Comment by crazygringo

21 days ago

What do you mean? There's literally tons of evidence. Do you think fluoride doesn't actually reduce cavities?

33 comments

crazygringo

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Spooky23  21 days ago

You can’t win. Freedom, IQ, precious bodily fluids. There’s no end to the nonsense.

My city started fluoridating a few years ago. The crazy was off the chart, they’re still active. NYC has fluoridated for 60 years, you’d think someone would have figured out that the entire city is dumber.

  • wqaatwt  21 days ago

    > you’d think someone would have figured out that

    Maybe that’s why they haven’t?

    But being serious if it’s relatively low and the negative effects only occur during pregnancy it’s not that easy to measure it.

    Obviously there is no conclusive evidence (even if the studies from China seem somewhat credible) but IMHO even if the likelihood of this being true is e.g. only 5-10%, risk of a population wide loss of 1-2 IQ points seems like a massively too high price to pay just to slightly reduce cavity rates.

    Also dismissing all credible (albeit weak) scientific evidence out of hand just because crazy people hold similar beliefs is a about as stupid as what they are doing..

  • somenameforme  20 days ago

    Well one issue with your snark here is that IQs within the country are going down, and nobody really knows why. [1]

    The Flynn Effect was the observation that real IQ scores were increasing over time. But sometime around 1990 this seems to have stopped in pretty much the entire developed world, including the US. I'm not implying that this is solely due to fluoridation, though it's certainly a plausible contributing factor. But as for your snark about 'someone would have figured out people are getting dumber' - well, they have, and we don't know why.

    [1] (pop media coverage of study) - https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a43469569/american-...

    [1] (study - no paywall!) - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...

    • chabes  19 days ago

      > IQs within the country are going down, and nobody really knows why.

      I’m no expert, but I have seen the public education system attacked and defunded for decades, at home and abroad. Even libraries are being shut down in places with enough anti-intellectual sentiment. This goes much deeper than the fluoride in water.

      If you can point to IQ values of New York specifically, going down more significantly starting with the introduction of fluoride into the water system, then you might have something there.

      Until then, policy discussions like this will continue to take focus from the things that actually have an impact on IQ, like public education, healthcare/nutrition, and poverty.

      3 replies →

    • alpaca128  20 days ago

      Flouridation of drinking water does not happen in the entire developed world, though.

      And lower IQ scores don't necessarily say much about pure intelligence directly, a worsening education system could also contribute and that's not exactly far fetched. And your linked source says:

      > The steepest slopes occurred for ages 18–22 and lower levels of education

      2 replies →

  • like_any_other  21 days ago

    Bodily autonomy is "nonsense"?

    • TheBicPen  21 days ago

      Do you think bodily autonomy is absolute? Your comments seem to imply that bodily autonomy is the only relevant thing to consider when discussing patient care. The world doesn't work that way. Believe it or not, a doctor won't amputate a limb when you show up with a runny nose even if you insist that that's the procedure you want. Search up the 4 principles of biomedical ethics if you want to learn more about the factors that influence doctors' ethical decisions.

      Or do you mean that your opinion should trump that of any doctor or expert in any field when the issue pertains to your person? If that's the case, I wonder why you choose to participate in society at all, given that you're uncomfortable with the idea that other people might know more than you.

      1 reply →

newZWhoDis  21 days ago

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  • jiggawatts  21 days ago

    That's just not true. Most of the studies simply compared areas with different amounts of natural fluoride in their local water supply, and applied some basic statistics comparing dental health. There have also been some A/B studies possible in areas that stopped or started using fluoride in their water.

    Multiple such studies have been done, globally, over many decades.

    • Brybry  21 days ago

      I think it depends on how strict your criteria and evidence requirements are.

      There are two Cochrane reviews that I saw on community water fluoridation:

      https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26092033/

      https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39362658/

      There is limited modern evidence (ie. in a world where everyone is brushing their teeth with fluoride toothpaste) of some reduction in tooth decay in children. There were no studies on adults that met the review criteria.

      Overall it seems like we just don't really know how much impact CWF currently has.

amazingamazing  21 days ago

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