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Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

The government can give out toothpaste in school, it doesn't need to add things to water.

The inviolability or integrity of one's own body to me is more important than any of this. You have the right to decide what medication to be given to you with informed consent always, or you have no freedom. Otherwise the freedom argument collapses and you stop having reasons to allow abortions, or a bunch of other informed consent situations.

And "knowing better" than poor people "for their own good" usually doesn't go well (for the people).

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Except schools handing out toothpaste will get brought up at thousands of board meetings across the country with sensitive or bored parents claiming government overreach and misuse of budgets.

Would you also ban iron in wheat flour?

I support the language here: https://fra.europa.eu/en/eu-charter/article/3-right-integrit...

Article 3 - Right to integrity of the person

1. Everyone has the right to respect for his or her physical and mental integrity.

2. In the fields of medicine and biology, the following must be respected in particular:

(a) the free and informed consent of the person concerned, according to the procedures laid down by law;

(b) the prohibition of eugenic practices, in particular those aiming at the selection of persons;

(d) the prohibition of the reproductive cloning of human beings.

You can presumably buy a different brand of flour or find a different source quite easily? Same applies to most other “fortified” products. With water your’e basically forced to waste money on bottled water or very expensive filtration systems.

But yes, adding additional vitamins or minerals to food products is generally unnecessary when supplements are generally cheap and highly available these days.

The knowledge about the supplements we need also cheap and highly available and yet lots of people don't have it. I myself don't know all the supplements I need.

I feel like for better or worse we are being forced into an era of individual responsibilities where the safeguards that we used to rely on without having to think are being actively dismantled.

> myself don't know all the supplements I need.

That certainly doesn’t mean that whoever decided to put extra iron into flour knows that you need it.

IIRC iron deficiency is pretty rare in men.

Also it might have made sense 100 years ago when most people had very similar diets and lacked similar nutrients, not these days though.

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