Experts clash over report suggesting fluoride can affect brain development
science.org
science.org
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also: if you can afford it / have insurance coverage to get said care.
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...
According to this, "ALL WATER IS FLUORIDATED"
https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/drinking_water/certlic/drinki...
Timberland water is in Placer County water district now that PUD owns it, it controls how it complies to fluoridation....
:-(
It would be interesting to test various alcohols for fluoride though.
I mean no disrespect, but that is as it should be. Water is the fight of the coming century and must be preserved as a public resource.
And if you also owned a water company, you would feel the way I do, and did.
Would you care to share some of these sources?
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.
Don't blame doing your own research. It galls me to hear people refusing to do their own research because other people are famously bad at it.
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
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.
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.
[citation needed]
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
1. Studies undertaken as part of a lawsuit should be considered radioactive. See the whole Wakefield thing.
2. Infants don't drink the same amount of water as an adult.
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.
Here's a link to an earlier draft of the report: https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/sites/default/files/ntp/about_ntp/... (caution, large PDF file). Look at the summary in 82, with some comments by reviewers. The summary text says:
"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.
> 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.
1. https://www.businessinsider.com/cities-worst-tap-water-us-20...
2. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/31/americas-tap...
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.
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.
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.
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.
They started making fluoridated toothpaste in 1956.
The issue isn't getting fluorine into Americans, the issue is doing it in a medically and ethically appropriate way.
There should be zero impacts on average dental health of Americans.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/tooth-decay-calgary-f...
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.
Do you hold the same belief when the government requires kids to get certain vaccines before entering school?
(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. )
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.
You can also decide to just not drink from the tap. There are large groups of people that make that decision.
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?