A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
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)
I mean, trump got reelected. I hope it's the flouride.
Like the ol' General said / s
We 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.
Fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face.
Eating seeds as a pastime activity
Toxicologist, toxicity, minuscule, fluoridated -- your big doctor words are just trying to trick us!
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.
Well look at the statistics:
Fluoride:
Autism:
Seems pretty clear cut to me.
/s because people think I posted this in seriousness.
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.
I want someone who knows about these things to respond to this 2012 metastudy that ties naturally fluoridated groundwater to neurological problems. I have used this the past decade to say “well the science is unclear;” I found it back then (2013 at the latest) when I was trying to disprove a crank and really questioned my shit. There was a(n unrelated?) follow up later that questioned the benefits. Since this is very far from my area of expertise, I’m not championing these; I just want to understand why they’re wrong or at least don’t matter in the discourse.
(Edit: for the educated, there could be a million ways these are wrong. Authors are idiots, study isn’t reproducible, industry capture, conclusions not backed up by data, whatever. I just don’t have the requisite knowledge to say these are wrong and therefore fluoridated water is both safe and useful)
Update: great newer studies in responses! You can have a rational convo starting with these two that moves to newer stuff.
There’s a follow up meta study from 2020.:
In conclusion, based on the totality of currently available scientific evidence, the present review does not support the presumption that fluoride should be assessed as a human developmental neurotoxicant at the current exposure levels in Europe.
A study in Canada was published in 2019 looking at the differences between 2 neighboring cities where on stopped fluoridating water in 2011. They saw that saw a significant increase in cavities in children in the city that stopped fluoridating vs the other. This is despite the fact the the city without fluoridation actually has somewhat higher adherence to brushing, flossing, and going to the dentist. No difference was seen yet in permanent teeth, but that's because the study would need more time to see effects there.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cdoe.12685
Of course, we still should do more studies on fluoride neurotoxicity. Most studies look at levels of fluoride at 1.5mg/L or higher, which is more than double the recommended level by the US (0.7 mg/L). There is a hard limit in the US of 4mg/L, but the EPA strongly recommends a limit of 2mg/L. This only really matters for locations with very high levels of fluoride in the groundwater, and is thus quite rare. The EU's limit is 1.5mg/L.
I also came across the same study while looking to disprove a conspiracy nut. We should really do more research on the effects of fluoride.
The Harvard geneticists little opinion piece she wrote completely ignores all the direct evidence that was gathered back then, about how cavities always decreased in fluoridated areas when compared to neighboring cities that hadn't yet done so.
Also, yeah, it's bad for you in large doses. Literally anything is bad for you in large enough doses.
Fluoridated water doesn't seem to make a difference on cavities. It does have neurological effects. It's simply not acutely fatal. It's already in our toothpaste. We don't need it in our municipal water supply and the majority of developed countries don't.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/magazine/magazine_article/fluoridated-drinking-water/
Thank you for the link. It's worth mentioning that there are response letters to the publication you linked from other experts, the majority of which are critical and point out misinterpretations and omissions by the author. It's always good to question, but in this instance it looks like the consensus amongst experts evaluating that publication is still that fluoridation is safe and improves dental health. The response letters can be read here.
Edit to add: The responses include a letter from the dean of the Harvard School of Dental Medicine stating that the publication is deeply flawed and requesting a retraction, and a similar condemnation from the students of the Harvard School of Dental Medicine. The article was given greater weight by being linked to Harvard, but in fact Harvard dental experts explicitly disagree.
This is a disingenuous take. This is a cherry-picked article that does not come to the conclusion you draw here. You also state "It does have neurological effects" but leave out the most important piece of information for that to be true: high doses.
Why should anyone trust what you say when you're twisting the information to suit your narrative?
Counterpoint: I live in an area without fluoridated water, and I'm told that dentists can reliably identify people who didn't grow up here by the state of their teeth.
Your link is more or less an opinion piece from a geneticist, so this isn't even her field of study.
All her health issues she points out are for fluoride concentrations over triple the amount that tap water is brought up to.
The reason it's usage spread across the country was because while the entire country had access to things such as fluoridated toothpaste, counties and cities that started fluoridation of their water supplies consistently had fewer cavities than areas that didn't fluoridate the water. This alone outlines the glaringly obvious flaw in her argument.
Further still, while the US adds fluoride to the tap water in a concentration to reach 0.5mg to 0.7mg per liter of water (a couple drops per 50 gallons), natural drinking water for over 20% of the world is in concentrations well over that (to be clear, being well over that can cause health issues. Too much of anything can cause health issues.)
In other words, there is no evidence that this low concentration of fluoride causes health issues. There is loads of direct evidence that it reduces cavities. Plus, this woman from your opinion piece is talking out of her field. Not to mention that 21% of the world's drinking water supply naturally already falls within the recommended range of what the US takes theirs up to. It's just that most of the US water supply naturally falls below that amount.
I appreciate that you put some reputable sources, rather than relying on a random tweet/post.
The source is not as reputable as it appears. The article in question is not from the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, and in fact was condemned by the HSDM. The actual dental experts at Harvard requested a formal retraction of the article: "Based on the significant flaws in the magazine article, we respectfully request that the article be rescinded, and a correction be published to clarify any misleading information that was provided."
That's because it's just a bs opinion piece by some geneticist. There's loads of very conclusive evidence and testing proving that it reduces cavities. Also, this geneticist points out that it only causes problems in doses far higher than what fluoridated tap water gets brought up to.
Keep in mind that they listed Canada as having non-flouride water, presumably based on the sole criteria that it's not a national requirement. The split between communities with and without flouride in their water varies wildly by province.
It's an opinion piece by a geneticist (so not a chemist or biologist or a field that could be related) and she ignores all the direct evidence that every city and county that added fluoride started having fewer cavities than neighboring areas that hadn't yet added it.
She then further points out that it only causes health issues in much higher concentrations than what the US was getting our water supply up to. You know, like literally anything that you get too much of is bad for you. You can literally die from drinking too much plain water. Too much of anything will kill you.
Only 3% of Quebec's population has access to fluoridated water and we have way more dental issues than any other province in Canada.
but what about my precious bodily fluids?!?
"Have you ever seen a commie drink a glass of water?"
Lemminologist here:
the fluoride levels vary because that’s how numbers do in reality