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Well it halved childhood cavities in the 50s. It did its job and I don’t think it’s hard to understand why it was done. Same reason why they stared iodine to s

Well it halved childhood cavities in the 50s. It did its job and I don’t think it’s hard to understand why it was done. Same reason why they stared iodine to salt… because people were having mental development issues. Now is it still necessary? That’s a different question but let’s not pretend that we don’t know why it was done.

KETpXDDzR 3y ago
Correlation doesn't yield causation! The whole fluoride in drinking water only came up based on a study from abroad. There, they noticed an improvement of dental health over time after they introduced fluoride in their water. However, this study and the same for the 50th ignore the fact that dental hygiene and awareness dramatically improved during this time. Thus, the better dental health is more likely from better topical application of fluoride and more regular brushing/flossing. I'm concerned that we have all the scientific facts and keep ignoring them. Fun fact: Dentists recommend flossing before brushing. Edit: "For example, in Finland and Germany, tooth decay rates remained stable or continued to decline after water fluoridation stopped in communities with widespread fluoride exposure from other sources." - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation
koboll 3y ago
I think there might be some confounders at play here. Consider this excerpt from Wikipedia's article on 'Tooth brushing': > In the United States, although toothbrushes were available at the end of the 19th century, the practice did not become widespread until after the Second World War, when US soldiers continued the tooth brushing that had been required during their military service.[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooth_brushing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooth_brushing
- Retric 3y ago
  Different communities added fluoride at different times, it’s not hard to adjust for other factors when you’re drowning in such data.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Outsife the US, fluoride is added to tooth paste. Sounds like a better idea to me.
    - 8note 3y ago
      Outside the US, it's added to water too
      - hef19898 3y ago
        Africa: 400,000 people out of 1.1 billion get fluorides in there water. Asia: close to none in China (didn't find any hard numbers), none in India, less than 1% in Japan. Only Malaysia is doing it at any resonable scale. Europe: 2% of the population get it, roughly 14 million people with 10.5 million of those being in the UK and Ireland. So that leaves North America, with the exception of Mexico which jas high natural fluoride levels and fluorides salt, Australia and Latin America. Going by these numbers, the majority of people get fluoride through different means from drinking water. Afroca of cpurse has a lot of other issues regarding drinking water, starting with the exostince of clean drinking water itself. Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_by_country https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_by_countr... So techinicalls you are correct, overall much less so.
        Retric 3y ago
        You left out Australia 70%, New Zealand 60%, Brazil 41%, Chile 70% etc. Japan, China, India, and much of Europe have many areas with natural levels of fluoride in the water near or even above the recommended level. Which seriously distort their numbers as proponents of adding fluoride to water supplies don’t want to increase it arbitrarily only to safe and effective levels. China has some really interesting data as in one location removing fluoride quickly resulted in “the incidence of dental caries among 4-year-old children had increased by 62%.”
  - koboll 3y ago
    It actually seems like it is hard: >Water fluoridation reduces cavities in children, while efficacy in adults is less clear.[9][10] A Cochrane review estimates a reduction in cavities when water fluoridation was used by children who had no access to other sources of fluoride to be 35% in baby teeth and 26% in permanent teeth.[9] However, this was based on older studies which failed to control for numerous variables, such as increasing sugar consumption as well as other dental strategies.[9] Most European countries have experienced substantial declines in tooth decay, though milk and salt fluoridation is widespread in lieu of water fluoridation.[11] Recent studies suggest that water fluoridation, particularly in industrialized nations, may be unnecessary because topical fluorides (such as in toothpaste) are widely used, and caries rates have become low.[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation
justsee 3y ago
The first meta-analysis of water fluoridation studies – The York Review – was conducted in 2002 and found that the data on efficacy was limited and of low quality. [1] A point to be considered here is that the institutionalised belief in water fluoridation for the half-century which preceded the York Review was apparently not grounded in much solid scientific enquiry, if any. This review was conducted 3 years after the CDC published "Ten Great Public Health Achievements in the 20th Century", which included water fluoridation as one of these great achievements. Another curiosity of this public health belief was the guideline that water fluoridation levels need to vary in a region based on temperature. This was because it is apparently a predictor of water consumption amounts by small children. Colder climates were meant to have higher levels of fluoride (up to 1.2 ppm) because people apparently drink less water, and warmer climates were meant to have lower levels (0.7 ppm), because they drink more water. It indicates that consumption is a very important factor in considering additive levels, and that all other factors are less important than climate. This was codified in a 1957 paper "Determining optimum fluoride concentrations" (Galagan and Vermillion) [2] which includes their scientific formula: parts per million of fluoride = 0.34 / E "Where E is the estimated average daily water intake for children through 10 years of age in ounces per pound of body weight. It may be calculated from the estimation equation E=-0.038+0.0062 temperature, where temperature is the mean maximum temperature in degrees Fahrenheit." This seems to reflect the kind of scientific rigour behind this belief, and perhaps the absurdity of the formula is why the US DHHS updated their guidelines in 2015 to settle on a flat 0.7 ppm regardless of climate [3]. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/4801410 https://www.nature.com/articles/4801410 [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2031310/?page=1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2031310/?page=1 [3] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2015/05/01/2015-10201/public-health-service-recommendation-for-fluoride-concentration-in-drinking-water-for-prevention-of https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2015/05/01/2015-10...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Alexqw85 3y ago
> Same reason why they stared iodine to salt… because people were having mental development issues. This is not directly related to the topic of Fluoride, but Iodine was actually initially introduced to reduce goiters. The mental benefits were a wonderful, unexpected side-effect. Studies have put the effects anywhere between 8-15 IQ bump for populations that were Iodine deficient. Pretty jaw dropping when you think about it.
- psychphysic 3y ago
  About 2.5% of the population has an intellectual impairment (if mean IQ is 100, and SD 15, 2.5% have IQ less than 70 the WHO cut off). Of this 2.5% some will have social/adaptive impaitment similarly 2SD below the mean and have an "intellectual/learning disability". Move that mean down one SD (15 IQ points). And now OVER 15% of the people meet the intellectual impairment criteria. Put it another way, due to the shape of the normal distribition moving IQ down 10-15 points amounts to 2-3X increase in the number with abnormally low IQ. Cut to the modern era, where fewer and fewer jobs are available for those with intellectual impairments, and the world requires more and more technical prowess and the situation is far worse than the figures appear.
throw0101b 3y ago
> Now is it still necessary? An experiment in Windsor, Ontario (across the border from Detroit, MI): > Yemmi Calito's children are patients of Dr. Meriano. The two oldest kids were raised on fluoridated water in Windsor and both have healthy teeth. Her two youngest weren't, and they've had to be treated for serious tooth decay. Calito said their oral hygiene habits are the same. > "The younger two I feel they have more cavities," Calito said. "My little one, my three-year-old, actually had to go have general anesthesia … [about] four weeks ago to get his teeth fixed. They were in pretty bad shape." * https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/fluoride-tap-water-1.4990257 https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/fluoride-tap-water-1.4990257 Calgary, AB, stopped and has recently decided to restart: * https://calgary.citynews.ca/2022/11/17/calgary-fluoride-water-2024/ https://calgary.citynews.ca/2022/11/17/calgary-fluoride-wate... The public voted in 2021 to stop: > What’s happened since 2012? A study found that within a couple of years of ending fluoridation, decay in children’s baby teeth had risen by 65 per cent compared to 2005, while the increase was only 14 per cent in Edmonton, which continues to fluoridate its water. “We weren’t looking at little tiny cavities that needed to be fixed. They were large cavities, they were destroyed teeth,” says dental hygienist Denise Kokaram, who led a dental program for vulnerable Calgary youth in the wake of fluoridation’s discontinuation. > In 2019, the University of Calgary’s public health institute summarized for council’s benefit the body of science on fluoridation—the abundant evidence that it curbs tooth decay in both children and adults, and the lack of conclusive evidence of the myriad harms that anti-fluoride activists allege, from bone deterioration to brain disease. (Authorities have lowered recommended fluoride levels in water to limit the risk of fluorosis, a condition that mainly causes mild tooth discoloration.) * https://macleans.ca/news/after-a-decade-of-cavities-will-calgary-put-fluoride-back-in-its-water-supply/ https://macleans.ca/news/after-a-decade-of-cavities-will-cal...
- spacephysics 3y ago
  Hot take: why don’t we stop the root cause of the problem, instead of the insestuous habit of layering on symptom management on top of symptom management. Stop giving kids these insanely high levels of sugar. No soda is a great start. Same thorn in my side is this completely crazy trend that this new life-long injection Ozempic/Wegovy is being suggested for kids 12 and up. Like what? It also atrophies muscle, tendons, and bones. I hope with the next generation of leaders, we stop this madness of blindly trusting big pharma and corporations and ask where the money trail goes, and what may actually be best for our kids and loved ones.
dennis_jeeves1 3y ago
>Well it halved childhood cavities in the 50s. It did its job and I don’t think it’s hard to understand why it was done. What I heard (but did not verify) was that cavities reduced similarly in countries that did not have fluoride in the water around the same time.
elzbardico 3y ago
1. We know that topic fluoride usage increased resistance to caries. 2. It is kind of difficult to consume fluorinated water without exposing your teeth topically to the fluoride. 3. Ingesting fluorine is definitely not good for you and recent studies seem to confirm this. So, it seems to me that while fluorinating drinking water would incidentally topically expose teeth to its beneficial effects, we don't really need to fluorinate our drinking water as there are other ways to expose teeth topically to fluorine that don't involve drinking fluorinated water. And no, fluorinating water was not a good decision because of the cautionary principle. Even from the beginning, they knew that the effects came from topical exposure, adding it to drinking water was reckless. But hell, this was the time where we added lead to gasoline.

KETpXDDzR 3y ago

Correlation doesn't yield causation! The whole fluoride in drinking water only came up based on a study from abroad. There, they noticed an improvement of dental health over time after they introduced fluoride in their water. However, this study and the same for the 50th ignore the fact that dental hygiene and awareness dramatically improved during this time. Thus, the better dental health is more likely from better topical application of fluoride and more regular brushing/flossing. I'm concerned that we have all the scientific facts and keep ignoring them. Fun fact: Dentists recommend flossing before brushing. Edit: "For example, in Finland and Germany, tooth decay rates remained stable or continued to decline after water fluoridation stopped in communities with widespread fluoride exposure from other sources." - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation

koboll 3y ago

I think there might be some confounders at play here. Consider this excerpt from Wikipedia's article on 'Tooth brushing': > In the United States, although toothbrushes were available at the end of the 19th century, the practice did not become widespread until after the Second World War, when US soldiers continued the tooth brushing that had been required during their military service.[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooth_brushing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooth_brushing

Retric 3y ago
Different communities added fluoride at different times, it’s not hard to adjust for other factors when you’re drowning in such data.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Outsife the US, fluoride is added to tooth paste. Sounds like a better idea to me.
  - 8note 3y ago
    Outside the US, it's added to water too
    - hef19898 3y ago
      Africa: 400,000 people out of 1.1 billion get fluorides in there water. Asia: close to none in China (didn't find any hard numbers), none in India, less than 1% in Japan. Only Malaysia is doing it at any resonable scale. Europe: 2% of the population get it, roughly 14 million people with 10.5 million of those being in the UK and Ireland. So that leaves North America, with the exception of Mexico which jas high natural fluoride levels and fluorides salt, Australia and Latin America. Going by these numbers, the majority of people get fluoride through different means from drinking water. Afroca of cpurse has a lot of other issues regarding drinking water, starting with the exostince of clean drinking water itself. Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_by_country https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_by_countr... So techinicalls you are correct, overall much less so.
      - Retric 3y ago
        You left out Australia 70%, New Zealand 60%, Brazil 41%, Chile 70% etc. Japan, China, India, and much of Europe have many areas with natural levels of fluoride in the water near or even above the recommended level. Which seriously distort their numbers as proponents of adding fluoride to water supplies don’t want to increase it arbitrarily only to safe and effective levels. China has some really interesting data as in one location removing fluoride quickly resulted in “the incidence of dental caries among 4-year-old children had increased by 62%.”
- koboll 3y ago
  It actually seems like it is hard: >Water fluoridation reduces cavities in children, while efficacy in adults is less clear.[9][10] A Cochrane review estimates a reduction in cavities when water fluoridation was used by children who had no access to other sources of fluoride to be 35% in baby teeth and 26% in permanent teeth.[9] However, this was based on older studies which failed to control for numerous variables, such as increasing sugar consumption as well as other dental strategies.[9] Most European countries have experienced substantial declines in tooth decay, though milk and salt fluoridation is widespread in lieu of water fluoridation.[11] Recent studies suggest that water fluoridation, particularly in industrialized nations, may be unnecessary because topical fluorides (such as in toothpaste) are widely used, and caries rates have become low.[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation

justsee 3y ago

The first meta-analysis of water fluoridation studies – The York Review – was conducted in 2002 and found that the data on efficacy was limited and of low quality. [1] A point to be considered here is that the institutionalised belief in water fluoridation for the half-century which preceded the York Review was apparently not grounded in much solid scientific enquiry, if any. This review was conducted 3 years after the CDC published "Ten Great Public Health Achievements in the 20th Century", which included water fluoridation as one of these great achievements. Another curiosity of this public health belief was the guideline that water fluoridation levels need to vary in a region based on temperature. This was because it is apparently a predictor of water consumption amounts by small children. Colder climates were meant to have higher levels of fluoride (up to 1.2 ppm) because people apparently drink less water, and warmer climates were meant to have lower levels (0.7 ppm), because they drink more water. It indicates that consumption is a very important factor in considering additive levels, and that all other factors are less important than climate. This was codified in a 1957 paper "Determining optimum fluoride concentrations" (Galagan and Vermillion) [2] which includes their scientific formula: parts per million of fluoride = 0.34 / E "Where E is the estimated average daily water intake for children through 10 years of age in ounces per pound of body weight. It may be calculated from the estimation equation E=-0.038+0.0062 temperature, where temperature is the mean maximum temperature in degrees Fahrenheit." This seems to reflect the kind of scientific rigour behind this belief, and perhaps the absurdity of the formula is why the US DHHS updated their guidelines in 2015 to settle on a flat 0.7 ppm regardless of climate [3]. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/4801410 https://www.nature.com/articles/4801410 [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2031310/?page=1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2031310/?page=1 [3] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2015/05/01/2015-10201/public-health-service-recommendation-for-fluoride-concentration-in-drinking-water-for-prevention-of https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2015/05/01/2015-10...

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

Alexqw85 3y ago

> Same reason why they stared iodine to salt… because people were having mental development issues. This is not directly related to the topic of Fluoride, but Iodine was actually initially introduced to reduce goiters. The mental benefits were a wonderful, unexpected side-effect. Studies have put the effects anywhere between 8-15 IQ bump for populations that were Iodine deficient. Pretty jaw dropping when you think about it.

psychphysic 3y ago
About 2.5% of the population has an intellectual impairment (if mean IQ is 100, and SD 15, 2.5% have IQ less than 70 the WHO cut off). Of this 2.5% some will have social/adaptive impaitment similarly 2SD below the mean and have an "intellectual/learning disability". Move that mean down one SD (15 IQ points). And now OVER 15% of the people meet the intellectual impairment criteria. Put it another way, due to the shape of the normal distribition moving IQ down 10-15 points amounts to 2-3X increase in the number with abnormally low IQ. Cut to the modern era, where fewer and fewer jobs are available for those with intellectual impairments, and the world requires more and more technical prowess and the situation is far worse than the figures appear.

throw0101b 3y ago

> Now is it still necessary? An experiment in Windsor, Ontario (across the border from Detroit, MI): > Yemmi Calito's children are patients of Dr. Meriano. The two oldest kids were raised on fluoridated water in Windsor and both have healthy teeth. Her two youngest weren't, and they've had to be treated for serious tooth decay. Calito said their oral hygiene habits are the same. > "The younger two I feel they have more cavities," Calito said. "My little one, my three-year-old, actually had to go have general anesthesia … [about] four weeks ago to get his teeth fixed. They were in pretty bad shape." * https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/fluoride-tap-water-1.4990257 https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/fluoride-tap-water-1.4990257 Calgary, AB, stopped and has recently decided to restart: * https://calgary.citynews.ca/2022/11/17/calgary-fluoride-water-2024/ https://calgary.citynews.ca/2022/11/17/calgary-fluoride-wate... The public voted in 2021 to stop: > What’s happened since 2012? A study found that within a couple of years of ending fluoridation, decay in children’s baby teeth had risen by 65 per cent compared to 2005, while the increase was only 14 per cent in Edmonton, which continues to fluoridate its water. “We weren’t looking at little tiny cavities that needed to be fixed. They were large cavities, they were destroyed teeth,” says dental hygienist Denise Kokaram, who led a dental program for vulnerable Calgary youth in the wake of fluoridation’s discontinuation. > In 2019, the University of Calgary’s public health institute summarized for council’s benefit the body of science on fluoridation—the abundant evidence that it curbs tooth decay in both children and adults, and the lack of conclusive evidence of the myriad harms that anti-fluoride activists allege, from bone deterioration to brain disease. (Authorities have lowered recommended fluoride levels in water to limit the risk of fluorosis, a condition that mainly causes mild tooth discoloration.) * https://macleans.ca/news/after-a-decade-of-cavities-will-calgary-put-fluoride-back-in-its-water-supply/ https://macleans.ca/news/after-a-decade-of-cavities-will-cal...

spacephysics 3y ago
Hot take: why don’t we stop the root cause of the problem, instead of the insestuous habit of layering on symptom management on top of symptom management. Stop giving kids these insanely high levels of sugar. No soda is a great start. Same thorn in my side is this completely crazy trend that this new life-long injection Ozempic/Wegovy is being suggested for kids 12 and up. Like what? It also atrophies muscle, tendons, and bones. I hope with the next generation of leaders, we stop this madness of blindly trusting big pharma and corporations and ask where the money trail goes, and what may actually be best for our kids and loved ones.

dennis_jeeves1 3y ago

>Well it halved childhood cavities in the 50s. It did its job and I don’t think it’s hard to understand why it was done. What I heard (but did not verify) was that cavities reduced similarly in countries that did not have fluoride in the water around the same time.

elzbardico 3y ago

1. We know that topic fluoride usage increased resistance to caries. 2. It is kind of difficult to consume fluorinated water without exposing your teeth topically to the fluoride. 3. Ingesting fluorine is definitely not good for you and recent studies seem to confirm this. So, it seems to me that while fluorinating drinking water would incidentally topically expose teeth to its beneficial effects, we don't really need to fluorinate our drinking water as there are other ways to expose teeth topically to fluorine that don't involve drinking fluorinated water. And no, fluorinating water was not a good decision because of the cautionary principle. Even from the beginning, they knew that the effects came from topical exposure, adding it to drinking water was reckless. But hell, this was the time where we added lead to gasoline.