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Adding fluoride to water has always seemed weird to me, since you can't control for how much water someone is drinking or account for different bodily factors l
by TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
Adding fluoride to water has always seemed weird to me, since you can't control for how much water someone is drinking or account for different bodily factors like age and weight. I wonder why the European solution of adding it to salt isn't the default, especially given that iodized salt is already so popular and commonplace.
As a general rule of thumb, I think it's interesting to scrutinize dosage recommendations and compare regulations between countries. If someone claims that the science on some topic is well settled then health officials in multiple countries should arrive at roughly similar results. If there's a discrepancy between the suggestions made by health officials in the US and EU, it's worth asking why.
- nathanwh 3y agoDon't you have the same problem with the salt that you have with the water, no way to tell what dose everyone is receiving?
- para_parolu 3y agoMy guess it easier to buy different salt but hard to get second water pipe.
- Thorrez 3y ago>A Reverse Osmosis (RO) system can remove 85-92%* of fluoride in your water. https://www.paragonwater.com/does-reverse-osmosis-remove-fluoride/ https://www.paragonwater.com/does-reverse-osmosis-remove-flu...
- mixedCase 3y agoAn RO filter is not accesible to the majority of the population.
- Thorrez 3y agoBut it's a lot cheaper than "get[ting a] second water pipe."
- sp0rk 3y agoRO systems waste something like three gallons for every usable gallon they produce.
- 20after4 3y agoI think that's improved, at least according to product literature (I haven't tested it myself), however: The latest generation of small under-sink reverse osmosis filters claim to waste only 1 gallon for every 2 gallons of usable water. Still bad but much better than before.
- Thorrez 3y agoIt won't be used for showering, bathing, flushing toilets, washing clothes, washing dishes, watering plants, washing cars, filling pools, or other outdoor water usage. How much does it increase a household's water usage?
- elif 3y agoRO water is demineralized and the pH is impacted. It is not a healthy drinking water outside of occasional use. It is also not appetizing and thus it's easy to become dehydrated. After years of RO water I switched to spring water due to health issues and I will never look back. Of course, it is insanely expensive to drink 3L of spring water and so frustrating to not have unpoisoned water from the tap.
- webworker 3y agoThere are certain models which have a sixth stage to remineralize the water and balance the pH. Also relying on municipal water for mineralization is a bad argument. The minerals in water supplies is highly localized, or drinking tap water could leave you deficient in one or more minerals depending just depending on where you live.
- Thorrez 3y agoHuh, I drank RO water for most of my liquid intake growing up and loved the taste. I like it a lot more than tap water.
- dr_dshiv 3y agoOmg, no wonder my teeth are getting worse after moving to Amsterdam. I drink a ton of water and use Maldon salt. I didn’t realize there wasn’t fluoride in the water. (All the Nutella isn’t helping either, but… ooh, maybe that’s a reasonable vector for Europeans)
- dtech 3y agoEveryone in the Netherlands is using fluorided toothpaste and brushes twice a day, cavities are really low.
- theodric 3y agoGood thing I left NL or I would have invalidated your statement! Actually, I don't know anyone who brushes twice daily.
- distances 3y agoWhy don't you, isn't that a recommendation where you come from? I also don't know anyone who doesn't brush twice daily (I'm from Nordics).
- theodric 3y agoAuthorities making recommendations about minutiae does not really dictate much of the way I live my life. If they want to make it a law, fine, I'll brush my teeth in between the cups of coffee I serially drink from the moment I rise until roughly dinnertime when I then switch to alcohol (something strongly discommended by other authorities). My teeth are fine, 40 years and counting. Perhaps it's all a conspiracy by Big Toothpaste to sell more toothpaste.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Wh1zz 3y agoI don't know anyone that doesn't brush twice daily. Am quite a sociable person and have lived in multiple European countries
- osigurdson 3y agoI think the obvious answer is, we can’t actually tell one way or the other if it is a net benefit. However, humans can’t handle uncertainty so must be told in confident tones that the decision is the correct one. If anyone questions the established decision, they must be discredited.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoIt's worse than that. We may know perfectly well which way is better on the net. But since masses can't handle uncertainty, you can't just say "doing this is more beneficial on the net" - you have to project certainty, or else people will interpret your lack of confidence as indicative of scheming, and do the opposite.
- osigurdson 3y agoWhat related problem domains are understood “perfectly well”? I think until we can accurately simulate the human body, there is essentially no hope for these areas. Unless it is possible to run highly controlled multi-generational studies with large numbers of people, statistical significance cannot be attained. Various meta analysis are funded and completed, but these do not count as strict definition science requires actual experiments to be independently replicated.
- newZWhoDis 3y agoNo credible scientific evidence exists that ingesting fluoride is beneficial. Whenever you point this out, people respond with studies that focused on topical application. This topic is weird. Otherwise intelligent people shut down and begin quoting movies from the 1960’s, and are somehow incapable of distinguishing between a topical mouthwash and oral consumption. Might as well drink sunscreen and talk about the reduction in lip skin cancer.
- a_bonobo 3y ago>No credible scientific evidence exists that ingesting fluoride is beneficial. ??? >Regular toothbrushing with fluoride toothpaste is the principal non‐professional intervention to prevent caries, but the caries‐preventive effect varies according to different concentrations of fluoride in toothpaste, with higher concentrations associated with increased caries control. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6398117/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6398117/ Higher concentrations lead to better caries control (unless you go too high), what other evidence do you want?
- arcticbull 3y agoCaveat that I have no issue whatsoever with fluoride. The parent poster said "ingestion" of fluoride, but brushing is strictly not ingestion but rather topical application - you are directed to spit it back out. I'm curious if there were studies that covered drinking it.
- robbiep 3y agoI am unsure if this - I grew up in rural australia and we took fluoride tablets as kids. N=3 but no fillings till post 25
- satellite2 3y agoThe amount is calibrated for the small part that you ingest despite spittingit out. Kids toothpaste have much less because most of the paste is assumed to be ingested.
- adrian_b 3y agoNo, fluoride must not be added to any food or beverage, because it provides no benefits whatsoever when ingested. Fluoride is beneficial only when applied externally on the dental enamel, so that the fluoride ions will passively substitute the hydroxide ions. There is no known biological process that uses actively fluoride in the human body and excessive ingested fluoride has bad effects, e.g. bone damage. Therefore fluoride must be added only to tooth paste and mouth washes, which provides all the benefits and none of the risks. Intentionally ingesting fluoride is incredibly stupid and it is beyond my power of understanding how this could be mandated by law in USA and in some other countries which imitated USA irrationally.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- levzettelin 3y agoSome people lack the self control to use toothpaste regularly. For those people it's beneficial adding flouride to water.
- oblak 3y agoThis has to be satire. What sort of incredible self control does something like this require? Where does it end?
- shrx 3y agoEU citizen here, they're not putting it in salt here, but in toothpaste.
- cinntaile 3y agoHe's probably confusing it with iodide.
- Timon3 3y agoMy german salt has both iodide and fluoride.
- neuronic 3y ago'german salt' sounds funny to me. Let's say you're buying the most popular and common brand, Bad Reichenhall. This is your selection: https://www.bad-reichenhaller.de/en/products.html https://www.bad-reichenhaller.de/en/products.html In most supermarkets you get almost all of these options. Disclaimer is I have never seen the one with Selenium added.
- raverbashing 3y agoI wonder what's the mineral composition of the 'pure salt' (it certainly contains some trace minerals) and/or the famed pink salt Wouldn't be surprising if it naturally had some fluoride
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tpush 3y agoSalt is definitely commonly supplemented with fluoride, say least in Germany.
- neuronic 3y agoIt's on the label and you can decide to just buy the non-fluoride version. Not sure how salt in processed food or restaurants is used though - this is the 'out-of-control' factor here.
- irthomasthomas 3y agoI always found it bizarre that health care is so expensive, and yet here we are given unlimited, free medicine, on tap!
- Garvi 3y ago>it's worth asking why It's been a popular and wide spread conspiracy theory that the "shadow government" is either trying to lower the IQ or the total population numbers using fluoride in the water supply. And since politicians don't get chosen on a basis of competency, but rather popularity, you have the vast majority being relatively severely logically challenged and thus unable to read scientific papers and understand complicated topics like child dental care.
- jiggawatts 3y agoOr any topic that involves more than one interacting decision, a graph, or any numbers at all. COVID made it pretty clear that neither the general population nor most politicians are remotely qualified to make decisions. Not just medical decisions, just… decisions.
- mrguyorama 3y agoI have a lot of very smart friends, like significantly higher than average in terms of degrees and technical jobs and standardized testing scores at least. One of them purchased a game that is like Apples to Apples but the point is to provide labels or name the axis of a graph. It was enlightening just how many of my friends that had a passing notion of calculus could not intuitively interpret what a graph actually means. For example, they would often misunderstand the relation between the dependent and independent variable, or not even understand what it meant for a variable to depend on another variable. Too bad too, because it was a really fun game for me.
- jiggawatts 3y agoSomething I saw a smart IT manager do is produce graphs for the monthly board report without a legend, labels, or any numbers at all. Just lines, but not even grid lines. His explanation was that nobody understood the numbers anyway, the graph is just there to be a pretty colourful picture while he talks.
- taskforcegemini 3y agoso salt would not only be bad for my heart but also for my brain?
- jeezfrk 3y agochange our kids over to frack fluid! better still ... give em dioxin the way capitalist Jesus intended!