Comment by foldr
20 days ago
You can also remove fluoride from your own water if you want to. Although I don't know if there are any filters that can distinguish between naturally occurring fluoride (ok) and fluoride added by the government (evil).
20 days ago
You can also remove fluoride from your own water if you want to. Although I don't know if there are any filters that can distinguish between naturally occurring fluoride (ok) and fluoride added by the government (evil).
This requires a Reverse-Osmosis filter which is super expensive. So if you really want to give fluoride, I'd be happy for the government to hand out free sodium fluoride tabs for whoever wants it, in exchange to not force the water to have fluoride by default. See, we get the best of both worlds?
How much of your water treatment do you want to do yourself? I assume you don’t want the ‘government’ to send you completely untreated water. So what is the problem with fluoridation as compared to all the other uncontroversial ways in which your tap water has been treated? All kinds of stuff gets added to and removed from the water.
Also, there are simple (and cheap) water filters that are quite effective at removing fluoride. As fluoride is often naturally present in water anyway, it is only really necessary to remove the majority of the added fluoride to get the water back into a ‘natural’ state.
The issue is that putting fluoride in the water isn't really "treating" the water. It's in essence acting a medication (see my paragraph below for a justification of this), to the benefit of people's teeth. As far as I know, every other chemical added / removed from the water is done for the purpose of the taste of the water, protecting the pipes which serve the water, or disinfecting the water. In this way, it's different from all the other chemicals, and there is also some limited opposition to other chemicals (e.g. debate on the use of UV / chlorine / ozone).
As for a loose argument for why fluoride in water is medicinal: the FDA classifies toothpaste as a cosmetic and also potentially a drug (depending on whether it contains fluoride and the claims the product makes):
> Ingredients that cause a product to be considered a drug because they have a well-known (to the public and industry) therapeutic use. An example is fluoride in toothpaste.
> Some products meet the definitions of both cosmetics and drugs. [...] Among other cosmetic/drug combinations are toothpastes with claims to freshen breath and cleanse the teeth that contain fluoride. [Both quotes are from https://www.fda.gov/cosmetics/cosmetics-laws-regulations/it-...]