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Comment by _yb2s | Hacker News Reader

This is an area where the rampant scientism really bugs me... and everyone is polarized politically without looking at the actual evidence.

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.

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These concerns are not limited to fluoride in municipal water, but also excessive fluoride consumption via tea, see. e.g.: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14034948219902...

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.

England didn't start adding it until 1964

I believe they mean the naturally occurring fluoride in tea:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4808922/

The paper is referring to the flouride content of tea itself, which seems to be much greater than that of fluoridated water systems.

TFA: "Among beverages, tea has the highest potential for increasing daily fluoride intake [17], as the tea plant, Camellia sinensis, accumulates fluoride that is released into tea infusions"

This is an interesting point. I know the British are really into tea, but I assume they don’t let kids drink it due to the caffeine?

Not unheard of for 10 year olds to drink milky tea when I was growing up.

Why would that be? When I was growing up it was not uncommon for kids to drink coffee. I used to brew my own (bad and sweet) coffee before I was old enough for school.

> 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.

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.

> Modern dental care to handle any an increase in tooth decay would need to be factored in.

Also: if you can afford it / have insurance coverage to get said care.

> 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.

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.

Dental health can be controlled in other ways. Forcing a specific dental care method with (hypothetically) known negative effects is immoral; individuals should be allowed to choose their own dental care methods. Informed *choice* is (was?) a crucial tenant of medicine.

> Informed choice is (was?) a crucial tenant of medicine.

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.

I don't think a naive cost-benefit analysis is sufficient for making the decision to administer what amounts to medicine without informed consent.

We have the concept of “public health” for this reason. This is no more or less non-consensual than vitamin-enriched foods or municipal spraying for malaria.

Fluoride for dental care should be replaced with vitamins D and K2, which will move calcium to the bones and teeth. Diets could be adapted to be more tooth decay preventative.

No there does not need to be such a comparison. The question is whether fluoride affects intellectual development.

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.

Absolutely.

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....

:-(

>I wanted to bottle the water but the PUD signed a law preventing me from doing so.

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.

Look at my update... At least I would have preserved a non-fluoridated system.

And if you also owned a water company, you would feel the way I do, and did.

It’s about total dose… probably 1 percent or less of the liquids I drink are packaged or processed things rather than water from my own RO device.

I don't see how wine could be fluoridated?

Wine is watered to a standard strength. Also grapes can absorb many chemicals from what they are watered with. Thats the point of regional wine differences.

Watered to a standard strength? Wtf are you talking about? And grapes get water from the rain.

Yeahm I should have left wine off there - my point was anything that uses municipal water as the primary input of water in said products. Which is likely any liquid that comes in something plastic.

It would be interesting to test various alcohols for fluoride though.

What you experienced is what happens when I deep dive into any issue. (It’s very disconcerting)

> I looked into the peer reviewed evidence myself

Would you care to share some of these sources?

Not your parent, but after "looking into the evidence" I ended up at a different conclusion

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-99688-w

I’d rather not, it was 6 years ago and I’m no expert on this topic. My intent here is to explain my experience as a parent looking into these things, and my dismay at the polarization and lack of nuance in scientific discussion.

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.

I could do that. But in the vast majority of cases, I prefer to let the acknowledged experts do that work for me - because that's what they have spent their life doing. In most cases this is more effective that me "Doing my own research" and deciding that the Earth is most decidely flat.

If you do your own research and determine the earth is flat, you're stupid.

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.

What about fluoridated toothpaste? Mouth rinses? If there is clear indication that it causes neurological harm, why is it in so many things?

Its usually written on the packaging of such products that ingesting them is not healthy.

You don’t drink toothpaste, you’re supposed to spit it out

Typically you're not supposed to swallow toothpaste or mouth rinses, so relatively little actually stays in your body. Tap water is generally considered fine to swallow in large amounts though.

A lot of medicines are taken sublingually, because absorption is expected to be higher than through the oral route. Does fluoride not get absorbed that way?

Not higher, but faster into the blood stream

Why is it in so many things? Because it's effective. It's not like people smoked cigarettes because they wanted a small amount of lung cancer risk, they smoked cigarettes for a totally different effect of the product.

*Large amount of lung cancer risk

> The approximate dose where this effect likely just begins to occur

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

not necessarily; consider hormesis, a two-phased dose response -- something can be highly beneficial at a low dose, then ineffective or simply toxic at higher doses

No, toxins usually have no effect, or a totally different effect until some the threshold dose.

Did you settle on some kind of filtering system? Curious as to how people remove fluoride - just realized the other day my current *triple filter** aquasana under sink system doesn’t do it

Filters like AlkaViva and Berkey do a good job of filtering out industrial waste such as fluoride.

Deep Nutrition is a great book on this and other topics.

If it suggests Berkey filters. No it isn't.

What’s wrong with Berkey?

ZeroWater filters remove 90%.

Any reverse osmosis system removes essentially everything from the water. I am using a counter top AquaTru device. They are much more expensive and complex than a “water filter” however.

Do you add back in minerals for flavor/taste then?

IQ scores show extreme subnormal intellectual ability. Scores above that (including the majority of below average scores) tell us precisely nothing. Zero. Nada. Nowt.

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.

> IQ scores show extreme subnormal intellectual ability. Scores above that (including the majority of below average scores) tell us precisely nothing. Zero. Nada. Nowt.

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.

I thought they made experiments on kids who recently moved in another country that show that IQ isn't stable in kids and depends on the environment?

There are environmental effects. Common sense things can affect performance on IQ tests, including taking the test a second time in short succession (you get better with practice). Certain early childhood education interventions will cause children to over-perform on IQ tests relative to their IQ measured later in life. If the subject has the flu, they will also tend to underperform. The environment definitely plays a role, but the degree to which it is stable is, to me at least, surprising.

What you are saying isn’t accurate… IQ tests are reliably repeatable, and accurately predict ability at a large number of other tasks. There was a pretty good recent radiolab podcast talking about the history and evidence behind it.

I wonder how many cavities would be taken away if they got rid of adding sugar into our food supply?

> I looked into the peer reviewed evidence myself when deciding

[citation needed]

I don’t understand this perspective… if you are interested it would make sense to do your own careful research and come to your own conclusions. Don’t trust me, some random internet stranger that last looked at this stuff 6 years ago to do it for you.

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?

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