Comment by jedberg
7 months ago
And dentists rejoiced at their newfound source of income! /s
This is so dumb, and based on psudoscience at best, and straight up falsities at worst.
In 10 years we're going to hear about how cavities are so much higher in Utah than anywhere else.
Don't they sell toothpaste with flourid in Utah?
Generally kids don't use toothpaste with fluoride because of the risk of swollowing it. Yes, we know it's bad in high doses, which is why kids toothpaste often doesn't have it. You have to wait until they are old enough to spit when brushing.
In reality what will happen is that rich kids will be just fine because they will get their fluoride treatments at the dentist every six months.
It's the poor kids who will suffer because they don't see the dentist regularly because it's expensive, so they won't get their treatments.
There is a such thing as baby teeth. Presumably most children learn to brush properly while they still have them. If they do something wrong, they get a second chance when their adult teeth replace them. Why does this even need to be explained?
As for “fluoride treatments”, those are applied to the teeth, not drank. They are not a substitute for regular brushing.
You sound concerned about the kids. We are on the same side. There is evidence that fluoridation level is correlated (dose dependent) with sleep problems, lower IQ scores, early onset puberty and bone cancer in children. There are specific areas outside blood brain barrier that it accumulates to the degree of fluoridation (100x to 200x levels of other tissues), all postmortem tests verify this.
It is true that many studies were at higher doses(2x to 4x), but that should not mean that it is acceptable to intentionally raise fluoride levels to half of harmful levels, because we want to protect teeth.
If you don't want cavities decrease sucrose, brush and floss. Can I brush my teeth with use baking soda, use whatever? Arent they are OUR teeth? What if we find some additive might help some other health issue? Should we add that to everyone's drinking water?
10 replies →
Kids until which age? Ime somewhere between 4-5 seem to be perfectly able to spit their toothpaste without swallowing. Guidelines in the EU typically suggest normally fluoride toothpaste in increasing amounts after 4.
Also, fluoride helps with remineralisation when it is used pretty much regularly, not once per 6 months. Fluoride treatments once per 6 months are not gonna bring back the enamel lost.
I do not understand what is the big deal here. In many countries there are specific recommendations wrt to fluoride and kids brushing their teeth that seem to work fine. This seems to be a solved issue in many places in the world without fluoridating water.
The recommendation from doctors is to use a small amount of toothpaste with fluoride. Apparently even if they cant spit yet. I was surprised to be told that, even though there are a ton of fluoride free toothpastes available.
>This is so dumb, and based on psudoscience at best, and straight up falsities at worst.
I don't know whether water fluoridation is worthwhile. But I do know that various European countries have discontinued it. <https://web.archive.org/web/20160303202219/http://www.appgaf...> Are they also working off of pseudoscience and falsities?
I'm not following closely, but is this pseudoscience?
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/fluoride-childrens-health-gran...
https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/whatwestudy/assessments/noncancer/...
Fluoride is known to be problematic at high concentrations (hell, everything is). The problems of fluoride really start to come into play at concentrations of around 10-20mg/L, and some of the areas being studied are running well in excess of 100mg/L of fluoride.
The EPA limit for fluoride is 4mg/L. There's an argument to be made that it should be lowered to 2mg/L. When fluoride is added to drinking water, the target is around 0.9mg/L--no one's coming close to the EPA limit, and that exists because groundwater sources can end up being naturally high in fluoride. (I'm not sure what the typical natural occurrence of fluoride is in Utah, but I strongly suspect that they're not making any moves to actually remove fluoride from existing systems.)
Seems to cause problems at lower levels than that:
> The NTP monograph concluded, with moderate confidence, that higher levels of fluoride exposure, such as drinking water containing more than 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter, are associated with lower IQ in children.
https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/whatwestudy/assessments/noncancer/...
Those are based on countries with much higher levels of fluoride than the USA adds.
Follow up studies have found the levels in the USA to be perfectly safe and in fact beneficial since poor people don't get dental care like they do in other countries.
> levels in the USA to be perfectly safe
because everybody drinks the same amount of water right?
ridiculous position to argue from.
1 reply →
Please share study that shows it is safe in the US for children. The EPA allows up to 2mg/L in water and we have some evident that 1.5mg/L has negative effects on children.
HN Comments were very credulous before the election. Shows how flexible belief in science is.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39235663
1 reply →
I didnt look too closely, but the concentration recommended by the FDA is much lower than many of the sample sets in that linked study. Some 10 times as much. One is a hundred times as much.
Not sure if that first link was to the Harvard summary intentionally but heres the actual study: https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/ehp.1104912
The second link showed a concentration as little 2x the US amount was impactful.
*The NTP monograph concluded, with moderate confidence, that higher levels of fluoride exposure, such as drinking water containing more than 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter, are associated with lower IQ in children. The NTP review was designed to evaluate total fluoride exposure from all sources and was not designed to evaluate the health effects of fluoridated drinking water alone. It is important to note that there were insufficient data to determine if the low fluoride level of 0.7 mg/L currently recommended for U.S. community water supplies has a negative effect on children’s IQ.*
[dead]