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As someone who comes from an area with clean fresh water, that does not contain added fluoride, this is not a complex issue. It's simply not a question that com

As someone who comes from an area with clean fresh water, that does not contain added fluoride, this is not a complex issue. It's simply not a question that comes up. People have good dental hygiene here. To my mind, yes sure you can over complicate the entire debate, but all of that is irrelevant in the face of these basic points: - Is there a chance that fluoride ingestion could be detrimental to human health? - Can tooth decay be prevented by diet and brush/floss with good quality toothpaste? Presumed safety of chemicals (at the behest of organizations) to human/environment until proven otherwise is shocking to me. They irony of all this is that if you want to buy good quality toothpaste you are forced to import it from overseas, due to the FDA limiting ingredients in toothpaste.

bsder 3y ago
Citing: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24308394/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24308394/ which recommends flouridating salt. "Children and adults of the low socio-economic strata tend to have substantially more untreated caries than higher strata. Salt fluoridation is by far the cheapest method for improving oral health." Sure, good for you that you're in one of the higher socioeconomic strata who can take care of their teeth. Not everyone else is.
- zackees 3y ago
  [dead]
- hammock 3y ago
  >recommends flouridating salt That is a scary recommendation. Would be very hard to avoid fluoride if restaurants, packaged food etc all used fluoridated salt
  - epgui 3y ago
    It’s not particularly scary. In fact almost all salt has added iodine for public health reasons.
    - hammock 3y ago
      Iodine and fluoride aren’t really the same thing. Iodine is essential, you cannot survive without it, and it is added to supplement a deficiency. Fluoride is not essential, you can survive without it, and its addition is purely therapeutic, not due to some deficiency
      - epgui 3y ago
        As a biochemist, I know this perfectly well. But the motivation behind your “this is terrifying” was left as an exercise to the reader, so there was no way of distinguishing it from “omg the chemicals”.
  - newZWhoDis 3y ago
    It already is that way. Your steak came from a cow that drank fluoridated water, the salad was watered constantly with fluoride. Your bread was baked with fluoride water, same with your coffee/beer/tea. Your Mayonnaise even.
    - hammock 3y ago
      Doubtful on the steak and salad. That water typically gets pulled from different kinds of wells, not municipal drinking water supply
trws 3y ago
What do you consider necessary for “good quality toothpaste?”
- xk_id 3y ago
  I’m not OP or american, but i can comment. >1,500ppm concentration of fluoride is prescription only (so you either pay for a pointless dentist visit or get it on the grey market), despite being safe and much more effective at remineralisation. There are also experimental ingredients such as nanohydroxyapatite and Novamin which are difficult to find on the american market due to the FDA
  - voisin 3y ago
    Novamin used to be available via Sensodyne Pronamel in Canada. I was surprised to see that at some point it disappeared from our market - no longer able to buy at any grocery store or pharmacy or on Amazon, whereas it used to be available in all of these places.
    - snapplebobapple 3y ago
      It's now in Sensodyne repair and protect and I usually buy it from walmart.ca 6-10 tubes at a time. There was about 2 years there where I had to buy it on ebay shipped from India though. I did try Biomin and I think that even if the material performs better than novamin, the rest of the toothpaste is so inferior to sensodyne that as a whole it works worse, for me at least.
    - waboremo 3y ago
      It's still available, look for "Sensodyne Repair and Protect" (no other name). Shoppers Drug Mart has it, Superstore, Walmart, etc. Most everywhere. We also have other options here with nanohydroxyapatite that are easy to get too, from X-Pur to Davids Toothpaste. Those products tend to be more expensive though due to higher %, whereas Sensodyne tops out at 5% Novamin. Also as a Canadian you should avoid Amazon for groceries and most hygiene goods, they're overpriced even compared to Shoppers Drug Mart most of the time, half of the time the goods aren't even offered by the company but instead by a random middleman charging absurd markup.
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
I always thought anti fluoridation sentiment in Utah was related to them having the highest dentist count per capita. It’s the only state that I know of where fluoridation isn’t common.
- hammock 3y ago
  Dentists are the ones who are pro-fluoridation … at least it was a dental trade group that fought the release of this report (maybe they are funded behind the scenes by a different interest group)
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    Maybe. At least the Dental academy and association of LDS Dentists thinks so: https://www.deseret.com/2000/9/29/19531458/fluoride-brochures-going-out-but-have-magnifying-glass-ready https://www.deseret.com/2000/9/29/19531458/fluoride-brochure... It was a weird position against back then similar to the anti-vax position today.
  - dotancohen 3y ago
    The cynical position would be that dentists in areas without fluoridation have more work.
andrewmutz 3y ago
[flagged]
- mgiampapa 3y ago
  It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids, without the knowledge of the individual, certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
rexarex 3y ago
My understanding is that some water sources naturally contain fluoride anyhow so this isn’t a great comparison. From the sources I read awhile ago they started fluoride additives because it was known that certain areas like Texas had bad teeth.
- FollowingTheDao 3y ago
  It’s a circle that all people talk about in regards to caries is fluoride. And literally, no one will talk about molybdenum. Maybe Texas has low levels of molybdenum? https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2229411220160203 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/222941122016020...
rgrieselhuber 3y ago
It seems pretty simple. Stop putting toxic waste in the water. If you’re worried about dental health, cut the sugar and use those little interdental brushes in addition to flossing and brushing well.
- CodexArcana 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - Obscurity4340 3y ago
    Can you imagine? Definitely abbreviates the "sweet tea" making process
    - rgbgraph 3y ago
      Would increase water consumption in the general populace — diverting some usage of sugary drinks. Health officials get to say they lead an initiative that drastically improved water drinking and drastically reduced soda drinking. Who wouldn’t that on their CV? Long-term side-effects require longitudinal studies that can be done post facto. Give it 50 years, maybe. By then everyone who dreamt up the scheme will be already retired or dead — and no careers will ever be in jeopardy. Sounds familiar, but it has a certain special twist to it. If anyone here decides to implement this idea, please invite me to your Nobel prize reception.
xupybd 3y ago
My wife comes from a country that did not add fluoride to the water. She has very good dental hygiene but here teeth are not in good shape for her age. That's one data point that I have observed.
- ux-app 3y ago
  >That's one data point that I have observed. As with many things genetics plays a big part. I neglected going to the dentist for 15 years and take just ok care of my teeth (brush at least once per day, don't floss). I was expecting bad news, lots of cavities, but my teeth are perfect. After some plaque removal, not a single cavity. Asked the dentist about this, he shrugged and just said "genetics".
  - xupybd 3y ago
    I'm sure they do, but the dentists here have told her that lack of fluoride is her problem. She is using a night time fluoride paste to help.
    - FollowingTheDao 3y ago
      It might not be a fluoride, it might also be a lack of molybdenum. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2229411220160203 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/222941122016020...
      - xupybd 3y ago
        Interesting, I didn't know about molybdenum. Her home city of Hanoi doesn't have tap water that the locals like to drink. Even after boiling I think it can taste bad. So she grew up with heavily filtered water or bottled water. I would guess her diet was lacking in many trace minerals from this.
    - epgui 3y ago
      Dentists don’t do genome sequencing, so they have no way of ruling out genetics.
throwaway2037 3y ago
They irony of all this is that if you want to buy good quality toothpaste you are forced to import it from overseas, due to the FDA limiting ingredients in toothpaste. I never heard such a thing. Can you be more specific? Plus you can buy Darlie toothpaste in most Chinatown's around the world, even if unapproved by local dental orgs.
- dannyw 3y ago
  International versions of Sensodyne contain Novamin, which is a teeth-material-like compound that layers over your teeth to protect it. It has been proven in many clinical trials to not only reduce sensitivity, but also protect against tooth decay and cavities.
  - lettergram 3y ago
    Why isn’t it in the US?
    - ars 3y ago
      See here: https://medium.com/@ravenstine/the-curious-history-of-novamin-toothpaste-620c6bef8881 https://medium.com/@ravenstine/the-curious-history-of-novami... Basically FDA won't let them label it without studies. Other countries consider toothpaste a cosmetic and don't requite studies.
    - klooney 3y ago
      You can get it on Amazon, since they don't do a ton of vetting or enforcement. You can also get toothpaste with Biomin, a substantially similar deal (its manufacturer claims it's better). For me, novamin/biomin didn't seem to make a difference with tooth sensitivity.
  - dotancohen 3y ago
    Interesting. I use Sensodyne for a completely unrelated reason: it does not contain Sodium Laurel Sulfate. I have not had a cavity in my entire life, and I'm over 45.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
> but all of that is irrelevant in the face of these basic points: > - Is there a chance that fluoride ingestion could be detrimental to human health? - Can tooth decay be prevented by diet and brush/floss with good quality toothpaste? When evaluating those points, be sure to assess what actually happens, in real life, to real people, and not what could happen in theory. For example, even if tooth decay could be effectively "prevented by diet and brush/floss with good quality toothpaste" in theory, the effect might be smaller (possibly much smaller) in practice, as people in general suck at lifestyle changes, dieting being a prime example, and then a noticeable subset of the population has problems with regularly brushing their teeth (for some reason, this is surprising to many). Unless you have a way for fixing that (so far no one has), this may well make fluoridated water come out ahead in comparison. -- EDIT: The above is similar to the argument for, e.g., opt-out health insurance and social retirement savings plans - you're still free to choose an alternative or decide to stay with the default, but if for some reason you can't understand the choice or can't be arsed to make one, you and everyone else are better off with you having some insurance and savings by default. The similarity is that we know for certain that the "incapable of making a choice" bucket will contain a substantial segment of the population, so at policy level, making health insurance/retirement savings opt-in with nothing as default, is just deciding to screw all those people over.
- armitron 3y ago
  Nobody is screwing anybody over when the water supply is not poisoned (which is the case for nearly every European country). The basis of "contract over status" that let us advance beyond feudalism is mutual assent (or do no harm to the counterparty). What you're describing is essentially centralized tyranny and comes in many forms ("think of the children!") And no, your health insurance / social retirement example doesn't fit. Sticking to the default in these cases does not amount to willingly poisoning oneself.
d0mine 3y ago
In theory, obesity can be solved with diet. In practice, it is a complex issue.

bsder 3y ago

Citing: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24308394/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24308394/ which recommends flouridating salt. "Children and adults of the low socio-economic strata tend to have substantially more untreated caries than higher strata. Salt fluoridation is by far the cheapest method for improving oral health." Sure, good for you that you're in one of the higher socioeconomic strata who can take care of their teeth. Not everyone else is.

zackees 3y ago
[dead]
hammock 3y ago
>recommends flouridating salt That is a scary recommendation. Would be very hard to avoid fluoride if restaurants, packaged food etc all used fluoridated salt
- epgui 3y ago
  It’s not particularly scary. In fact almost all salt has added iodine for public health reasons.
  - hammock 3y ago
    Iodine and fluoride aren’t really the same thing. Iodine is essential, you cannot survive without it, and it is added to supplement a deficiency. Fluoride is not essential, you can survive without it, and its addition is purely therapeutic, not due to some deficiency
    - epgui 3y ago
      As a biochemist, I know this perfectly well. But the motivation behind your “this is terrifying” was left as an exercise to the reader, so there was no way of distinguishing it from “omg the chemicals”.
- newZWhoDis 3y ago
  It already is that way. Your steak came from a cow that drank fluoridated water, the salad was watered constantly with fluoride. Your bread was baked with fluoride water, same with your coffee/beer/tea. Your Mayonnaise even.
  - hammock 3y ago
    Doubtful on the steak and salad. That water typically gets pulled from different kinds of wells, not municipal drinking water supply

trws 3y ago

What do you consider necessary for “good quality toothpaste?”

xk_id 3y ago
I’m not OP or american, but i can comment. >1,500ppm concentration of fluoride is prescription only (so you either pay for a pointless dentist visit or get it on the grey market), despite being safe and much more effective at remineralisation. There are also experimental ingredients such as nanohydroxyapatite and Novamin which are difficult to find on the american market due to the FDA
- voisin 3y ago
  Novamin used to be available via Sensodyne Pronamel in Canada. I was surprised to see that at some point it disappeared from our market - no longer able to buy at any grocery store or pharmacy or on Amazon, whereas it used to be available in all of these places.
  - snapplebobapple 3y ago
    It's now in Sensodyne repair and protect and I usually buy it from walmart.ca 6-10 tubes at a time. There was about 2 years there where I had to buy it on ebay shipped from India though. I did try Biomin and I think that even if the material performs better than novamin, the rest of the toothpaste is so inferior to sensodyne that as a whole it works worse, for me at least.
  - waboremo 3y ago
    It's still available, look for "Sensodyne Repair and Protect" (no other name). Shoppers Drug Mart has it, Superstore, Walmart, etc. Most everywhere. We also have other options here with nanohydroxyapatite that are easy to get too, from X-Pur to Davids Toothpaste. Those products tend to be more expensive though due to higher %, whereas Sensodyne tops out at 5% Novamin. Also as a Canadian you should avoid Amazon for groceries and most hygiene goods, they're overpriced even compared to Shoppers Drug Mart most of the time, half of the time the goods aren't even offered by the company but instead by a random middleman charging absurd markup.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago

I always thought anti fluoridation sentiment in Utah was related to them having the highest dentist count per capita. It’s the only state that I know of where fluoridation isn’t common.

hammock 3y ago
Dentists are the ones who are pro-fluoridation … at least it was a dental trade group that fought the release of this report (maybe they are funded behind the scenes by a different interest group)
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  Maybe. At least the Dental academy and association of LDS Dentists thinks so: https://www.deseret.com/2000/9/29/19531458/fluoride-brochures-going-out-but-have-magnifying-glass-ready https://www.deseret.com/2000/9/29/19531458/fluoride-brochure... It was a weird position against back then similar to the anti-vax position today.
- dotancohen 3y ago
  The cynical position would be that dentists in areas without fluoridation have more work.

andrewmutz 3y ago

[flagged]

mgiampapa 3y ago
It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids, without the knowledge of the individual, certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

rexarex 3y ago

My understanding is that some water sources naturally contain fluoride anyhow so this isn’t a great comparison. From the sources I read awhile ago they started fluoride additives because it was known that certain areas like Texas had bad teeth.

FollowingTheDao 3y ago
It’s a circle that all people talk about in regards to caries is fluoride. And literally, no one will talk about molybdenum. Maybe Texas has low levels of molybdenum? https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2229411220160203 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/222941122016020...

rgrieselhuber 3y ago

It seems pretty simple. Stop putting toxic waste in the water. If you’re worried about dental health, cut the sugar and use those little interdental brushes in addition to flossing and brushing well.

CodexArcana 3y ago
[flagged]
- Obscurity4340 3y ago
  Can you imagine? Definitely abbreviates the "sweet tea" making process
  - rgbgraph 3y ago
    Would increase water consumption in the general populace — diverting some usage of sugary drinks. Health officials get to say they lead an initiative that drastically improved water drinking and drastically reduced soda drinking. Who wouldn’t that on their CV? Long-term side-effects require longitudinal studies that can be done post facto. Give it 50 years, maybe. By then everyone who dreamt up the scheme will be already retired or dead — and no careers will ever be in jeopardy. Sounds familiar, but it has a certain special twist to it. If anyone here decides to implement this idea, please invite me to your Nobel prize reception.

xupybd 3y ago

My wife comes from a country that did not add fluoride to the water. She has very good dental hygiene but here teeth are not in good shape for her age. That's one data point that I have observed.

ux-app 3y ago
>That's one data point that I have observed. As with many things genetics plays a big part. I neglected going to the dentist for 15 years and take just ok care of my teeth (brush at least once per day, don't floss). I was expecting bad news, lots of cavities, but my teeth are perfect. After some plaque removal, not a single cavity. Asked the dentist about this, he shrugged and just said "genetics".
- xupybd 3y ago
  I'm sure they do, but the dentists here have told her that lack of fluoride is her problem. She is using a night time fluoride paste to help.
  - FollowingTheDao 3y ago
    It might not be a fluoride, it might also be a lack of molybdenum. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2229411220160203 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/222941122016020...
    - xupybd 3y ago
      Interesting, I didn't know about molybdenum. Her home city of Hanoi doesn't have tap water that the locals like to drink. Even after boiling I think it can taste bad. So she grew up with heavily filtered water or bottled water. I would guess her diet was lacking in many trace minerals from this.
  - epgui 3y ago
    Dentists don’t do genome sequencing, so they have no way of ruling out genetics.

throwaway2037 3y ago

They irony of all this is that if you want to buy good quality toothpaste you are forced to import it from overseas, due to the FDA limiting ingredients in toothpaste. I never heard such a thing. Can you be more specific? Plus you can buy Darlie toothpaste in most Chinatown's around the world, even if unapproved by local dental orgs.

dannyw 3y ago
International versions of Sensodyne contain Novamin, which is a teeth-material-like compound that layers over your teeth to protect it. It has been proven in many clinical trials to not only reduce sensitivity, but also protect against tooth decay and cavities.
- lettergram 3y ago
  Why isn’t it in the US?
  - ars 3y ago
    See here: https://medium.com/@ravenstine/the-curious-history-of-novamin-toothpaste-620c6bef8881 https://medium.com/@ravenstine/the-curious-history-of-novami... Basically FDA won't let them label it without studies. Other countries consider toothpaste a cosmetic and don't requite studies.
  - klooney 3y ago
    You can get it on Amazon, since they don't do a ton of vetting or enforcement. You can also get toothpaste with Biomin, a substantially similar deal (its manufacturer claims it's better). For me, novamin/biomin didn't seem to make a difference with tooth sensitivity.
- dotancohen 3y ago
  Interesting. I use Sensodyne for a completely unrelated reason: it does not contain Sodium Laurel Sulfate. I have not had a cavity in my entire life, and I'm over 45.

TeMPOraL 3y ago

> but all of that is irrelevant in the face of these basic points: > - Is there a chance that fluoride ingestion could be detrimental to human health? - Can tooth decay be prevented by diet and brush/floss with good quality toothpaste? When evaluating those points, be sure to assess what actually happens, in real life, to real people, and not what could happen in theory. For example, even if tooth decay could be effectively "prevented by diet and brush/floss with good quality toothpaste" in theory, the effect might be smaller (possibly much smaller) in practice, as people in general suck at lifestyle changes, dieting being a prime example, and then a noticeable subset of the population has problems with regularly brushing their teeth (for some reason, this is surprising to many). Unless you have a way for fixing that (so far no one has), this may well make fluoridated water come out ahead in comparison. -- EDIT: The above is similar to the argument for, e.g., opt-out health insurance and social retirement savings plans - you're still free to choose an alternative or decide to stay with the default, but if for some reason you can't understand the choice or can't be arsed to make one, you and everyone else are better off with you having some insurance and savings by default. The similarity is that we know for certain that the "incapable of making a choice" bucket will contain a substantial segment of the population, so at policy level, making health insurance/retirement savings opt-in with nothing as default, is just deciding to screw all those people over.

armitron 3y ago
Nobody is screwing anybody over when the water supply is not poisoned (which is the case for nearly every European country). The basis of "contract over status" that let us advance beyond feudalism is mutual assent (or do no harm to the counterparty). What you're describing is essentially centralized tyranny and comes in many forms ("think of the children!") And no, your health insurance / social retirement example doesn't fit. Sticking to the default in these cases does not amount to willingly poisoning oneself.

d0mine 3y ago

In theory, obesity can be solved with diet. In practice, it is a complex issue.