The new research is the first to measure community water fluoridation exposure during childhood and any potential impact on cognition up to age 80.
The paper is here
Alternative headline: Science disproves well known conspiracy theory again; conspiracy theorists deny evidence.
I’ve added so many “Conspiracy Theorist” tags to users thanks to these posts…
I wondered that when I started reading: is this actual science, or being forced to disprove the idiots yet again? But right at the beginning it talked about bringing first of its kind, actual data, yadda yadda … reads like actual science, like something that adds value to our knowledgebase
I think in this case it’s valuable to do the study. A lot of these conspiracy theories are based on the idea that common thing could be harmful in some way, but assumes that it really is and that they know the effects. Some are more plausible than others because chemistry is complex and biology is a lot of chemistry, so it can be hard to say that something is harmless without doing a lot of scientific research.
But a MAGA coworker told me Fluoride is bad according to new studies. When asked for specifics the answer was read the studies.
I always assume if MAGA says something is bad, then it’s good.
Blind squirrels eventually find nuts.
Like knowing that there are pedophiles in the Epstein files.
Well, they already have low IQ and poor brain function. They don’t need fluoride.
What MAGA doesn’t need personally, they don’t want anyone else to have. So it makes sense.
I’m all for replacing fluoride in water with ethanol. It lowers IQ, damages teeth, and fosters violence, but it’d be a lot more fun than fluoride.
But it does have an effect on dental health! A positive one!
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Yes it has measurable effect, lots of research has established that with a very high degree of certainty. But maybe the causality isn’t proven?
The claim is that it strengthen teeth, but I’m not sure that is proven, for all I know it could also be it prevents bacteria from flourishing in the mouth to a degree that is significant enough to prevent tooth decay.
But that may just be lack of access to the data. This issue is very heavily researched for many decades, so professionals should have a pretty good grasp on the facts by now. It just irks me that I’ve never seen anything documenting the causality, there is clear proof of correlation, but AFAIK not the causality.If it did prevent bacterial growth it would prevent plaque formation because bacteria doesn’t grow directly on teeth surprisingly and before anybody says anything please go search up some dentistry science
Wait, wtf is plaque then??!? Is there lichen on my teeth?
It creates a layer that it can live on thats how bacteria grows on your teeth
Awwww, no lichen.
The biofilm can attract multiple species so technically not lichen but similar.
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Random guy on the internet claiming to debunk the WHO, various national health authorities, and every dentist I’ve ever talked to ever. Ok buddy.
Just to cover all the bases here: what’s your take on the mRNA COVID vaccines?
Got a source for those claims, buttercup?
The only research paper I have been able to find was from my own country Denmark more than a decade ago, and was about natural
flourfluor in the water, because it’s illegal to add to the water here.
That paper was very clear that people in the area that had flour had better teeth health.Mmmm, pancake water.
I bet you never thought it would work. 😋
…because they brush their teeth? With toothpaste that has fluoride in it?
Source pls. I have seen many, many studies showing the benefits of flouride here in Australia, especially on the teeth of people in the lowest rungs of society, controlled for diet, disease, etc. If you have countervailing studies, great! Show em!
I’m sorry, what were you just lying?
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Fluoride has a special property that causes people’s low IQ levels to be confirmed.
This study was funded by people that don’t wear tinfoil hats outside. They’re compromised.
I love how brainwashed right wingers pretend to be an authority on gender and sex, then believe shit like this.
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What?
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I don’t understand your point. I’m making fun of the right wing for believing in dumb pseudoscience. I’m well aware of the crunchy moms on the left, but that’s not who I’m making fun of right now.
You’re… Bringing in UC Berkeley and the aluminum industry for some reason? It really just seems like you wanted to rant and chose my comment at random to do that.
Anti fluoride people love listening and reading their own words. If they got used to the alternative they might change their mind, hence the correlation.
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Yeah, you’re really not fighting the allegation that you just wanted to rant. Literally no one brought up Berkeley.
Supposing your unhinged rant is at all accurate, why does any of that matter in the context of the article?
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good fucking god is that where we’re at.
We always knew excess flouride fucked up your bones and teeth. That was the potential danger. We’ve known that since Colorado Springs. Why are we testing cognition.
A recent analysis (1) finding a negative relationship between fluoride exposure and adolescent IQ was prominently cited in decisions to end community water fluoridation (CWF) in parts of the United States. However, the quality and salience of that evidence have been questioned (2, 3). Most notably, the bulk of the evidence presented by Taylor et al. (1) concerned extremely high dosages of fluoride—far exceeding levels relevant to CWF policy discussions. None of their evidence came from population-representative samples; most failed to account for selection into treatment. None of the research was conducted using data collected in the United States.
this research was done to figure out the unknown
But IQ DOES have a long term effect on fluoridation!
Utah is proof of this.
The worst it does is put spots on your (cavity-resisting) teeth.
You need a lot of fluoride for that to happen.
and thats only if you ingest a large amount of it during childhood.
But having healthy teeth will prolong your life statistically so…
Fluoride does harm brain development, but only if you get way too much of it. This happens in some places where the natural water already contains a lot of fluoride. You absolutely don’t want to add even more fluoride there.
But most places, especially in the US, the fluoride level is far below that, so far below that we have to add fluoride to the water to get enough to maintain dental health. But it’s still far below the level that causes harm.
It also begins to have a purely cosmetic but noticeable impact on your teeth long before the detrimental health effects kick in.
The big issue is that the process to make ground water safe to drink removes the Sodium Flouride from it. We have to add it back in, unless you live in a town like mine where they decided to stop flouridating the water because they believe in conspiracy theories and Facebook science.
The levels you need to consume to cause harm are pretty substantial. You would have to be intentionally consuming a LOT of Sodium Flouride to cause issues. It’s almost on the level of “how many bananas do you need to eat to get radiation poisoning”.
That is dangerous misinformation. With an LD50 of 0.052 grams per kilogram of body weight, swallowing a teaspoon of sodium fluoride will kill most people (if they aren’t induced to vomit or receive emergency medical attention). It’s harmless in the dosage put in tap water, but if you have a tub of pure sodium fluoride it is similarly toxic to bleach or moth balls.
Meanwhile you physically can’t eat enough bananas to get radiation poisoning. Bananas are less radioactive than human flesh, less radioactive than hotdogs, less radioactive than potatoes. You can swim in liquefied banana and be exposed to less radiation than walking outside on a cloudy day without sunscreen.
And a teaspoon is 5 ml. Flouridated water is, on average, 0.7 mcg/L. Therefore, you would have to drink over 17,000 liters of water for the flouride to kill you.
That’s cool, but kind of irrelevant to their remark that sodium fluoride is safe.
You physically can’t drink enough (properly) fluoridated water to get fluoride poisoning.
Some back of the napkin math says a typical American (rounded to 200lbs) would need ~67 liters of water to get a lethal does of fluoride. Some lazy googling says that the absolute most your kidneys would handle is 20 liters in a 24hr period before they start failing. Literally, the amount water you can drink is more toxic than the amount of fluoride in it.
That’s not what they said, though. What they said is that “you would have to be intentionally consuming a LOT of sodium fluoride to cause issues”. Not fluorinated water, sodium fluoride. The actual salt that kills you if you eat a teaspoon of it.
That’ll be a risk if you have pure sodium fluoride sitting around. Fortunately “no one” does. (Yes, industrial toothpaste manufacturing workers might have an opportunity to be exposed to such a thing).
Typical toothpaste is 1000-1100 ppm of sodium fluoride. “Prescription strength” is about 5000 ppm. So to hit your target LD50 you need to eat around 10 g of toothpaste per kg. Assuming on the extremely small end (40 kg bodyweight): if I did my math right, that’s about 400 g of prescription strength toothpaste, or more than two (170 g) tubes.
Normal toothpaste (1100 ppm) for a normal person (80 kg female average), you need to eat more than 22 tubes of toothpaste to kill half the people involved.
Thats just stupid, there’s zero risk of any of that happening.
Look, I’m not saying the average consumer will ever run into this risk, I’m saying that you shouldn’t go around saying H301 acutely toxic chemicals are as safe to ingest as bananas. You’re not the president of the United States.
Why are you getting downvoted for providing relevant facts? Sometimes this place is as reactionary as 8chan
Critically judging authorial intent is a 6th grade reading level, and 54% of USAmerican adults have a 5th grade reading level or below. I could have written it more for my audience, the sort of person that needs to hear that pure sodium fluoride is unsafe to ingest.
When crunchy lefties were first spouting off about this, they at least had an explanation. It was a nonsense explanation rooted in woo-woo pseudoscience and mysticism, but it was at least an explanation. Also, most people were inoculated against that kind of bullshit, we knew they were slightly crazy and wrong, and it was a view that was relatively harmless and allowed to exist. Most places it was “go ahead, you do you - drink your fluoride-free water and let your teeth rot, but you have to source your water yourself - this municipality fluoridates for the public good, it’s backed by science and dental experts, etc.”
These new crazy people, most of them don’t even have an explanation. (some of them are actually the same people, just moved down the alt-right pipeline after a couple decades of propaganda). If you were to ask them why they think fluoride is bad you could get responses ranging from blank stares to actual physical attacks. Transmission of conspiracy theories is so supercharged in this environment - all you have to do is jump on a bandwagon, and your buddies in the same club as you will give you the approval you desperately need just for wearing that opinion on your sleeve - no critical thought required, just base monkey instinct. This is such an irresistible way of belonging to some group and getting that special feeling that it’s becoming a real problem for most of us.
A small minority of these folks are (small L) libertarians or anti-authoritarians who believe in bodily sovereignty. That’s a rational thought process that I can actually sympathize with, so they get a minimum amount of points for having a comprehensible, defensible position. They just shouldn’t be able to force their choice on everyone else. (That would seem to contradict their own philosophy anyway). The public good of fluoridation, backed by science and experts, should vastly outweigh even that position. As before with the crunchy hippies, fine, it’s your right to choose what goes into your body - along with that comes the responsibility to take care of that for yourself, in line with your own stated ideals.
FWIW, the anti-fluoride thing started off when the John Birch Society, a right-wing hate group, started pushing it decades ago.
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Not to any meaningful degree in the US. It was the John Birch Society and KKK here.
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They both certainly existed, though the latter was somewhat underground in the 1950s.
It’s easy to find documentation of their positions on fluoridation; it’s not so common to find evidence of environmental groups opposing it when there was a clear public health benefit.
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You’ve never met a conspiracy theory you didn’t want to deep throat, have you, sweaty?
I always laugh when people misspell sweetie. You think you’re being clever, but you’ve completely botched your insult.
I didn’t misspell anything, spud.
And you definitely haven’t met a conspiracy theory you didn’t want to dry hump.
What was lefty uber-liberal hippieism got co-opted during covid by right wingers and fascist science deniers.
I am recovering from being raised by ultra crunchy parents. I had no vaccinations until I was already an adult. I have a unique vantage point into both sides of this issue and the thing of it is that yes maybe they are dumb, but the fear comes from a very real, even logical, place. Anything pushed on you by the American government should give anyone pause, because when was the last time the government spent gobs of money in the name of public health? Massive infrastructure spending in order to keep Americans from spending less on healthcare and increase their quality of life? Yeah that does not sound real. Why would the same government that has been dismantling public education and food/medication regulation spend a single red cent to make Americans’ teeth better? It makes no logical sense, so it is easy to see why generations of Americans that have been screwed over by their government at every turn would be skeptical of anything put in the water supply “for their benefit.” This is about a loss of trust in lawmakers, and all they’ve done to perpetuate it.
As an aside, though, I have watched a ton of people traverse the crunchy leftist to MAGA pipeline and it still bewilders me. “I don’t trust the government, but I trust the sleezy car salesman I have vehemently loathed for decades.” I can only blame lead poisoning for that one.
The decision to fluoridate is with the municipality afaik, but there are probably federal guidelines. Some places have never fluoridated, and if you want it you need to use tablets. There are also loads of people on well water where that’s supported by the local geology - it’s super common in my area. Well water may or may not contain naturally-occurring fluoride, and usually not at the level of a municipal source.
But that makes it even more amazing IMO, that a consensus was reached and implemented in a decentralized fashion in most places, to the point where it’s normalized. The only other collective action I can recall, which might surpass it in scope and impressiveness, also backed by scientific insight, was the Montreal Protocol.
I grew up in Moscow in the 80s, I think they tried fluoride in the water, but it wasn’t nearly enough to make a difference.
As a child, my teeth were atrocious. Constant cavities despite brushing and not eating a ton of sweets and never even trying soda.
After I moved here at 18, my teeth got significantly better. I’m glad there is fluoride in the water!
I think there are town where the fluoride occurs naturally and the inhabitants teeth turned brown, but their teeth were healthy as hell
