Comment by freehorse
20 days ago
This is one of these US-specific polarised debates I find really bizarre, around some kind of issue that the rest of the world has by large solved but without any acknowledgement of this fact. Maybe the US should look into how other countries have solved it? It is completely bizarre witnessing both sides getting so polarised around a basically non-issue.
What I love about this comment is that one person thought "of course every other country just does the right thing when the US doesn't" and posted it, and then a bunch of other people thought "of course every other country just does the right thing when the US doesn't" and upvoted it, and not a single one of them thought to check what the "right thing" is.
Meanwhile, back here on Earth-1, there's no right thing, and countries all over the world have "by and large solved" the issue by doing completely different things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_by_country
> Water fluoridation is considered very common in the United States, Canada, Ireland, Chile and Australia where over 50% of the population drinks fluoridated water.
> Most European countries including Italy, France, Finland, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Hungary and Switzerland do not fluoridate water.
The missing context here is that the science and established benefits of fluoride aren’t a culture war political football in those countries.
These countries largely publicly recognise the benefits of fluoride, but don’t add it because:
- Some countries opt for intake via supplementation.
- Some have a naturally sufficient supply in drinking water via natural processes.
- Some even need to reduce the abundance of fluoride in their water due to over supply.
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Why is that missing context? I don't think anybody who is against fluoridated tap water rejects the benefits of fluoride, they just think the harms of adding it to tap water outweigh the benefits.
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Generally speaking I see fluoridation as a ridiciulous idea, on the grounds that the vast majority of tap water ends up being used for things other than brushing your teeth. It is wasteful and damaging to the environment, that excess flouride that has no business being there ends up in the drain, or the water you use for your plants.
Flouride should be put in the toothpaste. Then people can make a choice on whether they want it, but most importantly, its in the only product that is actually used for brushing teeth
Fluoridation for public health is done at lower levels than fluoride is found naturally in water in other areas.
If it's harmful as you imply, lots of water would need defluoridation.
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> It is wasteful and damaging to the environment
It's basically a waste product and water naturally has fluoride in it at the same levels, or more, that fluoridated water has, and the environment has been just fine in those places.
While I acknowledge it is not a "solved" issue, I find it bizarre nonetheless, simply because it is so disproportionately low-stakes compared to the amount of controversy around it. Increased risk of cavities versus tentative evidence of losing 1-2 IQ points at 1.5 mg/L? Sounds like a Monty Python sketch to me that people would get so worked up over this.
The risk of cavities is reduced by using toothpaste or mouth washes with fluoride, not by drinking fluoridated water.
Almost all fluoride from the drinking water does not have any effect on tooth enamel, because it has contact with it only for a few seconds, except for an infinitesimal fraction that may exit again the body in saliva.
On the other hand, the harmful effects of fluoride in drinking water are certain and it cannot be predicted exactly how much water will be ingested by someone, i.e. which will be the harmful dose of ingested fluoride.
The only argument of those who support water fluoridation is that most people must be morons who cannot be taught to wash their teeth. I do not believe that this theory can be right.
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Im sorry, but I think it’s ridiculous that thinking something that knows off an IQ point or two isn’t a big deal.
For one, we’re literally making everyone slightly less intelligent. While it’s a very small factor, I sure as hell wouldn’t want that for my daughters.
For two, IQ is easy to measure. Through that, we know it’s affecting the brain during development. How else is it affecting it? We don’t know.
Weighed against potentially higher risk of cavities pretty much only during childhood and the math seems incredibly clear to me. I feel like the only reason we haven’t banned adding it to water supplies is because people have a knee jerk reaction to anything that sounds even vaguely anti-vax nowadays.
The fact that until 10 years ago the US allowed significantly higher levels should be a really big deal to people.
I’m on reverse osmosis well water so it doesn’t matter to me personally, for what it’s worth.
IQ points is just an indicator that could be measured consistently. Who knows what else is going on.. and statistically (especially depending on the distribution) 2 IQ points is quite a lot. After all 50% of the population fall into the 20 point range in the middle..
Of course it comes down to whether the relationship actually exists. But picking a slightly higher risk of cavities when the other option is potential mental impairment (however mild) seems like a no-brainer..
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you're really genuinely shocked that people would get worked up over chemicals being added to their drinking water without their consent? chemicals which have not been conclusively proven to be non-toxic? chemicals which are already in toothpaste giving people the choice to use them anyway?
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To straw man, you could argue that 1-2 IQ extra might have a large affect on the salary as everything is relative. If you are on the lower IQ scale, a ten point reduction would double your likelihood of doing crime.
I put in a spelling error in the above paragraph of 215 characters, you still understand it but what was your perception of me from this very small error?
The specifics of fluoride are low stakes.
The general idea of the government medicating the people writ large isn't low stakes.
In the US there are a lot of people who are of the opinion the government should just let people be.
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Agree, it's a little bit like child Covid vaccinations. Not much evidence for either benefit or harm, recommended in the US but not most of Europe.
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Once you start trying to cross-reference a public health campaign with something related to peoples' diets, it becomes difficult to make super broad and conclusive statements.
Here's some interesting data (2003 I believe, so pretty old) [1]: It reports that most of Europe, Canada, Australia, and South America experiences cavities at rates higher than the United States. However: Many of these countries have public health care; the US does not. Is the US under-reporting? (I didn't dig much deeper into the underlying data; may not be a relevant concern).
Three things I think are likely to be true: (1) Fluoridated toothpaste is widely available and cheap. (2) Cavity rates are significant even in countries with high rates of fluoridation. (3) Fluoridating the water supply carries with it a non-zero monetary cost. I tend to believe that these three realities, at the very least, justify the conversation as being one we should have. It could be the case that water fluoridation made a ton of sense in a world where people didn't have as much access to fluoridated toothpaste, but nowadays the typical person has hit the limit on what it can do for them, and ingesting more is, at best, doing nothing.
Here's another way I like to think about it: Put the science aside for a second (I know, hard, not ideal, but bear with me). You've got two people who are low income. Person A believes, for their own health and in the expression of their own personal liberties, they want access to fluoride; but the Government is not fluoridating their water. They can spend $5 a month to buy fluoridated toothpaste; possibly not even more expensive than the toothpaste they were already buying. Person B is living in the opposite world: They believe that they do not want to ingest fluoride, but the government is fluoridating their water. They would have to spend many dozens to hundreds of dollars a month buying water bottled somewhere more natural. From a personal liberty and economics perspective: Its pretty clear-cut.
[1] https://smile-365.com/what-countries-have-the-lowest-prevale...
Using your "person a" "person b" story, what about "persons c-z" that also want fluoride because they trust doctors?
If one out of a hundred people don't want fluoride, can't they can spend slightly more on bottled water? Why require the other 99 to be up-to-date on research to get the best personal medical outcome?
> a non-zero monetary cost
Direct monetary cost is entirely insignificant, though. Potential risk of mental impairment (of course there is no conclusive evidence of that) seems like a much bigger issue.
IIRC _some_ of the European countries that “do not fluoridate their water” have naturally occurring fluoride levels in their water, obviating the need for them to do it.
In fact, many countries even have a maximum permissible limit for fluoride in tap and bottled water.
In France, for example, the limit is 1.5 mg/L in tap water. https://www.anses.fr/en/system/files/NUT2007sa0315q.pdf
Supplementation mainly concerns iodine for non-marine salts. Sea salt naturally contains iodine and fluorine. Salt from salt mines contains much less. For this reason, iodine deficiency was relatively common in the Alps until the beginning of the twentieth century.
To my knowledge, there is no debate or controversy on the subject. Endemic goiters are exceedingly rare and are linked to behavioral and eating disorders.
In Germany having salt with added fluoride is very common. There is salt without it if you don’t want it though.
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Are the levels in water consistently checked?
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Germany and France don't fluoridate water, but they add fluorine compounds to table salt.
Meanwhile growing up in Poland in the 90s as kids we had these fluoridation sessions in school, for which everyone had to bring their toothbrush and brush their teeth with some kind of sour tasting fluid that contained fluorine.
> we had these fluoridation sessions in school
We had the same in Sweden up until the early 90s, and it's apparently doing sort of a revival in some schools.
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluortant
In Germany, you can buy salt with or without fluorine. Both options are available at my local Lidl. It's clearly marked on the front of the box.
The world map is hilarious. Germany sure does not look like this anymore (and this is not the GDR split but goes further back). Maybe they should update this. Draws into the question, the whole data.
The map is drawing Germany and Czechia both with the same white color as the border.
Unfortunate that the color scheme is confusing, but not any weird borders.
You can see the uncolored map here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BlankMap-World6-Equirec...
Both non-fluoridating countries and country borders are white, so it's not that Germany is drawn wrong, but that that countries near Germany (Czechia, Netherlands, Luxembourg) look like they're part of the same white blob.
The point is basically no one else has politicised this to the extent the US did. Pointing to how different countries solve it differently is missing the point completely.
"Well, whether it's better to fluoridate the water or not, ~half the world got the answer wrong. But the important thing is they didn't argue about it."
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The issue, to my eyes at least, is much less of water, and much more of fluoride itself. That is what seems mostly a settled and non controversial topic elsewhere such that it is not perennially raised anew with tone of fans quoting Dr. Strangelove except meaning it.
I thought the comment was about resolving the issue one way or the other without it becoming yet another polarization topic . It probably matters less in either resolution than the cost due schisms and distrust the "debate" causes.
Regardless of whether the water is fluoridated or not, the main guideline is "brush your teeth with fluoridated toothpaste". No policy maker elsewhere is pushing narratives against fluoride at large like in the US. These narratives there are even dangerous. One can easily look at dental associations reviews, or official state guidelines and see that more or less they say very similar things. It is very easy to find these policy-informing reviews online.
And regardless of whether the water is fluoridated or not, there is no big debate elsewhere about it, nobody cares that much about it, because all the evidence is that in smaller amounts prob it is does not matter much either way, in the presence of people brushing their teeth. A lot of countries stopped it due to logistic purposes. In netherlands they tried fluoride in the water, a court said they should actually pass a law in order to be able to do it, and they did not even bother with that and dropped it. The fact that some countries may not use fluoride in the water is not due to some deeply-held conviction about how destructive fluoride is for the iq of the kids. In terms of risks of fluoride, fluorosis is what is mostly discussed anyway, and to a degree, unless it is too serious, this may just be an aesthetic issue.
From the perspective of one that watches this craziness from outside, the whole debate is non-sense, and whether some european countries use water fluoridation or not is not very important, it does not cause any heated debate in the EU. The debate in the US is not because the US considers some things that others do not consider. There is no actual truthseeking mentality from the current administration or anybody on this to actually find for sure if fluoride decreases iq, or if fluoride in the water is absolutely essential for dental health even if people are brushing their teeth.
Sure, but they are also not fighting about it, this seems crucial.
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Incisive comment, thanks for questioning the assumptions here.
How much natural fluoride does Europe have in their water?
The map accounts for that
What does the UK do? This will tell you what people should do because I’ve seen English teeth.
> In England, approximately 10% of the population, or around 6 million people, receive fluoridated water, either naturally or through water fluoridation schemes, mainly in the West Midlands and the North East.
Uh oh. I know it is better now but in 1978 a third of people in the UK didn’t have their natural teeth.
This was not much different everywhere else. Public dental care campaigns helped a lot, the same with affordable dental care products. Looking at my parents generation there are lots of false teeth going around. (Not uk)
I was reading a while ago about populations that moved to England, and within 2 generations their teeth are messed up (the first gen of kids born is usually raised on the food of their original culture).
You saw it too in Canada when the Inuit went on food stamps and went from eating mostly meat to mostly plants: their teeth went all over the place and full of holes within a single generation.
We also saw that with the advent of agriculture in general, along with a massive decline in average height.
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This perception is out of date. The UK population actually has very healthy teeth as a whole:
https://www.yongeeglintondental.com/blog/healthy-primary-tee...
That, of course, is not quite the same thing as perfectly white, perfectly aligned teeth.
My grandfather, who was still alive in 1978, had all his teeth removed and was given a set of dentures when conscripted into WWII. From what I can gather this was pretty common - the service dentist would check you over on arrival and if you had at least one cavity they'd whip the lot out so that they wouldn't need to do anything else to them for the rest of your service.
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Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake. The whole "everyone else agrees on X" bit is such a reliable tell.
Most developed countries have stopped using fluoride. I think that’s the commenter’s point. The US and Australia are outliers here for sure.
The US rarely looks into how other countries solve problems. (i.e. Universal Healthcare, High Speed Trains and so), this is the sad part of "American Exceptionalism"
Those are two odd examples. The Affordable Care Act is similar to the Netherlands health insurance system: https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2011/lessons-abroad-du... (“These similarities are not entirely coincidental. American public officials, health industry leaders, and scholars made frequent visits to the Netherlands in the run-up to the debate over U.S. health care reform, borrowing ideas and, on occasion, citing the Dutch system as a model for what the U.S. might achieve.”).
As to rail, both the first-gen and second-gen Acela is based on the French TGV.
The U.S. has a pitiful amount of high speed rail. It serves no point to mention that this pitiful amount of high speed rail is based off of TGV.
The comparison to the Dutch healthcare system is not apt. While the Heritage foundation may used ideas from the Dutch system our system is quite a bit more Byzantine and inefficient. We spend twice as much per capita on healthcare and have worse outcomes and fewer people covered. Our citizens have far more per capita medical debt than the Dutch.
We didn’t really implement the Dutch system and we didn’t really learn from the French how to build and maintain high speed rail. Saying we learned healthcare from the Dutch because we have doctors like they do makes as much sense as your argument.
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> The Affordable Care Act is similar to the Netherlands health insurance systemh
> The average Obamacare plan costs $483 monthly for a 30-year-old, $544 for a 40-year-old and $760 for a 50-year-old.
> The bronze plan covers 60% of the costs associated with care.
I feel like they missed the most important parts of the Dutch health insurance system…
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I thought the ACA was based on the Swiss system of mandatory insurance? The heritage foundation copied the Swiss, Romney took that proposal to Mass, and Obama thought going with a Conservative initiated plan would make it more bipartisan (it didn’t, but mainly because republicans hated Obama).
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A less cynical framing is that the US is a much different culture from European countries, and is massively larger in scale. Depending on the problem, some of their solutions simply can't or don't apply.
The scale argument is thrown around a lot as a justification for why the US couldn't possibly implement universal healthcare. The elephant in the room that I'm always surprises at how rarely it's mentioned in these discussions is Brazil, which is a huge country of comparable size (both territory and population wise), and it manages to make UHC work even though it's also a much poorer country.
It's not perfect by any means, but it's definitely much better than nothing. So the US should absolutely be able to at the very least match that, but really most likely it should be able to do much better. That it doesn't is very much a choice.
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I got a Master's Degree in Education and spent 2 years in Educational Psychology Ph.D. program and absolutely 0 time was spent looking at how other countries do education.
It's baffling how despite numerous other countries outperforming the US in educational outcomes we do not even look at other approaches!
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Which part here exactly cannot work in the US? I am talking about brushing one's teeth with toothpaste containing fluoride, which sounds as plain simple as possible to me. Is it regular brushing teeth that fails in the US for cultural reasons? Fluoride in the toothpaste? Supervising kids while brushing their teeth to make sure they do not swallow? It is an honest question.
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This is exactly the framing. "What worked there can't work here", whether it's firearm control, socialized medicine or education, whatever.
We're either bigger, or denser, or less dense, or ... essentially whatever suits the argument.
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Scale is a scapegoat. Take the US region by region and you can find analogs around the world.
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There shouldn't be a scale issue with regards to fluoride in the water. It is either scientifically shown to be beneficial or it isn't, scale and geography likely have nothing to do with it.
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You're not wrong in that our culture is different, but that cultural difference is chiefly a self fulfilling prophecy of "the government can't do it," promoted by billionaire owned media, so that those same billionaires can run for-profit industries like healthcare and transportation.
The cultural difference is that our rich people are too rich, our media is too centralized, and none of those in power want to enrich and empower the country, when they could enrich and empower themselves.
This is the excuse all American use about literally every single issue anytime anybody points out that other do things better. Most often without actually having thought about it beyond 'muhuhu US BIGGG! USA! USA! USA!'.
If you want to make that argument, actually make it, because if you try, 99% of the time its not actually true, its simply ignorance.
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I feel like this always comes up in these sorts of arguments, that the US is so unique that solutions that work elsewhere can't work here. And yet this point is always hand-waved in, without and specifics discussed, and is just presented as a given.
I really don't buy it, at least not as a general statement.
This argument works fine for high-speed rail, not so well for insurance and healthcare.
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Why is it less cynical, what does the scale of the US have to do with it?
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When I was a kid the schools taught us the metric system, telling us it was the world standard, and would become the standard is the US by the time I was an adult. That was over 40 years ago. And that pretty much sums it all up.
The US legally switched to metric when England did. It is taught in all schools and used for international trade. But, just like in England there is a mix of imperial and metric units used domestically. If you dont travel internationally, like many Americans, there is little need to use metric. Another generation and there won't be many people left in the US that didn't at least learn metric.
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At least they were right about one thing. It definitely is the world standard.
see that proves it - the U.S can't adopt the metric system, it's too big, you don't want to have to break out the megameters! /s
How has the debate been solved by the rest of the world? My understanding is that many countries in Europe don't fluoridate the water supply.
I'm skeptical of results showing IQ loss but I also think fluoridation should be phased out as fluoride toothpaste and mouthwash are now widely available. Banning it seems like the wrong move to me...states should simply decide to continue adding it or not.
> How has the debate been solved by the rest of the world?
By having official country-level guidelines by the health ministries or similar for people to brush their teeth with toothpaste containing fluoride, and specific guidelines around it for kids, as trivial as it may sound. Along with experts' reviews providing more details on these decisions, and explaining tradeoffs properly.
Fluoride containing toothpaste is the main recommendation, even in places that fluoridate the water (which are the minority). There is not much to add to this apart from refining these guidelines. Eg in the EU where some countries fluoridate water, most don't, there is no huge debate about it overall. Most eu countries that fluoridated the water stopped doing it some point mostly because it was no longer needed in preventing cavities, and prob largely due to logistics/costs than possible risks.
Your second paragraph reflects my personal views on it, too. The "banning" is weird, esp since, according to the article, it comes from people that seem to advocate against use of fluoride in general in toothpastes etc. The discussion should be around best policies to prevent cavities etc, but it does not seem to be around that. I see nothing wrong with local communities deciding if they want to put fluoride or not in their water, based on their own opinions but also general situation. Maybe in some much poorer areas fluoridation of water could be beneficial until some other measures take place, for example.
> Banning it seems like the wrong move to me...states should simply decide to continue adding it or not.
Isn't that exactly what's happening here? A state deciding to not continue adding it?
Nope, the bill as written prevents local municipalities from making that decision.
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Banning its addition is a step beyond — but in Queensland, Australia for example, the state government no longer mandates its inclusion, and thus the local councils are able to set their own policy.
> While more than 90 per cent of Australians have access to fluoridated water, that figure is significantly lagging in the sunshine state, where local councils have ultimate authority over whether it is adopted.
> A decade after the Newman government handed responsibility for fluoridated drinking water to local governments, 51 out of 77 have opted out. That means about 28 per cent of Queenslanders do not have fluoridated drinking water
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-24/fluoride-dental-care-...
So how does their dental conditions and IQs compare? Sounds like a nice little AB test.
The same discussion happened in Netherlands in the 70s, and water in NL is no longer fluoridated since the 70s for that reason. So it's not that "US-specific". I don't know about other countries from the top of my head.
Funny thing you mention that. Since it is now monitored and maintained by natural source. There is fluoride, just not added anymore. (It is at lower levels than when added obviously)
>(It is at lower levels than when added obviously)
This is not obvious. Some water has high levels of fluoride, which can cause harm (fluoride added for public health reasons is not the highest level of fluoride you will find [in the UK]).
Fluoridation could be done by mixing of naturally high fluoride water sources into other water.
How has it been “solved?” There’s just tradeoffs.
There’s evidence that despite widespread availability of fluoride toothpaste and mouthwash, fluoridated drinking water improves dental outcomes at the population level.
There’s also evidence that at high levels (not the normal levels it is added at, but at higher levels which can happen on accident) fluoride may reduce IQ.
I’m ok with either trade off but the “solved” phrasing makes it sound like there is an obviously superior choice.
I’d agree that Europe has solved this issue by removing fluoride from drinking water.
But beyond Europe there’s still no global consensus.
I do agree that the US is an outlier with fluoride being nearly universal.
Which European countries _remove_ fluoride from water generally? UK adds it in naturally low fluoride areas.
Some countries no longer add it (but their water still has naturally occurring fluoride that they don't remove).
No no, in the US we figure out the worst way to do something, and then do that, and invent reasons why the US is unique such that the reasonable solutions that other countries employ just couldn't possibly work here.
(To be fair, though, many [most?] Western countries do not fluoridate their water. The US is actually not doing the common thing here.)
It's honestly not clear if water fluoridation in the US is necessary or all that useful here anymore, as we started doing it when fluoride toothpaste wasn't really a thing. Now pretty much all(?) toothpaste in the US has fluoride in it. If someone can't afford toothpaste, then they probably can't afford regular dental care either, and fluoridated water isn't going to make much of an impact anyway.
> Maybe the US should look into how other countries have solved it?
How have other countries solved it?
By not adding fluoride into the tap water and let people choose whether to buy toothpaste with fluoride themselves. a.k.a. the European way.
Adding fluoride into tap water always sounds borderline insane to me. The only benefit is to protect your teeth, which, to me, strongly suggests that the correct approach is to put it into toothpaste or other oral hygiene products instead of water.
I remember the first time I went to a German dentist and he told me how amazing my teeth looked and that he could tell I must be American. Fluoride may have some downsides but it definitely has upsides.
Is it good for teeth because it's "applied" when drinking it, or is it due to ingesting it? I think ingesting is the issue.
Food often has much higher levels of fluoride than water, but the fluoride isn’t as bioavailable to teeth when it is in food, hence putting it in water. Fluorine in food may become more bioavailable further down the digestive tract where it does much less good.
Here in England, there's some areas that put fluoride into the water and other areas already have sufficient fluoride levels. People complaining about the side effects of fluoridation often forget that water can naturally contain high levels of fluoride - it's really not an issue.
https://www.uk-water-filters.co.uk/pages/areas-with-fluoride...
> This is one of these US-specific polarised debates I find really bizarre, around some kind of issue that the rest of the world has by large solved but without any acknowledgement of this fact.
> Maybe the US should look into how other countries have solved it?
I mean Utah is trying, sorry it took a while. I know Germany and Sweden don't fluoridate its water, I assume you mean Western Europe by the "world" (sorry if I am interpreting too much here, but that's usually what's popular to compare US to and bash US on how bad it is), so US is getting "with the program", finally I suppose. States having individual laws here is a benefit, one state doesn't have to wait for the Federal Government to act.
> This is one of these US-specific polarised debates I find really bizarre,
I don't think it's that polarizing? Unless 1) you're listening to US media more and 2) you're not getting many non-polarizing issues in the news, because those are well are just boring and don't sell ads.
If you look at the US as a simulation that branched of the mother tree of Europe in the 15th century, you won't find it odd that it is rediscovering what Europe has already figured out. Just in it's own way and time. (No chemicals/colors in foods and adequate drinking water) Wait till they figure out mass transit, that will be a shocker.
Has Europe figured out mass transit? In Barcelona, a trip that takes me 1.5 hours of total time using “transit” takes me 28 minutes on my motor scooter. I think there is still some figuring out that needs to happen before I’ll add 2 hours to my daily commute.
These people have been around forever but the pivotal point in my opinion is when the Lancet retracted the article on the link between MMR and autism.
Suddenly everything was up for debate.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_MMR_autism_fraud
1. Its a fringe issue in Australia 2. The US doesnt believe in other countries so why check.
Even in Europe Fluoridation is not uniform.
Some place do it. Others partially, many not at all.
Think slightly more broadly about the issue.
For context... some people think statins should be put in the water. Maybe they should. But were does mass medication of the people stop?
It stops when we run out of easy things that can be done to improve the lives of people. It's not that hard.
And when you get a tyrant at the top? Every capability you give the government needs to be viewed through the lens of "what happens when we get a really really bad leader?". If you haven't been paying attention, the majority of countries have had at least one really really bad leader over the past few hundred years. Many have one right now.
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There are a few studies out which say fluoride is bad. But as is often the case with these health idiots, the studies actually refer to places where fluoride is naturally way too high in the water. The entire debate is dumb.
It’s far more than a few, and the level does not need to be that high:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
This was my perspective for awhile — recommend you look into more recent studies if you haven’t in the past 2y or so. I don’t think it’s the worst thing in our water but do think it’s objectively a bad idea.
completely bizarre witnessing both sides getting so polarised around a basically non-issue
This isn't a sensible way to think about it. Every contentious conversation I've ever had has gone this way:
It's irrational to complain about 'both sides' when only one side is insisting on making it into an issue. I generally just try to disegnage from people as soon as they start freaking out about fluoride/ chemtrails/ vaccinations etc, but people like this frequently treat skepticism as a personal attack. Increasingly they occupy positions of political power (see eg RFK) having acquired them by public displays of conviction rather than any objective criteria.
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There is not real debate, just some people who don't understand how chemistry works.
What they're referring to is the fact that very few countries in the rest of the world even consider the possibility of adding fluoride to the water supply. It's basically just the US, Australia, and to a much lesser extent Canada.
It's not a debate everywhere else because adding fluoride to the water is objectively an unusual thing to do that they just... don't. Presumably they get fluoride other ways.
How many countries actually drink their tap water as their main source of water?
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AFAIK all (former) USSR does that.
I'd really like to hear your take
Talk to your dentist.
They are experts in this field, and, unlike “random person on the internet who spent 2 minutes on google”, have informed opinions on this topic.
If you want a serious discussion on why fluoride is good or bad, that’s where you need to go.
Random person on the internet is very easy to disagree with, because we’re all idiots right? It’s a very easy lazy way of self confirmation.
…but if you are serious about critically considering the issue and facing your own biases, talk to an actual topic expert.
My dentist told me he had carefully reviewed the literature and determined to his satisfaction that public fluoridated water was in the best interests of public health, currently. He offered to share some reading that he was convinced by.
You can’t really ask for more that that.
Discussing this here is a bit like protesting by posting on social media; yes, I suppose it’s better than doing nothing and not engaging with the topic at all… but only barely, and not in any meaningful way.
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What do you mean? Florine creates a substance in human teeth that is much more resistant to decay than calcium.
fluoridated water drastically reduces dental cavities and has no evidence of being dangerous.