…
It is a scenario playing out nationwide. From Oregon to Pennsylvania, hundreds of communities have in recent years either stopped adding fluoride to their water supplies or voted to prevent its addition. Supporters of such bans argue that people should be given the freedom of choice. The broad availability of over-the-counter dental products containing the mineral makes it no longer necessary to add to public water supplies, they say. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that while store-bought products reduce tooth decay, the greatest protection comes when they are used in combination with water fluoridation.
The outcome of an ongoing federal case in California could force the Environmental Protection Agency to create a rule regulating or banning the use of fluoride in drinking water nationwide. In the meantime, the trend is raising alarm bells for public health researchers who worry that, much like vaccines, fluoride may have become a victim of its own success.
The CDC maintains that community water fluoridation is not only safe and effective but also yields significant cost savings in dental treatment. Public health officials say removing fluoride could be particularly harmful to low-income families — for whom drinking water may be the only source of preventive dental care.
“If you have to go out and get care on your own, it’s a whole different ballgame,” said Myron Allukian Jr., a dentist and past president of the American Public Health Association. Millions of people have lived with fluoridated water for years, “and we’ve had no major health problems,” he said. “It’s much easier to prevent a disease than to treat it.”
According to the anti-fluoride group Fluoride Action Network, since 2010, over 240 communities around the world have removed fluoride from their drinking water or decided not to add it.
So lead, plastic, and PFAS are fine but fluoride is where they draw the line…?
They’re also against vaccines because supposedly vaccines will damage their DNA… whereas apparently PFAS don’t.
This
I am SO tired of being at the mercy of idiots.
“Never Underestimate The Power Of Stupid People In Large Groups” -George Carlin
No, people shouldn’t have the right to choose if fluoride is added to their water. People are stupid. You vote to remove something that will greatly help children that can’t vote. The government’s job, sometimes, is to stop stupid people from hurting others and their selves. That’s the reason you can’t drink raw milk or use lead gas.
The raw milk thing is actually part of the reason the FDA was formed!
That’s the reason you can’t drink raw milk or use lead gas.
You can get raw milk if your state allows it. The federal government bans it, but only has regulatory authority over interstate commerce, so it can’t be moved across state boundaries, but you can get it if it’s made in-state.
I mean, I think that you’re mostly aiming to expose yourself to listeria, but if that’s what someone wants…
My guess is that dairy farmers have an interest in promoting it in that if they can sell it, it gives them a market without much competition.
Drinking milk was a bad example. I should have said sell unpasteurized milk. The point I think we both agree is that stupid for people make stupid decisions. Just like I don’t think people can decide about vaccines that have very low risk rates. It effects everyone, not just the idiots.
If stupid people want to make stupid decisions, that’s fine. The problem is when they try to take the rest of society down with them via damage or converting others to that stupidity.
That was my badly worded point. Other are effected by a few people with extra time.
You can drill your own well to get your own water, just like you can have a cow for raw milk.
can we compromise on drinking raw milk with flouride added?
Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others!
Well, and TB.
Some of the herd nobly chose to sacrifice itself to improve the genetic resistance of the whole.
Just let them die then, rather than trying to make them age where they don’t want to.
That is a completely different argument and has nothing to do with the topic.
Of course you can drink raw milk if you want to!
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Wow! That escalated quickly.
Guess mods don’t under sarcasm
Btw, cooking milk destroys some of the good stuff in it.
Edit: Raw milk has proteins which boost immune system and growth (because it’s for baby cows), which break down while cooking.
And yeah, probably don’t drink raw milk in US.
And all the things that kill you.
Probably a culture and laws difference. Here (swiss) getting raw milk from your local farmer is no problem.
I’m sure small doses of cyanide has benefits too.
Yes they should. Ingesting fluoride is bad for you, and it doesn’t help your teeth to drink it. That’s why small children’s toothpaste doesn’t have it, because you can’t trust them not to eat it. It’s only good when applied directly to the teeth, which can be accomplished on a daily basis by using toothpaste with fluoride and/or a mouthwash containing it, both of which you don’t drink.
Fluoride is removed from my drinking water by my reverse-osmosis filtration system, along with all the other contaminants like PFAS and lead. I’ve been drinking fluoride-free water for 10 years, and my teeth are beautiful and healthy. Anyone who drinks bottled water is also probably drinking fluoride-free water since those companies mostly use the same filtration method to produce their bottled water.
Do you have evidence?
Sure, here’s a good article with lots of info.
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/tswj/2014/293019/
Link to original article. Cheers to you for citing your sources, but the authors here are massively conflating the effects of industrial fluoride exposure with residential water fluoridation in an attempt to prove a position they began with.
That’s not a peer reviewed study - its somebody’s editorialized book report.
Go ahead and review it then - their sources are cited.
Evidence has been presented, whether or not you agree with what it says is irrelevant.
thanks
We live in the time of the most readily available and advanced information yet continually make the dumbest fucking decisions.
“Cavities…yeah….goddamn hadn’t had one of those in awhile, we should bring those back.”
I’d like to chime in that fluoridation plus a toothpaste containing hydroxyapatite is a game changer; my kids went from several cavities a year to almost none. You used to have to buy japanese toothpastes for this, but it’s starting to show up in america.
What are you talking about?
People get cavities all the time, and it’s because they don’t brush their damn teeth.
you know they put fluoride in toothpaste right? if you’re not getting enough from that your water isn’t going to make up the difference.
It demonstrably makes a huge difference, even with people who brush on a regular basis.
Let us suppose that brushing alone gives you maximum benefit you can get from fluoride.
There are people out there who can’t brush their teeth as often as they should, for reasons outside their control. Why should we deprive them of the benefit of fluorinated water? It makes no difference to us. Would you rather live in a world with more tooth problems, or fewer?
There are people out there who can’t brush their teeth as often as they should, for reasons outside their control.
Hello! That would be me! I have trigeminal neuralgia.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/trigeminal-neuralgia/symptoms-causes/syc-20353344
As the image should illustrate, brushing my teeth really really hurts, so I can’t do it anywhere near as often as I’d like to.
The article addresses this. They explicitly state that this decision will disproportionately effect poorer people whose only preventative care may be drinking water. In order for this to be as effective as having fluoride in the water supply, you’d have to find some way to get said toothpaste to these poorer people AND ensure compliance. So, definitely not as easy as just removing the fluoride and letting toothpaste handle it.
If they are so poor that they can’t afford toothpaste, and their only option for obtaining fluoride is by drinking tap water, their teeth are going to be absolutely fucked no matter what we put in that tap water. So this is not a good reason.
Their teeth will be less fucked with fluorinated water.
We should just buy them toothpaste and toothbrushes instead, that would be far more effective to help. Don’t buy fluoride to put in the drinking water that nobody needs to drink, and invest that money in toothpaste and toothbrushes to be mailed out for free or whatever.
Poverty isn’t just money. It’s education and time as well. A less-well-off person will be less educated, and thus they won’t really know or understand why consistently brushing is important. People who are struggling to keep afloat also tend to have multiple jobs, or other responsibilities. Brush time seems insignificant until you realize that some people’s average day is: wake up after 2 or 3 hours sleep, eat a piece of bread if lucky, go to first job, work 4-8 hours, go to second job, go home, go to bed, do it again. There’s no time and energy in there for such a simple maintenance item that is, strictly speaking, not required for life.
Plus disabled people, plus people in an abusive relationship, plus depressed people, plus people who are just plain gross. Who wouldn’t want to live in a world where all these people have better teeth?
As a child you can’t brush your adult teeth that haven’t grown in yet, but you can drink fluoridated water and have it deposit in your adult teeth as they are growing making them stronger than they otherwise would have been for the rest of your life.
There’s other ways to do that too. Kids here (Netherlands) get fluoride treatments from a young age (after their adult teeth have come through, I think) up to 18. It’s not particularly enjoyable but like you said, it benefits you for the rest of your life.
Free/affordable healthcare means checkups at the dentist about every 6 months. After the checkup you get these two small jaw shaped containers (for upper and lower sides) filled with a fluoride paste and you just sit there for a few minutes drooling into a metal bowl. There’s even flavours but they’re all gross, haha. Apparently that’s on purpose so you don’t swallow too much.
Anyway, this whole fluoride in the water thing appears to be a very US based discussion, so I’ve got no horse in this race. I just wish the US had better, more affordable healthcare to begin with.
If you’re poor and American, you essentially can’t afford a dentist. This is better than nothing.
Excuse me! The fluoride treatment flavours ar wonderful! Best part of going to the dentist as a kid!
Community water fluoridation has been identified as the most cost-effective method of delivering fluoride to all members of the community regardless of age, educational attainment, income level, and the availability of dental care. In studies conducted after other fluoride products, such as toothpaste, were widely available, scientists found additional reductions in tooth decay – up to 25 percent – among people with community water fluoridation as compared to those without fluoridation.
Do you drink your toothpaste?
The UK used the same argument to stop the addition of iodine to salt. “People already consume enough dietary iodine”. You know what happened? Thyroid diseases are on the rise in the UK again, slowly creeping back to early XX century levels.
I think iodine is underappreciated. But also I think fewer and fewer people use the salt shaker because they eat so much processed food (which has salt that is not iodized). Then you’re down to milk and seafood. Milk gets it because they use iodine to sanitize the udders. So if you don’t drink milk and who eats seafood on most days. Solution to anyone reading: multivitamin.
Same with Switzerland
You can’t trust this stuff. I only drink water straight from the creek and- excuse me, my diarrhea is acting up.
What a bad faith argument.
Most people who want to avoid fluoride in their drinking water use reverse osmosis.
Then I guess there’s a solution and we don’t need to remove it for everyone else.
Why should people have to resort to using reverse osmosis to avoid fluoride in their drinking water?
Also, good job pivoting instead of admitting you were arguing in bad faith.
I expect you to keep doing that.
Why should people have to suffer at the hands of idiots who want to ban fluoride in water?
That’s a loaded question because people do not suffer without fluoridated water.
Do you want to explain how they suffer without fluoridated water? That way you’re talking specifics that can actually be debated upon instead of generalities where people need to make your arguments for you.
No you’re wrong. It’s no loaded. Lack of fluoride increased the risk of tooth decay. https://www.msdmanuals.com/home/disorders-of-nutrition/minerals/fluoride-deficiency
The addition of fluoride (fluoridation) to drinking water that is low in fluoride or the use of fluoride toothpaste and supplements significantly reduces the risk of tooth decay.
Jeez, you really can’t read, can you?
I don’t expect you to be capable of making worthwhile arguments, so I’m just going to end this here.
Goodbye.
For the same reason people should “have to” resort to anything else they don’t want that everyone else is fine with. You don’t get to choose for society as a whole.
If you don’t want to eat inspected meat, fine. Go raise or hunt your own.
For the same reason people should “have to” resort to anything else they don’t want that everyone else is fine with.
Like lead in gasoline? The thing is, everyone else is not “fine” with this. Why do you think there’s an article about it?
Ban the fluoride and give universal dental care like Canada is planning.
A pipe dream. The dummies will likely just ban the fluoride with no other plan or solution.
Or, ya know, keep the fluoride in the water and also give universal dental care. Removing the fluoride from the water is the more expensive solution.
Yeah, so few people advocate for this though. It’s either fluoridation is unbalancing my humors or let’s fluoridate a bunch of water that will go down the drain.
You know that eventually free healthcare is still paid by everyone ? Why add the cost of generally preventable tooth decay to the tab? It’s not mutually exclusive…
Free universal healthcare is cheaper than the current US system for a whole pile of reasons, mainly by consolating the consumer into one giant bargaining group. But there are secondary savings, like enabling people to get regular check ups to catch things early before they get expensive. It also enables them to go to the doctor when they need it, instead of gambling that they’ll get better; it’s cheaper if many people go in for small things than if a few people go in for large things.
US healthcare is the most expensive healthcare in the world because it can push people and insurance companies around. The rest of the 1st world pays LESS than the US does for itd healthcare because governments have the power to tell healthcare providers to go fuck themselves if they try and charge too much
That’s unrelated with the need of prevention over having comprehensive healthcare coverage… I mean it’s not a bad point, but it’s unrelated.
Let healthcare be free for the patient thanks to magic money it still sucks to experience tooth decay that would have been prevented by chemically treating water as it’s always been.
Its not the magic of free money, thats literally what tax $ are for. And when the government pays for healthcare, suddenly, for some reason, they care more about legislation that keeps its citizens healthier. Stop eating the propaganda that private healthcare tries to sell you, universal healthcare is as free as libraries, paved roads in cities, and clean water in proper 1st world countries is. Private healthcare is more expensive in literally every sense than universal healthcare is.
tl:dr: You want flouridated water? A government that has to pay for the dental costs of its citizens is going to have a hell of a lot more incentive to keep flouridating the water as long as it doesnt cause healthcare costs elsewhere
I thiiiiink the point they’re trying to make is, why not both? It’s cheaper to have some kind of subsidized public healthcare, versus what we have now. Doing that, but then removing the fluoride from the water will still be cheaper than today’s plan, but more expensive than better healthcare AND fluoridated water. Why choose one when there’s no real reason not to have both?
I even put it in the Tl:dr though, a government paying for its citizens healthcare is likely going to push for Flouridated water, both is the default, “why not both” is a redundant argument, and OP is still referring to universal healthcare as “magic money” which is disingenuous, stupid, and a private healthcare propaganda sound byte
“Free Healthcare” is free as in libre, not free as in beer.
Everyone is free to get it. We all pay for it. We would pay far less than what we pay now in premiums. It works on other countries, and there is no reason it wouldn’t work here in the USA.
“Free at the point of service”.
“Inclusive as a part of citizenship”.Of course it costs money, of course everyone pays for it. That’s what taxes are
Yeah it’s free as in roads and parks
state and local taxes work that way - state and local governments spend tax dollars to buy goods and services
federal taxes just delete money from targeted people, choosing who to make poorer in order to regulate inflation - the federal government creates new dollars when it needs to buy something
It is free as in beer, in the sense that you as a patient never have to spend out of pocket for medical care.
There’s always someone arguing “It’s not free cause your taxes pay for it,” but you’re paying those taxes anyway regardless of where the money goes. You as an individual would never notice the difference in your taxes.
And the idiots dont realise that EVERYONE pays less in those taxes than they currently pay for their private healthcare. Private healthcare COSTS MORE than public healthcare because the drug makers, hospitals, etc have more power to gouge insurance companies and the average Joe than they do a large government
yeah and a car accident is generally preventable too.
how about an impacted wisdom tooth? should have thought about that before growing teefs nerd, enjoy your crippling debt.
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USA, can you PPEASE remform your education system and actually ensure that everyone gets a normal and good education? Your idiots are ruining the country.
Also while at it, use that education to teach the kids what freedom really is, how little you really have of it, that boasting about it is dumb, and that using it to make idiotic decisions doesn’t make you look awesome, it makes you look like, well, an idiot.
De-education has been an agenda of one of the parties since the eighties, and we’re just seeing it take fruit now.
These things take time, and that party plays the ‘long game’.
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Since that person named USA explicitly, I’m going to assume that they’re not an American, and that English is not their native language, and hence, not being taken to task for their spelling.
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Assuming makes an ass out of you and me.
I assume nobody has planted a bomb on my car, that my spouse hasn’t poisoned my food, and that my chair hasn’t been rigged to collapse when I sit on it.
Assuming is how people can reasonably function day to day. You assumed your post had value. Sometimes assuming works out for you, sometimes it doesn’t.
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Actually assuming makes an ass out of you and Ming
🪦
Stop bothering Ming. She has done nothing to deserve that
Supporters of such bans argue that people should be given the freedom of choice.
If you honestly don’t want fluoride, you can remove it yourself.
Honestly, if you’re that paranoid about anything in your drinking water, you’d probably benefit from outright distilling it anyway.
They don’t get the choice of whether or not their water is purified either. Damn gubmint!
I mean, people do pay more for mineral water. Yesterday, I was at CVS, and there were at least three sections of refrigerated cabinet consisting of different brands of mineral water.
But if someone wants to produce hard water, I’m sure that they can do that too.
googles
https://www.amazon.com/iSpring-FA15-Water-Filter-Clear/dp/B00FBLGD1S/
Yeah. From the “related filters” section on that, looks like there’s a whole industry of selling people things they can jam inline into their reverse osmosis filter system to do things to their water to make them happy. This one adds “calcium, magnesium, and potassium”.
I don’t see much on there by way of numbers as to what concentrations it’s supposed to produce, but I suppose that if it makes people happy, it’s available. Not like they’re getting any guarantees as to how hard their municipal water is either.
They can buy bottled water and pay for their stupidity.
You can’t remove fluoride using standard water filters, or even high-end RO filter systems. A specialized fluoride-specific filtration system (multi-stage) is required due to fluoride’s chemical bond.
We need to stop letting the village idiots make policy.
We need to stop letting the conservatives make policy.
FTFY
You just repeated what OP said.
That would require a large community effort to resist occupation.
Yes we definitely need to get rid of this democracy thing /s
The problem with our current democracy is that we haven’t enshrined education as a right. Democracy works great if the population is informed and has critical thinking skills. In America, any stupid idea that becomes popular enough can become the law, because the population is too stupid to make pragmatic, evidence-based decisions.
The first thing is not so much less democracy, but more participation. I’m definitely guilty of this myself, so not trying to be holier than thou preachy. Conservatives have been doing a concerted effort to take over lower level offices as well, school boards, municipal positions, etc. Part of the issue seems ro be the people who want to do this stuff often have an ulterior motive, and people who should probably be in these spots have a lack of interest.
Local office is pretty much shit. You get yelled at for whatever the crazies saw on TV last night, you can’t fix anything, and everyone is angry about something.
Never doing it again.
The christofascists are trying to destroy democracy. The village idiots are their brown shirts.
If you want to protect democracy maybe don’t defend the worst examples of it.
Funnily enough, the idiots do have a grain a truth here, that grain just happens to be an example of the internet’s favorite, Dunning-Kruger.
Excess flouride does have profound negative effects on intelligence. Several hundreds times the levels you get positive effects for tooth health from, and thus well beyond the scope of flouridation programs. There are also other notable side effects from flouride toxicity, so it’d be quite noticable.
There are even several regions of America and China where they need deflouridation treatments for ground water, but the conspiracy types never seem to mention those.
They also don’t seem to note that flouride toxicity, like lead toxicity, leads to both decreased intelligence and increased aggression.
How making the working class angry and dumb makes them easier for the owner class to control and profit from never seems to come up.
Lead exposure also causes reduced intelligence.
Leaded gasoline was still a thing when I was a kid.
Lead paint chips are delicious.
And those Stanley cups that suburbia is raging over, also contains lead.
You should probably read the whole thing, but, you know, the lead, I get it
Nice. I’m used to reacting to post headlines long since past.
Also lead.
Excess of ANYTHING leads to brain damage or death
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How making the working class angry and dumb makes them easier for the owner class to control and profit from never seems to come up.
Ask the folks at the Jan 6th riot. Trump played them all like fiddles.
Sure, but I don’t think anyone is accusing Trump of being behind a flouridation conspiracy. It demonstrates rather that angry morons are rather easy to point at the government, which is why the government probably doesn’t want a bunch of angry morons to rule.
I don’t think anyone is accusing Trump of being behind a flouridation conspiracy.
Sure. I’m simply noting that whipping people up into a frenzy or panic is an age old technique for controlling large populations.
It demonstrates rather that angry morons are rather easy to point at the government
Or at this or that ethnic group or religious sect or ideological cohort, sure. You don’t even have to be particularly conservative for this technique to work. Liberals fall for the Immigrant Caravan Invasion and Crime Wave panic stories and Pending Federal Bankruptcy and Communist Invasion stories as easily as any moderate Republican.
the government probably doesn’t want a bunch of angry morons to rule
They do, if they want to export that violence overseas or inflict it on minority groups and women, as a means of social control.
And it isn’t as though state officials are even all that rational. Certainly, Joe Biden’s had no problem perpetuating a genocide overseas, despite his policy whipping up a bonfire of opposition at home and in neighboring regions. Neither do Vladimir Putin or MBS or Narendra Modi seem shy about stoking the fires of bigotry in their own countries, as a means of mobilizing large groups of people into parades of support for their rule.
Angry morons are a great source of cheap activist labor, whether you’re storming the capital on Jan 6th or rallying Hindu nationalists to tear down a 600-year-old mosque in Delhi.
Americans won the battle to bring back measles
Now they’re fighting to bring back tooth decay
Article mentions multiple places in Canada doing the same thing. I am sure you read the article and knew that.
Did I touch a nerve? I was making a joke
Guess Americans aren’t the only ones that can’t read eh?
I suppose, all I saw was that in Canada a self reported study found communities with fluoride thought they weren’t as smart as people in those without thought they were
So I must be illiterate
Your og comment is one that brings nothing of value except circlejerk. You sound like a redditor
Thanks friend
It’s good you finally read the article though.
Can’t stand a liar.
Guys doubling fisting 64oz Big Gulps won that war ages ago
Reverse osmosis filtered bottled water too
People can be fucking ignorant and unfortunately Covid made this all worse. There are simple measures we can take as a society to make everyone’s health better but people succumb to misinformation spread by those who profit from the alternative.
I don’t think covid really made it worse, it just appeared at the right time.
The world has just gone bonkers with misinformation.
It’s only “fluoride” if it’s from the Florida region of the United States of America—otherwise it’s just a sparkling inorganic, monatomic anion of fluorine.
Common misconception - to Floridate water, a man wrestles an aligator and one of them must pee in it.
The water, or the alligator?
This is what happens when you have an scientifically illiterate population.
It’s the old Alex Jones “turning the frogs gay” line. Just enough science to hurt yourself with.
I wanted to watch the video, but piped isn’t working. Can you help with another link, 🔗 or not, no biggie?
I went ahead and just linked it to the Youtube link. Should be working now.
On a more positive note if they lose their teeth they might have less luck at reproduction. Problem fixes itself, fingers crossed
From personal experience in dealing with people without as many teeth as the average, it doesn’t stop them. R selection strategies in action.
I am missing a tooth from a face injury.
You’re still above average! ;)
How? I don’t know anyone my age that is missing two teeth. It isn’t a big deal I have a fake one in there. Hurt like fucking hell at the time however.
Lol, mostly because I’m playing with the numbers. Kids only have 20 teeth until they’re in double digits. But I was also working with a population that typically had 3-10 teeth missing, so my perspective is skewed ;)
Do your point a favor, remove the n from an
When the tap water is “cloudy, bubbly, and milky” I think of a thousand different reasons why this could be. Flourid is not on that list.
If the tap water looks like that, I’d have the installarion checked before anything else. And I would not put it beyond an American water provider to deliver absolutely shitty water.
There are plenty of places that deliver bubbly, cloudy, milky water and it ain’t from fluoride
