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Comment by roguecoder | Hacker News Reader

It is not that expensive to run double-blind fluoride experiments. There are hundreds that have been run over decades. There is a Scotland that the found an 81.4% reduction in cavities. A double-blind study from New Zealand found no benefit to osteoporosis is postmenopausal women. Etc. Etc.

If these neurocognitive effects were actually measurable, they wouldn't need to cherry-picking population-level correlation studies to find effects that are within the margin of error of the tests.

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> There is a Scotland that the found an 81.4% reduction in cavities.

Do you have a reference?

"Hi we would like to give your child something that we think will lower their intelligence would you sign here please."

> we would like to give your child something that we think will lower their intelligence

“The association between drinking carbonated drinks, eating chips and intelligence level was significant (P= 0.043, 0.001) and prevalence odds ratio of 1.5 and 2.4 respectively” [1].

Anyone arguing this is about childhood IQ and wouldn’t similarly ban (not stop mandating, ban) soft drinks, chips and fast food for kids, they’re signalling this is about something other than kids’ health.

(Note: this isn’t my mole hill. I think communities should have the right to make this call on their own. And the cited study quality is just as good as the fluoride causes autism ones.)

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3507933/

Note that you are making a casual claim (that junk food lowers intelligence in children) but the paper you cite provides no evidence of causation, only a statistical association between diet and intelligence scores. Further, this association could be caused by the well known fact that parents who are more focused on their child’s well being are not only more likely to provide a diet more in line with health recommendations (less junk) but also more likely to invest in their child’s educational outcomes.

The parent comment is not making a causal claim. They're pointing out a double standard: "Anyone arguing this is about childhood IQ and wouldn’t similarly ban (not stop mandating, ban) soft drinks, chips and fast food for kids, they’re signalling this is about something other than kids’ health."

In other words, if these people are anti-fluoride because it's supposedly bad for children's IQ, they should also oppose bad food for the same reason. If they don't, the supposed (unproven) health effects are not the reason. That's the point that is made, at least.

Yup. We don't have causal studies on fluoride's effects on intelligence, to my knowledge. This is so obviously not about kids' health, but like MMRs, partisan/social identity signalling.

Even if you believed that to be the case, you could choose an area that had high natural fluoride in the water, provide gravity filters and then double-blind supplement fluoride at a moderate level for one group.

It is certainly more ethical than saying "we are definitely going to let your children's teeth rot because some people think, on the basis of circumstantial evidence, it might have approximately the same effects as not having children's books in the home."

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