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Comment by rustyconover | Hacker News Reader

Floride doesn't prevent gum disease per se, but it does prevent cavities, which are real money makers for dentists.

You may only brush your teeth 3 times a day, but with fluoride in water you're exposing your enamel to it more frequently especially if you're a child who's drinking water often.

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People really underestimate the degree to which public oral health has improved over the recent past. A few decades ago, most children had cavities. In most communities in USA today, that's not the case. Many experts would credit fluoridation for a portion of this improvement, but I think education and access improvements also deserve credit.

Flouridation became widely used in the US in the 1960s. It's hard to discern facts with all the hyperbole from activists against it but I thought flouridation was unnecessary now because of toothpaste and how people brush their teeth more. From Wikipedia, most countries in Europe substantially reduced cavities without flouridation and tooth decay rates remained stabled or declined in Germany and Finland when it was stopped. Though it does say that in-school dental care and more going to the dentist in Europe than in the US may be the reason.

But so many people in the US have home filtration systems, filtered water jugs or drink bottled water that it seems it's more due to flouride toothpaste and better hygiene. While there is some flouride in some bottled water, it's generally less.

Flouridation [sic] became widely used in the US in the 1960s.

Yes but many communities only fluoridated in the 1980s (I know because my father was the concerned citizen who eventually got this done in several nearby towns), and the smallest water districts still don't have it.

Off topic, while I know how to spell fluoride I rarely write flurodiation. And I rely on Google's spellcheck which for whatever reason will show incorrect spellings. And in gmail, it will also do the opposite; indicate a correctly spelled word is wrong.

Haha actually even simple "fluoride" eludes me fairly often. The gmail remark reminds me of the "please advice" idiom that MS-Outlook established. Of course the original, grammatically correct request is "Please advise," which one might expect to see at the end of any issue-raising business email. Because Outlook "corrected" this phrase to "please advice" for so many years, many people now actually think "advice" is correct.

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