ~600 homes from our little water company, which was literally a spring in the side of the mountain, in Timberland, Lake Tahoe, and it fill our giant water tank and flowed into the pipes to the neighborhood below.
My dad single-handedly ran that water company for several decades. Never flouridated the water. Had a lot of frozen pipes burst though.
I wanted to bottle the water but the PUD signed a law preventing me from doing so.
EDIT: My dad had to sell the water company to the tahoe PUD (they had been trying to buy it for years) - my dad finally sold when he needed the money for cancer...
So the PUD bought it, and I wonder if they flouridate the water now that they integrated it into the entanglement...
I’d rather not, it was 6 years ago and I’m no expert on this topic. My intent here is to explain my experience as a parent looking into these things, and my dismay at the polarization and lack of nuance in scientific discussion.
I would recommend doing a broad google scholar search and looking at everything you can find before coming to your own conclusion, and not letting a stranger or authority cherry pick studies for you.
Typically you're not supposed to swallow toothpaste or mouth rinses, so relatively little actually stays in your body. Tap water is generally considered fine to swallow in large amounts though.
Why is it in so many things? Because it's effective. It's not like people smoked cigarettes because they wanted a small amount of lung cancer risk, they smoked cigarettes for a totally different effect of the product.
> The approximate dose where this effect likely just begins to occur
Don't effects like this usually "begin" at a dosage of zero? If the effect size ends up being 0.001 points of IQ lost at a reasonable dosage, I don't particularly care whether scientists prove that there's a casual and statistically significant effect. Doesn't matter either way
not necessarily; consider hormesis, a two-phased dose response -- something can be highly beneficial at a low dose, then ineffective or simply toxic at higher doses
Did you settle on some kind of filtering system? Curious as to how people remove fluoride - just realized the other day my current *triple filter** aquasana under sink system doesn’t do it
Any reverse osmosis system removes essentially everything from the water. I am using a counter top AquaTru device. They are much more expensive and complex than a “water filter” however.
IQ scores show extreme subnormal intellectual ability. Scores above that (including the majority of below average scores) tell us precisely nothing. Zero. Nada. Nowt.
Consider this research again in that light maybe?
The IQ score research fraud needs to be called, loudly, by all of us every single time some charlatan uses it.
What you are saying isn’t accurate… IQ tests are reliably repeatable, and accurately predict ability at a large number of other tasks. There was a pretty good recent radiolab podcast talking about the history and evidence behind it.
> IQ scores show extreme subnormal intellectual ability. Scores above that (including the majority of below average scores) tell us precisely nothing. Zero. Nada. Nowt.
That's just not true. Among other things, they quite reliably predict how well you will do on an IQ test 10 years from now. This might sound trivial, but it's a good indicator that they are:
1. Measuring something
2. Measuring something that is intrinsic, in the sense of it being stable over time.
I don’t understand this perspective… if you are interested it would make sense to do your own careful research and come to your own conclusions. Don’t trust me, some random internet stranger that last looked at this stuff 6 years ago to do it for you.
And don’t expect me to compile evidence unless you are paying for my time!
I suspect this type of perspective comes from thinking I am trying to convince others of some controversial position and not recognizing that I’m sharing my personal emotional experience dealing with this issue as a parent?
> The American Dental Association has strongly urged NTP to add a disclaimer to the report highlighting its scientific limitations.
A recurring theme in alternative health circles is that dentists, doctors, etc. fundamentally can’t be trusted due to profit motives: that “real” medicine is suppressed because there’s no profit in it.
I think this quote is worth highlighting because it’s the exact opposite: water fluoridation is virtually free, and has a lopsided positive impact on dental health. In other words: it’s hard to square with the normal claims of profit seeking.
There's profit motive everywhere. "Alternative" medicine is a many billion dollar massive business that often has higher margins than "big pharma" because they aren't highly regulated, yet a ton of people consider it more credible because they think only mainstream medicine has profit motive.
The point is about municipal water. I don’t have to (and in fact don’t) believe that the ADA is a virtuous organization to observe that there is no financial benefit to their support for fluoride in municipal water supplies. Less fluoride in the water means more money for them.
"Existing animal
studies provide little insight into the question of whether fluoride exposure affects IQ. Human
mechanistic studies were too heterogenous and limited in number to make any determination on
biological plausibility. The body of evidence from studies on adults is also limited and provides
low confidence that fluoride exposure is associated with adverse effects on adult cognition.
There is, however, a large body of evidence on IQ effects in children. There is also some
evidence that higher fluoride exposure is associated with other neurodevelopmental and
cognitive effects; although, because of the heterogeneity of the outcomes, there is low
confidence in the literature for these other effects. This review finds, with moderate confidence,
that higher fluoride exposure [e.g., represented by populations whose total fluoride exposure
approximates or exceeds the WHO Guidelines for Drinking-water Quality of 1.5 mg/L of
fluoride (WHO 2017)] is consistently associated with lower IQ in children. More studies are
needed to fully understand the potential for lower fluoride exposure to affect children’s IQ."
The commenters raise some objections about the way confidence of the results were expressed.
I think the consequences are so dire (IQ impairment in children) that any doubt has to be rigorously examined.
Sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about.
> filter out beneficial minerals
Take a supplement if you feel you are deficient in any specific mineral because it doesn't justify whole body fluoridation or ingesting sketchy tap water. Flint, MI isn't an isolated incident.[0,1,2] Anecdotally, my mom's cousin's family died from silent uranium contamination of the tap water in the Four Corners region.
> are $$
I bought a 100 GPD RO system for $180 that uses generic parts. Running cost is $70/year including cleaning and membranes. Yes, it's work.
> waste a lot of water
FUD. Using less water on landscaping, hygiene, and laundry are far more important. Brine only leaves the system during generation. If there's no demand, e.g., you're not taking any water out of the tank, then there's zero waste. Permeate pumps ($50 option) reduces brine waste considerably by saving the backpressure leaving the system and boosting the intake pressure at the membrane. The brine waste stream is roughly 2x with a permeate pump vs 8x without. RO water at our house is only used for drinking and ice, which is ~2 GPD, so the total water usage is trivial.
Having had one for years they are fairly expensive, require some not insignificant maintenance and cleaning to keep them running optimally and are made almost entirely of plastic and are not recyclable.
A better option would be a carbon + sediment filter but again these are usually plastic fiber or at the least some sort of synthetic fiber and carbon in a plastic shell - a slight step up in recyclability than RO filters though.
I'd wager it's far more efficient for the municipality to get their water quality right at the source than every home fit a filter.
Use a different sediment pre filter that those cheap-o ones. It's just to prevent fouling of the rest of the system should serious sediment or scale come down the pipe.
For a final filter, it's a good idea to use a specialized filter for chemicals of concern, typically heavy metals and/or chloramines. (Example: https://matrikx.com )
NSF polypropylene should be studied more but I doubt it is a significant source of microplastics. Although, I wished pressurized residential RO systems could be 99% stainless steel or something else inert and easy to clean like thick borosilicate glass because PP does stain. It's important to use NSF listed / FDA compliant (CFR21.177.2600 A-E) O-rings and lubrication rather than random junk from Amazon. Any "water filtration" system that doesn't use RO or significant water pressure is only for taste and not a filtration system.
- RO for drinking water and icemaker for most people. Fancy: Bathroom faucet RO needs additional piping, pump (sometimes), and a larger tank.
- Whole house filters (3- to 5-stage carbon) provides a belts-and-suspenders check on tap water quality.
- Cation exchange (salt consuming) water softeners where applicable. Soft water feels good in the shower and improve laundry efficiency. A house's exterior and kitchen cold water ideally should be plumbed with filtered hard water, bypassing water softening for irrigation.
There should be a lot of natural experiments that can test this. Just find the boundaries of municipal water systems that fluoridate and take a look at the populations near the boundary but on opposite sides.
Often those boundaries will cut through a neighborhood and so you end up with a population of demographically similar households but some are on city water and some have wells.
Many of those neighborhoods will have fluoride levels in their well water that are quite different from the levels in their city water, making them good subjects for a study.
Give it up, don't use reason against conspiracy theories because they're exactly a refusal to think.
Evidence? Just look at the anti-vax paranoia after the Covid vaccine came along. Billions have been vaccinated, deaths decreased and idiots proudly say they won't take vaccines.
I'm more worried about possible impacts of an increase in atmospheric CO2 on cognitive function. It probably isn't an easily measurable amount on individuals, but across the worlds population it may have a notable effect.
Unless we finally get that tooth growing paste that has been talked about for the past two decades. Or actually, offering to shave those teeth down might still make a good business proposition,
Looking up north to Canada, there are cities that removed fluoridated water and found an increase in severe cavities in children[1]. This would assuredly happen in America as well because like we found during the pandemic and people not knowing how to wash their hands, most people do not brush their teeth properly either.
Slightly off-topic but wasn't there work on eliminating the bacteria that colonizes the mouth and causes tooth decay? I vaguely remember reading there was putative work that had reached trials or something and it just kind of fell of the map.
Obviously thats when things are found to have efficacy and be safe etc but the tenor was slightly conspiratorial in the way of "ICE manyfacturer buys and shelves first electric car"...
Are the mouth bacteria actually valuable or impossible to erradicate?
Recapping American jurisprudence in 2024: anyone can file a suit in order to get a jurist to draw a conclusion of chemistry. Nobody has standing to get a jurist to draw a conclusion about matters of law, such as whether their rights to vote have been violated.
This is an area where the rampant scientism really bugs me... and everyone is polarized politically without looking at the actual evidence.
I looked into the peer reviewed evidence myself when deciding if I should give my kid fluoridated water, and it is pretty clear that high doses of fluoride do cause intellectual impairment, among other problems. The approximate dose where this effect likely just begins to occur is right around where municipal water systems that add fluoride target, but the data is unclear.
Dismissing this possibility as crazy (as it usually is) seems really ignorant. The most plausible explanation is that current levels likely do cause some small level of intellectual impairment in at least some portion people.
These concerns are not limited to fluoride in municipal water, but also excessive fluoride consumption via tea, see. e.g.: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14034948219902...
One wonders, therefore, whether the Victorian British (who consumed an annual average of 6 pounds of tea per person in 1900) suffered from hyperfluoridation, and what its downstream effects might have been... In fairness, and what needs to be noted, the intellectual output of that place and era was highly superior.
This is an interesting point. I know the British are really into tea, but I assume they don’t let kids drink it due to the caffeine?
2 replies →
England didn't start adding it until 1964
3 replies →
> Dismissing this possibility as crazy (as it usually is) seems really ignorant. The most plausible explanation is that current levels likely do cause some small level of intellectual impairment in at least some portion people.
If so it needs to be compared to the level of intellectual impairment caused by any increase in infection from tooth decay or the more tentatively researched links between mastication and cognitive decline.
Modern dental care to handle any an increase in tooth decay would need to be factored in. My main point is to make sure IQ changes on both sides of the equation are addressed.
Dental health can be controlled in other ways. Forcing a specific dental care method with (hypothetically) known negative effects is immoral; individuals should be allowed to choose their own dental care methods. Informed *choice* is (was?) a crucial tenant of medicine.
1 reply →
> Modern dental care to handle any an increase in tooth decay would need to be factored in. My main point is to make sure IQ changes on both sides of the equation are addressed.
But you’re not even supposed to drink it! It’s supposed to be absorbed on your teeth. Adding it to all drinking so that a tiny amount gets absorbed would sound crazy for another additive.
Fluoride for dental care should be replaced with vitamins D and K2, which will move calcium to the bones and teeth. Diets could be adapted to be more tooth decay preventative.
I don't think a naive cost-benefit analysis is sufficient for making the decision to administer what amounts to medicine without informed consent.
1 reply →
No there does not need to be such a comparison. The question is whether fluoride affects intellectual development.
The problem of what to do once we know how much fluoride affects intellectual development is a policy problem that is entirely separate from the original question.
Not to mention forcing people into drinking a neurotoxin (from the recommendation of dentists who are very very far from being neurologists too lol). It looks absolutely insane from the outside.
> Modern dental care to handle any an increase in tooth decay would need to be factored in.
Also: if you can afford it / have insurance coverage to get said care.
Absolutely.
I did the same thing with my kids when they were toddlers.
I also asked water delivery companies about specifying non-flouridated water and they charged more for it (alhambra)...
But here is my main kicker, think of all the various drinks you buy, from wine, beer, soda, coffee, energy drinks, bottled water, water at the restaurant to go with dinner... etc...
All of them, 100% of them, are a product made using flouridated water. Unless they specifically market that they are not (which I would still question).
My dad owned Timberland Water Company in Lake Tahoe, and we served ~600 homes from our little water company, which was literally a spring in the side of the mountain, in Timberland, Lake Tahoe, and it fill our giant water tank and flowed into the pipes to the neighborhood below.
My dad single-handedly ran that water company for several decades. Never flouridated the water. Had a lot of frozen pipes burst though.
I wanted to bottle the water but the PUD signed a law preventing me from doing so.
EDIT: My dad had to sell the water company to the tahoe PUD (they had been trying to buy it for years) - my dad finally sold when he needed the money for cancer...
So the PUD bought it, and I wonder if they flouridate the water now that they integrated it into the entanglement...
According to this, "ALL WATER IS FLUORIDATED"
https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/drinking_water/certlic/drinki...
Timberland water is in Placer County water district now that PUD owns it, it controls how it complies to fluoridation....
:-(
It’s about total dose… probably 1 percent or less of the liquids I drink are packaged or processed things rather than water from my own RO device.
I don't see how wine could be fluoridated?
3 replies →
>I wanted to bottle the water but the PUD signed a law preventing me from doing so.
I mean no disrespect, but that is as it should be. Water is the fight of the coming century and must be preserved as a public resource.
1 reply →
What you experienced is what happens when I deep dive into any issue. (It’s very disconcerting)
> I looked into the peer reviewed evidence myself
Would you care to share some of these sources?
Not your parent, but after "looking into the evidence" I ended up at a different conclusion
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-99688-w
I’d rather not, it was 6 years ago and I’m no expert on this topic. My intent here is to explain my experience as a parent looking into these things, and my dismay at the polarization and lack of nuance in scientific discussion.
I would recommend doing a broad google scholar search and looking at everything you can find before coming to your own conclusion, and not letting a stranger or authority cherry pick studies for you.
2 replies →
What about fluoridated toothpaste? Mouth rinses? If there is clear indication that it causes neurological harm, why is it in so many things?
Typically you're not supposed to swallow toothpaste or mouth rinses, so relatively little actually stays in your body. Tap water is generally considered fine to swallow in large amounts though.
2 replies →
You don’t drink toothpaste, you’re supposed to spit it out
1 reply →
Its usually written on the packaging of such products that ingesting them is not healthy.
Why is it in so many things? Because it's effective. It's not like people smoked cigarettes because they wanted a small amount of lung cancer risk, they smoked cigarettes for a totally different effect of the product.
1 reply →
> The approximate dose where this effect likely just begins to occur
Don't effects like this usually "begin" at a dosage of zero? If the effect size ends up being 0.001 points of IQ lost at a reasonable dosage, I don't particularly care whether scientists prove that there's a casual and statistically significant effect. Doesn't matter either way
not necessarily; consider hormesis, a two-phased dose response -- something can be highly beneficial at a low dose, then ineffective or simply toxic at higher doses
No, toxins usually have no effect, or a totally different effect until some the threshold dose.
Did you settle on some kind of filtering system? Curious as to how people remove fluoride - just realized the other day my current *triple filter** aquasana under sink system doesn’t do it
Any reverse osmosis system removes essentially everything from the water. I am using a counter top AquaTru device. They are much more expensive and complex than a “water filter” however.
1 reply →
ZeroWater filters remove 90%.
Filters like AlkaViva and Berkey do a good job of filtering out industrial waste such as fluoride.
3 replies →
IQ scores show extreme subnormal intellectual ability. Scores above that (including the majority of below average scores) tell us precisely nothing. Zero. Nada. Nowt.
Consider this research again in that light maybe?
The IQ score research fraud needs to be called, loudly, by all of us every single time some charlatan uses it.
What you are saying isn’t accurate… IQ tests are reliably repeatable, and accurately predict ability at a large number of other tasks. There was a pretty good recent radiolab podcast talking about the history and evidence behind it.
> IQ scores show extreme subnormal intellectual ability. Scores above that (including the majority of below average scores) tell us precisely nothing. Zero. Nada. Nowt.
That's just not true. Among other things, they quite reliably predict how well you will do on an IQ test 10 years from now. This might sound trivial, but it's a good indicator that they are:
1. Measuring something
2. Measuring something that is intrinsic, in the sense of it being stable over time.
2 replies →
I wonder how many cavities would be taken away if they got rid of adding sugar into our food supply?
> I looked into the peer reviewed evidence myself when deciding
[citation needed]
I don’t understand this perspective… if you are interested it would make sense to do your own careful research and come to your own conclusions. Don’t trust me, some random internet stranger that last looked at this stuff 6 years ago to do it for you.
And don’t expect me to compile evidence unless you are paying for my time!
I suspect this type of perspective comes from thinking I am trying to convince others of some controversial position and not recognizing that I’m sharing my personal emotional experience dealing with this issue as a parent?
This stood out to me:
> The American Dental Association has strongly urged NTP to add a disclaimer to the report highlighting its scientific limitations.
A recurring theme in alternative health circles is that dentists, doctors, etc. fundamentally can’t be trusted due to profit motives: that “real” medicine is suppressed because there’s no profit in it.
I think this quote is worth highlighting because it’s the exact opposite: water fluoridation is virtually free, and has a lopsided positive impact on dental health. In other words: it’s hard to square with the normal claims of profit seeking.
There's profit motive everywhere. "Alternative" medicine is a many billion dollar massive business that often has higher margins than "big pharma" because they aren't highly regulated, yet a ton of people consider it more credible because they think only mainstream medicine has profit motive.
Somebody is getting paid for that fluoride.
Someone is always getting paid for something. That doesn’t mean dentists have a financial interest your municipality’s water supply.
4 replies →
[flagged]
> Losing fluoride would eliminate billable parts of appointments and even some dental visits costing association members.
Isn't this the opposite?
Removing fluoride from drinking water would presumably increase cavities, which would increase business for dentists.
4 replies →
The point is about municipal water. I don’t have to (and in fact don’t) believe that the ADA is a virtuous organization to observe that there is no financial benefit to their support for fluoride in municipal water supplies. Less fluoride in the water means more money for them.
A couple of reminders for facts that the last thread on this proved weren't as obvious as you'd think:
1. Studies undertaken as part of a lawsuit should be considered radioactive. See the whole Wakefield thing.
2. Infants don't drink the same amount of water as an adult.
They drink more if they are formula fed and use that as a water source.
Again, it is physically impossible for an infant to drink as much water as an adult.
7 replies →
The article says "unpublished assessment" but the reason it's unpublished is because it was put on hold, as explained here: https://fluoridealert.org/articles/ntp-will-make-blocked-neu....
Here's a link to an earlier draft of the report: https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/sites/default/files/ntp/about_ntp/... (caution, large PDF file). Look at the summary in 82, with some comments by reviewers. The summary text says:
"Existing animal studies provide little insight into the question of whether fluoride exposure affects IQ. Human mechanistic studies were too heterogenous and limited in number to make any determination on biological plausibility. The body of evidence from studies on adults is also limited and provides low confidence that fluoride exposure is associated with adverse effects on adult cognition. There is, however, a large body of evidence on IQ effects in children. There is also some evidence that higher fluoride exposure is associated with other neurodevelopmental and cognitive effects; although, because of the heterogeneity of the outcomes, there is low confidence in the literature for these other effects. This review finds, with moderate confidence, that higher fluoride exposure [e.g., represented by populations whose total fluoride exposure approximates or exceeds the WHO Guidelines for Drinking-water Quality of 1.5 mg/L of fluoride (WHO 2017)] is consistently associated with lower IQ in children. More studies are needed to fully understand the potential for lower fluoride exposure to affect children’s IQ."
The commenters raise some objections about the way confidence of the results were expressed.
I think the consequences are so dire (IQ impairment in children) that any doubt has to be rigorously examined.
Surprised more people don't install reverse osmosis filters in their homes. Fairly easy to buy and install.
RO systems filter out beneficial minerals, are $$, and waste a lot of water. I wouldn't suggest them for most people.
Sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about.
> filter out beneficial minerals
Take a supplement if you feel you are deficient in any specific mineral because it doesn't justify whole body fluoridation or ingesting sketchy tap water. Flint, MI isn't an isolated incident.[0,1,2] Anecdotally, my mom's cousin's family died from silent uranium contamination of the tap water in the Four Corners region.
> are $$
I bought a 100 GPD RO system for $180 that uses generic parts. Running cost is $70/year including cleaning and membranes. Yes, it's work.
> waste a lot of water
FUD. Using less water on landscaping, hygiene, and laundry are far more important. Brine only leaves the system during generation. If there's no demand, e.g., you're not taking any water out of the tank, then there's zero waste. Permeate pumps ($50 option) reduces brine waste considerably by saving the backpressure leaving the system and boosting the intake pressure at the membrane. The brine waste stream is roughly 2x with a permeate pump vs 8x without. RO water at our house is only used for drinking and ice, which is ~2 GPD, so the total water usage is trivial.
0. https://mytapwater.org
1. https://www.businessinsider.com/cities-worst-tap-water-us-20...
2. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/31/americas-tap...
Having had one for years they are fairly expensive, require some not insignificant maintenance and cleaning to keep them running optimally and are made almost entirely of plastic and are not recyclable.
A better option would be a carbon + sediment filter but again these are usually plastic fiber or at the least some sort of synthetic fiber and carbon in a plastic shell - a slight step up in recyclability than RO filters though.
I'd wager it's far more efficient for the municipality to get their water quality right at the source than every home fit a filter.
Use a different sediment pre filter that those cheap-o ones. It's just to prevent fouling of the rest of the system should serious sediment or scale come down the pipe.
For a final filter, it's a good idea to use a specialized filter for chemicals of concern, typically heavy metals and/or chloramines. (Example: https://matrikx.com )
NSF polypropylene should be studied more but I doubt it is a significant source of microplastics. Although, I wished pressurized residential RO systems could be 99% stainless steel or something else inert and easy to clean like thick borosilicate glass because PP does stain. It's important to use NSF listed / FDA compliant (CFR21.177.2600 A-E) O-rings and lubrication rather than random junk from Amazon. Any "water filtration" system that doesn't use RO or significant water pressure is only for taste and not a filtration system.
Preaching to the choir here. ;] To be specific:
- RO for drinking water and icemaker for most people. Fancy: Bathroom faucet RO needs additional piping, pump (sometimes), and a larger tank.
- Whole house filters (3- to 5-stage carbon) provides a belts-and-suspenders check on tap water quality.
- Cation exchange (salt consuming) water softeners where applicable. Soft water feels good in the shower and improve laundry efficiency. A house's exterior and kitchen cold water ideally should be plumbed with filtered hard water, bypassing water softening for irrigation.
Shouldn't the effect be visible on epidemiological level? Like the one from leaded gasoline?
There should be a lot of natural experiments that can test this. Just find the boundaries of municipal water systems that fluoridate and take a look at the populations near the boundary but on opposite sides.
Often those boundaries will cut through a neighborhood and so you end up with a population of demographically similar households but some are on city water and some have wells.
Many of those neighborhoods will have fluoride levels in their well water that are quite different from the levels in their city water, making them good subjects for a study.
It is, that is the whole point of this discussion…
Give it up, don't use reason against conspiracy theories because they're exactly a refusal to think.
Evidence? Just look at the anti-vax paranoia after the Covid vaccine came along. Billions have been vaccinated, deaths decreased and idiots proudly say they won't take vaccines.
I'm more worried about possible impacts of an increase in atmospheric CO2 on cognitive function. It probably isn't an easily measurable amount on individuals, but across the worlds population it may have a notable effect.
This is a good sign for anyone considering dental school. Only a matter of time.
Unless we finally get that tooth growing paste that has been talked about for the past two decades. Or actually, offering to shave those teeth down might still make a good business proposition,
They started fluoridating the water in 1946.
They started making fluoridated toothpaste in 1956.
The issue isn't getting fluorine into Americans, the issue is doing it in a medically and ethically appropriate way.
There should be zero impacts on average dental health of Americans.
Looking up north to Canada, there are cities that removed fluoridated water and found an increase in severe cavities in children[1]. This would assuredly happen in America as well because like we found during the pandemic and people not knowing how to wash their hands, most people do not brush their teeth properly either.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/tooth-decay-calgary-f...
7 replies →
Slightly off-topic but wasn't there work on eliminating the bacteria that colonizes the mouth and causes tooth decay? I vaguely remember reading there was putative work that had reached trials or something and it just kind of fell of the map.
Obviously thats when things are found to have efficacy and be safe etc but the tenor was slightly conspiratorial in the way of "ICE manyfacturer buys and shelves first electric car"...
Are the mouth bacteria actually valuable or impossible to erradicate?
I don't think fluoride affected my brain or helped my teeth. What's the purpose of it?
At minimum it’s a communist plot to steal our precious bodily fluids
Source: https://youtu.be/Qr2bSL5VQgM?si=iSJ0Z5r7LoPSMcEp&t=97
Tough crowd here on HN, apparently not a lot of classic movie lovers.
I'd upvote but they weren't trying to steal the fluids, they were trying to impurify them.
[flagged]
[flagged]
Recapping American jurisprudence in 2024: anyone can file a suit in order to get a jurist to draw a conclusion of chemistry. Nobody has standing to get a jurist to draw a conclusion about matters of law, such as whether their rights to vote have been violated.