This is an area where the rampant scientism really bugs me... and everyone is polarized politically without looking at the actual evidence.
I looked into the peer reviewed evidence myself when deciding if I should give my kid fluoridated water, and it is pretty clear that high doses of fluoride do cause intellectual impairment, among other problems. The approximate dose where this effect likely just begins to occur is right around where municipal water systems that add fluoride target, but the data is unclear.
Dismissing this possibility as crazy (as it usually is) seems really ignorant. The most plausible explanation is that current levels likely do cause some small level of intellectual impairment in at least some portion people.
One wonders, therefore, whether the Victorian British (who consumed an annual average of 6 pounds of tea per person in 1900) suffered from hyperfluoridation, and what its downstream effects might have been... In fairness, and what needs to be noted, the intellectual output of that place and era was highly superior.
Why would that be? When I was growing up it was not uncommon for kids to drink coffee. I used to brew my own (bad and sweet) coffee before I was old enough for school.
TFA: "Among beverages, tea has the highest potential for increasing daily fluoride intake [17], as the tea plant, Camellia sinensis, accumulates fluoride that is released into tea infusions"
> Dismissing this possibility as crazy (as it usually is) seems really ignorant. The most plausible explanation is that current levels likely do cause some small level of intellectual impairment in at least some portion people.
If so it needs to be compared to the level of intellectual impairment caused by any increase in infection from tooth decay or the more tentatively researched links between mastication and cognitive decline.
Modern dental care to handle any an increase in tooth decay would need to be factored in. My main point is to make sure IQ changes on both sides of the equation are addressed.
Dental health can be controlled in other ways. Forcing a specific dental care method with (hypothetically) known negative effects is immoral; individuals should be allowed to choose their own dental care methods. Informed *choice* is (was?) a crucial tenant of medicine.
> Informed choice is (was?) a crucial tenant of medicine.
We are not talking about doctors doing medical care, but governments making choices for the governed and that gets in to moral and governmental theories for how the consent of the governed is granted/gathered.
> Modern dental care to handle any an increase in tooth decay would need to be factored in. My main point is to make sure IQ changes on both sides of the equation are addressed.
But you’re not even supposed to drink it! It’s supposed to be absorbed on your teeth. Adding it to all drinking so that a tiny amount gets absorbed would sound crazy for another additive.
Fluoride for dental care should be replaced with vitamins D and K2, which will move calcium to the bones and teeth.
Diets could be adapted to be more tooth decay preventative.
We have the concept of “public health” for this reason. This is no more or less non-consensual than vitamin-enriched foods or municipal spraying for malaria.
No there does not need to be such a comparison. The question is whether fluoride affects intellectual development.
The problem of what to do once we know how much fluoride affects intellectual development is a policy problem that is entirely separate from the original question.
Not to mention forcing people into drinking a neurotoxin (from the recommendation of dentists who are very very far from being neurologists too lol). It looks absolutely insane from the outside.
I did the same thing with my kids when they were toddlers.
I also asked water delivery companies about specifying non-flouridated water and they charged more for it (alhambra)...
But here is my main kicker, think of all the various drinks you buy, from wine, beer, soda, coffee, energy drinks, bottled water, water at the restaurant to go with dinner... etc...
All of them, 100% of them, are a product made using flouridated water. Unless they specifically market that they are not (which I would still question).
My dad owned Timberland Water Company in Lake Tahoe, and we served ~600 homes from our little water company, which was literally a spring in the side of the mountain, in Timberland, Lake Tahoe, and it fill our giant water tank and flowed into the pipes to the neighborhood below.
My dad single-handedly ran that water company for several decades. Never flouridated the water. Had a lot of frozen pipes burst though.
I wanted to bottle the water but the PUD signed a law preventing me from doing so.
EDIT: My dad had to sell the water company to the tahoe PUD (they had been trying to buy it for years) - my dad finally sold when he needed the money for cancer...
So the PUD bought it, and I wonder if they flouridate the water now that they integrated it into the entanglement...
Wine is watered to a standard strength. Also grapes can absorb many chemicals from what they are watered with. Thats the point of regional wine differences.
Yeahm I should have left wine off there - my point was anything that uses municipal water as the primary input of water in said products. Which is likely any liquid that comes in something plastic.
It would be interesting to test various alcohols for fluoride though.
I’d rather not, it was 6 years ago and I’m no expert on this topic. My intent here is to explain my experience as a parent looking into these things, and my dismay at the polarization and lack of nuance in scientific discussion.
I would recommend doing a broad google scholar search and looking at everything you can find before coming to your own conclusion, and not letting a stranger or authority cherry pick studies for you.
I could do that. But in the vast majority of cases, I prefer to let the acknowledged experts do that work for me - because that's what they have spent their life doing. In most cases this is more effective that me "Doing my own research" and deciding that the Earth is most decidely flat.
Typically you're not supposed to swallow toothpaste or mouth rinses, so relatively little actually stays in your body. Tap water is generally considered fine to swallow in large amounts though.
A lot of medicines are taken sublingually, because absorption is expected to be higher than through the oral route. Does fluoride not get absorbed that way?
Why is it in so many things? Because it's effective. It's not like people smoked cigarettes because they wanted a small amount of lung cancer risk, they smoked cigarettes for a totally different effect of the product.
> The approximate dose where this effect likely just begins to occur
Don't effects like this usually "begin" at a dosage of zero? If the effect size ends up being 0.001 points of IQ lost at a reasonable dosage, I don't particularly care whether scientists prove that there's a casual and statistically significant effect. Doesn't matter either way
not necessarily; consider hormesis, a two-phased dose response -- something can be highly beneficial at a low dose, then ineffective or simply toxic at higher doses
Did you settle on some kind of filtering system? Curious as to how people remove fluoride - just realized the other day my current *triple filter** aquasana under sink system doesn’t do it
Any reverse osmosis system removes essentially everything from the water. I am using a counter top AquaTru device. They are much more expensive and complex than a “water filter” however.
IQ scores show extreme subnormal intellectual ability. Scores above that (including the majority of below average scores) tell us precisely nothing. Zero. Nada. Nowt.
Consider this research again in that light maybe?
The IQ score research fraud needs to be called, loudly, by all of us every single time some charlatan uses it.
What you are saying isn’t accurate… IQ tests are reliably repeatable, and accurately predict ability at a large number of other tasks. There was a pretty good recent radiolab podcast talking about the history and evidence behind it.
> IQ scores show extreme subnormal intellectual ability. Scores above that (including the majority of below average scores) tell us precisely nothing. Zero. Nada. Nowt.
That's just not true. Among other things, they quite reliably predict how well you will do on an IQ test 10 years from now. This might sound trivial, but it's a good indicator that they are:
1. Measuring something
2. Measuring something that is intrinsic, in the sense of it being stable over time.
There are environmental effects. Common sense things can affect performance on IQ tests, including taking the test a second time in short succession (you get better with practice). Certain early childhood education interventions will cause children to over-perform on IQ tests relative to their IQ measured later in life. If the subject has the flu, they will also tend to underperform. The environment definitely plays a role, but the degree to which it is stable is, to me at least, surprising.
I don’t understand this perspective… if you are interested it would make sense to do your own careful research and come to your own conclusions. Don’t trust me, some random internet stranger that last looked at this stuff 6 years ago to do it for you.
And don’t expect me to compile evidence unless you are paying for my time!
I suspect this type of perspective comes from thinking I am trying to convince others of some controversial position and not recognizing that I’m sharing my personal emotional experience dealing with this issue as a parent?
> The American Dental Association has strongly urged NTP to add a disclaimer to the report highlighting its scientific limitations.
A recurring theme in alternative health circles is that dentists, doctors, etc. fundamentally can’t be trusted due to profit motives: that “real” medicine is suppressed because there’s no profit in it.
I think this quote is worth highlighting because it’s the exact opposite: water fluoridation is virtually free, and has a lopsided positive impact on dental health. In other words: it’s hard to square with the normal claims of profit seeking.
There's profit motive everywhere. "Alternative" medicine is a many billion dollar massive business that often has higher margins than "big pharma" because they aren't highly regulated, yet a ton of people consider it more credible because they think only mainstream medicine has profit motive.
They don't except for "eye wash" procedures like fluoride trays and polishes. The ADA has a vested interest in fluoridation because of reputation, and chemical suppliers do to a minimal degree.
A long time ago, it was decided US fluoridation "improved public health" with the quick win of moving the needle of tooth decay while failing to consider the long-term, detrimental health effects of systemic fluoride ingestion. The rest of the world doesn't do it because of the evidence against it and widespread availability of modern dental care products containing fluoride.
The trivialization of anti-fluoridation is primarily due to mass media indoctrination, i.e., Dr. Strangelove, and association with conspiracy wingnuts.
A reputational interest is impossible to falsify. But I also disagree: I don’t think the ADA would lose any face over a change in this position to most people (and to the anti-fluoride people, nothing will change).
> The rest of the world doesn't do it because of the evidence against it and widespread availability of modern dental care products containing fluoride.
Much of continental Europe does fluoridation through dietary additions (e.g. salt). Just because it isn’t in the water doesn’t mean it isn’t added. There are some countries that notably don’t fluoridate at all, and many fall into two camps: they either don’t have safe municipal water supplies, or already have naturally high fluoride levels (sometimes higher than the US’s introduced levels).
You’ve flipped the causality, by the way: it’s in Dr. Strangelove because it is a conspiracy wingnut thing to obsess over.
Learning that the ADA's recommendation has led to decades of mass poisoning of the population into intellectual impairment will absolutely damage the reputation of the ADA.
First: this isn't true. Even TFA's position is conflicted: the majority of evidence points to current municipal fluoride levels having no meaningful impact on mental development. There are large parts of the world (including parts of Switzerland and Japan) with significantly higher levels of fluoride in their groundwater than the U.S. adds, and even these areas do not support the hypothesis.
Second: if you think that the average American will remember the ADA for fluoride, I'll ask you for your opinion on General Motors. They actually did poison our air and soil with a known neurotoxin for over 50 years, and they seem to be doing fine in the court of public opinion.
Windsor (ON) decided to start adding it back in for public health reasons:
> According to the latest oral health report[1] from WECHU, the percentage of children with "decay and/or requiring urgent care" in 2016/2017 increased by 51 per cent compared to 2011/2012.
> "The most alarming trend was the three-fold increase in the proportion of children eligible for topical fluorides," the report reads.
This is contorted. But even if it was true: I’m pretty sure the cost of repairing caries significantly outstrips the cost (both to you and your insurance) for regular checkups.
The point is about municipal water. I don’t have to (and in fact don’t) believe that the ADA is a virtuous organization to observe that there is no financial benefit to their support for fluoride in municipal water supplies. Less fluoride in the water means more money for them.
True. I wouldn't give a baby anything that doesn't have a safe chain of custody and history of purity and reliability. Even in the 1970's from whence I came, my parents didn't trust tap water for anything more than brushing teeth and showering because the water had floating crap (scale) in it and high hardness.
Personal water intake history:
70's - 1993: Name brand bottled water from grocery stores
1993 - 1997: Self-service distilled or reverse osmosis water store, and remote pump at home
1997 - 2001: Carbon block, multi-stage, under sink filtration
2001 - 2018: Add reverse osmosis
2018 - present: Add UV stage
PSA1: Alkaline water is a scam
PSA2: Buy a water softener, whole house filter system, under-counter RO system, and maybe an indoor tankless water heater together on a wink-wink commercial purchase order (taxable) and have it freighted to your driveway (liftgate charge). It saves thousands on plumber markup and allows buying a TCO cheaper and better system.
People have been drinking hard water for a long time. Seeing as the whole population of a place like Copenhagen hasn't keeled over or shown any particular health issues in general I'm going to come down on the side of it's fine for health but annoying for appliances. I've got a filter for tea water for taste preference. The level's you're going to seem a bit extreme, are they a waste of your time and money?
There’s plenty of evidence that many of the minerals in hard water are beneficial. I use mineral drops to reharden my RO water after removing the flouride, and hexavalent chromium in my tap water.
"Existing animal
studies provide little insight into the question of whether fluoride exposure affects IQ. Human
mechanistic studies were too heterogenous and limited in number to make any determination on
biological plausibility. The body of evidence from studies on adults is also limited and provides
low confidence that fluoride exposure is associated with adverse effects on adult cognition.
There is, however, a large body of evidence on IQ effects in children. There is also some
evidence that higher fluoride exposure is associated with other neurodevelopmental and
cognitive effects; although, because of the heterogeneity of the outcomes, there is low
confidence in the literature for these other effects. This review finds, with moderate confidence,
that higher fluoride exposure [e.g., represented by populations whose total fluoride exposure
approximates or exceeds the WHO Guidelines for Drinking-water Quality of 1.5 mg/L of
fluoride (WHO 2017)] is consistently associated with lower IQ in children. More studies are
needed to fully understand the potential for lower fluoride exposure to affect children’s IQ."
The commenters raise some objections about the way confidence of the results were expressed.
I think the consequences are so dire (IQ impairment in children) that any doubt has to be rigorously examined.
Sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about.
> filter out beneficial minerals
Take a supplement if you feel you are deficient in any specific mineral because it doesn't justify whole body fluoridation or ingesting sketchy tap water. Flint, MI isn't an isolated incident.[0,1,2] Anecdotally, my mom's cousin's family died from silent uranium contamination of the tap water in the Four Corners region.
> are $$
I bought a 100 GPD RO system for $180 that uses generic parts. Running cost is $70/year including cleaning and membranes. Yes, it's work.
> waste a lot of water
FUD. Using less water on landscaping, hygiene, and laundry are far more important. Brine only leaves the system during generation. If there's no demand, e.g., you're not taking any water out of the tank, then there's zero waste. Permeate pumps ($50 option) reduces brine waste considerably by saving the backpressure leaving the system and boosting the intake pressure at the membrane. The brine waste stream is roughly 2x with a permeate pump vs 8x without. RO water at our house is only used for drinking and ice, which is ~2 GPD, so the total water usage is trivial.
Having had one for years they are fairly expensive, require some not insignificant maintenance and cleaning to keep them running optimally and are made almost entirely of plastic and are not recyclable.
A better option would be a carbon + sediment filter but again these are usually plastic fiber or at the least some sort of synthetic fiber and carbon in a plastic shell - a slight step up in recyclability than RO filters though.
I'd wager it's far more efficient for the municipality to get their water quality right at the source than every home fit a filter.
Use a different sediment pre filter that those cheap-o ones. It's just to prevent fouling of the rest of the system should serious sediment or scale come down the pipe.
For a final filter, it's a good idea to use a specialized filter for chemicals of concern, typically heavy metals and/or chloramines. (Example: https://matrikx.com )
NSF polypropylene should be studied more but I doubt it is a significant source of microplastics. Although, I wished pressurized residential RO systems could be 99% stainless steel or something else inert and easy to clean like thick borosilicate glass because PP does stain. It's important to use NSF listed / FDA compliant (CFR21.177.2600 A-E) O-rings and lubrication rather than random junk from Amazon. Any "water filtration" system that doesn't use RO or significant water pressure is only for taste and not a filtration system.
- RO for drinking water and icemaker for most people. Fancy: Bathroom faucet RO needs additional piping, pump (sometimes), and a larger tank.
- Whole house filters (3- to 5-stage carbon) provides a belts-and-suspenders check on tap water quality.
- Cation exchange (salt consuming) water softeners where applicable. Soft water feels good in the shower and improve laundry efficiency. A house's exterior and kitchen cold water ideally should be plumbed with filtered hard water, bypassing water softening for irrigation.
There should be a lot of natural experiments that can test this. Just find the boundaries of municipal water systems that fluoridate and take a look at the populations near the boundary but on opposite sides.
Often those boundaries will cut through a neighborhood and so you end up with a population of demographically similar households but some are on city water and some have wells.
Many of those neighborhoods will have fluoride levels in their well water that are quite different from the levels in their city water, making them good subjects for a study.
Give it up, don't use reason against conspiracy theories because they're exactly a refusal to think.
Evidence? Just look at the anti-vax paranoia after the Covid vaccine came along. Billions have been vaccinated, deaths decreased and idiots proudly say they won't take vaccines.
I'm more worried about possible impacts of an increase in atmospheric CO2 on cognitive function. It probably isn't an easily measurable amount on individuals, but across the worlds population it may have a notable effect.
Unless we finally get that tooth growing paste that has been talked about for the past two decades. Or actually, offering to shave those teeth down might still make a good business proposition,
Looking up north to Canada, there are cities that removed fluoridated water and found an increase in severe cavities in children[1]. This would assuredly happen in America as well because like we found during the pandemic and people not knowing how to wash their hands, most people do not brush their teeth properly either.
I can imagine several ways to manage that outcome that don't involve engaging in an unrequested medical intervention on their behalf using the public water supply.
They also didn't "find" that. They have a very limited study with exceptionally poor controls that they openly acknowledge and thus they're only capable of suggesting an "indication" that this "may be true."
For such an important question, I would want a lot more work than that particular study, which only examined 2nd graders, has done before arriving at a conclusion that we should medicate an entire population without consent.
Finally, I'd suggest a better study, between the cities that had fluoride removed, were the citizens even informed that a change was made to their water supply? 2 to 3 years later, instead of looking at kids teeth, how many adults understood the ramifications of the change? How many of them even consciously _knew_ the change had been made?
Which highlights the point here, it's fundamentally unethical for a government to wholesale dose their entire population, even if they think they're doing them a favor.
> Which highlights the point here, it's fundamentally unethical for a government to wholesale dose their entire population, even if they think they're doing them a favor.
Do you hold the same belief when the government requires kids to get certain vaccines before entering school?
So because one type of intervention is "forced" all types can be? Are you trying to give the "slippery slope" argument more credit or? Just because vaccines are more or less required doesn't give any argument for doing so for other stuff. Unless you want even more opposition considering you are literally using it as a slippery slope to justify more requirements.
(I'm not saying I oppose fluoride in water, I think the attention it gets is insane for what is probably not much effects on cognition even if those claims turn out to be true. I have naturally bad teeth so I'm very happy to get fluoride, and use medical toothpastes with very high concentrations of it. But I really dislike when this type of argument is made. It only provides more arguments that slippery slopes are real, and that a certain compromise or requirement will lead to more inevitably. Just argue about the merit of fluoride in water, on its own. )
No where did I say I am for or against flouride in water. I'm just trying to see if they are against all government medical intervention or just this one.
> Do you hold the same belief when the government requires kids to get certain vaccines before entering school?
What an odd inference to attempt to draw. There's no comparison. Can parents decide to NOT send their children to school because they don't want to comply with entry requirements? If the answer is yes, then your question is obviously a complete non-sequitur.
> Can parents decide to NOT send their children to school because they don't want to comply with entry requirements? If the answer is yes, then your question is obviously a complete non-sequitur.
You can also decide to just not drink from the tap. There are large groups of people that make that decision.
Slightly off-topic but wasn't there work on eliminating the bacteria that colonizes the mouth and causes tooth decay? I vaguely remember reading there was putative work that had reached trials or something and it just kind of fell of the map.
Obviously thats when things are found to have efficacy and be safe etc but the tenor was slightly conspiratorial in the way of "ICE manyfacturer buys and shelves first electric car"...
Are the mouth bacteria actually valuable or impossible to erradicate?
Recapping American jurisprudence in 2024: anyone can file a suit in order to get a jurist to draw a conclusion of chemistry. Nobody has standing to get a jurist to draw a conclusion about matters of law, such as whether their rights to vote have been violated.
I looked into the peer reviewed evidence myself when deciding if I should give my kid fluoridated water, and it is pretty clear that high doses of fluoride do cause intellectual impairment, among other problems. The approximate dose where this effect likely just begins to occur is right around where municipal water systems that add fluoride target, but the data is unclear.
Dismissing this possibility as crazy (as it usually is) seems really ignorant. The most plausible explanation is that current levels likely do cause some small level of intellectual impairment in at least some portion people.