I believe the objection to fluoride is that it is a tranquilizer that keeps us from achieving glory through violent uprising… or sweet sweet dentist profits.
This is a conspiracy by fluoridians.
Thats what the fluoridiots say.
thanks Ron DeSantooth
fluorida man strikes again
Yeah but I read an article on a bullshit website. I think some no name website knows more than a toxicologist
Why is some dumb scientist expert trying to tell me, a person who pays for an internet connection, what the truth is?
Because something something shill money.
Back when I was in college, people didn’t like fluoride because it calcifies the pinneal gland. I assume that rhetoric has only been further exaggerated over the years
Another point that conspiracy bros will bring up is that fluoride is a toxic byproduct of aluminum manufacture and dumping it into the water supply is a cheap way for Alcoa to dispose of it benevolently.
Honestly it really is sad, we have so many more uses for it
Every atom of fluoride going into our water is another atom that can’t go into chlorine trifluoride production. Putting it into the water is a huge sacrifice we make for the health of society.
Weird. The only argument I heard, and successfully made it to policy in my area is that it costs tax money and takes away choice. All thus smart stuff is for those damn yankees.
It does do this. However so does ageing, low sunlight exposure, low altitude, ethnicity, sex, nutrition, neuro-divergence, cell phone use, EM fields… you get the idea.
Don’t forget the gravitational pull of Betelgeuse. In a very, very small way, that also effects calcification of the pineal gland.
(Don’t give them ideas…)
Does fluoride-enhanced water actually do this, though? Or just pure fluoride? Yes, pure fluoride has an effect, but I always thought the miniscule amount in our water is not enough to actually make a difference to the natural calcification of our pineal gland, anyways.
From what I have read studies do not show it, however it is believed it does happen because, when the data in those studies is extrapolated for 60+ years, it shows that it should contribute to it, at least
So, yeah, seems too, but it really isn’t a factor worth worrying about
Agreed but can we turn down the chloramine valve? It tastes awful.
Why not just get a water filter?
Great post… but where is the meme?
Welcome to Science Memes, where the science isn’t memes and the memes aren’t about science.
The meme is now this is not US policy.
Its like stating the world is not flat… when in fact NASA’s official stance is that the world is, indeed, flat.
Without Fluoride all the humour in the world dies.
The people who need to hear this sadly would not believe that too much water can kill you even if you showed them someone die from it, I fear. I’d also be shocked if they read “water poisoning” and didn’t think of poisoned water.
I didn’t know this was a thing when I was younger, but not young enough to not be classified as a moron.
Drank about 7-8 litres of water in 3 hours without going to the bathroom as a contest against a work colleague. Suffice to say I started feeling a little off on the way home, even after going to the bathroom. Years later I finally learned you can drown yourself from drinking too much and the symptoms were eerily close to what I experienced that night.
Oh don’t get me wrong! I also only learned about water toxicity when I was very much an adult.
But the difference between us and the type of person I’m talking about, is that we (I’m presuming on your part) don’t think fluoride in water is a bad thing.
The kind of person who hears “the government adds CHEMICAL_NAME to water” and assumes that’s a bad thing is the kind of person who will not believe drinking too much water can kill you, even (or especially) if they are told by an expert.
How much oatmeal would I have to eat to die of fluoride poisoning?
0.08mg per half cup serving, but may vary depending on water used. https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Fluoride-HealthProfessional/
10mg is the accepted daily upper limit for an adult. So 62.5 cups of oatmeal to reach that max safe limit. https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Fluoride-Consumer/
Acute poisoning symptoms may appear as low as 10-15 mg/kg, lethal dose might be 32-64 mg/kg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoride_toxicity
So 200 to 400 cups of oatmeal per kg you weigh for a lethal dose. (32/0.08/2=200, 64/0.08/2=400)
That’s a lot of oatmeal.
Oh yeah? And what if someone ignores that, simply lies and says it’s toxic? I’m convinced!
And both of these people telling me about fluoride in water are both experts in their field. One an expert toxicologist, and the other an expert liar. Now I don’t know what to believe.
I feel like I woke up in the movie Dr. Strangelove
I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
Second time I got to post this today, unfortunately because it’s almost ceased being satire.
Toxicologist here. I think that take is dishonest or dumb.
Taking a lethal dose is almost never the concern with any substance in our drinking water.
Hormones, heavy metals, persistent organic chemicals, ammonia are all in our drinking water. But for all of them we can’t drink enough water to die from a high dose.
Some of them still have a large effect on our bodies.
It’s about the longterm effects. Which we need longterm studies to learn about. That makes them harder to study.
Still doesn’t mean flouride does anything bad longerm. But the argument is bad.
Yeah, it seems to me like he got the right idea and wanted to convince people by making an extreme statement…
That might well be the case. I’m not sure if it is helpful to use those half truths which are simpler to convince certain people. Or if it weakens the point because it is in the end not really correct.
Yeah, by this argument lead in the water isn’t a concern.
You just made me mad by helping me realize that the Trump bros are going to break water by removing fluoride long before they fix water by removing lead.
They like the lead, though!
(Probably. I mean, they did in Flint, MI…)
Yeah but lead bioaccumulates where as fluoride/ine doesn’t
Are you sure fluoride doesn’t? It does accumulate in the soil, building up in crops. Considering fluoride exposure from all sources, many people are above upper safe limits, even from tea drinking alone
I don’t think fluoride should be added to water as it just pollutes the environment, where 99.99% of water isn’t coming in contact with teeth
It doesn’t. This is high-school chemistry.
Fluoride only “accumulates” up to the peak concentration of the environment (no further) on places where it is removed from contact with that environment.
You can only accumulate fluoride in the soil if you keep adding it and there is almost no rain to wash it away.
Like how crops are irrigated with town water, and in many areas with lowering rainfall? Accumulates in fruit, vegetables, leaves too
Yes, irrigation with the minimum possible amount of water is known to destroy land for millennia at this point. But sodium will be a problem way before you notice any change in fluoride.
Yup, same with PFAS and forever chemicals. Maybe I’m ignorant because I’m not a doctor, but I don’t know if this line of thinking holds water - pun not intended.
It’s so funny I was just having a similar conversation about neurotoxic venomous animals in another thread. Lethality is an obviously concerning threshold, but there are substances out there that can easily destroy your quality of life and livelihood that never reach the concern of being lethal.
I think for mostly rational people concerned about fluoride in their water is that it was a public health decision made with little to no actual science proving it’s safety or efficacy when it was first decided that they were going to add it to the public water supply. The proposed benefits of it weren’t even supported by scientific evidence, it was just supposed that exposure to sodium fluoride could potentially reduce tooth decay for some.
Personally, I’ve suffered from the cosmetic damage of dental fluorosis, and I’m not necessarily thrilled about fluoride. But I have way more issues with public mandates founded on pseudoscience than I am with sodium fluoride. Especially now that we can see evidence that for some people fluoride can be especially beneficial.
So what was wrong with giving people the option of using fluoride toothpaste or mouthwashes… Why did it have to go into the public water supply?
Mate, your entire second paragraph is completely false. Like, you need to just read this: https://www.nidcr.nih.gov/health-info/fluoride/the-story-of-fluoridation
It’s considered by the CDC as one of the greatest Public Health Achievements of the last Century. There have been dozens, if not hundreds of studies about fluoride affects in the water supply.
Yeah that proves my point entirely.
In 1945 they fluoridated the first public water supply.
In 1979 the first published research began to appear to show how fluoride might be able to remineralize dental enamel.
Also, isn’t it recommended to not give infants fluorided water, hence why you can buy it in virtually every grocery store?
Pretty much anything you can think of is recommended by someone, because different people have conflicting views. The key is to choose whose recommendations are based on the best reasoning & evidence aligning with your goals.
Also “because I’m an expert and I say so” is a good way to convince someone to let you poison them.
Fluoride does have long term effects though once you consider fluoride exposure through all sources like diet, which is mostly due to fluoride from water ending up in farmland. Tradesmen alone regularly exceed the upper limits due to high water consumption in hotter seasons
Citation needed
So, once again, DHMO is the chemical we need to fear.
Any chemical that can exist as a solid, a liquid and a gas at the same time isn’t safe to put into our bodies!
The stuff also known as hydric acid. People just don’t talk enough about how corrosive it is. Plus, it gets in the air and gets in your lungs!
It’s 10 million times more acidic than drain cleaner!!! And the government is trying to force you to drink it by forcing it to be used in municipal drinking fountains
It’s so pervasive that they have found it in the bodies of every single child worldwide.
There was an incident involving it on April 14th 1912 that took over 1500 lives.
I heard that anyone who’s ever come into contact with it has later died
Its a common component of all cancer cells, and trace amounts have been found in the blood of dead lab rats.
terrorists will drink vast amounts of it every day before an attack
This is a better argument than the one in the post. No one is worried about acute toxicity of fluoride but rather long term. But it’s not long term toxic, doesn’t accumulate in the body, and is only present in very low amounts in water. However it should be enough to use fluoridated toothpaste to get the positive effects.
I don’t understand your point.
Nobody drinks the ocean. Fluoride is barely active topically. Most humans rarely if at all swim in the ocean.
Talking about the ocean is odd, but there are towns in the UK (and most countries I’d assume?) where the natural level of fluoride is higher than the concentration they aim for when adding fluoride. I think that’s a pretty good argument for it being safe - the people of Hartlepool have been drinking fluoride rich water for 13 centuries and don’t have any noticeable issues compared to the rest OF County Durham.
Yeah. It’s not an entirely salient point. It does, however, underline the ubiquitous nature of fluorine.
The biggest source of Flourine in the environment is just the normal weathering of rocks that contain it. The biggest of the anthropogenic sources include brick production, phosphate fertiliser application and coal burning.
The minor amount added to drinking water really wouldn’t be the biggest issue if it was as toxic as it’s made out to be.
i know this guy has a fancy degree and everything, but is he really as reliable a source as rfk junior? you don’t need fluoride when you have an army of worms ready to eat any kinds of bacteria that may enter your system.
The fluoride added to water gets it up to 0.7mg/liter.
That ends up to be 2 or 3 drops in a 55 gallon drums worth of water. Not much.
Fluoride is a natural substance and is found in many areas drinking water already. Many areas in much higher concentrations than 0.7mg/liter, so realistically people all over the world have drank fluoridated water for thousands of years.
You have to well over double the 0.7 before any health issues may appear and the first to appear is at about triple the concentration in kids under 8 years old who drink it for years getting spots on their teeth. The spots are only superficial.
Going into concentrations even higher than that CAN cause health issues when drank for longer periods of time. All of those cases being from naturally occurring fluoride, which actually effects somewhere north of 20% of the world’s population.
Which makes the argument that fluoride in our water keeps us passive as being extra stupid, since water sourced around Columbia (the country) is far higher than .07mg/liter and Columbia seems to be caught in violence and turmoil and instability quite a bit over the decades.
*edit: Colombia
Just because a concentration is low doesn’t mean it’s safe. Water with 0.7 mg/L of Po-210 is lethal.
You can put an amount of it in a 55 gallon drum that is not visible
It’s a natural substance
Fluoride is in fact safe at the amounts that the FDA regulates but saying it’s a small concentration or that it’s natural are not the reasons it’s safe. It’s the hundreds of peer reviewed research articles that show that it’s safe
Its presence in groundwater is how we discovered it’s good for teeth.
In fact, there used to be so much in some areas,it actually stained the teeth. In Colorado Springs a dentist noticed that the children were developing brown stains on their teeth. In researching it, it was discovered that the “Colorado Brown Stain” was caused by excessive fluoride in the drinking water. But it also lead to the discovery that regions with natural fluoride present but in lower levels than Colorado Springs didn’t have stained teeth, but did have lower levels of tooth decay.
Yep. In fact, 21% of the world’s natural drinking water used falls within the recommended range for fluoride, while over another 20% is higher and in some countries actually does cause some non-superficial side effects and problems. Those don’t pop up until in concentrations at least 3 times higher than recommended.
Small note: the country name is spelled “Colombia,” and spelling it correctly means you don’t need to specify which one!
Fair enough!
