„Fluoride reduces IQ" report needs to be retracted | Hacker News Reader

„Fluoride reduces IQ" report needs to be retracted

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50 pointsMrBuddyCasino24 comments

I haven't done the deep dive into the details of this - it seems difficult to test at this point because everyone in the US has fluoride - but given that it repeatedly is raised for decades, why not have a few US states remove fluoride as a controlled test and we see what happens in a decade or two?

I think that yes, more cavities but dentists can fix this, but it would be interesting to see the results on IQ, etc during that time. I think that large scale tests are the only way to move forward because it seems many groups in the US do not accept any other evidence.

So let them experiment on themselves?

This is already happening:

https://apnews.com/article/fluoride-ban-drinking-water-utah-...

https://adanews.ada.org/ada-news/2025/february/utah-set-to-b...

Hawaii has never had fluoride in its water (I would assume due to the close interaction between the ocean and their water supply). The study could be done. I doubt we would see a statistical difference in the IQ of Hawaiians vs everyone else.

There are big racial, religious and cultural differences between Hawai'i and the mainland. I don't think anyone would be happy with any study's results.

In the latest report I can find (admittedly ~10 years old), Hawaii has some of the worst oral health and highest rates of tooth decay in the nation:

https://www.civilbeat.org/2020/02/why-hawaii-continues-to-ke...

> but dentists can fix this

I find this a laughably bad excuse. Dentist visits are expensive. A society-wide increase in dentist visits is expensive to society. The post in OP mentioned that dentist visits went up in Israel by 2x. This is not an adequate alternative option to fluoride.

Edit: also, dentistry does not fully restore teeth to their pre-cavity condition anyway. It doesn't prevent all the pain. There's lots of non-monetary damage even before the dentist visits increase.

This wouldn't be informative as to the effects of fluoride, because the results would be confounded to hell and back. Just to give the most obvious example, the states that go for this are going to be the ones where the legislature is more skeptical of government interventions to improve public health, and that's going to affect outcomes in a lot of ways that have nothing to do with fluoride.

This pretty much sums up my impression of that literature, not just the meta analysis.

The Broadbent et al paper is probably the best one I've found on the topic, and they didn't find any effect:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24832151/

https://osf.io/preprints/osf/zhm54_v3

The problem is food. Stop eating many carbs and no more tooth problems.

Trying to solve tooth rot with flouride is stupid because it misses the point: flouride doesn't help much: people still get tooth rot.

So basicaly if you flouridate water you get tooth rot + you ingest a neurotoxins.

Stop eating trash food and you won't get rotten teeth + no neurotoxin will be ingested!

People who will comment in the likes of "yeah but people won't change their diets": I agree, they won't. But I don't want to get neurotoxin put into my water because other people are fine with poisoning their children with trash food.

> flouride doesn't help much: people still get tooth rot

Source? I've not heard the efficacy of fluoride debated, just it's toxicity.

Well if flouride would be efficient enough, there wouldn't be so many dentists around. What source do you need for that?

There are many oral health problems that flouride does not solve.

I hope you're joking. This applies "efficient enough" is 100% effective and tooth decay is the only reason for dentists. The vast majority of my dental visits have been unrelated to cavities, and the studies I've seen quote 25% efficacy, which I'd hope you'd agree isn't "no effect!"

sorry I was not joking. If flouride (also in toothpaste) would be enough to stop the typical tooth decay with the current habits of eating sugar, soda etc., well then fine.

But it is not enough. However I believe that stopping sugar, soda, bread etc. would be enough. In that case, the fluoride neurotoxin would not be necessary anymore.

I don't disagree. Sugar isn't a harmless chemical either! It's significantly worse than fluoride at the quantities we consume. The problem is how to actually do something about it.

Adding fluoride to water is insanely effective for how easy it is. The 70% of Americans who drink fluorinated water get a free 25% reduction in cavities without active involvement.

What would it take to see a similar impact from sugar reduction? I can pretty much guarantee it won't be voluntary! I assume you're going to need to start by making Coke illegal, stop subsidizing corn syrup, ban most fast food and restaurant chains, and retool many of our factories.

But that sounds like political suicide, and we haven't even attempted it despite the growing mountain of evidence to the harms of sugar.

Yes indeed I can choose to avoid it at the individual level. Then I at least don’t want to be forced toxic water upon me.

the thing is that floride does reduce the collective "IQ" of society, through the sheer amount of energy devoted to arguing about it given that there is more than enough data to make complete and open determinations of all of florides effects, it would serve everybody to create and publish all of it. there ARE problems with water supplies, worldwide, and there have been horrible mistakes and cover ups. If there areedge cases and people with suseptibilities to floride(very likely), then that needs to be understood, and published. The simple fact is that there is a great deal of variability in human populations in how they can metabolise things in food and water, with some populations able to pass levels of arsinic that is lethal to others. There is one view point that suggests that population groups should be defined by there enzimatic balance, rather than ethnicity or race. I personaly had a accidental, but major impact on our local water supply, when chatting with some of our local legislators about our water, I joked that I was considering refuseing to pay my water bill, as water is defined as a coulorless, oderless liquid, and what came out of my tap, was niether......the one guy said "can I use that?" we got a whole new water supply clean water and air need to be primary, non negotiable rights, that every person has, and must be included in all municipal declarations, ie:no clean water, no town or city

clean*~up to date published testing....no secrets

!trivia: floride was identified as benificial to dental health from small populations in ?sweden? switzerland? way way back, who had great teath, and the local wells have naturaly occuring, floride......

thanks for that. never read about it in-depth and so never knew where the trial results for healthier teeth came from.

some friends stopped using paste with fluoride just when they stopped smoking and reduced coffee intake) and they don't have more tooth rot than before ... it's been 3+ years ...

i can imagine fluoride having a heavier impact on measurable concentration and attention in people with auto-immune diseases like thyroid syndromes and of course hyper-sensitive people with and without ADHD and such ...

if I wanted to be conspiratorial about it, it's no more than some peoples' attempt to worsen some of the conditions some people ARE BORN WITH, both, for the sake of the economy and some interest groups need to whatever ...

and there are so many pointless additives ... of course, it's easy to put it on personal responsibility but when the information reaches you only in your mid to late twenties, the damage is already done, and billions in economic and human value are LOST ...

broken pieces of legacy systems and perspectives, I guess ...

but then again, 'member the times when mass surveillance was a myth and the last genocide was at least a few decades in the past? or when nobody tried to eradicate some culture and their language out of the country they had been born in for centuries?

> the last genocide was at least a few decades in the past

When was that? Even if you exclude arguable ones there has not been a period of decades without a genocide for a very long time:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides#List

Agreed, my bad. I somehow forget that neither the official definition nor my own POV on the concept entail a number of 'casualties'/'victims'/'successfully eliminated targets' ...

Thanks for the note.

Recently I learned that black and green tea contains not-insignificant levels of fluoride, because the tea plant concentrates the substance in its leaves as it grows.

This suddenly made amazing sense: Englishmen comprise an empire pacified by means of voluntarily drinking tea (as well as China/Japan, et. al.) and in fact making it a veritably religious ritual that is so ubiquitous that you name mealtimes after it.

So when other nations pondered how to introduce fluoride to non-tea-drinkers, they needed to be crafty about it.

Thanks mom, for dozens of gallons of wholly ineffective fluoridated water when we were growing up. Surely my perpetual stupidity and mental illness and Prozac prescriptions are unrelated.

Much of the tea growing parts of the Empire were colonised by Scots, not the English. Sri Lanka's mountainous central regions in particular.

Indeed, old bean! And who has better motivation to pacify the populace south of the border so that another shooting war doesn’t break out over primacy of the Crown? Genius!

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