this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

How much oatmeal would I have to eat to die of fluoride poisoning?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 hours ago

The people who need to hear this sadly would not believe that too much water can kill you even if you showed them someone die from it, I fear. I'd also be shocked if they read "water poisoning" and didn't think of poisoned water.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I feel like I woke up in the movie Dr. Strangelove

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 hours ago

I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

Second time I got to post this today, unfortunately because it's almost ceased being satire.

[–] [email protected] 69 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Oh yeah? And what if someone ignores that, simply lies and says it's toxic? I'm convinced!

[–] [email protected] 21 points 7 hours ago

And both of these people telling me about fluoride in water are both experts in their field. One an expert toxicologist, and the other an expert liar. Now I don't know what to believe.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 hours ago

I don't understand your point.

Nobody drinks the ocean. Fluoride is barely active topically. Most humans rarely if at all swim in the ocean.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

So, once again, DHMO is the chemical we need to fear.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 hours ago (3 children)

The stuff also known as hydric acid. People just don't talk enough about how corrosive it is. Plus, it gets in the air and gets in your lungs!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

It’s 10 million times more acidic than drain cleaner!!! And the government is trying to force you to drink it by forcing it to be used in municipal drinking fountains

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

It’s so pervasive that they have found it in the bodies of every single child worldwide.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

There was an incident involving it on April 14th 1912 that took over 1500 lives.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

I heard that anyone who's ever come into contact with it has later died

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago

terrorists will drink vast amounts of it every day before an attack

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 hours ago

Its a common component of all cancer cells, and trace amounts have been found in the blood of dead lab rats.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 hours ago

i know this guy has a fancy degree and everything, but is he really as reliable a source as rfk junior? you don’t need fluoride when you have an army of worms ready to eat any kinds of bacteria that may enter your system.

[–] [email protected] 185 points 12 hours ago (6 children)

Toxicologist here. I think that take is dishonest or dumb.

Taking a lethal dose is almost never the concern with any substance in our drinking water.

Hormones, heavy metals, persistent organic chemicals, ammonia are all in our drinking water. But for all of them we can't drink enough water to die from a high dose.

Some of them still have a large effect on our bodies.

It's about the longterm effects. Which longterm studies to learn about. That makes them harder to study.

Still doesn't mit flouride does anything bad longerm. But the argument is bad.

[–] [email protected] 84 points 12 hours ago (3 children)

Yeah, by this argument lead in the water isn't a concern.

[–] [email protected] 76 points 11 hours ago

You just made me mad by helping me realize that the Trump bros are going to break water by removing fluoride long before they fix water by removing lead.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 hours ago (4 children)

Yeah but lead bioaccumulates where as fluoride/ine doesn't

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

It's so funny I was just having a similar conversation about neurotoxic venomous animals in another thread. Lethality is an obviously concerning threshold, but there are substances out there that can easily destroy your quality of life and livelihood that never reach the concern of being lethal.

I think for mostly rational people concerned about fluoride in their water is that it was a public health decision made with little to no actual science proving it's safety or efficacy when it was first decided that they were going to add it to the public water supply. The proposed benefits of it weren't even supported by scientific evidence, it was just supposed that exposure to sodium fluoride could potentially reduce tooth decay for some.

Personally, I've suffered from the cosmetic damage of dental fluorosis, and I'm not necessarily thrilled about fluoride. But I have way more issues with public mandates founded on pseudoscience than I am with sodium fluoride. Especially now that we can see evidence that for some people fluoride can be especially beneficial.

So what was wrong with giving people the option of using fluoride toothpaste or mouthwashes... Why did it have to go into the public water supply?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Mate, your entire second paragraph is completely false. Like, you need to just read this: https://www.nidcr.nih.gov/health-info/fluoride/the-story-of-fluoridation

It's considered by the CDC as one of the greatest Public Health Achievements of the last Century. There have been dozens, if not hundreds of studies about fluoride affects in the water supply.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 50 minutes ago

Yeah that proves my point entirely.

In 1945 they fluoridated the first public water supply.

In 1979 the first published research began to appear to show how fluoride might be able to remineralize dental enamel.

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[–] [email protected] 58 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (3 children)

The fluoride added to water gets it up to 0.7mg/liter.

That ends up to be 2 or 3 drops in a 55 gallon drums worth of water. Not much.

Fluoride is a natural substance and is found in many areas drinking water already. Many areas in much higher concentrations than 0.7mg/liter, so realistically people all over the world have drank fluoridated water for thousands of years.

You have to well over double the 0.7 before any health issues may appear and the first to appear is at about triple the concentration in kids under 8 years old who drink it for years getting spots on their teeth. The spots are only superficial.

Going into concentrations even higher than that CAN cause health issues when drank for longer periods of time. All of those cases being from naturally occurring fluoride, which actually effects somewhere north of 20% of the world's population.

Which makes the argument that fluoride in our water keeps us passive as being extra stupid, since water sourced around Columbia (the country) is far higher than .07mg/liter and Columbia seems to be caught in violence and turmoil and instability quite a bit over the decades.

*edit: Colombia

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 hours ago

Just because a concentration is low doesn’t mean it’s safe. Water with 0.7 mg/L of Po-210 is lethal.

You can put an amount of it in a 55 gallon drum that is not visible

It’s a natural substance

Fluoride is in fact safe at the amounts that the FDA regulates but saying it’s a small concentration or that it’s natural are not the reasons it’s safe. It’s the hundreds of peer reviewed research articles that show that it’s safe

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Its presence in groundwater is how we discovered it's good for teeth.

In fact, there used to be so much in some areas,it actually stained the teeth. In Colorado Springs a dentist noticed that the children were developing brown stains on their teeth. In researching it, it was discovered that the "Colorado Brown Stain" was caused by excessive fluoride in the drinking water. But it also lead to the discovery that regions with natural fluoride present but in lower levels than Colorado Springs didn't have stained teeth, but did have lower levels of tooth decay.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Small note: the country name is spelled “Colombia,” and spelling it correctly means you don’t need to specify which one!

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Next headline will be how fluoride contributes to autism and it will have just as much evidence as the vaccine bit does. How is this even a thing? Is ground zero on this RFK?

Meanwhile, all the people who can’t afford dentists will have even worse teeth going forward. Make America’s teeth British again.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (5 children)

Well look at the statistics:

Fluoride:

  • Water fluoridation in the United States began in the 1940s
  • By 1949, nearly 1 million Americans were receiving fluoridated tap water
  • In 1951, the number jumped dramatically to 4.85 million people
  • By 1952, the number nearly tripled again to 13.3 million Americans
  • In 1954, the number exceeded 20 million people
  • In 1965 an additional 13.5 million Americans gained access to fluoridated water.
  • By 1969, 43.7% of Americans had access to fluoridated tap water.
  • In 2000, approximately 162 million Americans (65.8% of the population served by public water systems) received optimally fluoridated water
  • 2006: 69.2% of people on public water systems (61.5% of total population)
  • 2012: 74.6% of people on public water systems (67.1% of total population)

Autism:

  • First recognised in the 1940s
  • During the 1960s and 1970s, prevalence estimates were approximately 0.5 cases per 1,000 children.
  • Prevalence rates increased to about 1 case per 1,000 children in the 1980s.
  • 2000: 1 in 150 children
  • 2006: 1 in 110 children
  • 2014: 1 in 59 children
  • 2016: 1 in 54 children
  • 2020: 1 in 36 children

Seems pretty clear cut to me.

/s because people think I posted this in seriousness.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

They need to do stuff like this often in HS to show students how you can bullshit truths and make its facade of truth feel legit.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

This is, and I don't say this lightly, one of the dumbest conclusions I've ever seen someone jump to.

Might as well say that fluoride in the water caused software developers, lmao.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Satire, I think.

Classic ice cream sales and violent crimes in summer correlation.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

It's too much like the real anti-fluoride arguments, man. I can't recognize it, man.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 hours ago

Actually, software developers cause autism

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 hours ago

Let's ignore the better diagnosis processes and just take two trending upward statistics and make a broad correlation and call it fact.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

Not sure if you're being sarcastic but if not, then I'm about to blow your fucking mind

STOP EATING RICE!

NAME YOUR DAUGHTER SARAH, IT'S THE ONLY WAY TO SAVE THE AMAZON! AND WHATEVER YOU DO...

...DO NOT NAME THEM TRISTEN

If we shut down flights to Antarctica, inflation would've been solved yesterday.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

Damn, I guess fluoridated water also then caused computers, world population growth and the eradication of polio.

Idk if this is a troll post or this person never heard of the fact that correlation does not equal causation.

Case and point.

[–] [email protected] 55 points 13 hours ago (8 children)

It's not about toxicity, it's about mind control! Fluoride makes you passive. But you know this since you're a tool of the government pushing poison.

Just bleach your teeth like normal people! You know, with the bleach under the kitchen sink.

(Don't actually do this)

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 13 hours ago

Toxicologist, toxicity, minuscule, fluoridated -- your big doctor words are just trying to trick us!

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