Putting fluoride in water promotes freedom. That sounds crazy, but let me justify it.
If you are poor you can't go anywhere or buy anything. You're not free if you're poor. If you are sick, you may be confined to a hospital bed or not feel good enough to do anything. If you are sick you're not free.
Putting fluoride in water reduces dental costs and incidence of cavities and therefore tooth infections, particularly among societies poorest. Therefore, due to fluoridation in water some people are less sick and have more money and therefore are more free.
The contrasting view is that putting fluoride in water is literally medicating people without their affirmative consent. It is the government forcing you to take a medication. It is coercive and therefore an attack on your freedom to not take medication. It is the government interfering in your life.
The contrast between positive freedom, the freedom to do something, and negative freedom, the freedom from interference in your life, is the core political argument in America right now. Negative freedom, freedom from government interference, is being promoted by those seeking to weaken the government enough to supplant it. People who are poor and sick are likely unable to stand up for themselves or participate in solidarity against authority. This individual issue is relatively small, but you take 100's of issues like this, and the effect is to create a class of people who aren't able to do anything but be obedient workers.
This take has a few problems:
Poor people in the US are capable of using fluoride toothpaste and flossing. At least at homeless shelters at outreach things I’ve been to, toothpaste and toothbrushes are freely available. Your argument hinges on them being incapable on the whole and needing a Benevolent But Superior Intelligence to provide an alternative for them.
Second, it completely ignores any debate over effectiveness or side effects. It could well be that fluoride in water is great for teeth but bad for brains. The objections to fluoride in water I’ve seen are more along those lines. Im not clear the validity of those claims but for example anti fluoride advocates don’t typically object to chlorine in water to kill germs. That seems the core issue- without bias from stakeholders, is the benefit of fluoride proven and the risks disproven? It’s hard to answer because a study needs to span many years and exclude many variables.
And in general I think that is what needs to happen with these type debates. Take them _out_ of the sphere of charged political opinion and focus on getting to the objective truth of risks and benefits, then be transparent. People can handle “here are the known pros and cons and what we think that means” over “there are only pros and no cons and if you disagree you hate poor people”
> Second, it completely ignores any debate over effectiveness or side effects. It could well be that fluoride in water is great for teeth but bad for brains.
Except it's not—fluoride in the drinking water concentrations is proven safe and it doesn't affect brains.
> Im not clear the validity of those claims
Thoroughly scientifically debunked. Repeatedly, over decades.
> That seems the core issue- without bias from stakeholders, is the benefit of fluoride proven and the risks disproven? It’s hard to answer because a study needs to span many years and exclude many variables.
No, it's not hard to answer, because all those studies have been done and the results were that fluoride is safe.
> And in general I think that is what needs to happen with these type debates.
What needs to stop happening is people ignoring objective reality just because the results happen to align with the other "team's" position on something.
What needs to stop happening is people ignoring objective reality just because the results happen to align with the other "team's" position on something.
"Out of a population of about three-quarters of a billion, under 14 million people (approximately 2%) in Europe receive artificially-fluoridated water."
The problem I continually see in the USA is the ascription of differences of opinion on [any topic] to America's Great Divide between enlightenment and barbarism. I find it often helpful to just check, what do these policies look like outside of America? It doesn't mean Europe got it right on fluoride, it just suggests against adopting the framing that your POV is 100% objective reality proven beyond doubt by Science™ and no rational person not in the throes of "own the [other team]" bad faith might disagree.
Maybe Utah will be a place with alternative systems, based on another thread it sounds like they have an interesting Mormon safety net. But I would hope states do pilot tests first at least. If studies show that the historic gap in dental health between fluorinated & unfluorinated communities no longer apply, then that would be data driven policy
But it seems like this policy is based on someone's common sense that you shouldn't put minerals in water
"In Switzerland 85% of domestic salt consumed is fluoridated and 67% in Germany. Salt fluoridation schemes are reaching more than one hundred million in Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Cuba. The cost of salt fluoridation is very low, within 0.02 and 0.05 € per year and capita. 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. "
(Sea salt and Kosher salt are the salts that aren't fluoridated and iodated in those countries, fancy, more expensive salts, regular table salt- and the salt added in commercial/restaurants has both.)
So sure, you don't need to fluoridate the water, if you fluoridate the salt instead. But you have to do it some way or another. And the US and Canada doesn't, at present fluoridate the salt because we have it in the water. Remove it from some people's water but don't add it to the salt because everyone else has it in the water? Bad combination.
heh, I feel it, I'm in Canada where oral healthcare is deemed cosmetic. Giving us some 22minutes satire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZsUp-DHMZ4 "do people really need to see & chew?"
That said, WHO does profiles of dental health, providing comparison:
Didn't the NDP and Liberals recently pass universal government payer dental coverage in Canada?
It never made sense that dentistry somehow is considered a separate form of healthcare from the rest of your body.
Especially considering researchers are increasingly finding links between oral health and other conditions such as Alzheimer's heart disease. And that preventative dental care is so much cheaper and less invasive than treating major decay when care is delayed.
Look - all for whatever science says is best, but wouldn’t countries with public healthcare also be incentivised to have fluoride in the water to reduce costs/public efficiency of public dental healthcare?
themgt quoted the 2% figure to show that the europoors reject fluoride in water, but neglects to mention that tap water often naturally contains significant levels of fluoride already, nevermind other fluoride-fortified foodstuffs.
Indeed. While the UK and the USA have comparable levels of dental health, in US television actors typically require very good (or rather, cosmetically appealing according to local norms) teeth in order to succeed. In the UK, it's less important.
Not just comparable, UK is actually a bit higher. The difference is the NHS doesn't cover anything cosmetic, so they are very healthy teeth but they look rubbish unless you're lucky.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but you made multiple strong claims without a single citation or study link. We could have a better conversation with data to look at. There's a decent (though somewhat biased) review of the debate in [1]. It's worth noting that if you read the linked studies there closely you'll find the truth is, as usual, nuanced. Specifically, that "fluoridation is a population-level caries preventive strategy" [which may or may not be effective at the individual or small community level due to other factors]. I.e., good at the national level for statistically significant reduction of tooth disease incidence, but at less-aggregated levels the confounding factors like diet and how often/well people brush their teeth are going to be bigger determinants of efficacy.
It's also worth nothing that 1) over-fluoridation is pretty bad and can affect poor or malnourished communities (ex, [2]); and 2) there are alternatives to fluoride that may be equally effective with fewer risks at higher concentrations (ex. nano hydroxyapatite).
That's a whole lot of words for you acknowledging that I'm right. Fluoridated drinking water, at the appropriate levels, has no effect on IQ.
Would you like to debate the reality of anthropogenic climate change next? This will be another area where any links you dig up will only point to a single conclusion.
> Fluoridated drinking water, at the appropriate levels
Going to hijack this comment to ask about something I've always wondered: how robust are "appropriate" drinking levels to the different things you can reasonably expect people to do with the water? Not all water is simply drunk as is.
For example, I like to make beans in my slow cooker. This involves simmering them for 9 or 10 hours, periodically adding more water. In theory, this will increase the concentration of fluoride because the fluoride doesn't boil off while the water does. I assume, based on how much water I need to keep adding, this could double the fluoride concentration. Is that still appropriate levels? What about a cup that has been left out such that a lot of the water evaporates? That won't increase the amount of fluoride, but will increase its concentration.
I have to assume the "wiggle room" they build into the fluoridation rate handles these cases, but it's been hard to find any details on it since most of the results are about stuff like boiling water removing fluoride or turning it into poison fluorine gas and stuff.
Nevertheless, every time I see discussion where people talk about safe levels, I wonder how that works with all the things people do with water other than just drinking it as is.
And how does the fluoride get in the water? Our water tastes strongly of chlorine because we are near the treatment plant and they put in enough so that it’s still effective at the edges of the system. I don’t know if fluoride works the same way, but what makes people think it’s always added at exactly the right levels?
The chlorine you are tasting in your water is an active, reacting compound. It has to be because it literally reacts with cells to kill them and keep the water (relatively) free from living organisms. It's great as a cheap way to keep living things out of the water but at the end of the pipe it should be removed - a simple Brita filter is fine.
Flouride added is in a chemical state that makes it stable, like the chlorine in table salt. It will stay at the same concentration as it travels in the pipe.
I remember this from a water chemistry course at university.
If there were issues, they’d appear at population level studies. Lots of people boil coffee, tea, potatoes, rice, etc. and, as far as I know, are not suffering brain damage as a result.
You missed the point. It’s not objectively true in all situations that if you don’t believe fluorinating water is necessary that you’re an a-scientific bad faith actor. One can argue the opposite position in good faith, reasonably. Your statements very strongly supposed that this is a solved case closed topic and any challenges are not supported by evidence. The response was that there is nuance and a better conversation would acknowledge it.
> You missed the point. It’s not objectively true in all situations that if you don’t believe fluorinating water is necessary that you’re an a-scientific bad faith actor.
That's not what was being debated. What was asserted was that fluoride in water lowers IQ, a position that has been so thoroughly debunked at this point, that if, much like being anti-vax or thinking climate change doesn't exist, any continued movement reinforcing it is almost by definition bad faith. The information exists and short of purposely going out and looking for contrarian nonsense relative to the established position of science on the subject, you and everyone else can find it.
As frustrating as it is that "do your own research" has been basically ruined as a phrase by the professional internet bullshitter industrial complex, you really should, with a nod to the need for critical analysis of sources, an important part of that that frequently gets left to the side.
> Your statements very strongly supposed that this is a solved case closed topic
Because it is, and we need more of that and less endless citation. Not because citation is impossible or bad, but because we don't need to keep arguing every last point. If you think certain things, like fluoride lowers IQ, or that climate change doesn't exist, you are not needing an intellectual rebuke, you're needing enough people making fun of you that you stop spouting horseshit and go learn about things. All of humanity's knowledge is at your fingertips. It is not the responsibility of reasonable people to educate you against your will.
I've never thought much about it as tap water tastes nasty to me, but it does seem like legit scientists are still studying the issue, as of 2023.[0] Course we over produce scientists and so much of science is low efficiency, but they're getting funding and being published none-the-less.
I’m actually now much less certain that fluoride is unequivocally safe and newly skeptical of anybody arguing that anybody else questioning it, including effects on the brain, is a whacko. Thanks to down-thread links to the meta analysis from this year by the national toxicology program, it is crystal clear that high levels of fluoride ARE linked to lower IQ. It begs the question about working to better understand the effects of lower levels. Absolutely nothing presented thus far draws the conclusion that low levels of fluoride are safe, full stop. Thank you for changing my mind and making me look deeper, fervent fluoride supporters.
There are also other harmful side effects of fluoride, such as fluorosis, which I have. It’s not a huge deal, and I personally still think it’s a huge net positive, but people should be allowed to make their own decisions, and the science is far less settled than you claim, and not comparable at all to the debate over climate change.
I guess I (and probably the GGP) understood the response to be more general, picking out the IQ point as easily refutable therefore a short-circuit way to dismiss the broader narrative.
The "let's have a nuanced debate and use reason and intellect" bias is useful in most contexts. Bold claims, hot takes, that's the future. Citations can be ai'd now.
Please define appropriate levels and then cite some evidence that proves with high certainty that level is safe.
For the sake of argument, assume that only 1% of the US has levels that harm IQ. Would it not be worth it to remove fluoride from the water to improve the intelligence of 1% of the population? Especially when you consider we can get fluoride from toothpaste?
> Thoroughly scientifically debunked. Repeatedly, over decades.
"The NTP monograph concluded, with moderate confidence, that higher levels of fluoride exposure, such as drinking water containing more than 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter, are associated with lower IQ in children"
This is from an NIH meta-analysis. Its a pretty rigorous study.
"It is important to note that there were insufficient data to determine if the low fluoride level of 0.7 mg/L currently recommended for U.S. community water supplies has a negative effect on children’s IQ"
This is why there's such a fierce debate. Based on the most recent scientific literature there seems to be evidence of a dose-dependent effect of fluorine levels in water and lowered IQ in children, meaning it has some kind of neurotoxic effect. But we don't have robust evidence to say 0.7 mg/L has a similar effect. That doesn't mean it is DEFINITELY safe, it just means more research needs to be done and the current research that does cover the 0.7 mg/L range may not reach statistical significance.
The fact though the NIH suggests 1.5mg/L is likely unsafe, which is only 2x what America's tap water contains, I would not blame people for being uneasy about. It is often the case the that the FDA regulates food additives that have potential negative side effects to be limited to concentrations 10x lower than what is seen as unsafe.
I am not suggesting it's a straightforward choice to defluorinate water, but I see people often repeating claims like you have that dangers of fluoride are "thoroughly debunked" and that's simply not true. I don't blame people for having that sentiment either, because 0.7mg/L is seemingly still considered safe, and some of the loudest advocates of defluorination have no shortage of thoroughly debunked crazy views on things (possibly due to brains half eaten by worms). It makes it very easy to brush off the skepticism.
But it's also important to keep in mind science is built on the premise that one must be ready to re-evaluate past assumptions when new data arises, and generally speaking the new data around fluoride I hate to say seems to show there is indeed smoke.
It's also the case that when the US initially fluorinated water supplies it was a massive public health success, but these days it seems to make a much lower impact now that fluoride toothpaste use is ubiquitous (plus the levels were lowered from 1.0mg/L in the 70s, likely reducing its overall effectiveness). It is IMO both very reasonable to fund more research into this to know conclusively if 0.7mg/L is indeed safe, and also consider public health policy that focuses on promoting dental hygiene through other means in places that do defluorinate.
I do not agree with Utah's decision here mostly because it seems to neglect that defluorination will create a void that requires other public health policy efforts to fill it, poorer and less educated communities will suffer unless government led efforts to promote and make dental hygine affordable are not also undertaken.
> It is IMO both very reasonable to fund more research into this to know conclusively if 0.7mg/L is indeed safe
How exactly do you propose we do this? It's tough to prove absence of harm.
The meta-analysis put together tons of research under different situations, and found a weak and relatively small dose-response relationship above 1.0 mg/L and failed to find a relationship below. The evidence between 1.0mg/L and 1.5mg/L is particularly weak. And, of course, most dose-response curves are sigmoidal, so the failure to find a response under 1.0 mg/L is most easily explained by the inflection point being above that level.
If you're not satisfied when combining 74 studies fails to find a relationship, will you be happy with 75? 76? 100?
(Sure, a big proportion of the studies and study power focused on higher levels of fluorination-- and I always support filling gaps in research; but it's not like we have an absence of research below 1.5 mg/L).
The Cochrane Collaboration's research is near the gold standard, and yet they find surprisingly limited evidence of benefit for CWF in the modern research:
"These low‐certainty findings (a 4 percentage point difference and 3 percentage point difference for primary and permanent dentition, respectively) favoured CWF."
3-4% reduction in cavities is not nothing, but it's a far cry from the 60% drop observed in the 1940s and certainly much less than what I think most strong proponents of water fluoridation would have you believe. The ongoing discussion I find quite legitimate given we're no longer living in the 1940s and CWF seems to have a substantially lower benefit than it once did, and likewise we do notice a concerning trend with fluorine neurotoxicity that has only emerged in the last few decades of research.
Public health policy is all about a risk/benefit analysis, and CWF is one of those topics that I feel legitimately should be discussed because much has changed over the many decades since the US first introduced it and since then the risks seemingly have gone up and the benefit has astronomically gone down.
Again, I do not think there'd be much discussion if current water fluorination was at 0.15mg/L, and we started seeing a negative trend at 1.5mg/L. But I don't think its actually at all unreasonable for public health officials to be worried and possibly start considering alternatives to CWF out of an abundance of caution.
> but it's not like we have an absence of research below 1.5 mg/L).
But it is?
>> "It is important to note that there were insufficient data to determine if the low fluoride level of 0.7 mg/L currently recommended for U.S. community water supplies has a negative effect on children’s IQ"
Yes you would need a higher powered study to rule out the potentially smaller effect, but when your treatment can affect tens of millions of children, it doesn't seem crazy to ask for more funding.
> > but it's not like we have an absence of research below 1.5 mg/L).
> But it is?
But it isn't. There's 7 studies included in that meta-analysis looking at levels below 1.5mg/L, covering 2832 children. The effect measured so far across all of the studies is a statistically insignificant increase in IQ.
I'm in favor of additional research; I just don't think getting to n=10,000 showing little or no effect is going to convince anyone. I also don't think that these possible modest effects are going to be in the top 5 most important environmental stressors to measure the effects of.
I agree, the effects of fluoride probably aren't in the top 5 things to be concerned about (although perhaps they are from a political perspective, with it becoming such a strong topic of debate for a variety of reasons). But do you assume that getting to n=10,000 is going to show little or no effect (e.g. having a level you define as little effect)? I'm not convinced the NTP data is extremely high quality and can't make much conclusion from it on the effects.
Also, for other commenters: the 2832 children number I believe comes from the supplemental content from the supplemental material for the NTP Fluoride Monograph: https://cdn.jamanetwork.com/ama/content_public/journal/peds/... (this url is very long because of some hashing measure, sorry: if it is no longer accessible, it is the supplemental content for doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2024.5542), on page 51 of the PDF. I have a small summary table of data I view relevant here:
The columns are:
* Studies used; Fluoride Exposure; Number of Studies / Number of Observations (number of Children)
* Estimate for slope in linear Model, given as increase in IQ points per mg/L increase (95% CI) (p value)
> But do you assume that getting to n=10,000 is going to show little or no effect (e.g. having a level you define as little effect)?
I don't necessarily assume this, but even if you assume linearity, 0.7 * -0.32 is pretty dang small at baseline. I think if you generate n=10000 showing MLE=-.32 or +.05, few people are going to change their minds. I might, but I don't think it does much to shape the debate.
While I would like to think that I have gotten a lot smarter in the last 20 years it seems more likely that other people have on average gotten a lot dumber.
While I’m sure there are many causes I’m of the opinion that no stone should remain unturned when looking for answers. Fluorine in water has a viable alternative (toothpaste that is spit out) so out of an abundance of caution my preference is for unflurinated water. In my past life as an applied researcher I have learned to be rather distrustful of academia and the ‘science’ that is produced, ‘fruit from a poisonous tree’.
"The NTP monograph concluded, with moderate confidence, that higher levels of fluoride exposure, such as drinking water containing more than 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter, are associated with lower IQ in children"
They found fluoride in drinking water concentrations was associated with lower IQ, the opposite of your claim of "proven safe".
Show us some evidence that is proven safe, so far as I can tell all evidence points to unsafe or "we're not sure".
> What needs to stop happening is people ignoring objective reality just because the results happen to align with the other "team's" position on something.
I couldn't agree more. The study that is cited above started when Obama was president by the way.
Why did you omit the sentence immediately after the one you quoted?
> The NTP review was designed to evaluate total fluoride exposure from all sources and was not designed to evaluate the health effects of fluoridated drinking water alone.
…or the following sentence, which they bolded to ensure the reader wouldn't miss it?
> It is important to note that there were insufficient data to determine if the low fluoride level of 0.7 mg/L currently recommended for U.S. community water supplies has a negative effect on children’s IQ.
So no, they very explicitly did not find that fluoride in drinking water concentrations was associated with lower IQ.
I see the goalposts are moving from "fluoride in drinking water concentrations" (implication: concentrations commonly found in municipal drinking water) to "fluoride in drinking water at certain concentrations" (i.e. any arbitrary number that could support your position).
Anyway, there's a pretty obvious definition of "drinking water concentrations": the recommended amount for US drinking water. Again, the authors of the study bolded this sentence to ensure you wouldn't miss it:
> It is important to note that there were insufficient data to determine if the low fluoride level of 0.7 mg/L currently recommended for U.S. community water supplies has a negative effect on children’s IQ.
My first sentence in my original post was " The conclusion from the largest and strongest studies is that there is a certain level of fluoride that harms IQ." I did not move the goal posts from there.
I was replying to a comment that said "fluoride in the drinking water concentrations is proven safe" (there is actually no proof of this).
I never claimed that all fluoride levels harm IQ.
It's great that the US recommends that fluoride doesn't exceed levels that are proven to harm children's IQ, instead they only recommend levels for which there is "insufficient data".
I suppose we will ignore the people who are still drinking water with levels above what is known to be harmful.
To be clear, about whom exactly are we talking here? Who are the actual people drinking water with known harmful levels of fluoride that we’re ignoring?
If we take the known harmful level of fluoride as being >1.5mg/L then the NTP monograph itself has some information ():
> areas including central Australia, eastern Brazil, sub-Saharan Africa, the southern Arabian Peninsula, south and east Asia, and western North America (Podgorski and Berg 2022). Regions of the United States where CWS and private wells contain natural fluoride concentrations of more than 1.5 mg/L serve over 2.9 million U.S. residents (Hefferon et al. 2024). The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that 172,000 U.S. residents are served by domestic wells that
exceed EPA’s enforceable standard of 4.0 mg/L fluoride in drinking water, and 522,000 are served by domestic wells that exceed EPA’s non-enforceable standard of 2.0 mg/L fluoride in drinking water (USGS 2020).
[https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/sites/default/files/2024-08/fluori... Page 2 or Page 22 of the PDF]
Note in the US this is almost all people drinking well water. So if we take the known harmful level at 1.5mg/L, then there are lots of people known to be drinking water above these concentrations. I'm not sure I would say we're necessarily ignoring them, but could argue regulations aren't up to date: the current EPA MCL is 4.0mg/L and secondary MCL is 2.0mg/L.
For more in depth data, we can take the EPA's Review of Fluoride Occurrence for the Fourth Six-Year Review (2024) [https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2024-04/syr4_fluo...]. Page 15 of the PDF shows artificially fluoridated water nowadays has fluoride concentrations between 0.6mg/L and 1.2mg/L. Page 18 shows that ~4.7 million are being served with concentrations of fluoride >1.5mg/L. This is higher than the Hefferon et al figure but it seems this figure is based on data from 2006-2011 (where the population was lower, but also the recommended fluoride concentration was higher, with the max at 1.2mg/L pre-2015). I also am not convinced Hefferon et al has any figures on private wells (although maybe I misread the paper).
Anyone who talks about who was President when a study was done is immediately clarifying for you that they have a political agenda.
If there’s a problem with a study, or a study is particularly strong, that should be due to something about the study itself (methodology, significance of results, etc), not its political environment.
> Except it's not—fluoride in the drinking water concentrations is proven safe and it doesn't affect brains.
What's amazing is these anti-science wackos are rejecting the largest-scale experiment of all time, with the best evidence that anyone is ever going to have on the subject. We have both temporal and spatial boundary conditions with and without community water fluoridation, where a large population has it and another large population doesn't have it. There is no evidence that the without-fluoridation population has higher intelligence! There is a huge body of evidence that the people without fluoridation have more decayed teeth.
Before calling them "anti science wackos", why not review the evidence or cite some of your own. Ironic that the "wackos" seem to be the only ones providing any evidence for their claims.
There is high quality evidence that fluoride at levels contained in some US water supplies is associated with lower childhood intelligence. For lower levels, the conclusion is "we don't know", not that there is no harm.
There is also high quality evidence that in the age of fluorinated toothpaste, fluorinated water "may slightly" improve dental health.
“The evidence suggests that water fluoridation may slightly reduce tooth decay in children,” says co-author Dr Lucy O’Malley, Senior Lecturer in Health Services Research at the University of Manchester. “Given that the benefit has reduced over time, before introducing a new fluoridation scheme, careful thought needs to be given to costs, acceptability, feasibility and ongoing monitoring."
The literally bold-faced conclusion of your article is that no evidence exists that community water fluoridation affects childhood IQ.
We have a natural experiment running for 80 years where each arm of the experiment has N > 100e6. If there was going to be evidence of community water fluoridation lowering IQ, it would have emerged by now.
"The NTP monograph concluded, with moderate confidence, that higher levels of fluoride exposure, such as drinking water containing more than 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter, are associated with lower IQ in children".
They found drinking water with levels that lowered IQ. The actual conclusion was that higher levels (that were found in drinking water) lower IQ.
For lower levels the conclusion is we don't know how it effects IQ. The actual bold face conclusion is "More research is needed to better understand if there are health risks associated with low fluoride exposures".
The National Toxicology Program’s monograph failed peer review by the prestigious and independent National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine. In fact, the document failed peer review twice:
It seems that this team found what they wanted to find. Are they scientists or ideologues? Were they creating the 'evidence' for the San Francisco trail?
> fluoride in the drinking water concentrations is proven safe and it doesn't affect brains.
We can never be sure who funded the studies and whether or not the results can be trusted. Studies have shown that studies cannot be trusted. I err on the side of caution.
You're welcome to put it in your own drinking water if you trust the studies.
> What needs to stop happening is people ignoring objective reality just because the results happen to align with the other "team's" position on something.
Nobody can perceive objective reality. Everyone is delusional concerning just about everything. The people who think they know what's going on, are most delusional of all.
Dark times are ahead, I'm afraid, and people's trust-meters are going to be valuable again.
> We can never be sure who funded the studies and whether or not the results can be trusted. Studies have shown that studies cannot be trusted. I err on the side of caution.
What does this mean for you in practice? Do you see just fluoride studies this way, or "studies" in general? If the former, what makes those different? If the latter, what is your stance on science-backed decision-making and policymaking in general?
> Studies have shown that studies cannot be trusted.
Well, that's basically the end of the debate, isn't it? Before we can have reasonable discourse, everyone has to agree on some points. Sure, individual studies have problems. That's why we make them reproducible and aggregate the results. So yeah, don't trust some individual paper; but if you're distrusting the aggregate, well, you're distrusting all of science.
> Nobody can perceive objective reality. Everyone is delusional concerning just about everything.
This is the entire point of the scientific method. It's why we make sure tests are reproducible by other people in other teams in other countries. Each with their own funding and biases. What remains after all of that is as close to objective reality as possible without decompiling the universe.
> Dark times are ahead, I'm afraid, and people's trust-meters are going to be valuable again.
You know what else has been shown to be unequivocal bullshit? People making decisions based on their "gut". Your personal "trust-meter" is just another form of that. Dark times are indeed ahead, but it's because there are people out there who want to do whatever the hell they want- and it's easier for them to get away with it if they discredit science and get the population to do so as well. This is what you're helping by spreading such things. Please stop.
> We can never be sure who funded the studies and whether or not the results can be trusted
> Nobody can perceive objective reality. Everyone is delusional concerning just about everything
This is just hyper-cynical fear mongering. An excuse to reject inconvenient things you see and substitute them with your own alternative reality.
The people who sell fear and things like alternative medicine love to push this angle: They want you to distrust everything. Everything except what they tell you, of course.
> We can never be sure who funded the studies and whether or not the results can be trusted. Studies have shown that studies cannot be trusted
the growing prevalence of anti science thinking like this has been a disaster for humanity. There's so much time and good faith effort put into trying to better understand our reality then people like you come along and handwave it all away because "well can we really know anything"
How does one live or even function with no trust? You’re going to do your own experiments on everything in your life? Do you purchase any food, take any medicines, travel in any vehicles, or use any technology? You’re relying on products that are the outcome of studies if you do. Sure people are fallible and sometimes have agendas or are wrong, but approaching objectivity is not impossible, it just takes a little work. Science is the best thing we’ve got, it has brought humanity further and faster than anything else ever. There’s nothing else to even compare it to. If we throw our hands up and insist on trusting no one, dismantle public health and public education and public trust, then yeah we could go back to the dark ages. If instead we trust that science works over time, and we are diligent about electing leaders who stop stoking fears and using pseudoscience and intentionally eroding trust in science and education, then we might have the chance to be able to trust each other and make forward progress.
"Findings: Despite differences in exposure and outcome measures and risk of bias across studies, and when using group-level and individual-level exposure estimates, this systematic review and meta-analysis of 74 cross-sectional and prospective cohort studies found significant inverse associations between fluoride exposure and children’s IQ scores. [...]"
Maybe you should reconsider that what you heard once was the definite truth.
Isn't this talking about naturally-occurring fluoridation, not added? The concentrations they describe as having an inverse affect are far higher than what gets added to water on purpose:
What the study measured:
"For fluoride measured in water, associations remained inverse when exposed groups were restricted to less than 4 mg/L or less than 2 mg/L but not when restricted to less than 1.5 mg/L"
And what the US federal government recommends (or I guess soon, previously recommended):
"Through this final recommendation, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) updates and replaces its 1962 Drinking Water Standards related to community water fluoridation—the controlled addition of a fluoride compound to a community water supply to achieve a concentration optimal for dental caries prevention.1 For these community water systems that add fluoride, PHS now recommends an optimal fluoride concentration of 0.7 milligrams/liter (mg/L)" [1]
The source of fluoride is irrelevant, the effect of fluoride is cumulative. If you're getting half of the "harmful dosage" just from your water, you're much more likely to pass that threshold than if the water had no fluoride. In nations with easy access to fluoridated toothpaste and where dental hygiene is common, the cost-benefit is not at all clear.
If the source of fluoride is irrelevant, then shouldn't fluoridated toothpaste also be banned as a result of harmful dosages? Even assuming someone spits out said toothpaste, they are still increasing the fluoride levels in their body.
The US government isn't forcing people to use fluoridated toothpaste. There's plenty of non-fluoridated toothpaste available if people want it.
Also: fluoride works topically, not when ingested. That implies we should try to deliver fluoride to teeth in a way that is focused on topical application (toothpaste), not ingestion (water supply).
I think the common consensus is that the primary benefit of fluoride is topical, not systemic:
* Initially, fluoride was considered beneficial when given systemically during tooth development, but later research has shown the importance and the advantages of its topical effects in the prevention or treatment of dental caries and tooth decay. [The Fluoride Debate: The Pros and Cons of Fluoridation; Prev Nutr Food Sci, 2018; https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6195894].
* The actual mechanism of fluoride action is still a subject of debate. A dogma has existed for many decades, that fluoride has to be ingested and acts mainly pre-eruptively. However, recent studies concerning the systemic effect of fluoride supplementation concluded that the caries-preventive effect of fluoride is almost exclusively posteruptive. [Systemic versus topical fluoride; Carries Res, 2004; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15153698/]
* As noted by
Thorrez, your link does not mention topical application vs systemic ingestion. There is a publication from the CDC however stating that the benefit of fluoride is mainly topical:
> Fluoride's caries-preventive properties initially were attributed to changes in enamel during tooth development because of the association between fluoride and cosmetic changes in enamel and a belief that fluoride incorporated into enamel during tooth development would result in a more acid-resistant mineral. However, laboratory and epidemiologic research suggests that fluoride prevents dental caries predominately after eruption of the tooth into the mouth, and its actions primarily are topical for both adults and children (1).
[https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4841a1.htm ; 1999].
This material was covered in depositions for TSCA Fluoride trial in 2018, where Casey Hannan (director of the division of oral health at the CDC) was the examinee for the deposition. A temporary upload of a clip from this deposition may be found at https://0x0.st/8Lom.mp4.
When I say "fluoride works topically, not when ingested", I mean there's no benefit to teeth from swallowing fluoride, the only benefit to teeth is from it touching teeth directly. That link doesn't say that there's a tooth health benefit from swallowing fluoride.
Both toothpaste and water supply cause some fluoride to touch the teeth (topical) and some fluoride to be swallowed (ingestion). However, toothpaste has a higher ratio of topical application to swallowing, vs water supply which has a lower ratio of topical application to swallowing. That's why I said toothpaste is focused on topical application and water supply is focused on ingestion.
"The bill, signed by Cox on Thursday, prohibits communities from adding fluoride to their public water supplies.
The law does not mention any public health concerns related to the mineral, but Republican state lawmaker Stephanie Gricius - who introduced the bill in the state legislature - has argued that there is research suggesting fluoride could have possible cognitive effects in children."
You're lying through some linguistic convolution. What you said is wrong on a factual level. Communities cannot decide to include fluoride in their water, as that is banned, so fluoride is banned from Utah water. This is what words mean
If people getting under 2mg/L were getting harmed, doesn't it seem logical that people getting 0.7 mg/L would also get harmed, just by a smaller amount?
Not necessarily. For instance, if you take enough ibuprofen you'll suffer liver damage, but it doesn't follow that a smaller dose you'll still suffer damage.
I only really have enough general understanding of chemistry and biology to note that dosage generally is pretty important and often non-linear in its effects -- I write JavaScript, not drug formulations -- but "dosage makes the poison" has always struck me a good general purpose aphorism to keep in mind.
> For fluoride measured in water, associations remained inverse when exposed groups were restricted to less than 4 mg/L or less than 2 mg/L but not when restricted to less than 1.5 mg/L;
So this study found no negative effects on IQ when the fluoride concentration is less than 1.5mg/L
The U.S. Public Health Service recommends 0.7mg/L of fluoride[1]. This study supports the idea that the amount of fluoride used in the US drinking water is safe.
I couldn't find any information on how much fluoride is in utah drinking water as a whole, but a report from Davis County shows that they stay between 0.6mg/L and 0.8mg/L [2]. I'd say its fair to assume basically all the water in Utah doesn't have too much fluoride, and if it did, lowering the amount to 0.7mg/L would be enough to address the health concerns.
I think you should read it. It literally says fluoride in higher concentrations is linked to lower IQ. It says there is insufficient evidence to draw any conclusions in lower concentrations. NOT that fluoride in lower concentrations is definitely without a doubt safe. It leaves open the question. And, it studied fluoride in urine, which means even if the drinking water levels in the US are in the “insufficient data” range, the cumulative effect of multiple sources of fluoride is still a factor.
Also note that in reality 0.7 mg/L is the “low” value and 1.5 mg/L is the high water mark from the study. That’s not a huge window by any means…
Maybe apply some critical thinking and notice that the water levels from fluoridation add on top of any other sources of fluoride people ingest, eg. toothpaste, food, etc.
The source of fluoride is irrelevant, the effect of fluoride is cumulative. If you get 0.7mg/L from drinking water and then add toothpaste and other sources, you could easily surmount the level where harmful effects occur.
Truth and even the idea that there is objective truth is a fundamentally political concept. Authoritarians are opposed to the idea of objective truth because objective truth gives a person a foundation on which to criticize and dissent from those in power. Truth is threatening to authoritarians. Truth is an alternative source of legitimacy.
We are experiencing an assault on objective truth in the US in order to get scientific institutions to submit to political authority rather than the authority of reason.
So I agree with you, it is policy that should not be handled by politicians but by experts, which none of us are. Unfortunately science is being politicized.
The problem is science challenges those who derive power from means other than reason.
Defending scientific consensus is seen as an equally political act as denying it.
"The problem is science challenges those who derive power from means other than reason."
There's been a fundamental shift away from science in the last fifty years or so. Some is understandable—chemical pollution, etc. which is unreasonably blamed on science instead of industry's bad behavior—but there's another thread running here and it's an anti-establishment one.
The question I can't fully put a measure on is why nowadays so many people automatically reject anything that's mandated by government even when they'll benefit from that mandate. The fluoride debate is somewhat akin to the vaccination one, rather than weighing up the comparatively minor risks versus overwhelmingly beneficial outcomes of those mandates they'll simply reject them outright.
It's pretty easy actually. Rejecting the mandate gives people political platform. If the issue at hand isnt directly affecting you in the meaningfull way, it works like a charm every single time.
Not to stir the pot even more however when a vaccine does go bad, it goes really bad
The narrative around vaccines has been completely strong armed in different ways by both sides. Which has left legitimate cases of bad reactions to be largely ignored, underreported and/or not believed, and carries a negative stigma.
My wife has had a medically verified bad reaction to vaccine it was extremely severe. It took multiple doctors before it was recognized and by that point she progressed to having permanent disability
"Not to stir the pot even more however when a vaccine does go bad, it goes really bad"
I'm frightfully aware of that. I'm old enough to remember the polio epidemic in the 1950s and the bad batch of polio vaccine that killed kids.
I wasn't in the US and the Salk vaccine wasn't available where I was living and it was another five or so years before we were vaccinated. Before that one kid in my school class died and another ended up in calipers.
Despite everyone knowing about the bad batch and the deaths I cannot tell you how relieved everyone was when the vaccine finally arrived. No one—not one single kid—at my school skipped the vaccine. To not have it would have been unthinkable, it wasn't even a consideration.
Frankly, it horrifies me how risk averse and timid people have become these days. How thinking has changed since that time is frightening.
That's not to say things don't go wrong—they do and all too often as you are aware, and even at this distance I can't help but feel sorry for both you and your wife.
Right, that Salk vaccine killed people but saved millions of others, even now the live attenuated Sabin vaccine occasionally goes rogue mutates and gives people polio but both of those vaccines have almost eradicated that fucking horrible disease from the face of the planet, it's only politics and misinformation that have stopped that from happening.
What are we to do when things are beneficial on a large scale yet are nevertheless responsible for a small number of tragedies? For instance, almost everyone on the planet loves their smartphone yet they kill innocent people—albeit indirectly when irresponsible drivers who are driving and texting at the same time hit and kill pedestrians.
When that happens we don't call for smartphones to be banned, same when a passenger jet clashes. But it's a different story with vaccines, fluoride in water, chemicals in foods. For some illogical reason suddenly all hell breaks loose and people become quite irrational.
BTW, over the years I've had many, many dozen vaccine shots for many different diseases and I've never had a negative reaction. That's not to say it won't happen on my next visit to the doctor or, say, to next person who's next in line in the doctor's surgery.
Unfortunately, life's dangerous and it's eventually fatal. As I see it, these scientific discoveries—whilst imperfect—ameliorate that condition somewhat.
I think there should be such a thing as just compensation when anyone effectively takes one for the team for the rest of humanity. There is one way to help significantly once something bad does happen.
Awareness too, and more testing never hurts. One thing we learned about post incident is that a test of her immune system would have likely shown she shouldn’t be vaccinated at all, due to potential reactions. Why not work on making such tests cheaper and faster so we can prevent needless harm?
"I think there should be such a thing as just compensation when anyone effectively takes one for the team for the rest of humanity."
I agree absolutely. What really pisses me off is how governments seemingly everywhere become misers—miserable bastards—and either deny responsibility or when cornered screw compensation down as far as possible.
It's not only in matters such as vaccine failures, or Flint's lead-in-water crisis but you see this miserly attitude with war veterans, and so on.
Trouble is, we the citizenry are ultimately responsible. For some reason we see someone getting something from government that we are not getting and that brings out the worst in us—we seem to forget too easily that the injured or those disadvantaged through no fault of their own deserve fair and reasonable compensation.
In my opinion that all-too-common attitude is a blight on the human character.
Awareness, that goes back to proper schooling. That that's lacking is another tragedy.
Edit: both government and the companies responsible for vaccines, pharmaceuticals, etc. ought to take much greater responsibly to inform people of the risks even if they are minor. One way of achieving this would be to hold those employees (both in government and in those companies) directly responsible for providing the necessary information. This would go a long way in stopping pharmaceutical companies hiding the unsatisfactory results of drug trials etc.
Don't hold your breath though, I can't see that happening anytime soon.
Tolerating this slippery slope that “theres always the other side” is how we got to a place where I have to vaccinate again for measles at 40 because there are people out there saying the measles vaccine isn’t safe.
I don’t agree with the framing of “we are experiencing an assault on objective truth…”.
We are experiencing a challenge to some existing status quo practices, some of which have come out of science in the past.
But nowhere in any conversation has the dialog been “we must question status quo institutional knowledge, and objective truth, to dismantle the institution”. (That’s left speak, actually, and I am acutely aware of leftist circles where that is the conversation.)
Look at RFK Jr. This guy doesn't need power and control. He’s a whacko with some different beliefs about health—who fundamentally believes he’s making humans safer because of his negative lived experience with health policy in the US.
Occam's razor points to there being a credible benign reason for him to be motivated to challenge existing policy. (And if there is one area of science ripe for iteration, it’s nutritional health.) We don’t need to grab for more extreme alarmist narratives to explain what’s happening.
It simply doesn't take some autocratic utopian agenda to question whether fluoride is worth it and advocate for political change.
It’s honestly really disingenuous and disheartening to hear people towing this “the right is trying to dismantle the fabric of western liberal democracy and install fascism” line.
He is a dangerous crank, but fresh roadkill is a perfectly fine practice.
You have to cook it thoroughly, same as any other game meat. Do not eat the central nervous system, again same as game. But dead is dead, and a car is no worse than a bullet.
That does not alter that we have a dangerous idiot running out health care policy.
Dead is dead but for how long? If you hunt, you know when the animal died and presumably cleaned it promptly. It didn't bake on the pavement with all its guts inside for hours or days.
Sure! Which means he’s either a really effective covert operative, or just a crank. To be clear I’m not arguing in support of crack science. I’m arguing against him being plugged into some broader insidious agenda.
It’s a big jump to assume competence in targeting half of all science funding. As you saw in my link above they eliminated an entire graduate class of biomedical researchers. That’s a few dozen lifetimes of research that won’t be done now, delaying breakthroughs
What’s the alternative if you believe we can’t sustain the funding? Who is competent enough to decide whether “a whole class” of biomedical researchers are worth spending public money on or not? These aren’t easy questions with happy answers.
And if I am tuned in at all enough to take a guess at the impetus, it would be “why are we giving exorbitant grants to academic institutions where 90% of the money goes to support their administrative process instead of actually fund grad students doing research?” And the message from the government might be “cut the fat” and the response from the academic institution is either “no” and the students are collateral, or it’s “yes” and the college, not the gov’t, decided the specific grad program wasn’t valuable or important enough to retain.
This is happening concurrently with a 2.5 trillion dollar tax cut for the billionaire class. So if your concern is with the deficit then maybe reconsider doing that.
The basic science research that’s being cut is responsible for the US being at the technological forefront. Cutting that pipeline will mean that industry will fall behind.
The administrative costs allow researchers to focus on research and not on administration. Also if that’s your issue then maybe don’t pull the rug from these institutions by canceling grants that were already approved. The financial urgency does not warrant it. You can have a conversation about admin costs that takes place over a year or two. That’s not what’s happening here.
The head of OMB pretty much directly said that science backed departments, like the EPA, are being destroyed/hamstrung so that they can't regulate industry, like our energy sector.
But that doesn't mean the administration is anti-science. It means they believe the situation is dire enough to justify drastic cuts. And that is a policy call regardless of your scientific beliefs.
In other words, one can reasonably take a position of “don’t publicly fund addressing an issue even if research supports it existing and even if that same individual espouses the conclusion of the research and might fund it privately”.
Call that what you want, but it is not a grand scheme to undermine science and replace it with fake propaganda.
The science projects are a tiny fraction of the budget. Cancel all of them and you won't make a dent in the deficit.
Add to that the administration's deliberate rejection of climate science and putting an anti-vaxxer in charge of the health department, and there is no way to avoid the straightforward judgment of "anti science". This is ideology and nothing else .
The Republican party has been trying to squash inconvenient science for a long time.
One of the signature pieces of Gingrich's "Contract With America" in 1995 was the elimination of the Office of Technology Assessment. The office had the unfortunate duty to communicate well researched facts, and these facts contradicted conservative policy positions. (OTA: The planet is warming. R: No it's not. Exxon says it's not.) So the OTA had to go.
There are a nearly endless list of these things over the last 30 years.
The fluoride thing alone wouldn't even move the needle or be too worth talking about on its own, but when you see everything that is happening and you know it's just the public things, it gives a distinctly different context around what is happening. You know we are overtly threatening Canadian sovereignty right? Countries are setting up travel warnings. Plain clothes officers have abducted people in public. People have been robbed of due process. The head of the office of management and budget said he wants to put government workers in trauma. Deleting public data sets... At least two second in commands to the entire US military have said he is unfit. A chief of staff said the president said "I wish I had Hitler's generals." At least 4 prominent republicans have Sieg Heiled in front of a crowd, including Bannon who did not put his hand over his heart first.
> question status quo institutional knowledge
I am in favor of this when its done in good faith, but good faith hasn't been established.
> It’s honestly really disingenuous and disheartening to hear people towing this “the right is trying to take over the world and install fascism” line.
I find it disheartening that people are in denial about it.
What does Canadian sovereignty have to do with even a broader picture argument that the right is using illiberal science to undermine and dismantle political institutions?
“Anybody who wants to debate me must first demonstrate good faith by espousing my political stance before we can continue.” Really now…
People can’t be in denial about something that isn't happening. That’s called crazy.
This is a direct quote from the guy running the Office of Management and Budget, Russel Vought:
We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.
I think equating poor people to homeless people is non sequitur.
What about the vast population of “barely making it” people?
But have it your way. I’ve given up on American people (I exist as a 54 year old one amongst them). Decades of wealth have created a society so “me” centric it makes me nauseous sick. Never have I respected those older than me so little. It makes me so sad what we’ve done for those younger.
It’s even worse than that. People aren’t even voting for their own self interest. The people in the poorest states and in poor counties in richer states in the United States are consistently voting against universal healthcare, affordable post high school education and are cheering the government taking away services that they depend on the most.
There are two basic categories of causes.
The first is being pure anti science - anti vaccine, anti fluoride, etc
The second is they are more concerned about “God and guns”, immigrants, and the demographic shifts in the US than their own interest.
Oh and the third is the cult of MAGA.
I’m 50, Native born American and on a meta level it concerns me. On a micro level, me and mine will be okay.
While I am not one of these shrill people saying I’m leaving the US tomorrow, my wife and I are definitely putting plans in place to have a dual residency (not citizenship) in Costa Rica closer to when I get ready to retire.
> Poor people in the US are capable of using fluoride toothpaste and flossing. At least at homeless shelters at outreach things I’ve been to, toothpaste and toothbrushes are freely available. Your argument hinges on them being incapable on the whole and needing a Benevolent But Superior Intelligence to provide an alternative for them.
This is so incurious. Obviously most people, poor or not, have access to fluoridated toothpaste and toothbrushes, and can brush.
Fluoridated water makes the most impact on poor and undeserved communities: Why?
Is it because poor people are less capable of brushing or have less access to fluoridated toothpaste?
Is it because poor people are poor because they have poor self control, which prevents them from regular brushing?
Does it matter? Nothing hinges on them being incapable at all - your conjecture can be as uncharitable - poor people are dirty and incapable - or charitable - poor people have less money and time to seek dental care, have higher rates of untreated mental and physical illness i.e. ADHD, disabilities that interrupt daily tooth-brushing routine - as you want.
But the result is still that if we want children from poor families to have less cavities by the time they reach adulthood - we should fluoridate the water! If you trust the western medical establishment, it's broadly safe. If you don't, then none of the evidence above matters to you anyways.
You're close but still a bit strawmanny. If we want poor kids to have better dental outcomes we should do more than just flouridate. We should find out why the poor have worse dental outcomes and address the root problem(s), which I would imagine in the US is something like soda consumption or lack of dentists in poor areas.
What is strawman in my comment? I'm genuinely interested.
> We should find out why the poor have worse dental outcomes and address the root problem
The root problem is that parents that are absent, either for noble reasons (working multiple low-wage jobs) or less noble reasons (addiction, abandonment) will not have the presence to enforce good dental hygiene.
There will always be some subset of parents that are more or less absent, and the main solution that exists for that in the US currently i.e. the foster care system has measurably terrible outcomes, and so it is only applied in the most egregious cases.
Why should we let perfect be the enemy of good here? I'm all for removing fluoride from the water, once it has no benefit on the population. But currently, it has a huge benefit, just on people who are least likely to advocate for it.
"You're just pushing your "Benevolent But Superior Intelligence" onto people" is an appeal to emotion, not a solution to real problems that real children face.
More emotionally: it's fucking embarrassing we let bullshit arguments like this hurt people in real life.
See this is the problem today. Just because some one doesn’t know doesn’t make it non existent. We have decades of studies and evidence that fluoride is good and has no side effects, but the detractors ignore all of it and keep nullifying all that knowledge. Now they are successful too. In a society where everyone wants the whole boat to rise up, we need a certain amount of honesty and integrity and sadly these arguments don’t have it
> Poor people in the US are capable of using fluoride toothpaste and flossing
This is absolutely not a substitute for fluoride in drinking water, which is most important for kids. When your teeth are forming below the gumline, the fluoride you ingest strengthens them. Brushing gums with fluoride doesn’t help.
Objective truth isn't something you can know, but it's a destination that must exist for pursuit of knowledge/curiosity to have any meaning.
With contradictions you know what is not true, and through knowing what is not true, you can approach what is true. Truth is expressed in consistency, not completeness.
That's why anyone should be extremely suspicious of anyone who is not, or doesn't care about, being internally consistent.
You're getting downvoted because you're retreating into philosophical nihilism rather than actually addressing the points. If you disagree with how people interpret the studies, the studies themselves, or how science measures reality - just say that.
Adding fluoride to water was revolutionary in the 1940s, but its benefits have significantly declined since fluoride toothpaste became common in the 1970s. While fluoridation made sense when products containing fluoride weren't widely available, it is much less effective and necessary now. Sure, some countries and communities may still see benefits from it, but widespread fluoridation doesn't seem necessary in many parts of the world.
Not true. Every time I see a dentist here in Queensland (non-fluoridated water) he asks me where else I lived as my teeth are so much better than what he usually sees, and if drilling my teeth are much harder than most Queenslanders.
My early years were spent in Melbourne, where fluoridation was introduced around 1970. That's the only time I lived with fluoridated water, for about 3 years. yet dentists can see the effects 50+ years later.
I don't use a toothbrush or toothpaste, and haven't ever really, as my ASD makes it unbearable.
You're refuting a statment based on studies and statistics by anecdotal evedince. Also, GP never denied that flouridation is still helpful for non-brushing residents.
Poster claimed fluoridation was unnessecary in many parts of the world. This is true of places with natural fluoridation. But not everyone has access to fluoridated toothpaste, or even toothpaste. To assume otherwise is assuming everyone is neurotypical in a developed country.
Anything to back that up? And even if it's true, the person would logically still not be to tier as the people with good nutrition and genetics who also brush would likely be better.
True. Part of the reason is aggressive saliva that just doesn't let some bacteria live and thus keeps the teeth healthy for longer. Dry mouth is literally damaging your teeth as well.
You need zero water to brush your teeth with toothpaste. Many dentists even say it’s preferable to not rinse your brush before and not rinse your mouth after.
So when you go to brush your teeth you don't wet the toothpaste and toothbrush from the tap? Is it the fear of tap water that centers around this? I am curious about this as it seems the answers carry some cultural significance.
No - toothpaste is in part an abrasive. If it's wetter, the abrasive is less effective at removing biofilm/plaque, and the chemical components are diluted in situ. Your mouth is plenty wet enough as-is.
That implies toothpaste isn't designed with this water dilution in mind, as that is common practice. If I don't wet it beforehand it's too thick and doesn't get distributed as easily.
Water treatment is usually done at the municipal or regional level. The state government is declaring that towns and cities may not do this. The alternative would be each and every municipal water authority deciding on its own.
Not really when it comes to government initiatives. They'd like the water plants to stop adding fluoride, so they make a policy that the plants should not add fluoride.
That wouldn’t require a ban. The state banned it because some towns wanted to add it to their water supply. It’s literally big government stopping the will of the people.
Of course it does. Their goal was to stop it from being added, including in said towns.
Policy makers make things happen by passing laws that make it a requirement or provide financial incentives to do it, and make things stop by outlawing it or taxing it. It is what they are elected to do.
This is not "big government" - democracy does not mean that small groups that disagree should be allowed to do whatever they want, and water additives is a quite signficant thing to mess with.
Democracy and big government aren’t in opposition. Social Security for example is extremely popular.
Letting small groups that disagree do what they want is the definition of small government. Outlawing water additives is a significant thing to mess with, it’s a meaningful intrusion on people’s heath and general welfare.
What makes this entire thing silly is many areas of the US ~11% naturally have fluoride levels high enough not to need supplementation, but nobody seems to want to drop that to some ultra low level when they argue for outlawing adding fluoride. It’s not an argument that these levels are unhealthy, just the naturalist fallacy in action. https://www.usgs.gov/publications/fluoride-occurrence-united...
Nobody's preventing you from going and finding your own water source either. The government is too much of a nanny state for putting flouride in water for public health, but it's just fine for providing water to you in the first place?
Where do you live where you can collect rain at a quantity that would allow you to forgo central water?
I’m not talking about having a barrel. Most states don’t care about that quantity. I’m talking about storing on the order of 10k gallons. A rain barrel is nothing. An average family in the USA uses hundreds of gallons a day. It doesn’t rain daily so you’d need thousands of gallons. Most states do not allow this, nor is it actually feasible for everyone to do this due to space constraints, which is why it’s generally not allowed.
Which state is this? Some states such as Massachusetts and Maine, will allow you to have a well, but then you cannot have central water. Thus, the dichotomy is irrelevant since it's not like someone actually has a choose, since it's done on the municipal level.
In fact, generally the places in Connecticut, and New England that have well water are because they specifically cannot have the other.
I don't know much about western USA, but I suspect it's similar.
You're being actively misleading. Like on a scale of normal people to politicians to liars you're at least in the politicians range.
The only states with restrictive surface water policies, generally, are the western ones, because every drop of water is allocated according to interstate agreements and letting peasants take what falls on their land is like the toddler version of letting privateers crap on a treaty.
In New England and the east generally, you can either have a well or municipal water, not both, because they don't want to worry about back flows and contamination of the municipal water supply, etc. It's not the big deal you're making it out to be.
> In New England and the east generally, you can either have a well or municipal water, not both, because they don't want to worry about back flows and contamination of the municipal water supply, etc. It's not the big deal you're making it out to be.
this just isn't true. Can you have private well water in Boston, Hartford or Portsmouth? The answer is no. In general in the northeast, those who have well water have it explicitly because they're not served by the municipality. Feel free to give counter examples with specific cities or towns that serve both and actively let you switch between both for a given address that supports both.
There are some towns in New Hampshire for example where the town has municipal water but a given house does not (it has well water), but usually that’s due to specific characteristics of the lot that forbid it from having a municipal without a large cost, so the developer sets up well water instead.
What you're saying doesn't even make sense - municipal water is routed to a treatment plant, so it wouldn't matter anyway.
> Most states do not allow this, nor is it actually feasible for everyone to do this due to space constraints, which is why it’s generally not allowed.
You are getting into something there. You understand the necessity of municipal water collection mandates due to space constraints, but when it comes to public health (e.g vaccines) or public dental health (e.g fluoride in water), that's beyond comprehension and an infringement on your right (to have bad teeth)?
Also, in the real world, most (emphasis on most) states don't have any restrictions on collecting rainwater, and some actively encourage people to do so.
That's not true in general especially if you weight it with population in mind, such as the wet states of NJ, PA, MD etc. that have more population; though there are areas where the states have passed laws concerning water rights where it is true(CO, WY).
Nobody is preventing the citizens from digging their own well and ensuring their own water supply and having bad teeth.
I like it how when it comes to fluoride in water, that's the nanny state pushing things on people, but when it comes to municipal water, said people can't bother to use their freedom and get their own water supply. It's the same that parents refuse to vaccinate their children for measles and then hurry to the doctors when the child inevitably gets sick. The freedom to die of preventable diseases is a great thing!
You can also remove fluoride from your own water if you want to. Although I don't know if there are any filters that can distinguish between naturally occurring fluoride (ok) and fluoride added by the government (evil).
This requires a Reverse-Osmosis filter which is super expensive. So if you really want to give fluoride, I'd be happy for the government to hand out free sodium fluoride tabs for whoever wants it, in exchange to not force the water to have fluoride by default. See, we get the best of both worlds?
How much of your water treatment do you want to do yourself? I assume you don’t want the ‘government’ to send you completely untreated water. So what is the problem with fluoridation as compared to all the other uncontroversial ways in which your tap water has been treated? All kinds of stuff gets added to and removed from the water.
Also, there are simple (and cheap) water filters that are quite effective at removing fluoride. As fluoride is often naturally present in water anyway, it is only really necessary to remove the majority of the added fluoride to get the water back into a ‘natural’ state.
The issue is that putting fluoride in the water isn't really "treating" the water. It's in essence acting a medication (see my paragraph below for a justification of this), to the benefit of people's teeth. As far as I know, every other chemical added / removed from the water is done for the purpose of the taste of the water, protecting the pipes which serve the water, or disinfecting the water. In this way, it's different from all the other chemicals, and there is also some limited opposition to other chemicals (e.g. debate on the use of UV / chlorine / ozone).
As for a loose argument for why fluoride in water is medicinal: the FDA classifies toothpaste as a cosmetic and also potentially a drug (depending on whether it contains fluoride and the claims the product makes):
> Ingredients that cause a product to be considered a drug because they have a well-known (to the public and industry) therapeutic use. An example is fluoride in toothpaste.
> Some products meet the definitions of both cosmetics and drugs. [...] Among other cosmetic/drug combinations are toothpastes with claims to freshen breath and cleanse the teeth that contain fluoride.
[Both quotes are from https://www.fda.gov/cosmetics/cosmetics-laws-regulations/it-...]
But you will brush your teeth anyway, and then you apply fluoride topically. It works.
Here in Sweden we decided against fluoride for this reason and the fact that it is in fact toxic. It isn't sensible to use systemic exposure when we can use topical exposure and can improve mouth health by education, so that people do what they're supposed to.
The fluoride approach achieves a basic level of health, but you can do so much better.
Fluoride is not "in fact toxic". A substance becomes toxic in high amounts. Vitamin D becomes toxic in high amounts. The level of fluoride in drinking water is well below the toxic level.
I really don't agree with that Paracelsian view. Some substances are Paracelsian, other are like lead, and I'd place fluorides in-between these two, a neither fully Paracelsian or non-Paracelsian poison.
I can't believe so many people would downvote a peer-reviewed paper just because it doesn't sit well with their politics, it really shows how cult-like science discourse in the US has become.
Somewhat related, as a teen in the 90s I worked at McDonald’s in The Netherlands. Because of the diet in the US, the bread used for hamburgers contained extra calcium to be more ‘healthy’, because many people did not get enough calcium intake. In The Netherlands, where people drink much more dairy products, especially back in the 90s, people would get plenty of calcium so there was no need to put extra in the bread. But because a hamburger should be a hamburger no matter where you buy it worldwide, the Dutch McDonald’s hamburger bread still had the added calcium
I was surprised when I realized that milk didn’t have that much calcium by volume, relative to how it was promoted to me as a kid.
I found that almond milk had a good bit more by volume and the US dairy industry probably just had some good marketing in the 2000s with the Got Milk campaign.
Too much calcium is a bad thing. I had enormous amounts of milk as a child, a multivitamin containing calcium and a calcium supplement. I probably had 2 to 3 people’s recommended daily amount of calcium per day. Now as an adult, the calcium is in my muscles and it occasionally causes me to feel like my arm has been dislocated from my socket for days whenever there is a flare up. Moving my arm during a flare up makes it worse. It occurs in my dominant arm and the pain is so bad that during flare ups, I sometimes contemplate amputation. There is no cure for this condition. The “get enough calcium” stuff really backfired in my case since I clearly overdosed on calcium because of it. On the bright side, I have excellent bone health.
They drink A LOT of milk! I went to a business meeting in the Netherlands and the cafeteria had buttermilk machine on tap like an elementary school in the US. They set the meeting table with pitchers of milk and buttermilk. And breakfast / lunch always has cheese.
Which is also happens to be the average daily milk consumption in the Netherlands. They drink 340 kg per year on average which is 33 oz per day. And people used to drink more milk back then.
In the UK at least some areas have fluoridated water, despite almost all toothpaste being fluoridated. I suppose it most benefits the minority of people who do not brush their teeth. That benefit has to be balanced[1] against some evidence of risk.
IMO the right fix is better dental hygiene, and a better (less sugary) diet. These are in turn are in part symptomatic of other problems (poverty, long working hours with regards to lack of supervision of children).
There a really unfortunate use of "significant" in that document. The scientific meaning and the general meaning will cause very different interpretations from laymen.
"Here in Sweden we decided against fluoride for this reason and the fact that it is in fact toxic."
All water collected from natural sources contains some level of fluoride and other salts (which varies greatly from place to place). Does then your local water authority remove these naturally-acquired chemicals?
Generally not, but we choose where we take our from water from.
If there's too much fluoride in the rock water we take soil or surface water instead, for example. If there's too much fluoride in the water we do not supply it to people's taps, but this is for values like 4 mg/L.
So we mostly don't take any measures. In Stockholm it's apparently less than 0.2 mg/L though.
Yes, I was going to mention this. Had a friend who went down the coast for a day trip with a bunch of mates. On the way back on the train (1.5 hour ride) they had a competition to see who could drink the most water and most of them had several litres, a few of them managed a bit more. My mate also had a bunch of chips/snacks, but not everyone did.
Later that night, he got a desperate phone from his friends mum, screaming at him "What did you take! What drugs did you take!!!", he replied that they hadn't taken anything, but wasn't really believed. His friend was rushed to hospital with severe seizures and convulsions. The doctors eventually put him on a saline drip and he recovered.
Basically his friend lowered the salt content in his body so much that his body could not pass electrical signals. My friend was fine because he had consumed a bit of salt in his snacks. Kinda crazy.
Three DJs and 7 other employees got fired for running a contest where whoever could hold their pee for the longest after drinking too much water would win a prize and someone died.
There was an infamous death in Australia when a young girl drank too much water after taking MDMA. It's blamed on the drug, but the thing that actually killed her was water intoxication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Wood_(born_1980)
Your GDP per capita is 50% higher than ours. You have money for this.
If there's no will to raise up the poor, you it should be straightforward to use the state directly to ensure that everyone is taught how to brush their teeth and ensured to have access to brushes and toothpaste.
I agree with you, but GDP per capita isn't the correct measure here when the bottom 8% in the US has no health insurance compared to Sweden's 0%, which I have to assume because I didn't even find this measured anywhere due to universal healthcare.
While Sweden has free health care, it does not completely include dental care. It's free until you turn 20, after that you pay out of your own pocket. This is to incentivize people to take care of their teeth, instead of not caring and then expecting free replacement of your teeth. One you're 20, you only get a very tiny deductible on your dental care which equates to almost the exactly the cost of a single basic check-up once a year.
I think that's the same mentality, "yes I'm poor now, but I'll get the break I deserve soon enough, and I don't want all these undesirables to benefit when I do".
I agree with this in an American context. In Sweden, it will be much less true. This difference can also however be attributed to government "interference" with higher taxation supporting better social care for those at the poorer end of the scale.
Freedom comes at a cost, the US and Sweden are paying that cost in different ways.
> Here in Sweden we decided against fluoride for this reason and the fact that it is in fact toxic.
How?
Please don't express that it damages development. That's trivially refutable by statistics. We can compare Canada's and UK's IQs for example, or some other proxy to the G factor, said countries were chosen for their similar cultural demographics, we find then that the metrics are mostly identical, while the difference in consumption of fluoride is staggering.
That's why Canada becoming an American anything is ridiculous and pisses off Canada so much that, for example, we've reduced our flights to America by +70% over the coming months.
Not when it comes to religion though: the European way (and I feel very much like considering Canadians something like honorary Europeans these days) was forged in painful wars stemming from and fueled by influence of religion on politics, and abuse of religion by politics. Both on the collective level, not so much on the individual level. The European way is all about having a strong firewall between religion and politics, to keep the former out of the later. Freedom from.
The American way is completely devoid of that concept. It's all built on that Pilgrim Fathers founding myth and only ever cares about keeping the state from getting in the way of individual beliefs. It's so focused on that part and only that part that even an almost-all-out theocracy would be fine as long as it did not mess with individual beliefs. "Freedom to" without the tiniest trace of "freedom from".
This is factually incorrect. Even though in most European countries there is a formal separation of religion and state, there is nothing that "forbids" any political party from having a strong religious affiliation. In fact, in nearly every European country there are major political parties with a strong Christian affiliation. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_democracy
There are even countries which have political parties that are Islamic affiliated.
The separation between religion and state refers to two things: the state not being able to enforce any religious aspects on citizens (freedom TO exercise any religion without interference from government), and religious entities not being able to influence or pressure the government outside the electoral process (freedom TO govern without interference from religious entities). Neither of these things prevents a political party founded on religious beliefs to participate in the electoral process.
Parent never said that political parties were forbidden from having a religious affiliation. Yet, the 'Christian' in European 'Christian democracy' is not remotely comparable to the role of religion in the society of the USA.
The USA is overtly and intentionally Christian: American banknotes have "In God We Trust" emblazoned on one side, and schoolchildren (usually) recite an oath pledging allegiance to "one nation under God". Christian democracy, on the other hand, usually stands for a loosely defined, mildly conservative political ideology in a strictly secular system of governance.
> The European way is all about having a strong firewall between religion and politics
I find this quite contrary to my experience of e.g. modern Germany, Spain, Poland, Italy where many politicians are explicitly religious, laws are written with majority religious affiliation in mind, religious taxes may still be levied. Even France still feels in many ways like a "catholic country", even if they do have good explicit separation of church and state.
I would have said that government and (Christian) religion are completely inextricable for most Europeans, even if the majority of the population isn't seriously devout or even practicing.
Things like church taxes handled by the state in Germany (entirely opt-in, even when it's effectively opt-out for individuals opted in by their parents) have the opposite effect though, they make the churches boring institutions (except for the occasional child abuse wtf that haunts them just like any other church) far from any radicalization.
When you dig deeper in Germany it gets surprisingly murky, e.g. bishops not paid out of those church taxes but out of regular state taxes, e.g. those paid by atheists and Muslims, which dates back to Napoleonic age secularization when those payments were introduced as a (meager) compensation for the enormous income the (catholic) church had from being worldly lords of enormous realms. But this as well contribute to keeping the churches out of politics. They know pretty well what is their place and what isn't.
> Canada does the opposite of America even if it hurts Canada - it’s a part of its identity.
As a duel citizen of the US and another Commonwealth nation, I have to say that this is exactly the ridiculous self-caricature perspective that gives foreign nationals a sort of combination of pity and contempt for the average US citizen.
While it's true that your cartoonish portrayal of freedom is one possible interpretation, there are most certainly others, many of which present citizens with actual measurable freedoms that they would not enjoy in the US.
For instance, Australians have, since the late 1990s, been relatively free of mass shootings, especially in schools or other public areas. Because the police are allowed to force you to take a random breathalyser test without probable cause, we are generally substantially freer of drunk driving. Because we have a social safety net, people are free from the need to opt out of life saving surgery because they fear the abject economic violence that the US visits upon the "uninsured".
On the other hand, the US has substantially more sensible libel laws than most Commonwealth countries. These things can cut both ways, but it would be a mistake to interpret other countries as attempting a childish breath holding exercise just to differentiate themselves from the hip and cool nation.
> As a duel citizen of the US and another Commonwealth nation, I have to say that this is exactly the ridiculous self-caricature perspective that gives foreign nationals a sort of combination of pity and contempt for the average US citizen.
Ahh, you see there you made a mistake. I'm not American.
And your examples of "this is better" don't address the point I made - how Canadians identify themselves.
"freedom from", you will not be given a prevention from some horrible disease. You can buy it if you can afford it, but a significant portion of the population can't, and some of them will not be able to enjoy life because of it.
"freedom to", a prevention will be provided. You can always decide to take alternatives, if you can afford it. A significant portion of the population can't. They will be able to enjoy life.
Equating freedom with the liberties the rich have is absurd. In any society, the rich will have the most freedom, even in the most oppressive ones. The true litmus test for freedom is seeing the freedoms the poor can enjoy. By that standard, the US doesn't score very well.
How free a country is can be determined by this question.
Would you choose to be a randomly chosen citizen? You could be anyone in that country with all the rights, privileges - or lack thereof - that that random person has.
I think I'd rather be a random Canadian with healthcare and education than a random American.
Only a few. American Republican voters consistently show a pattern of not regretting their vote because bad things happen to other people, but only because bad things happen to themselves.
It doesn't appear to be that way. If that 1% difference lies in how each country _fundamentally_ defines freedom, then I’d argue that’s more than enough to say Americans and Canadians are not alike. When the core values differ at such a foundational level, the rest of the cultural similarities become irrelevant.
Personal freedom ≠ "freedom of communities"—there is no such thing. Freedom applies to individuals, not collectives. When a community makes a decision that affects all its members, that’s democracy, but democracy is not unlimited authority. A majority vote does not grant the right to infringe on individual autonomy, which is why safeguards exist against the tyranny of the majority.
Banning fluoride does not restrict freedom—it prevents government overreach. In contrast, forcing fluoride on everyone would violate personal autonomy. Protecting individual choice is a fundamental principle, backed by real-world safeguards like constitutional rights, judicial review, and bodily autonomy laws. The burden of proof is always on those seeking to impose a policy, not on those defending individual freedom.
> Freedom applies to individuals, not collectives.
In the US, it most certainly does. We have freedom to associate, and associations also have freedoms. Were it not so, we wouldn't have even been able to arrive at the conclusion we have with regard to corporate money in politics.
Yes, in the US associations are granted certain legal rights, including the right to political expression and collective action. That's a matter of legal precedent.
But law doesn't define philosophy — philosophy defines law. And from a philosophical standpoint, freedom is a property of individuals, not collectives. Only individuals possess consciousness, agency, and moral responsibility. Associations, corporations, and groups are abstractions — tools created by individuals, composed of individuals, and led by individuals. They cannot make free choices; they can only be directed.
Freedom of association means individuals are free to join or leave groups as they see fit. But the moment something is mandated, such as being forced to participate in a fluoridated water system, or coerced into accepting the political will of a corporate “person,” the individual's freedom is compromised in favor of an artificial entity.
Philosophically speaking, rights flow from individuals to associations, not the other way around. The association has no legitimacy that exceeds or contradicts the will of its participants, especially when it undermines individual liberty.
So yes, associations may have freedoms under law, but only because individuals granted them those freedoms. The moment those freedoms infringe on individual rights, they lose their moral legitimacy, regardless of legal precedent.
Then the community is exactly forcing people to seek other, and way more expensive and way more inconvenient, sources of water. That's the opposite of a freedom.
It isn't. But as a society, we voted for providing clean, affordable water to everyone was a public good. That's why municipal water exists.
The issue arises when that water is fluoridated against the will of a significant portion of the population. It effectively forces dissenters to either accept it or go through the hassle and expense of sourcing their own water — which defeats the original purpose of providing low-cost, universally accessible water.
Today, the marginal benefits of fluoridation are questionable, especially with fluoride available in toothpaste. So forcing it on everyone, despite objection, becomes harder to justify — and that's why some places have stopped adding it.
Really? 'Why is the government providing potable water'? Because that's the point of governments: to provide a framework and the bare essentials of civilization.
And well, libertarian led governments are TERRIBLE.
I think they're saying that the logical conclusion of kebman's libertarian line of argument is that no-one is entitled to municipal water anyway, so it is moot whether or not municipal authorities decide to add a particular substance to the water or not. After all, if you trace things back far enough, the municipal water supply depends on the government 'forcing' lots of people to do things (such as paying taxes and following various regulations).
The whole argument gets weirdly metaphysical. Not many people have a problem with local authorities removing things from the water. That is, I don't see many Americans demanding that their local authority provide them with completely untreated water. But apparently modifying the water by adding something to it is importantly different. You'd think that a more interesting discussion would be a practical one (about the pros of cons of treating water in different ways). But a certain current of American discourse would rather return again and again to essentially theological arguments. We must locate the original sin against freedom in our local water infrastructure!
The opposite is true. If there was no municipal water supply, then you would in theory have a freer market where there would be multiple suppliers and consumers could theoretically make this decision themselves- assuming it doesn't result in a natural monopoly.
Because there is a government monopoly on water, you need these protections to prevent government overreach, because this is the only way for the consumer to express their preferences.
Some people would prefer there to be fluoride added to the water and some people would prefer there not to be. There's one set of pipes (in a given municipality), so you can't please everyone. You might as well complain that the government doesn't offer you a choice of voltage or frequency for your electrical supply.
Looking around the thread, the idea seems to be that there is some kind of important metaphysical distinction between the government "adding" something to the water that people could in principle add themselves or merely "filtering out" bad stuff like pathogens — and that this metaphysical distinction is somehow linked to the difference between positive and negative liberties. As an aside, I think this probably makes no sense on a chemical level, as you generally can't remove stuff without also adding something else. But in any case, this strikes me as a uniquely American perspective. I think a more common perspective is the following:
* Essentially no-one wants raw untreated water supplied to their homes.
* The local government therefore needs to decide in which ways the water is going to be treated.
* This has to involve some compromises (because there's one set of pipes).
* These compromises are boring practical issues of municipal infrastructure and have no interesting philosophical or political implications.
> I think they're saying that the logical conclusion of kebman's libertarian line of argument is that no-one is entitled to municipal water anyway
Oh, I very much understand the libertarian 'argument', and I dismiss it as childish anarcho-primativist horseshit.
Almost all (aside the rare Lefty libertarian types) libertarians utterly leave out the fact that helping each other and coming together collectively can fix problems in what amounts exponentiation, compared to the collective action problem of individualism.
If everyone generated their own power, then grids would be mismatched and slow everyone down.
If water grids were individual wells, we would tap out natural aquifers in short notice. By collectively coming together, desalination plants and mass water purification is doable.
Libertarian types will demand absolute indepenendence for everything, but also want the spoils of a framework of governance. But even when they get their own community, as I linked, they so overwhelmingly fucked it up.
Communism is a better idea than rugged right-wing libertarianism (the common one in the USA). Turns out, none of the richies want to pay for anything.
But adding fluoride WAS everybody coming together to solve a problem (poor dental health). We could have a reasonable argument about whether or not fluorine in the water continues to serve that goal. Instead we’ve got this weird quasi-debate about types of freedoms.
In the political philosophy of the US, the unit whose freedoms matter is the individual, not the community. Freedoms for individuals necessarily come from reducing the freedom of "the community."
yes, and i think that’s a pretty recent reading of the US comprehension of freedom. my sense is that the collective individualistic tendencies have ballooned.
even as recently as the early 90s, my civics classes emphasized the importance of other people’s rights and that of the expression of your individual rights infringed on the rights of others then it was an irresponsible and improper use of individual rights.
it seems like this has devolved into people whose perspective on individual rights loosely aligns enough to coalesce and shout the loudest to create policy. until someone in the in-group’s individual freedom is impacted and the group fractures into smaller coalitions. rinse. lather. repeat.
I disagree with you that this is a recent idea. It goes back to Locke, Hobbes, and the social contract theorists. The "collective freedoms" idea is more recent, if anything, coming from the subsequent generation of philosophers.
i can agree with the theory behind what you’re saying, but also sense that the practical application of individual freedoms has become increasingly prevalent and acute
In some ways, though, this is a reaction to the move in the other direction. The US in the 1800's was very much in favor of individual freedoms, but by the 1920's-1960's things swung heavily towards the idea of "positive freedom" and "community freedom."
But, taking the individual freedom argument to its ultimate implications, the Free individual is also Free to not drink tap water in a community that decided to add fluoride to their water supply, and is also Free to move to a community that decided against it.
It's not a "freedom" to be forced to move away from a community just because you want pure water. Moral philosophy: A democracy should not act as the tyranny of the majority, and governments (local or otherwise) should not overreach their mandate with monopolistic policies that negatively affect individual freedoms.
Use the same argument on air and it falls apart. "The Free individual is also Free to not breathe air in a community that decided to add lead to their air supply." This was a big debate in the 70's btw due to car emissions.
the point was good until you tried to compare it to lead in the air. there are a few factors that make it impossible to use the same argument between lead in the air and fluoride in the water
>A democracy should not act as the tyranny of the majority, and governments (local or otherwise) should not overreach their mandate with monopolistic policies that negatively affect individual freedoms.
Then it shouldn't ban fluoridation when it could instead simply not mandate it.
In reality though, the freedom of the companies, which is just the freedom of the super rich ~100 - 1000 people (proxied via companies without taking direct responsibility: The sacred duty of company is to maximize shareholder returns!)
10,000 food additives that are banned in Europe are perfectly fine in US.
>This ban is anti-freedom. (Just like forcing them could be argued to be, even though that's what you argued against.)
By that logic is the first amendment "anti-freedom", because it prevents communities from instituting censorship laws, even if they actually want them?
You joke, but a lot of these freedom-rah-rah-rah people absolutely cried like babies and resisted seatbelt laws back in the 80s and 90s, too. Half my family believed it was evidence a communist takeover, and they all had those little defeat devices that you plugged into the latch, which silenced the car's seatbelt-off indicator.
"You can't tell me what to do" has been a religion in the USA for a long, long time.
So then, you'd also be against adding folate/folic acid to bread for the same reason?
For those who don't know many countries including the US mandate the inclusion of folic acid in bread and certain other foods to ensure pregnant women get enough. A deficiency of folic acid during pregnancy causes birth defects in infants.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folate
I never heard of that supplement (not a father) and was very surprised to find 80 countries mandate it. I checked the list (below) and it turns out the 80 countries are a bunch of poor nations plus USA, UAE, Qatar, Canada and Australia. I guess our medicare system supports the EU mothers fine enough so we don’t need to put that in the staple of food.
"Despite Public Health Initiatives across Europe recommending that women take 0.4 mg folic acid before becoming pregnant and during the first trimester, the prevalence of NTD pregnancies has not materially decreased in the EU since 1998, in contrast to the dramatic fall observed in the USA. This study aimed to estimate the number of NTD pregnancies that would have been prevented if flour had been fortified with folic acid in Europe from 1998 as it had been in the USA."
"Conclusions: This study suggests that failure to implement mandatory folic acid fortification in the 28 European countries has caused, and continues to cause, neural tube defects to occur in almost 1,000 pregnancies every year."
The most famous NTD is Spina Bifida, and most of them aren't really fixable by modern health care. So this is 1000 babies a year who are either born with severe birth defects, or, in what I'm guessing is many cases, terminated when they could have been born healthy with a flour enrichment mandate.
It would be interesting to know why EU countries chose not to mandate it. Also, I wonder if EU flour millers/producers add it voluntarily, and whether flour produced in Canada destined for EU markets leaves out the folate that's mandated for inclusion in the Canadian market.
Anti-folates (similarly with magnesium and a few other things) are closer to chemotherapy than anything else. They promote cancers because they promote nearly every human cell, and the logic behind removing them is that since cancer cells divide so comparatively rapidly they'll be selectively targeted by a lack of division-enabling nutrients. Most people absolutely shouldn't be restricting their folate intake.
If we take your claim to its logical conclusion (that we shouldn't add those vitamins and minerals to our foods because they might hurt a small percentage of people), the other side of the coin is that we should _remove_ extra vitamins and minerals. If we don't, we're just implicitly medicating a whole population rather than proactively medicating them. Peanuts hurt some people; let's ban them everywhere. End-stage kidney patients without full renal failure often can't tolerate salt or phosphorus; let's not salt any of our food and ban the sale of eggs and meats. Diabetics can't easily tolerate a high glycemic load; let's be extra safe and not use any sugars or alcohols.
Or...make reasonable population-level interventions and let people with special needs handle their own special needs. There are gluten-free breads, no-excess-folate flours, and all sorts of things on the market.
While we're talking about baseline levels of B vitamins (folate), did you know that most bakers are also dumping a rich, broad-spectrum source of most B vitamins and trace minerals into your bread? It's not just folate. They then let that yeast further multiply for 2hr+ just to bump the vitamin levels up (or, worse, add extra yeast at the start to speed up the baking cycle).
Presumably, if you're in the US or any of those countries that mandate folate then you don't eat bread or anything containing flour—or you have to get special flour without it.
I'd imagine that must be very difficult for you.
BTW, that fluoride reference refers to excessive fluoride in water whether natural or added. I've not entered the fluoride debate here except to ask a question. I'd certainly object if fluoride levels were excessive in my water supply.
It is difficult, but not impossible. Many bakeries do not add them to their dough and Whole Foods has some brands without them.
Do not get me started on the IMP and GMP they are adding to foods now...excitatory purine flavor enhancers in the form of things like "Malted Barely Flour"
"Folate is an essential water-soluble B vitamin found in foods, including dark-green leafy vegetables and legumes."
The above quote from that Springer reference reminds me of plant toxins in common foods especially in dark-green leafy ones, spinach, rhubarb, etc. Oxalic acid is one of the main ones but there are many others.
If you worry about what you eat you ought to be concerned about these. It's understandable that these toxins exist in these plants as they use them as protection against insects etc. Incidentally, I use oxalic acid industrially and I'm very careful how I handle it.
So instead of the niche individuals and groups working around society to meet their needs—because this absolutely can be done today—-those with an anti-flouridation belief are mandating that the majority give up economy of scale for something that it still wants and needs.
It’s doubtful that this stance is being promoting in good faith.
We've been trying for the history of mankind to figure out how to "not keep people trapped in poverty". No one has solved that problem yet, despite the best of intentions with monumental effort. I'll agree with Milton Friedman on this, Capitalism, as bad as it is, has been the most successful system to alleviate poverty.
This is getting wildly off topic, but I firmly believe that "we tried everything and free market capitalism is the best we have" is a myth.
It's incontrovertible that, under certain conditions, an unrestricted price system (a "market") is the most efficient allocation mechanism possible. There's a lot of research on that kind of thing.
The myth is that we have ever tried anything resembling that on a nationwide scale, or maybe even that it is achievable at all. There is a fundamental "paradox of tolerance" in economics, where market participants have strong and persistent incentives to distort or damage the market. This is why business interests so often align with free-market liberalism or conservatism.
Most of the so-called deregulation under the current Trump administration for example as little to do with improving the efficiency of market allocation. It's much more about making sure very large and powerful corporations can get even larger and more powerful, and removing the regulatory apparatus to prevent them from distorting and damaging markets to suppress competition, or to suppress labor costs.
Rather than taking choice away, we should be educating people on what the best choice is and letting them make it themselves.
Brush your teeth in the morning and in the evening. Standard dental hygiene - If a person can be an obedient worker they can probably brush their teeth twice a day. If they cant, they have bigger problems to sort out.
Is that not just a passive form of putting fluoride in the water though? Government is still spending money but without the desired outcome of having a healthier fitter population.
Can communities choose to permit murder or ban people of certain races? Is America not free because they cannot choose to vote for a government that would prohibit women from voting or jail people for expressing political opinions?
You're using an extreme definition of freedom that I suspect is not quite the trump card you think it is. No, "communities" can't just do whatever they want because they "choose" to, and nobody ouside the lunatic fringe thinks that's a prerequisite for freedom.
Federal limit is 1.5 mg/l. All water suppliers have to regularly chemically/biologically analyse their water and publish fairly detailed reports. Example: https://www.bwb.de/de/assets/downloads/analysewerte-wasserwe... Some states add extra reporting requirements.
While they don't add fluoride, the natural levels in German tap water can reach 0.3 mg/L. Compared to the US recommended level of 0.7 mg/L in fluoridated water, that's not an insignificant amount.
Sorry if you read my post as snarky - I don't think I missed that point, I meant the question at the end more as food for thought.
The OP contrasts adding fluroide to water vs. not adding fluoride to water and brings up the freedom question. I find that very interesting. But he omits that there's also the variant I sketched, namely that fluoride could still be made available to the population, but not through water.
Now, how does this factoid relate to the freedom (positive or negative) question?
So, please don't read my post as negative, my intent was to bring an additional perspective to the table.
That is not a very good reason. An absurd version of that would be putting antibiotics into the water because a lot of people don't have health insurance and can get infections.
So if the Science™ said it was good to add antibiotics (reduces illness!) and anti-psychotics (reduces violence!) to the water supply, you'd be for it?
That’s an even stupider comparison than the antibiotics one.
Let’s dismantle what you did here that you think is so clever.
You took an absurd comparison of a tried and tested naturally occurring substance with a substance that public health professionals are trying to get us to use less of.
You took that, and replaced it with an even more far-fetched and even more generalised hypothetical.
At least, given your ignorance around antibiotics you might be forgiven for thinking it would be a good thing to give antibiotics for all. I mean if it’s good enough for your food supply it should be good enough for humans right? Ignore egg prices going through the roof cause your flock has no innate immune system.
So then you replace that reasonable sounding but stupid supposition and you replace it with “a word” that you pulled out of the air that sounds like it might be a thing and then wowed us with your abuse of glyphs™
You are nothing but a depressing waste of time and whoever is putting you up to this I’d suggest you go back to them with your cap in hand and admit you’re not up to it.
>You took an absurd comparison of a tried and tested naturally occurring substance
It's ironic that you assert this, and then go on to claim that I'm ignorant, when you seem to be the ignorant one. Penicillin was originally derived from a mold and is one of the popular antibiotics out there, so it's arguably "tried and tested naturally occurring". The same is true of lithium. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_(medication)
>with a substance that public health professionals are trying to get us to use less of.
Under the hypothetical of "if the Science™ said it was good", this would not be a problem. If you can't understand how hypotheticals work, I suggest you stop wasting my time.
You seem to be saying that because Lithium and Flouride are both naturally occurring minerals, that would make it okay to put Lithium in the water supply.
Please go on, the sun is out and I’m enjoying this.
>You seem to be saying that because Lithium and Flouride are both naturally occurring minerals, that would make it okay to put Lithium in the water supply.
1. If you do a quick skim of the comment section, you'll find no shortage of people unironically making such argument.
2. It might seem I'm making such claim if you're rushed or have reading comprehension issues, but if you read my comments more carefully you'd see I'm not making no such claims, only posing it as a hypothetical.
Perhaps, vitamins, micro doses of aspirin, and other low level medical treatments should also be added to water, for the benefit of the silent poor and sick.
Or even crazier, hear me out, maybe we can just let people have healthcare without cost-gating it? Like oh idk, every other even semi-wealthy nation in the world except the one where measles is making a comeback?
Public healthcare systems in other countries have procedures they don't cover, and significant wait periods (i.e., shortages) to see doctors and specialists and have procedures done. Because of the cost.
I'm not saying they aren't better than America's, but the idea you can just let people have it and not worry about costs isn't true. Health is like around quarter of entire government expenditure, it's fantastically expensive. Around the same amount of welfare expenditure, so you could double the number of people receiving welfare or double the amount that welfare recipients get for the same price, for example, which would be lifechanging for millions of the poorest and most disadvantaged people.
> except the one where measles is making a comeback?
I mean, raise taxes on businesses (wanna guess how many walmart employees are on government aid, i.e how much we tax payers are directly subsidizing their exorbitant profits while they pay their employees below a living wage?)Tax the rich, (3 individuals hoard more wealth than 50% of the country combined) + Cut some large percentage of insurance jobs, military spending, and use that money to provide healthcare to every american, without spending time and money making sure they're poor before we deign them able to receive help. really, it's quite simple.
>Public healthcare systems in other countries have procedures they don't cover, and significant wait periods (i.e., shortages) to see doctors and specialists and have procedures done.
Agreed there. Ever wonder why?
Taking your point earnestly for a moment, can you earnestly tell me that's not still miles better than America, with more expensive outcomes, worse care outcomes, lowering life expectancy compared to poorer nations, record maternal mortality rates, and tons of medical bankruptcies?[2]
Cmon, be serious. Go fund me is one of the bigger health insurance systems in the country.[3] Btw, medicare for all saves tremendous amounts of money vs our current system.[1] Much like ubi, the science is clear, but the rich and the naive are too brainwashed or dumb by the propaganda of the oligarchy owned media to think American's deserve healthcare, housing, a dignified life.
Seriously, Compare your "worst case" to america, where people simply can't afford to see the specialists, or get the procedures at ALL. I know which one I would have and my opinion is backed by the sentiment, and empirical data of, like I said, literally every even half developed nation in the world. Your can offer nothing against this. It's simply fact.
That's not even to speak about women dying from things like birth complications because their draconian state let the theocratic fascists dictate what a women and their doctor can and can't do with their own body.[0]
>because of the cost
Drastic, brazen or glib misunderstanding of history and politics. Throughout conservative governments, from reagan to thatcher to bush to trump, the objective of these ayn rand reading dummies, (read, austerity politicians) are as follows:
1. cut funding to vital social agency.
2. point to resulting difficulties as proof it's a silly system.
3. sell it off to private corporations and get hefty kickbacks.
THAT is what causes all of the (still lesser than ours) problems you lament.
>the idea you can just let people have it and not worry about costs isn't true
Where did I say that again?
Man, if only someone had thought of that. If only we had a 1% that controls almost 40% of the wealth in this country. We could raise taxes to pay for such a program. Btw, I reiterate, every study, (even from neocon think tanks) recognize it would save us hundreds of billions.) But austerity/conservative politicians don't want to improve the lives of us, they want to enrich their fellow oligarchs.
Even thinking about this for a second will validate the notion. Instead of hundreds and thousands of employees whose job it is to give the least care to the least people for profit, maybe spend that money oh, idk, giving people healthcare? How much healthcare could've been provided from Luigi's cough victim's salary? If instead of getting paid millions to use AI to deny healthcare to those in need, that money was oh idk, spent on healthcare?
>Health is like around quarter of entire government expenditure, it's fantastically expensive.
Gee, I wonder what the cause of that is. Oh wait, I know this one too. Pretty common conservative talking point. Have you heard of the phrase "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure?"
Do you think a system where people are afraid to go to the dr for economic reasons contribute at all to the drastic healthcare expenses? I know someone that works as an ER nurse, people do not come in til they're at deaths door, with an issue that would have been remedied for a 100th the cost had they simply been able to see a doctor when first troubled. And again, all studies point to medicare for all saving hundreds of billions vs our current system.[1]
>Around the same amount of welfare expenditure, so you could double the number of people receiving welfare or double the amount that welfare recipients get for the same price, for example, which would be lifechanging for millions of the poorest and most disadvantaged people.
Or we could idk, just stop wasting money on evil "who deserves help" jobs and just you know, give that money directly to the people our government is supposed to improve the lives of? This goes for welfare, healthcare, unemployment, etc, too. How much of our social safety nets' budgets are spent in bureaucrats meant to make it difficult to get those benefits? To subsidize billion $ corporations? To bail out banks who speculated on subprime mortgages? To fund a $9T war on terror that did nothing but make us more enemies?
This is a fairly unhinged reply to my quite specific question and comment. Pretty rude saying things like this
> Drastic, brazen or glib misunderstanding of history and politics
while pretending you weren't just spouting on about measels htat you had no idea about.
Healthcare is extremely expensive and taxing more won't magically make costs irrelevant or the cost of healthcare having to be weighed against other important and worthwhile government expenditure like welfare. That's just the reality of it no matter how much you're going to prattle on.
Apparently the US spends twice on healthcare for the same outcomes compared to comparable nations with universal healthcare. Therefore the concern about costs does not add up.
> Apparently the US spends twice on healthcare for the same outcomes compared to comparable nations with universal healthcare.
Sure, but I was talking about costs in other developed countries, not USA. Healthcare in Australia is about 1/4 of government expenditure with welfare being another 1/4, for example.
> Therefore the concern about costs does not add up.
Non-sequitur. Costs obviously do and I explained in very simple terms why (e.g., you could double welfare payments for about the same cost). Please explain your reasoning if you want to support the claim that cost is not a concern.
What's your point equating welfare spending to healthcare spending? To suggest that we fund welfare more instead of putting more money in to healthcare? Why??? Are you simply stating that giving x money to one social program is the same as giving x money to another? What is your point, your policy proscription?
Giving $x to healthcare is almost always better than giving $x to welfare, as well funded universal healthcare reduces OOP costs for citizens, which reduces their need to consume other welfare services.[0,1]
> What's your point equating welfare spending to healthcare spending?
I'm not equating the spending, only the costs.
> To suggest that we fund welfare more instead of putting more money in to healthcare?
I'm not suggesting that, I'm explaining what the cost of healthcare is in terms of another enormous government programe.
> Why??? Are you simply stating that giving x money to one social program is the same as giving x money to another?
No.
> What is your point, your policy proscription?
To try to give you some perspective about the enormous cost of universal healthcare.
> Giving $x to healthcare is almost always better than giving $x to welfare, as well funded universal healthcare reduces OOP costs for citizens, which reduces their need to consume other welfare services.[0,1]
Calm down and take a breath and try re-reading what I wrote in my first comment. It's extremely simple, maybe the fact I pointed out you were wrong about measles set you off badly. I'm not saying healthcare expenditure is bad or worse than other welfare or that America has a good healthcare system. I said that healthcare is cost gated in countries with universal healthcare systems. Which it is. In your hypothetical fairy land of unicorns and pixies where corporations and billionaires pay for everything, sure it's not cost gated, and neither is your government issued pony. But that is not an answer to my point that healthcare in countries with universal healthcare systems (and America, if it were to adopt one), is cost gated. Cost gated meaning people who need or want treatment will not be able to receive it in a timely manner in all cases.
Yeah, I was a little heated, because I misunderstood what you meant by cost-gated, and thought you were being rhetorical and bad faith. My bad there.
We simply had different definitions of cost-gated, and talked past each other because of it.
>my point that healthcare in countries with universal healthcare systems (and America, if it were to adopt one), is cost gated
Sure, but... who cares? It still produces better outcomes, better coverage, better in nearly every measurable way. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
>Cost gated meaning people who need or want treatment will not be able to receive it in a timely manner in all cases.
Yeah, sure, but that really isn't the point. The point was that free at point of service (what I meant by not cost-gated) healthcare produces better outcomes, covers a larger % of citizens, and is generally simply a better way to do healthcare. Not receiving in a timely manner is miles better than not receiving at all because you can't afford it. That's a pretty worthy delineation to make, even if you could in the abstract call both "cost-gated".
The overall point is socialized medicine costs less, provides better outcomes, covers more people. All the rest is besides the point I was trying to make. Sorry again for coming in so hot, I'm clearly much too used to arguing with much more dishonest people than yourself.
Yeah, almost like he's a dishonest fool at best, or propagandist who will do anything to avoid acknowledging the simple, universally backed by data assertion that healthcare for all is cheaper, provides better outcomes, and the source of the problems of universal systems - austerity politicians who's m.o i laid out plainly. Defund, claim it doesn't work, privatize.
Complains I didn't answer every one of his points AND that my response was too long. Clearly a dishonest propagandist or a fool.
Disagreed, If you need soft kind words to believe the guy telling you the sky is blue over the guy speaking softer but telling you the sky is red, you're the problem, not me.
I respond in good faith until the other party shows themselves not to be, and his glib rhetoric of "what do you mean, cost-gated?" while in the next sentence demonstrating he knows exactly what I'm speaking of - a public healthcare option - made it clear what type of person I was dealing with, and it wasn't a good faith commenter.
I've heard every argument that guy made and can make 1000 times over from fox news talking heads or an equivalent level person.
What strengthens my positions are, well, the truthfulness of them. All of the facts and studies support my message, playing nice with a bad faith commenter has no bearing on any of the facts I presented.
Not to mention he calls a thought out, four citation response "unhinged prattle" because he refuses to engage with any of my responses (he knows i'm right) to his dishonest comment. It's the conservative m.o, I've seen it a thousand times.
If you can't/won't accept reality because there was some extremely mild condescension, that's on you. Plus that guy deserved no good faith, I've heard his exact comment from every conservative talking head for a decade+, I know guys like him backwards to forwards (politically)
> I respond in good faith until the other party shows themselves not to be,
That was my first comment.
> and his glib rhetoric of "what do you mean, cost-gated?" while in the next sentence demonstrating he knows exactly what I'm speaking of - a public healthcare option
Public healthcare is cost-gated though. The recipient doesn't see the cost, but they see wait lists and procedures and medications and devices that are not covered. It is cost-gated. Prattling on about taxing the rich doesn't change that, it's just deflecting and changing the subject. If governments had unlimited money then healthcare would not be cost gated. Great. Astounding deduction. Now back to reality...
I think your attempt to spread disinformation about measles -- or worse, simply being willfully uninformed about simple facts yet trying to make statements of authority about them -- shows exactly what kind of person I'm dealing with.
Ok, I see where the misunderstanding arose. Cost-gating in this context meant, to me, preventing access to healthcare based on if the individual can pay at point of service, not if the state program can pay to see people quickly or whatever. Apologies for not giving the best faith interpretation to your comment, but you can hopefully see why I misunderstood your use of the term.
Sure, as a byproduct of systematically underfunded social health programs, you see a similar effect in countries with social healthcare, but I refuted the importance of that point pretty completely by explaining the m.o of austerity politicians and worse than gilded-age levels of wealth inequality[0] as the sources of social healthcare systems' ails and the clear fact that it's still a much better system by any measure.
The outcomes are still better, cheaper, and more have access to healthcare. So, not really relevant to the point that public healthcare > privatized healthcare? The rest is semantic word games. We're talking about which system provides better outcomes to more people for less money. And there is no question as to the answer of that.
>Disinformation about the measles
Sure, I was unaware how severe the anti vaccination rhetoric has taken root in europe too. My tongue in cheek dig at measles being back in the US was not meant to be taken that seriously, but more like a "point and laugh at the us" addendum.
But you are right, though it's besides the point completely. That we're the only country suffering from anti vax idiots is incorrect, sure. But it is not even really part of the argument here, more just a dig on the US. Idk why that tiny part of the discussion was fixated on. Probably because it's the only point I wasn't correct about.
One man's slippery slope, is another man's exploration of an idea. I don't think exploring widely is unproductive.
I could also say, that discussing slippery slopes (a linguistic discussion) is itself what moves the discussion too far from the original topic. You protest too much.
The trouble with slippery slopes is that not all of them are fallacious, as you are suggesting. This is a reasonable point: if we are doing delivery of medicine through tap water, where's the line? A few people have seriously suggested putting low doses of lithium in the tap water as a societal antidepressant.
The line is where we've drawn it now - nothing has changed in decades. A few people suggest all kinds of things, that doesn't make them at imminent risk of happening.
The difference is that fluoride is effectively an industrial waste product and thus it benefits multiple parties to use it. If vitamins were also an industrial waste product, we would indeed be adding them to lots of things.
Do you think there's a difference between a/ treating water to make it clean and b/ adding minerals and vitamins for the benefit of others, whether they want it or not?
Not really. I'm sure some people want distilled water to come out of their tap. You can't provide any service to a large group of people without giving some of them something they don't want in some way or another.
That's exactly what I was trying to convey with my hyperbolic statement. I remember when I first moved to the city after being on well water for the first 25 years of my life and being put off by the chlorinated smell of the water. Now when I go back to visit family I'm put off by the well water... Especially when taking a shower.
I can't help but come away from this conversation with the impression that you people are talking about livestock and not human individuals with rights to their own body and bodily autonomy. This to me is straight out of the nazi/communist/fascist type of mindset.
> The contrast between positive freedom, the freedom to do something, and negative freedom, the freedom from interference in your life, is the core political argument in America right now.
True.
> Negative freedom, freedom from government interference, is being promoted by those seeking to weaken the government enough to supplant it.
Tenuous. Then again, like you, all of my political opponents are either stupid or evil or both.
> People who are poor and sick are likely unable to stand up for themselves or participate in solidarity against authority.
Contentious. Sometimes this is true, sometimes it is not - giving negative liberty rights (e.g. first amendment speech protections) to individuals has proven an incredibly effective tool to protect the individual against the state. Not perfect, but incredibly effective all the same.
> This individual issue is relatively small, but you take 100's of issues like this, and the effect is to create a class of people who aren't able to do anything but be obedient workers.
Any supporter of negative liberty (i.e. someone who is for small government) would tell you, that is what government does, which is a big reason why they want small government.
What in the Berkeley kind of logic is this? You have a pretty solid core logical structure. But, the conclusion is weak. The argument’s weakness lies in its simplifications and the final political assertion, which, although plausible within certain ideological frameworks, isn't logically proven by the earlier premise.
The American view of "freedom" is all messed up. You're "free" if the government doesn't tell you to do stuff. Even if corporations make you do stuff, even if they make you do more stuff the government did, that's somehow "free". And "stuff" somehow only includes trivial things like water fluoridation. No freedom-loving American patriot ever said America isn't free because cops can just murder you if they don't like you.
> The contrasting view is that putting fluoride in water is literally medicating people without their affirmative consent.
Is that the contrasting view, or the contrasting view that is preferred, because it is more easily demolished?
The stronger contrasting view isn't that the government is medicating people without their affirmative consent. It's that it's poisoning people, and no amount of consent by laymen to be poisoned would be acceptable.
I think his view is much stronger, since the intent is obviously to medicate even if it may indeed be inadvertently poisoning people in practice. So it doesn't assume one truth (poison or not) one way or the other, but still argues that it should be unlawful. While your view is much more narrow and suggests it should only be unlawful because it's poisoning people, which then begs the question of whether it is or not.
Fluoride occurs naturally in water, that’s literally how we discovered the effects of fluoride. People in areas where water naturally contained more fluoride had less cavities.
Anything, including water itself, is toxic (not poisonous, but I’m guessing you meant toxic, since fluoride is definitely not poisonous) in high enough doses. So you could say that about ANY mineral we may add to water to adjust its taste or health effects.
I happen to think adding fluoride isn’t worth the effort. But the hysteria against it is also really dumb.
> If you are poor you can't go anywhere or buy anything. You're not free if you're poor.
The solution is lifting people out of poverty not papering over the cracks with fluoride.
There is no fluoride in the water here in Norway yet dental health is good because of good education, free dental care for children, students pregnant women, and little absolute poverty.
I think it's a reductionist word game to reduce everything to a single dimension ("freedom") and then say "I think my policy is better, and since everything can reduce to a single variable it means there is more freedom".
If a right-wing voter thinks banning gay marriage is good for society, it is also positive freedom? If your counter-argument is "no, because while it would be positive freedom if it was good for society, it's not" then maybe I'm just disareeing on your terminology, but I suspect you would say "heck no, telling people what they can't do is not freedom, that's an abuse of the English language as well as being bad for society".
Governments exist to take away some freedoms, it's the whole point of them. People vote for governmets to take away freedoms (with laws and taxes) and get things like public services, justice systems and infrastructure in return. Ideally, they lean towards things that give you a lot of bang for your buck (like flourine), because taking away freedom is not good for creating a dynamic society, and they should be accountable to voters.
Just say that anyone who objects is an anarchist if you want to take the moral high ground from the right in terms they understand.
The issue is not the fluoride in the water, it's all the sugar that poor people eat and drink (especially sodas). And we actively fund the corn syrup industry at both ends via the farm bill (production and consumption via SNAP).
Always question whenever a highly educated and thoughtful (and likely wealthy) person like this commenter is telling you poor people are too stupid for their own good and can’t make decisions for themselves.
This is the definition of the principal-agent problem.
Also, “positive freedom” is a hilarious rebranding of dictatorial decision making.
Why not grant more “positive freedom” to the people by deciding exactly what these poor people should do for a living, how they should live, and how they should spend their money. The experts know best, after all.
I’m not even particularly against fluoride in water, but this kind of reasoning is insidious. If the people have voted for representatives that are against it, we should follow the will of the people. This is the definition of democracy.
Fluoridated water, enriched flour, iodized salt, vaccines, etc. are why we don't see diseases and conditions that plagued us in the past and continue to plague people in places without these measures.
Fluoridated water is the reason I've never had a cavity despite growing up poor with a terrible diet, dental hygiene and care.
There is no leap, when I finally got good access to dental care, I've had dentists tell me water fluoridation is what kept me from tooth decay in the chronic absence of dental care and basic hygiene.
Enriched flour is another good example that I was hoping someone would mention*.
It’s worth noting that it’s also slightly different in that processed flour is deficient in thiamin and calcium, so the fortification adds back these nutrients.
On the other hand, processing water to make it potable doesn’t remove fluoride and so fluoridation is not the process of adding back something that was there beforehand.
*I searched this page and found flouride and flouridation four times before your comment.
I've seen the enriched flour brought up a few times in this thread, and not with the important caveat: This is a poor substitute for the micronutrients that occur naturally in the bran and endosperm; parts of the grain that we've been stripping out for dubious reasons or 50-100 years. (In ~100% of restaurant and bakery food; ~90% of grocery food)
> The contrast between positive freedom, the freedom to do something, and negative freedom, the freedom from interference in your life, is the core political argument in America right now.
Interesing take but I don't buy this part at all. The core political argument in the US is epistemological. What's real and what counts as true? There are some axiological differences but I think they are minor in comparison to not being able to agree on how the world is in the first place.
It seems to be that the battleground is epistemological, but not so much the argument. The difference being that Trump uses 'claims of truth' without any care of how true they are.
I feel the majority of epistemological disagreement is the result of propaganda (not exclusively from MAGA). With only a small bit that is actually a disagreement on core values. Suchs true disagreement does exist, but it is no longer what the political discourse is about.
There's no such thing as "free" when something is "given" by a public entity. It always costs the people that actually work and are forcibly taxed, something.
74.6% of Americans get fluoridated tap water; https://jada.ada.org/article/S0002-8177(24)00204-6/fulltext shows that even with instructions to brush and floss and instructions to use it, water flouridation reduces cavities in a community by at least 20%.
Currently, there is a very effective push by people who want to weaken the government enough to supplant it. They are giving themselves ideological coverage by claiming they protecting people from interference.
No it isn't - OP didn't say everyone who promotes that idea wants to weaken the government, but rather those who wish to weaken the government are promoting that idea.
Fluoride has to be applied to the surface at a high concentration for brief contact time to be effective. What is the freedom to sell industrial waste to the government to pointlessly add to the water supply for profit called?
> Putting fluoride in water promotes freedom. That sounds crazy, but let me justify it.
> If you are poor you can't go anywhere or buy anything. You're not free if you're poor. If you are sick, you may be confined to a hospital bed or not feel good enough to do anything. If you are sick you're not free.
or, you know, you could avoid the problem in the first place and allow "even poors" to go somewhere or buy something... at least base items, and medicines...
this way they could afford dental costs, and you could spare the need to add fluoride in the water
This is the same reasonning with vaccine (only worse because you can die faster from not being vaccinated than from cavities -- although in some cases they can be lethal too).
People who want to be free from government interference should be prevented from using public roads, or public infrastructure of any kind. Want to mail something? Hire a courrier to deliver it for you. Etc.
Sure, go ahead, no taxes! But along with OP's rules against using public roads, or public infrastructure: You also can't use the public's air, because regulation keeps it clean. You can't eat at any restaurants, because the government regulates them and make sure they are serving safe food. No access to medicine, either, for the same reason. No airline travel, which is heavily regulated and safe, No working for any company subject to OSHA and other workplace safety regulations. No calling the police or fire department if you need help. Just you in your homestead in the woods--oh, and if someone robs your homestead, you don't have access to the courts to get your money back, either, money that you can't use anyway because it's issued by the government.
No taxes in exchange for you not benefiting from anything taxpayer-funded. How does that libertarian paradise sound?
i started and then deleted several responses to this. I'm not sure how it affects studies, because i don't really read studies that often, it's very taxing on my brain. However, one thing i think is important is it's generally a good idea to give children as little caffeine as possible. I'm sure this is a controversial claim. But if we take that as true, then children aren't getting fluoride from tea, ideally. Adults can make the decision to drink tea that has less or more fluoride, if they care. I personally don't care that much, so i get whatever tea. I have a well, and i brew my tea with distilled water, so whatever is in the bag is whatever i am drinking, and nothing else.
for those that might care, i RO my well water (screen-pre-RO-post filters) into 6 gallon containers, and then distill a gallon at a time. Each gallon of RO water takes ~5 hours total, including the time for the RO to process the water. My RO is very slow, but i am unwilling to pay for a jet pump for it, currently, to speed it up. It takes about 7-8 hours to fill 6 gallons, and it should be able to fill 6 gallons in 3 hours or so - it is a 50GPD filter system, so ~2GPH.
> Out of a population of about three-quarters of a billion, under 14 million people (approximately 2%) in Europe receive artificially-fluoridated water.
most people’s teeth in europe do not look great.. specially when compared to north americans.
from my experience, only people who are serious about their mouth health and go to the dentist at least twice a year, seem to have healthy and good looking teeth.
Twice a year? That's only recommended by dentists in north america because most insurances cover it because of lobby pressure. Every 1-2 years fully suffices, depending on your risk profile (smoker, genetics, ...). That's what countries where the insurrance doesn't have skin in the game recommend.
And the average european has much better tooth health than the average u.s. citizen, in my experience.
That’s a very American perspective (which is fine, given that we are talking about America). Most countries would view this as a non-partisan public health policy issue which has nothing to do with the abstract philosophical debates about freedom beloved of 90s internet libertarians.
Isaiah Berlin wrote about the two concepts of liberty[0] in 1958 and the constitution of the US is based on negative liberty, so it goes back a bit further than the 90s.
I'm aware of the history (I said "beloved of", not "invented by"). My point is that it's idiosyncratically American to think of decisions about municipal water treatment as being fundamentally questions of political liberty.
> I rather define freedom by the government not deciding what's good for me
Does that mean you are against this bill?
Before the bill, your community could either use your own water system, without fluoride, or use the wider system, which has fluoride.
After this bill, your community no longer can use your own water system with fluoride, and the wider system also does not have fluoride.
On a first read, this bill makes the government remove a choice for you, deciding what is good for you.
(I don’t have a horse in this race honestly. Assuming everyone can get toothpaste and toothbrushes, the effect is the same. But the wording of the bill is strange: “may not add fluoride” rather than just “is allowed not to add”.)
"Your community could decide" is not freedom in the American political sense. In US political theory, the unit of freedom is the individual, full stop.
Corporations are not actually persons. You should read the Citizens United opinion if that's what you think it meant.
Corporate owners are people engaging in voluntary transactions. Their freedom was essentially the question in Citizens United. "Corporations are people" emerged from the media as an oversimplified version.
Exactly this. But remember that "legal personhood" basically just means "able to enter contracts" and does not imply any sort of human rights or humanity. It does not mean anything like what "personhood" normally means.
This has also been the case for the entire history of corporations, which is longer than the history of the US.
Are we also "free" to not pay "voluntary" taxes then? We have to understand that we're N-levels deep into this spaghetti mess, and as a consequence of that it's very hard to argue anything from first-principles or absolutes.
The UK government is really big on doing things for our own good, but they don't seem to do much water flouridation. Which I think is some evidence that it's not a clearcut health benefit.
> We believe that water fluoridation is the single most effective public health measure there is for reducing oral health inequalities and tooth decay rates, especially amongst children. We welcome these proposals and believe they represent an opportunity to take a big step forward in not only improving this generation’s oral health, but those for decades to come.
Excessive fluoride exposure is associated with reduced childhood IQ: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/... . Giving poor people (the ones who can't afford to drink bottles water or buy a fancy filter) means to moderate their fluoride intake this risk is creating lower-iq, more obedient workers.
This started out as an interesting and fair take until “…enough to supplant it”. Freedom from the government is the original vision and one of the core principles of America assuming that anybody that wants smaller government just wants to supplant it is a massive misunderstanding of most Americans today and certainly the founding principles.
We can read this country's founding philosophy directly:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
It's not freedom from government but freedom from tyranny. They believed that governments existed to promote the protection of rights.
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
This demonstrates an intentional effort by the founders to strictly limit federal authority by explicitly enumerating government powers and leaving everything else beyond federal reach. It underscores that their conception of freedom involved a government that was deliberately restrained, designed primarily to safeguard individual liberties by minimizing governmental interference, rather than merely protecting from outright tyranny.
They were anti tyranny. Governments tend to be tyrannical, but they weren't against governments, they were against tyranny.
Timothy Snyder is the modern embodiment of founding father ideology/enlightenment philosophy and my original post was almost directly lifted from his talks/books.
Yes they may have been in favor of small government, but we have the tyranny of corporate power now. When healthcare is tied to a job, women are working instead of doing child care, the combined wages are not enough/barely enough to afford rent and necessities, and there are no savings for emergencies, that leads to the tyranny of business and wage slavery.
It leads to individuals without the means to withdrawal consent from a tyrannical government. It structurally disables acts of disobedience. Jefferson said rebellion unto tyranny is obedience to god, not rebellion unto governments. They were not subject to the levels of concentrated corporate power that grew out of industrialization. Robber Barrons were also tyrants who acted tyrannically.
There's probably something to be said about self reliance and protestant work ethic which can result in obedient workers willing to work under poor conditions for cultural reasons, but thinking that government is the only entity capable of unchecked power when we have businesses with a higher revenue than some entire countries/states shows a dogmatic chasing of a justification for a belief, rather than following the principles towards an assessment the principles themselves would lead to. It's a kind of originalism. The appearance of their beliefs, but not the substance of them.
A republic... If we can keep it.
Well good luck keeping it if the average citizen is too weak to project any kind of political power. Good luck having strong citizens (or a cohesive society) without strong social programs like public education.
> rather than merely protecting from outright tyranny.
Enlightenment ideology at it's core, the very central point of it, which our documents were written into respect to, says you give up some rights in order to have other rights protected [from tyranny]. That is why man leaves the state of nature... Greater protection from tyranny.
The constitution was a document meant to be adapted. The goal of the implementation is plainly stated:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
The government can give out toothpaste in school, it doesn't need to add things to water.
The inviolability or integrity of one's own body to me is more important than any of this. You have the right to decide what medication to be given to you with informed consent always, or you have no freedom. Otherwise the freedom argument collapses and you stop having reasons to allow abortions, or a bunch of other informed consent situations.
And "knowing better" than poor people "for their own good" usually doesn't go well (for the people).
Except schools handing out toothpaste will get brought up at thousands of board meetings across the country with sensitive or bored parents claiming government overreach and misuse of budgets.
You can presumably buy a different brand of flour or find a different source quite easily? Same applies to most other “fortified” products. With water your’e basically forced to waste money on bottled water or very expensive filtration systems.
But yes, adding additional vitamins or minerals to food products is generally unnecessary when supplements are generally cheap and highly available these days.
The knowledge about the supplements we need also cheap and highly available and yet lots of people don't have it. I myself don't know all the supplements I need.
I feel like for better or worse we are being forced into an era of individual responsibilities where the safeguards that we used to rely on without having to think are being actively dismantled.
If you are poor you can't go anywhere or buy anything. You're not free if you're poor. If you are sick, you may be confined to a hospital bed or not feel good enough to do anything. If you are sick you're not free.
Putting fluoride in water reduces dental costs and incidence of cavities and therefore tooth infections, particularly among societies poorest. Therefore, due to fluoridation in water some people are less sick and have more money and therefore are more free.
The contrasting view is that putting fluoride in water is literally medicating people without their affirmative consent. It is the government forcing you to take a medication. It is coercive and therefore an attack on your freedom to not take medication. It is the government interfering in your life.
The contrast between positive freedom, the freedom to do something, and negative freedom, the freedom from interference in your life, is the core political argument in America right now. Negative freedom, freedom from government interference, is being promoted by those seeking to weaken the government enough to supplant it. People who are poor and sick are likely unable to stand up for themselves or participate in solidarity against authority. This individual issue is relatively small, but you take 100's of issues like this, and the effect is to create a class of people who aren't able to do anything but be obedient workers.