Comment by 0xbadcafebee

20 days ago

I think it's worth reminding people of Occam's Razor, and the point of it is: a simple explanation is often better than a complicated one.

The US has had water fluoridation for 65 years, affecting 346 million people. That's a pretty big god damn sample size and long amount of time in which to observe effects. If we still have no proof of significant negative health effects, it's probably not bad for you.

That said: you can always lower the amount of fluoride if it turns out the local area already gets a lot of fluoride from other sources. You don't need to ban it, you can just lower the levels.

So please don't defend this decision by Utah. They're being children.

6 comments

0xbadcafebee

Reply
ckw  20 days ago 

  Using a prospective Canadian birth cohort, we found that estimated maternal exposure to higher fluoride levels during pregnancy was associated with lower IQ scores in children. This association was supported by converging findings from 2 measures of fluoride exposure during pregnancy. A difference in MUFSG spanning the interquartile range for the entire sample (ie, 0.33 mg/L), which is roughly the difference in MUFSG concentration for pregnant women living in a fluoridated vs a nonfluoridated community, was associated with a 1.5-point IQ decrement among boys. An increment of 0.70 mg/L in MUFSG concentration was associated with a 3-point IQ decrement in boys; about half of the women living in a fluoridated community have a MUFSG equal to or greater than 0.70 mg/L. These results did not change appreciably after controlling for other key exposures such as lead, arsenic, and mercury.

  To our knowledge, this study is the first to estimate fluoride exposure in a large birth cohort receiving optimally fluoridated water. These findings are consistent with that of a Mexican birth cohort study that reported a 6.3 decrement in IQ in preschool-aged children compared with a 4.5 decrement for boys in our study for every 1 mg/L of MUF.10 The findings of the current study are also concordant with ecologic studies that have shown an association between higher levels of fluoride exposure and lower intellectual abilities in children.7,8,26 Collectively, these findings support that fluoride exposure during pregnancy may be associated with neurocognitive deficits.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...

  • 0xbadcafebee  20 days ago

    1. IQ is not an objective measurement, it is inherently flawed

    2. A 1.5-3 IQ level difference is not noticeable in any practical way. Things like birth order have a more significant impact on IQ.

    3. Comparing Canadian children to Mexican is pretty dramatic, like comparing rich kids to poor kids; you will always see a marked difference between the two, in intelligence, in health, in crime, in all sorts of things. Mexican communities often over-fluoridate their water (I know because I grew up in Mexico and my teeth are stained because of it). Again, this is no reason to ban it, just lower it.

    This finding is a suggestion of a link, it's not empirical proof. The methods and findings have many questionable aspects. You can always find some paper that suggests something random like vegetables are bad for you or something. One paper does not a water-tight case make.

concordDance  20 days ago

> The US has had water fluoridation for 65 years, affecting 346 million people. That's a pretty big god damn sample size and long amount of time in which to observe effects. If we still have no proof of significant negative health effects, it's probably not bad for you.

The problem is there will have been a lot of confounders.

E.g. despite huge sample sizes, isolating the cause of the obesity crisis is too hard because so many different things changed at once.

  • 0xbadcafebee  20 days ago

    Sure, it's not easy to find a smoking gun. That doesn't mean we go all in on whatever we think might be the issue (if there even is an issue).

    The answer to the obesity crisis wasn't to ban Pizza. We don't we ban sodas and junk food at schools, which we know would have a positive impact on health. But we do ban fluoride, without proof that it will help? With actually the only scientific proof being that it would be detrimental to remove?

    If people's concern is really that it might slightly lower IQ, consider that 1) IQ has been steadily increasing since the 40's, and 2) you can get better IQ by investing in education, something that we do an embarrassing job of already and need to improve on.

    The other concern touted is that it might cause cancer. As we well know by now, nearly everything causes cancer.

    Banning fluoride is just a move by politicians to take advantage of ignorant scared people to drum up more votes/support. It's like every other action they take to vilify something scary or unknown and then claim victory over the evil thing they purged. This isn't new, either - this clearly partisan stance was being pointed out in the 1950's when it was first being considered for nationwide use.

    "After more than 70 years of investigation, there are still questions about how effective water fluoridation is at preventing dental decay and whether the possible risks are worth the benefits. Although water fluoridation undoubtedly did improve the dental health of many children in the 1960s and 1970s, fluoride proponents were perhaps too hasty in declaring that community water fluoridation was the best (or only) solution for dental decay. A less fractious debate might have encouraged a more open discussion in which the possible harms could have been more fully discussed and other options, such as providing fluoridated toothpaste, more fully considered." - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4504307/

    • concordDance  19 days ago

      > you can get better IQ by investing in education, something that we do an embarrassing job of already and need to improve on.

      You got a cite for this? I keep hearing that the education interventions tried in the West have universally failed to raise IQ.