It is a scenario playing out nationwide. From Oregon to Pennsylvania, hundreds of communities have in recent years either stopped adding fluoride to their water supplies or voted to prevent its addition. Supporters of such bans argue that people should be given the freedom of choice. The broad availability of over-the-counter dental products containing the mineral makes it no longer necessary to add to public water supplies, they say. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that while store-bought products reduce tooth decay, the greatest protection comes when they are used in combination with water fluoridation.

The outcome of an ongoing federal case in California could force the Environmental Protection Agency to create a rule regulating or banning the use of fluoride in drinking water nationwide. In the meantime, the trend is raising alarm bells for public health researchers who worry that, much like vaccines, fluoride may have become a victim of its own success.

The CDC maintains that community water fluoridation is not only safe and effective but also yields significant cost savings in dental treatment. Public health officials say removing fluoride could be particularly harmful to low-income families — for whom drinking water may be the only source of preventive dental care.

“If you have to go out and get care on your own, it’s a whole different ballgame,” said Myron Allukian Jr., a dentist and past president of the American Public Health Association. Millions of people have lived with fluoridated water for years, “and we’ve had no major health problems,” he said. “It’s much easier to prevent a disease than to treat it.”

According to the anti-fluoride group Fluoride Action Network, since 2010, over 240 communities around the world have removed fluoride from their drinking water or decided not to add it.

  • esc27@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    So lead, plastic, and PFAS are fine but fluoride is where they draw the line…?

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    No, people shouldn’t have the right to choose if fluoride is added to their water. People are stupid. You vote to remove something that will greatly help children that can’t vote. The government’s job, sometimes, is to stop stupid people from hurting others and their selves. That’s the reason you can’t drink raw milk or use lead gas.

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      That’s the reason you can’t drink raw milk or use lead gas.

      You can get raw milk if your state allows it. The federal government bans it, but only has regulatory authority over interstate commerce, so it can’t be moved across state boundaries, but you can get it if it’s made in-state.

      I mean, I think that you’re mostly aiming to expose yourself to listeria, but if that’s what someone wants…

      My guess is that dairy farmers have an interest in promoting it in that if they can sell it, it gives them a market without much competition.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_raw_milk_debate

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        Drinking milk was a bad example. I should have said sell unpasteurized milk. The point I think we both agree is that stupid for people make stupid decisions. Just like I don’t think people can decide about vaccines that have very low risk rates. It effects everyone, not just the idiots.

        • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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          If stupid people want to make stupid decisions, that’s fine. The problem is when they try to take the rest of society down with them via damage or converting others to that stupidity.

        • tal@lemmy.today
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          Some of the herd nobly chose to sacrifice itself to improve the genetic resistance of the whole.

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      7 months ago

      Just let them die then, rather than trying to make them age where they don’t want to.

    • MonkderDritte@feddit.de
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      Btw, cooking milk destroys some of the good stuff in it.

      Edit: Raw milk has proteins which boost immune system and growth (because it’s for baby cows), which break down while cooking.

      And yeah, probably don’t drink raw milk in US.

    • RaoulDook@lemmy.world
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      Yes they should. Ingesting fluoride is bad for you, and it doesn’t help your teeth to drink it. That’s why small children’s toothpaste doesn’t have it, because you can’t trust them not to eat it. It’s only good when applied directly to the teeth, which can be accomplished on a daily basis by using toothpaste with fluoride and/or a mouthwash containing it, both of which you don’t drink.

      Fluoride is removed from my drinking water by my reverse-osmosis filtration system, along with all the other contaminants like PFAS and lead. I’ve been drinking fluoride-free water for 10 years, and my teeth are beautiful and healthy. Anyone who drinks bottled water is also probably drinking fluoride-free water since those companies mostly use the same filtration method to produce their bottled water.

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    The UK used the same argument to stop the addition of iodine to salt. “People already consume enough dietary iodine”. You know what happened? Thyroid diseases are on the rise in the UK again, slowly creeping back to early XX century levels.

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      I think iodine is underappreciated. But also I think fewer and fewer people use the salt shaker because they eat so much processed food (which has salt that is not iodized). Then you’re down to milk and seafood. Milk gets it because they use iodine to sanitize the udders. So if you don’t drink milk and who eats seafood on most days. Solution to anyone reading: multivitamin.

      • affa@startrek.website
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        But also I think fewer and fewer people use the salt shaker because they eat so much processed food (which has salt that is not iodized).

        This. I never add salt to my cooking because there’s already so much salt in everything.

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    We live in the time of the most readily available and advanced information yet continually make the dumbest fucking decisions.

    “Cavities…yeah….goddamn hadn’t had one of those in awhile, we should bring those back.”

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      I’d like to chime in that fluoridation plus a toothpaste containing hydroxyapatite is a game changer; my kids went from several cavities a year to almost none. You used to have to buy japanese toothpastes for this, but it’s starting to show up in america.

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      What are you talking about?

      People get cavities all the time, and it’s because they don’t brush their damn teeth.

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    USA, can you PPEASE remform your education system and actually ensure that everyone gets a normal and good education? Your idiots are ruining the country.

    Also while at it, use that education to teach the kids what freedom really is, how little you really have of it, that boasting about it is dumb, and that using it to make idiotic decisions doesn’t make you look awesome, it makes you look like, well, an idiot.

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      De-education has been an agenda of one of the parties since the eighties, and we’re just seeing it take fruit now.

      These things take time, and that party plays the ‘long game’.

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        Since that person named USA explicitly, I’m going to assume that they’re not an American, and that English is not their native language, and hence, not being taken to task for their spelling.

      • BreakDecks@lemmy.ml
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        The problem with our current democracy is that we haven’t enshrined education as a right. Democracy works great if the population is informed and has critical thinking skills. In America, any stupid idea that becomes popular enough can become the law, because the population is too stupid to make pragmatic, evidence-based decisions.

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        The first thing is not so much less democracy, but more participation. I’m definitely guilty of this myself, so not trying to be holier than thou preachy. Conservatives have been doing a concerted effort to take over lower level offices as well, school boards, municipal positions, etc. Part of the issue seems ro be the people who want to do this stuff often have an ulterior motive, and people who should probably be in these spots have a lack of interest.

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          Local office is pretty much shit. You get yelled at for whatever the crazies saw on TV last night, you can’t fix anything, and everyone is angry about something.

          Never doing it again.

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      Funnily enough, the idiots do have a grain a truth here, that grain just happens to be an example of the internet’s favorite, Dunning-Kruger.

      Excess flouride does have profound negative effects on intelligence. Several hundreds times the levels you get positive effects for tooth health from, and thus well beyond the scope of flouridation programs. There are also other notable side effects from flouride toxicity, so it’d be quite noticable.

      There are even several regions of America and China where they need deflouridation treatments for ground water, but the conspiracy types never seem to mention those.

      They also don’t seem to note that flouride toxicity, like lead toxicity, leads to both decreased intelligence and increased aggression.

      How making the working class angry and dumb makes them easier for the owner class to control and profit from never seems to come up.

      • Veneroso@lemmy.world
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        Lead exposure also causes reduced intelligence.

        Leaded gasoline was still a thing when I was a kid.

        Lead paint chips are delicious.

        And those Stanley cups that suburbia is raging over, also contains lead.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        How making the working class angry and dumb makes them easier for the owner class to control and profit from never seems to come up.

        Ask the folks at the Jan 6th riot. Trump played them all like fiddles.

        • DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe
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          Sure, but I don’t think anyone is accusing Trump of being behind a flouridation conspiracy. It demonstrates rather that angry morons are rather easy to point at the government, which is why the government probably doesn’t want a bunch of angry morons to rule.

          • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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            I don’t think anyone is accusing Trump of being behind a flouridation conspiracy.

            Sure. I’m simply noting that whipping people up into a frenzy or panic is an age old technique for controlling large populations.

            It demonstrates rather that angry morons are rather easy to point at the government

            Or at this or that ethnic group or religious sect or ideological cohort, sure. You don’t even have to be particularly conservative for this technique to work. Liberals fall for the Immigrant Caravan Invasion and Crime Wave panic stories and Pending Federal Bankruptcy and Communist Invasion stories as easily as any moderate Republican.

            the government probably doesn’t want a bunch of angry morons to rule

            They do, if they want to export that violence overseas or inflict it on minority groups and women, as a means of social control.

            And it isn’t as though state officials are even all that rational. Certainly, Joe Biden’s had no problem perpetuating a genocide overseas, despite his policy whipping up a bonfire of opposition at home and in neighboring regions. Neither do Vladimir Putin or MBS or Narendra Modi seem shy about stoking the fires of bigotry in their own countries, as a means of mobilizing large groups of people into parades of support for their rule.

            Angry morons are a great source of cheap activist labor, whether you’re storming the capital on Jan 6th or rallying Hindu nationalists to tear down a 600-year-old mosque in Delhi.

  • ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
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    7 months ago

    Americans won the battle to bring back measles

    Now they’re fighting to bring back tooth decay

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    You can’t trust this stuff. I only drink water straight from the creek and- excuse me, my diarrhea is acting up.

    • affa@startrek.website
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      What a bad faith argument.

      Most people who want to avoid fluoride in their drinking water use reverse osmosis.

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          Why should people have to resort to using reverse osmosis to avoid fluoride in their drinking water?

          Also, good job pivoting instead of admitting you were arguing in bad faith.

          I expect you to keep doing that.

          • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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            For the same reason people should “have to” resort to anything else they don’t want that everyone else is fine with. You don’t get to choose for society as a whole.

            If you don’t want to eat inspected meat, fine. Go raise or hunt your own.

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              For the same reason people should “have to” resort to anything else they don’t want that everyone else is fine with.

              Like lead in gasoline? The thing is, everyone else is not “fine” with this. Why do you think there’s an article about it?

                • affa@startrek.website
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                  Can you stop replying to all my posts?

                  We’ve already established you can’t read.

                  In fact, I’m just gonna make the proactive decision to block you. Goodbye.

            • affa@startrek.website
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              That’s a loaded question because people do not suffer without fluoridated water.

              Do you want to explain how they suffer without fluoridated water? That way you’re talking specifics that can actually be debated upon instead of generalities where people need to make your arguments for you.

  • Zachariah@lemmy.world
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    It’s only “fluoride” if it’s from the Florida region of the United States of America—otherwise it’s just a sparkling inorganic, monatomic anion of fluorine.

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    Not this shit again. This pseudo-scientific nonsense has been debunked numerous times already. You would think that this would be a dead conspiracy theory but here we are debating this once more. This is what happens when you have an scientifically illiterate population.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      This is what happens when you have an scientifically illiterate population.

      It’s the old Alex Jones “turning the frogs gay” line. Just enough science to hurt yourself with.

    • TokenBoomer@lemmy.world
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      I wanted to watch the video, but piped isn’t working. Can you help with another link, 🔗 or not, no biggie?

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      On a more positive note if they lose their teeth they might have less luck at reproduction. Problem fixes itself, fingers crossed

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        From personal experience in dealing with people without as many teeth as the average, it doesn’t stop them. R selection strategies in action.

  • randon31415@lemmy.world
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    This sounds like that Simpsons episode where the school board votes down the “free recharging of fire extinguishers”. They aren’t even saying that their might be problems with floride, they just want choice for the option of choices sake. What is next, freedom to push your children into traffic?

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      they just want choice for the option of choices sake.

      This is a common talking point for people who can’t otherwise justify their position. It’s the “because I said so” of arguing. You see it a lot with far right talking points, where they’ll frame it as freedom of choice, when it’s really just an excuse to pander to conspiracy theorists, the extremely religious, racists, homophobes, etc…

      “The civil war wasn’t about slavery; it was about states’ rights.”

      “If I want to refuse service to a gay couple, that should be my choice.”

      “If I want to refuse service to a mixed race couple, that should be my choice.”

        • Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works
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          If I want to prevent your abortion, that should be my choice. “My” being the operative word, they’re incredibly selfish. (Oh, and should the situation arise, “My abortion is the only justified abortion.”)

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            “My abortion is the only justified abortion.”

            Practically a one-to-one correlation between pro-life politicians and pregnant sex workers forced to get abortions.

        • BreakDecks@lemmy.ml
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          But that was choices for women, who Conservatives have been clear that they view as property.

    • desktop_user@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      7 months ago

      Children yearn for the streets; It has been far too long since it was commonplace for them to beg for bread, freezing in the cold, yearning for Scrooge’s pocketbook.

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
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    Just another pest boil of the lack of scientific education in the US. Anti-Vaxx, Anti-Flouride, Anti-Science in general. Do you guys want to go back to the age of pilgrim fathers, or what?

    • orrk@lemmy.world
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      these people? dude they yearn for the “rural settler life” of course they want to go back to the good old, god fearing, sustenance farmers and factory workers

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        Let them go back there, I won’t stop them from being killed by preventable diseases, maimed by wild animals, and, most importantly, no phones and no internet.

        • orrk@lemmy.world
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          o0h no, they arn’t happy until EVERYONE has to live according to Pol Pot’s vision (+church)

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      Seriously though isn’t that what making everything “great again” in this country is referring to?

    • undergroundoverground@lemmy.world
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      I mean, most western countries don’t add fluoride to their water supply, as ingesting significant amounts of fluoride is bad for you. America is an outlier there, as far as I’m aware.

      There’s usually small amounts occurring naturally in water. However, we shouldn’t be adding in more, as it’s cytotoxic and were not supposed to injest it.

      • Aux@lemmy.world
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        Western countries do add fluoride, but it’s done regionally depending on natural fluoride content of local water (or, specifically, lack of it).

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        Well, the US probably adds too much, but a certain minimum level is needed. In some countries, flourides are delivered by other means, e.g. salt.

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    Supporters of such bans argue that people should be given the freedom of choice.

    If you honestly don’t want fluoride, you can remove it yourself.

    Honestly, if you’re that paranoid about anything in your drinking water, you’d probably benefit from outright distilling it anyway.

      • tal@lemmy.today
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        I mean, people do pay more for mineral water. Yesterday, I was at CVS, and there were at least three sections of refrigerated cabinet consisting of different brands of mineral water.

        But if someone wants to produce hard water, I’m sure that they can do that too.

        googles

        https://www.amazon.com/iSpring-FA15-Water-Filter-Clear/dp/B00FBLGD1S/

        Yeah. From the “related filters” section on that, looks like there’s a whole industry of selling people things they can jam inline into their reverse osmosis filter system to do things to their water to make them happy. This one adds “calcium, magnesium, and potassium”.

        I don’t see much on there by way of numbers as to what concentrations it’s supposed to produce, but I suppose that if it makes people happy, it’s available. Not like they’re getting any guarantees as to how hard their municipal water is either.

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      You can’t remove fluoride using standard water filters, or even high-end RO filter systems. A specialized fluoride-specific filtration system (multi-stage) is required due to fluoride’s chemical bond.

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    JFC this again? I thought all these conspiracy wackadoos had moved on to dumber and crazier things.

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      Apparently not:

      https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/11/opinion/alex-jones-wellness-conspiracy.html

      When Owen Shroyer, an anchor and reporter for Infowars, took the stand late last month in the defamation trial of his boss, the far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, he was asked about the many health products for sale on Jones’s site. Among them: diet pills, fluoride-free toothpaste that Jones once claimed “kills the whole SARS-corona family at point-blank range” and InstaHard, a supplement whose purpose I probably don’t have to spell out.