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.
> 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.
> 1. The beneficial effect of fluoride occurs only when fluoride is applied externally, in contact with the tooth enamel
I think you are kinda misusing science/not science arguments.
This is indeed the scientific reason why there is flouride in the water. It is also scientific reason why some countries removed it.
In some countries people take care of their teeth on average and in other countries not so much. So there is science for why fluoridation happens. You can read many articles about the fluoride benefits for teeth and what is the impact of teeth for overall health.
>The problem is that fluoridation of the drinking water is not supported by any science.
Yet it is supported by science.
Indeed even the discovery of this property of fluoride came about from the observation of people who naturally consumed fluoride had fewer dental caries and tooth decay.
Further studies cemented the benefits of the passive inclusion of fluoride in drinking water versus control groups.
So no, the science you speak of is almost certainly politics dressed up as science.
Just a note for future people reading this comment. This is completely and totally wrong, and arguably should be deleted from Hackernews for being so deluded.
There have been countless studies that show that communities with flouride in the water have consistently lower rates of tooth decay than communities without fluoride in the water. In fact, community water fluoridation has been recognized as one of the great public health achievements of the 20th century.
Systematic reviews and meta-analyses have shown repeatedly that water fluoridation reduces tooth decay in both children and adults by approximately 25-30%.
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.
The lethal dose of fluoride is in the 5-10g range for an adult [1] with immediate gastrointestinal effects at 15-20x lower. While those levels are quite obviously far above the recommended level of 0.7mg/l, it's very reasonable to call anything that's lethal at 5g, to a human adult, as dangerous.
The latest report from the National Toxicology Program has found a causal reduction of ~1.63 IQ per additional mg/L concentration of fluoride in their urine [2], which would seem sufficient to also call it a neurotoxin, though the NTP under extensive pressure chose to avoid any particular label after having previously declared it a "presumed neurotoxin."
Notably the study from NTP also mentioned something most people here seem to be missing: "There is a concern, however, that some pregnant women and children may be getting more fluoride than they need because they now get fluoride from many sources including treated public water, water-added foods and beverages, teas, toothpaste, floss, and mouthwash, and the combined total intake of fluoride may exceed safe amounts."
Fluoride being seen as desirable at safe levels, may have drove excessive multi-domain inputs of it, which can combine to drive it to unsafe levels.
> it's very reasonable to call anything that's lethal at 5g, to a human adult, as dangerous.
No it is not. It is sensational and intentionally inflammatory. It is especially damming coming from someone in his position.
Vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin B, iron, and caffeine are all deadly at that level. The first 4 are mandatory for life, shall we call them dangerous too? Or perhaps we have some nuance and acknowledge the co spirit oriel background (and other beliefs) of the people pushing the anti-fluoride message.
Obviously. In looking up the LD50/lethal dose for vitamin A, I ended up here. [1] You might notice the big red symbol "Health Hazard" at the top. And the LD50 for vitamin A ranges from 1500-3700mg/kg, contrasted against fluoride's 26-94! But really one of the biggest issues here is that unless you're actively trying to kill yourself with vitamins, an overdose generally has no major effects beyond some gastrointestinal issues. I've experienced it myself by supplementing with vitamins while body building and consuming an already extremely high nutrient diet.
But with fluoride we're talking about extremely low doses, well below the lethal level, being able to potentially permanently damage the mind's of children. Such an extreme risk justifies an abundance of caution, especially when the reason we're doing it is for some relatively modest dental gains, which are likely increasingly obsolete with fluoride being in tooth paste and many other sources besides water. In fact, as per the study I linked to up above, this is precisely the problem!
"Since 1945, the use of fluoride has been a successful public health initiative for reducing dental cavities and improving general oral health of adults and children. There is a concern, however, that some pregnant women and children may be getting more fluoride than they need because they now get fluoride from many sources including treated public water, water-added foods and beverages, teas, toothpaste, floss, and mouthwash, and the combined total intake of fluoride may exceed safe amounts."
> which are likely increasingly obsolete with fluoride being in tooth paste and many other sources besides water.
See the rest of this thread. If you think the group (at RFK doing so in an official government capacity) using such inflammatory language is going to stop at removing fluoride from just water I don't know what to tell you.
I disagree there. When you actually listen to what RFK says instead of the media's spin on the most extreme cuts taken out of context, it's nowhere near as sensational. In particular RFK has consistently and repeatedly stressed an opt-in view on all things health/pharmaceutical related. If you want it, you can have it. But when you do things like fluoridate public water supplies, you turn it into an opt-out system where unless you go out of your way - you're going to get it.
Tooth paste, and other commercial products, are opt-in systems. And indeed there are already numerous unfluoridated options available.
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
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.
> The risk of cavities is reduced by using toothpaste or mouth washes with fluoride, not by drinking fluoridated water.
it always surprises me how willing people are to just make something up and be confident in doing so. We've know for almost 75 years that water fluoridation reduces tooth decay[1] and yet here you are straight up denying that.
Do you just not care if you are correct? or do you know you aren't but are driven by the beliefs you already hold?
> 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
The contact via toothpaste or mouth wash isn’t all that much longer, so why would they be effective if fluoridated water isn’t? People intentionally wash out toothpaste and mouthwash after this short contact.
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..
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?
flouride naturally occurs in water all over the world, and if you don't want any chemicals in your water you should be drinking distilled water. Almost nobody does, because "chemicals in the water reeeeeee!!!" is just a mindless idiotic shreak, not anything insightful or debatable
having to resort to childish attempts like this essentially invalidates anything "insightful" you might want to say. if you can't see that manually adding safety-unproven chemicals to water without people's consent is a weird and unethical thing to do, then that's fine, but don't embarrass yourself and everyone else like this
> if you can't see that manually adding safety-unproven
Nobody is doing that, so maybe don't embarrass yourself like that?
> without people's consent
Also not happening. Consent was established when it was voted on, and if people want to change their local policies they are always free to do so. People that object against majority are also free to drink alternative water from the free market instead of relying on socialist handouts
If you want to have an actual, good faith debate about the pros/cons of a specific additive that's wonderful. But you didn't, you reduced the entire thing to "chemicals bad because chemicals". But, more significantly, so too has the US's administration which Utah is following suit on. The US is full on "feels not reals" government mode.
my friend at this point you are just wildly throwing whatever pops into your mind into the air and hoping it sticks somewhere
when was it voted on and by who? tell me.
you're also aware that people pay for water, it's not free? quite an odd thing for an adult to not know
"good faith debate". from someone who started making mocking autism noises in the middle of a normal conversation? that's what I suggested was embarrassing, you simply didn't read my comment because you yourself have no interest in having a good faith discussion and you're just blindly throwing terms like that as a way of dismissing an opinion you disagree with.
"chemicals bad because chemicals" I never said anything of the sort, this is a strawman you invented to strengthen your struggling argument. there have quite literally been studies linking increased fluoride to toxicity. it's not "chemicals bad because chemicals" it's "there have been studies suggesting this chemical may be toxic so why are we putting it in drinking water without a public consultation in the last 70 years?"
>The US is full on "feels not reals" government mode.
okay and here we have your real motivation. 90% likely you quite obviously don't give a fuck about fluoridated water or human rights, you are pissed about the current executive branch and you're looking to take it out somewhere. this "debate" is over.
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?
What rights of minorities have been targeted? If the only example is trans rights, it's dumb to think it's a simple issue of trampled rights. There are two competing sets of rights, you grant one set you take away from the other. There isn't a good solution.
If you think all the people advocating for small government must be fools or hypocrites, you don't understand the issues an any depth.
Why do trans people not count as a minority being targetted?
I'm curious, what rights are "granted" by making it illegal for doctors to prescribe puberty blocks when they as a medical professional and a child's parents as their guardian agree they're the best medical course of action for a child?
Saying "it's about granting and taking away" like rights are some zero-sum game feels like it's ignoring the complexity of these issues more than what I'm saying.
> What rights of minorities have been targeted? If the only example is trans rights, it's dumb to think it's a simple issue of trampled rights
So it's not an issue of trampled rights if it's just trans rights, yet you can't come up with a reason that trans rights need to be restricted to ensure freedom of others. And it's being disingenuous to call you out for saying trans rights don't matter when you say this...
Example: trans rights in sports. You let them play, you take away the rights to a fair playing field for women born women. You don't let them play, you take away their right to play sport. There isn't a good solution.
You knew the example. You know why society restricts people below 18 from all kinds of things. You are the very definition of disingenuous.
Trans people playing on the sporting team they want to is not "rights", and your focus on it to deflect from the very real issue I brought up is telling...
I don't mind being called "the very definition of disingenuous" by you.
It’s not at all the same, that’s a terrible example. Child vaccinations help reduce the Rt, regardless of whether the benefit to the individual is significant. Statements to the contrary have just confused the public. (biochemist)
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.
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?
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.
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.
That is not true. You are probably thinking of iodine. Actually fluoride is prohibited in children's toothpaste in Germany because of its suspected neurotoxicity.
EDIT: I checked. It is possible to buy salt with added fluoride in Germany but it comes with the health note "Zusätzliche fluoridhaltige Präparate sollten nur auf ärztliche Empfehlung eingenommen werden.", which means you should only use it on recommendation by your MD.
Thanks for pointing that out. I wrote "prohibited" from what I remembered when my child was little and the discrepancy to the info you provided made me research the topic, so here is a summary of what the law (1223/2009 Cosmetic Products Regulation Annex III) has to say:
Tooth paste with more than one per mille of fluoride has either to be marked as unsuitable for children or has to have a note that children have to be supervised using it and a doctor or dentist has to be consulted in case the child swallows more than a pea-sized amount.
So, not quite prohibited, but far from recommended.
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.
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.
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."
They do have a point. If you look at history, Americans do seem to have a bizarre habit of turning everything into a great controversy.
The British abolished slavery with a vote of parliament. The Russian emperor signed a decree, and freed the serfs. Compromised were made, compensation provided and people were made free. But for some reason, Americans felt the matter is important enough to start a civil war around it.
People complain about America being divided and both sides there being unable to compromise, but if anything, that's been the defining feature of the nation since it's creation. "Y'all should take a chill pill, this ain't that important" is a perfectly valid position to have.
> Americans felt the matter is important enough to start a civil war around it.
The answer was the same then as it is now: big business. Slave labor cash crops were central to the economy of the South. Great Britain was not dependent on it in the same way.
> The British abolished slavery with a vote of parliament
The situation was fundamentally different. Colonies that allowed slavery had no representation in parliament and the slave owners received massive “compensation” that the British people had to spend decades paying off..
Also AFAIK most slaveholders were living in Britain and just viewed their plantations as just another investment. There was very little ideological/“way of life”/racial supremacy stuff involved. So if some Liberals wanted to buyout their not necessarily very liquid “property” with cash they didn’t really have much reason to oppose it.
And then there were 5x more slaves in the US in 1864 while the population was only ~30% higher than that of Britain in 1830 (only if we don’t count the colonies).
Not sure how excited would the inhabitants of New England and other free states would have been if they were forced to buy out all the slaves in the country (if that was even an option).
Slavery for the British was a side note at that point while it was a fundamental component of the US economy.
Serfdom was fundamental to the Russian economy, but was abolished nonetheless. Alexander II forced the serfs to pay for their own freedom.
The idea that no compromise was possible sounds somewhat absurd since America did end the civil war with a compromise. "You can free the slaves, but then we oppress them for 100 or so years." Not that it was a good compromise or anything, but it does show that the civil war was fundamentally pointless.
Russia was a centralized absolutist empire. The Tsar could more or less do whatever he wanted as long as the army and some other elements of the bureaucracy supported him.
So it’s hardly applicable to the US (or Britain)
> end the civil war with a compromise
I’m not sure it’s was a compromise per se.
Most people in the north didn’t really actively support country wide abolition before the war (neither did Lincoln) nor were they necessarily particularly concerned about the treatment of the African-American population.
Opposing slavery is a very low bar. Most people in the free states were still deeply racist and segregation was effectively (while not necessarily legally) still a thing there. It only became a major issue in the mid 1900s.
England has 3 or 4 civil wars in it's history entirely focused on the matter of whether people should do as they're told and shut up. The usual result in those conflicts was a resounding victory for the "No" side.
What's rare is for a nation to have a civil war between sides that agree on almost everything, from the structure of the government to the economic system.
I'm not in the US but doesn't that downplay it a bit? Hasn't this been a contentious topic for some time? It's not like no one's been talking about it and Utah suddenly decided out of the blue.
> I'm not in the US but doesn't that downplay it a bit?
No, not really. There are a couple municipalities (Portland, OR, e.g.) that have famously not fluoridated their water forever, but for the most part this is not something most places argue about. UT is an exception.
The irony is that people on the Left will claim that red Utah is ignorantly making public health policy, while deep deep blue Portland is considered “progressive.” The public health “experts” are ripping into Utah but haven’t seemed to care about Portland. Perhaps because the public health people are mostly Democrat and care more about politics than actual health? I would love to be wrong — but why is Portland (and much of Europe) getting a free pass from the controversy, but a (relatively low population) red U.S. state isn’t?
Portland, Oregon is a city so the effects of their policies are a little more limited in scope. IMO if it really is a contentious health issue (well-founded or not, I guess people really do disagree about this issue) it is better to make the decision at the lowest level practical.
I think most cities manage their own utilities. So, Portland has to make some decision on this issue. Utah doesn’t, it was an active choice to intervene.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. What I meant was that it was my impression that the argument over fluoride has been going on for longer and is bigger than this one case. How and why the judge ruled and what the ruling was is tangential to that.
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.
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.
You’re right that dietary changes can impact health, but there are other factors at play. Stress from moving to a new country or experiencing forced dislocation can have serious effects on physical health, weakening the immune system and disrupting overall well-being. Along with this, shifting away from nature-based vocations to more sedentary lifestyles contributes to health decline. The increased consumption of sugar and alcohol also exacerbates dental and general health issues. So, it’s not just diet but a combination of stress, lifestyle changes, and modern substances that contribute to health problems in these populations.
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.
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.