Same reason why they stared iodine to salt… because people were having mental development issues.
Now is it still necessary? That’s a different question but let’s not pretend that we don’t know why it was done.
An experiment in Windsor, Ontario (across the border from Detroit, MI):
> Yemmi Calito's children are patients of Dr. Meriano. The two oldest kids were raised on fluoridated water in Windsor and both have healthy teeth. Her two youngest weren't, and they've had to be treated for serious tooth decay. Calito said their oral hygiene habits are the same.
> "The younger two I feel they have more cavities," Calito said. "My little one, my three-year-old, actually had to go have general anesthesia … [about] four weeks ago to get his teeth fixed. They were in pretty bad shape."
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/fluoride-tap-water-1.4990257
Calgary, AB, stopped and has recently decided to restart:
* https://calgary.citynews.ca/2022/11/17/calgary-fluoride-wate...
The public voted in 2021 to stop:
> What’s happened since 2012? A study found that within a couple of years of ending fluoridation, decay in children’s baby teeth had risen by 65 per cent compared to 2005, while the increase was only 14 per cent in Edmonton, which continues to fluoridate its water. “We weren’t looking at little tiny cavities that needed to be fixed. They were large cavities, they were destroyed teeth,” says dental hygienist Denise Kokaram, who led a dental program for vulnerable Calgary youth in the wake of fluoridation’s discontinuation.
> In 2019, the University of Calgary’s public health institute summarized for council’s benefit the body of science on fluoridation—the abundant evidence that it curbs tooth decay in both children and adults, and the lack of conclusive evidence of the myriad harms that anti-fluoride activists allege, from bone deterioration to brain disease. (Authorities have lowered recommended fluoride levels in water to limit the risk of fluorosis, a condition that mainly causes mild tooth discoloration.)
* https://macleans.ca/news/after-a-decade-of-cavities-will-cal...
Stop giving kids these insanely high levels of sugar. No soda is a great start.
Same thorn in my side is this completely crazy trend that this new life-long injection Ozempic/Wegovy is being suggested for kids 12 and up. Like what? It also atrophies muscle, tendons, and bones.
I hope with the next generation of leaders, we stop this madness of blindly trusting big pharma and corporations and ask where the money trail goes, and what may actually be best for our kids and loved ones.
Not saying you shouldn’t reduce sugar intake, that’s not my point - but - factors like genetics are very important too, and fluoride might help for such people.
So apparently there's a few things that trivially impact your dental health besides usual cleaning and few people seem to know about them.
You would think that in a “capitalist, free-market” such as the United States, an innovation with a clear and pronounced benefit over the status quo would take the marketplace by storm and quickly become the new status quo.
Last I checked, you can get Sensodyne with Novamin toothpaste on Amazon, but it does come from Canada.
"Review shows that Novamin has significantly less clinical evidence to prove its effectiveness as a remineralization agent in treating both carious and non-carious lesion. Hence, better designed clinical trials should be carried out in the future before definitive recommendations can be made."
I don’t know enough about chemistry or dentistry to really say beyond that which side is the correct side
https://www.lotusdental.com.au/post/effect-of-western-diet-o...
Previously, I’ve found the anti-fluoride argument to be a little shaky but I’m a scientist and some of the data in the report might make me reconsider that stance. That’s what science is. I must say that personally I haven’t drunk fluoride in my tap for decades really, since I use a reverse osmosis filter for my tap. So if you don’t want to drink fluoride you don’t have to.
I haven’t noticed more cavities in periods when I don’t drink fluoride vs when I do. But I brush my teeth twice a day (teeth bathed in fluoride toothpaste residue) and go to the dentist every six months. I don’t really have cavities.
I found this paper an interesting history on water fluoridation-
Debating Water Fluoridation Before Dr. Strangelove
Super simple answer: one requires everyone change their individual habits. Difficulty - very hard. The other requires no change at all on the individual level. Difficulty - very easy.
Be careful with falling into the "public health initiatives are just a bandaid" trap. I was going to say you probably wouldn't approach a pandemic by telling everyone to eat more healthfully but considering your last sentence, maybe you would have argued for that approach.
Or just every calorie?
Coca Cola, more fluoride, same classic taste!
I kind of remember this from being a kid. Until I was a teen anything with complex or savory tastes was absolutely disgusting. Only carbs, sugars, and very simple flavors and textures seemed edible. It changed when I got to around 12-14 when suddenly a salad was okay and some vegetables started to taste good. Another few years and I’d eat all kinds of things. Became a bit of a foodie by college.
It’s got to be some relic of early hominid evolution. My speculation is that in nature there are a lot of savory things that are toxic. So kids have a natural aversion to them until they are old enough to have learned the tribal knowledge about what is okay to eat. Sweet and carby things are usually safe to eat. If a kid eats random berries or grains thats probably okay. Random mushrooms or plants might kill them. Random sources of protein can also contain parasites or nasty infections.
No, it requires… parenting and education? And stopping children from being exposed to ads for sugary crap 12 hours a day.
Habits are a huge part of it. Kids who “would only eat sugar if they could” are already used to consuming lots of sugar. They will definitely not starve themselves to death if no sugar/carbs are easily available in the house.
Here in the Netherlands a lot of (but not all) kids choose to snack on cucumbers etc and are quite reserved in how much candy they eat. School doesn’t allow high-carb foods. Parties will have fries, lemonade and cake, no soda or infinite amounts of candy. Mine is approaching the early teens and hasn’t ever drank soda, without suffering any peer pressure (yet).
I see this like mandating using a helmet and HANS device when driving drunk. Surely it might help reduce casualties, but is not addressing the problem that people are inflicting unto themselves.
Dutch children love their bottles of apple juice and dutch teens love a can of chocolate milk, but I have to agree that the portion sizes of these are less than half of what you would get in the US.
> Reducing kids intake of sugar requires a level of vigilance bordering on isolation from society,
This is why I praise my child and treat him (not with sweets) every time that he turns down candy at friends' houses or parties. When the parent stands between the child and sweets, he is considered neurotic by other parents. When the child stands his ground, he is praised. I've been fortunate that all three of my children have stood with me on this stance.
Personally I didn't really understand that properly until either my late twenties or early thirties.
> In this study, maternal exposure to higher levels of fluoride during pregnancy was associated with lower IQ scores in children aged 3 to 4 years. These findings indicate the possible need to reduce fluoride intake during pregnancy.
"Association Between Maternal Fluoride Exposure During Pregnancy and IQ Scores in Offspring in Canada"
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
Consider this excerpt from Wikipedia's article on 'Tooth brushing':
> In the United States, although toothbrushes were available at the end of the 19th century, the practice did not become widespread until after the Second World War, when US soldiers continued the tooth brushing that had been required during their military service.[4]
Asia: close to none in China (didn't find any hard numbers), none in India, less than 1% in Japan. Only Malaysia is doing it at any resonable scale.
Europe: 2% of the population get it, roughly 14 million people with 10.5 million of those being in the UK and Ireland.
So that leaves North America, with the exception of Mexico which jas high natural fluoride levels and fluorides salt, Australia and Latin America.
Going by these numbers, the majority of people get fluoride through different means from drinking water. Afroca of cpurse has a lot of other issues regarding drinking water, starting with the exostince of clean drinking water itself.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_by_countr...
So techinicalls you are correct, overall much less so.
Japan, China, India, and much of Europe have many areas with natural levels of fluoride in the water near or even above the recommended level. Which seriously distort their numbers as proponents of adding fluoride to water supplies don’t want to increase it arbitrarily only to safe and effective levels.
China has some really interesting data as in one location removing fluoride quickly resulted in “the incidence of dental caries among 4-year-old children had increased by 62%.”
>Water fluoridation reduces cavities in children, while efficacy in adults is less clear.[9][10] A Cochrane review estimates a reduction in cavities when water fluoridation was used by children who had no access to other sources of fluoride to be 35% in baby teeth and 26% in permanent teeth.[9] However, this was based on older studies which failed to control for numerous variables, such as increasing sugar consumption as well as other dental strategies.[9] Most European countries have experienced substantial declines in tooth decay, though milk and salt fluoridation is widespread in lieu of water fluoridation.[11] Recent studies suggest that water fluoridation, particularly in industrialized nations, may be unnecessary because topical fluorides (such as in toothpaste) are widely used, and caries rates have become low.[3]
This is not directly related to the topic of Fluoride, but Iodine was actually initially introduced to reduce goiters. The mental benefits were a wonderful, unexpected side-effect. Studies have put the effects anywhere between 8-15 IQ bump for populations that were Iodine deficient. Pretty jaw dropping when you think about it.
Move that mean down one SD (15 IQ points). And now OVER 15% of the people meet the intellectual impairment criteria.
Put it another way, due to the shape of the normal distribition moving IQ down 10-15 points amounts to 2-3X increase in the number with abnormally low IQ.
Cut to the modern era, where fewer and fewer jobs are available for those with intellectual impairments, and the world requires more and more technical prowess and the situation is far worse than the figures appear.
Fun fact: Dentists recommend flossing before brushing.
Edit: "For example, in Finland and Germany, tooth decay rates remained stable or continued to decline after water fluoridation stopped in communities with widespread fluoride exposure from other sources." - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation
2. It is kind of difficult to consume fluorinated water without exposing your teeth topically to the fluoride.
3. Ingesting fluorine is definitely not good for you and recent studies seem to confirm this.
So, it seems to me that while fluorinating drinking water would incidentally topically expose teeth to its beneficial effects, we don't really need to fluorinate our drinking water as there are other ways to expose teeth topically to fluorine that don't involve drinking fluorinated water.
And no, fluorinating water was not a good decision because of the cautionary principle. Even from the beginning, they knew that the effects came from topical exposure, adding it to drinking water was reckless.
But hell, this was the time where we added lead to gasoline.
What I heard (but did not verify) was that cavities reduced similarly in countries that did not have fluoride in the water around the same time.
A point to be considered here is that the institutionalised belief in water fluoridation for the half-century which preceded the York Review was apparently not grounded in much solid scientific enquiry, if any.
This review was conducted 3 years after the CDC published "Ten Great Public Health Achievements in the 20th Century", which included water fluoridation as one of these great achievements.
Another curiosity of this public health belief was the guideline that water fluoridation levels need to vary in a region based on temperature. This was because it is apparently a predictor of water consumption amounts by small children.
Colder climates were meant to have higher levels of fluoride (up to 1.2 ppm) because people apparently drink less water, and warmer climates were meant to have lower levels (0.7 ppm), because they drink more water.
It indicates that consumption is a very important factor in considering additive levels, and that all other factors are less important than climate.
This was codified in a 1957 paper "Determining optimum fluoride concentrations" (Galagan and Vermillion) [2] which includes their scientific formula:
parts per million of fluoride = 0.34 / E
"Where E is the estimated average daily water intake for children through 10 years of age in ounces per pound of body weight. It may be calculated from the estimation equation E=-0.038+0.0062 temperature, where temperature is the mean maximum temperature in degrees Fahrenheit."
This seems to reflect the kind of scientific rigour behind this belief, and perhaps the absurdity of the formula is why the US DHHS updated their guidelines in 2015 to settle on a flat 0.7 ppm regardless of climate [3].
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/4801410
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2031310/?page=1
[3] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2015/05/01/2015-10...