Adding fluoride to water has always seemed weird to me, since you can't control for how much water someone is drinking or account for different bodily factors like age and weight. I wonder why the European solution of adding it to salt isn't the default, especially given that iodized salt is already so popular and commonplace.
As a general rule of thumb, I think it's interesting to scrutinize dosage recommendations and compare regulations between countries. If someone claims that the science on some topic is well settled then health officials in multiple countries should arrive at roughly similar results. If there's a discrepancy between the suggestions made by health officials in the US and EU, it's worth asking why.
No, fluoride must not be added to any food or beverage, because it provides no benefits whatsoever when ingested.
Fluoride is beneficial only when applied externally on the dental enamel, so that the fluoride ions will passively substitute the hydroxide ions. There is no known biological process that uses actively fluoride in the human body and excessive ingested fluoride has bad effects, e.g. bone damage.
Therefore fluoride must be added only to tooth paste and mouth washes, which provides all the benefits and none of the risks.
Intentionally ingesting fluoride is incredibly stupid and it is beyond my power of understanding how this could be mandated by law in USA and in some other countries which imitated USA irrationally.
An experiment in Windsor, Ontario (across the border from Detroit, MI):
> Yemmi Calito's children are patients of Dr. Meriano. The two oldest kids were raised on fluoridated water in Windsor and both have healthy teeth. Her two youngest weren't, and they've had to be treated for serious tooth decay. Calito said their oral hygiene habits are the same.
> "The younger two I feel they have more cavities," Calito said. "My little one, my three-year-old, actually had to go have general anesthesia … [about] four weeks ago to get his teeth fixed. They were in pretty bad shape."
> What’s happened since 2012? A study found that within a couple of years of ending fluoridation, decay in children’s baby teeth had risen by 65 per cent compared to 2005, while the increase was only 14 per cent in Edmonton, which continues to fluoridate its water. “We weren’t looking at little tiny cavities that needed to be fixed. They were large cavities, they were destroyed teeth,” says dental hygienist Denise Kokaram, who led a dental program for vulnerable Calgary youth in the wake of fluoridation’s discontinuation.
> In 2019, the University of Calgary’s public health institute summarized for council’s benefit the body of science on fluoridation—the abundant evidence that it curbs tooth decay in both children and adults, and the lack of conclusive evidence of the myriad harms that anti-fluoride activists allege, from bone deterioration to brain disease. (Authorities have lowered recommended fluoride levels in water to limit the risk of fluorosis, a condition that mainly causes mild tooth discoloration.)
Hot take: why don’t we stop the root cause of the problem, instead of the insestuous habit of layering on symptom management on top of symptom management.
Stop giving kids these insanely high levels of sugar. No soda is a great start.
Same thorn in my side is this completely crazy trend that this new life-long injection Ozempic/Wegovy is being suggested for kids 12 and up. Like what? It also atrophies muscle, tendons, and bones.
I hope with the next generation of leaders, we stop this madness of blindly trusting big pharma and corporations and ask where the money trail goes, and what may actually be best for our kids and loved ones.
Liquid sugar is bad for teeth, but nowhere near as bad as something like potato chips. Food remnants that are high in carbs that get stuck in your teeth and then break down into simple sugars cause way more problems.
If you want to go to root cause how about teaching kids that simple carbs and sugar are exactly the same as far as the body is concerned. Let alone the fact that most simple carbs come with added sugar on top of that.
Personally I didn't really understand that properly until either my late twenties or early thirties.
> why don’t we stop the root cause of the problem, instead of the insestuous habit of layering on symptom management on top of symptom management.
Super simple answer: one requires everyone change their individual habits. Difficulty - very hard. The other requires no change at all on the individual level. Difficulty - very easy.
Be careful with falling into the "public health initiatives are just a bandaid" trap. I was going to say you probably wouldn't approach a pandemic by telling everyone to eat more healthfully but considering your last sentence, maybe you would have argued for that approach.
The problem is sugar tastes good. Taxing processed sugary foods will certainly help, but are you also going to tax, say, sugar in a bag? If so, you have effectively banned Grandma's cookies. Do you want to be known as the politician who effectively banned home-cooked baked goods?
It’s probably worth noting that genetics is probably a significantly big factor than affects cavities, similar to lots of other stuff. Some folks can eat sugar foods and not brush twice a day and have no issues, while others who even floss daily end up with bad teeth.
Not saying you shouldn’t reduce sugar intake, that’s not my point - but - factors like genetics are very important too, and fluoride might help for such people.
So this may be useful to someone - I lost that genetic lottery and had lots of issues / most teeth patched up / painful cleans. Until recently, when I moved to a new dentist who said "oh, you've got lots of calcium buildup, you should be taking vit D+K2". This sorted out most of my issues almost immediately. I wish someone told me that 30 years ago...
So apparently there's a few things that trivially impact your dental health besides usual cleaning and few people seem to know about them.
Novamin is another “dental secret”. US toothpaste doesn’t have it, but studies consistently show it’s more effective than just fluoridated toothpaste and protecting teeth from decay.
You would think that in a “capitalist, free-market” such as the United States, an innovation with a clear and pronounced benefit over the status quo would take the marketplace by storm and quickly become the new status quo.
Last I checked, you can get Sensodyne with Novamin toothpaste on Amazon, but it does come from Canada.
"Review shows that Novamin has significantly less clinical evidence to prove its effectiveness as a remineralization agent in treating both carious and non-carious lesion. Hence, better designed clinical trials should be carried out in the future before definitive recommendations can be made."
Previously, I’ve found the anti-fluoride argument to be a little shaky but I’m a scientist and some of the data in the report might make me reconsider that stance. That’s what science is. I must say that personally I haven’t drunk fluoride in my tap for decades really, since I use a reverse osmosis filter for my tap. So if you don’t want to drink fluoride you don’t have to.
I haven’t noticed more cavities in periods when I don’t drink fluoride vs when I do. But I brush my teeth twice a day (teeth bathed in fluoride toothpaste residue) and go to the dentist every six months. I don’t really have cavities.
I found this paper an interesting history on water fluoridation-
Debating Water Fluoridation Before Dr. Strangelove
there's money on every side of every issue. The people that lean hard on the "follow the money" angle are almost always those that only acknowledge it happening on the side they disagree with.
Sugar is everywhere in everything. Reducing kids intake of sugar requires a level of vigilance bordering on isolation from society, especially since human children seem genetically programmed to crave sugar and simple carbohydrates. If it’s around most kids will eat little else.
I kind of remember this from being a kid. Until I was a teen anything with complex or savory tastes was absolutely disgusting. Only carbs, sugars, and very simple flavors and textures seemed edible. It changed when I got to around 12-14 when suddenly a salad was okay and some vegetables started to taste good. Another few years and I’d eat all kinds of things. Became a bit of a foodie by college.
It’s got to be some relic of early hominid evolution. My speculation is that in nature there are a lot of savory things that are toxic. So kids have a natural aversion to them until they are old enough to have learned the tribal knowledge about what is okay to eat. Sweet and carby things are usually safe to eat. If a kid eats random berries or grains thats probably okay. Random mushrooms or plants might kill them. Random sources of protein can also contain parasites or nasty infections.
> Reducing kids intake of sugar requires a level of vigilance bordering on isolation from society
No, it requires… parenting and education? And stopping children from being exposed to ads for sugary crap 12 hours a day.
Habits are a huge part of it. Kids who “would only eat sugar if they could” are already used to consuming lots of sugar. They will definitely not starve themselves to death if no sugar/carbs are easily available in the house.
Here in the Netherlands a lot of (but not all) kids choose to snack on cucumbers etc and are quite reserved in how much candy they eat. School doesn’t allow high-carb foods. Parties will have fries, lemonade and cake, no soda or infinite amounts of candy. Mine is approaching the early teens and hasn’t ever drank soda, without suffering any peer pressure (yet).
Is this a worse is better argument? I'm having a hard time understanding how it makes this a better solution than fluoridated water. It sounds like a moral argument against sugar rather than a practical solution to fight tooth decay.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “worse is better”. Fluoridation came about as a stop gap for bad dental hygiene and eating habits. We have all the resources to make this a non-issue in most of the world. I don’t consider this a moral argument, it’s a public health issue.
I see this like mandating using a helmet and HANS device when driving drunk. Surely it might help reduce casualties, but is not addressing the problem that people are inflicting unto themselves.
Some dutch people peer-pressured me into trying Rivella ;)
Dutch children love their bottles of apple juice and dutch teens love a can of chocolate milk, but I have to agree that the portion sizes of these are less than half of what you would get in the US.
> Reducing kids intake of sugar requires a level of vigilance bordering on isolation from society,
You are a good parent for recognizing this and speaking up.
This is why I praise my child and treat him (not with sweets) every time that he turns down candy at friends' houses or parties. When the parent stands between the child and sweets, he is considered neurotic by other parents. When the child stands his ground, he is praised. I've been fortunate that all three of my children have stood with me on this stance.
> In this study, maternal exposure to higher levels of fluoride during pregnancy was associated with lower IQ scores in children aged 3 to 4 years. These findings indicate the possible need to reduce fluoride intake during pregnancy.
"Association Between Maternal Fluoride Exposure During Pregnancy and IQ Scores in Offspring in Canada"
I think there might be some confounders at play here.
Consider this excerpt from Wikipedia's article on 'Tooth brushing':
> In the United States, although toothbrushes were available at the end of the 19th century, the practice did not become widespread until after the Second World War, when US soldiers continued the tooth brushing that had been required during their military service.[4]
>Water fluoridation reduces cavities in children, while efficacy in adults is less clear.[9][10] A Cochrane review estimates a reduction in cavities when water fluoridation was used by children who had no access to other sources of fluoride to be 35% in baby teeth and 26% in permanent teeth.[9] However, this was based on older studies which failed to control for numerous variables, such as increasing sugar consumption as well as other dental strategies.[9] Most European countries have experienced substantial declines in tooth decay, though milk and salt fluoridation is widespread in lieu of water fluoridation.[11] Recent studies suggest that water fluoridation, particularly in industrialized nations, may be unnecessary because topical fluorides (such as in toothpaste) are widely used, and caries rates have become low.[3]
Africa: 400,000 people out of 1.1 billion get fluorides in there water.
Asia: close to none in China (didn't find any hard numbers), none in India, less than 1% in Japan. Only Malaysia is doing it at any resonable scale.
Europe: 2% of the population get it, roughly 14 million people with 10.5 million of those being in the UK and Ireland.
So that leaves North America, with the exception of Mexico which jas high natural fluoride levels and fluorides salt, Australia and Latin America.
Going by these numbers, the majority of people get fluoride through different means from drinking water. Afroca of cpurse has a lot of other issues regarding drinking water, starting with the exostince of clean drinking water itself.
You left out Australia 70%, New Zealand 60%, Brazil 41%, Chile 70% etc.
Japan, China, India, and much of Europe have many areas with natural levels of fluoride in the water near or even above the recommended level. Which seriously distort their numbers as proponents of adding fluoride to water supplies don’t want to increase it arbitrarily only to safe and effective levels.
China has some really interesting data as in one location removing fluoride quickly resulted in “the incidence of dental caries among 4-year-old children had increased by 62%.”
> Same reason why they stared iodine to salt… because people were having mental development issues.
This is not directly related to the topic of Fluoride, but Iodine was actually initially introduced to reduce goiters. The mental benefits were a wonderful, unexpected side-effect. Studies have put the effects anywhere between 8-15 IQ bump for populations that were Iodine deficient. Pretty jaw dropping when you think about it.
About 2.5% of the population has an intellectual impairment (if mean IQ is 100, and SD 15, 2.5% have IQ less than 70 the WHO cut off). Of this 2.5% some will have social/adaptive impaitment similarly 2SD below the mean and have an "intellectual/learning disability".
Move that mean down one SD (15 IQ points). And now OVER 15% of the people meet the intellectual impairment criteria.
Put it another way, due to the shape of the normal distribition moving IQ down 10-15 points amounts to 2-3X increase in the number with abnormally low IQ.
Cut to the modern era, where fewer and fewer jobs are available for those with intellectual impairments, and the world requires more and more technical prowess and the situation is far worse than the figures appear.
Correlation doesn't yield causation!
The whole fluoride in drinking water only came up based on a study from abroad. There, they noticed an improvement of dental health over time after they introduced fluoride in their water. However, this study and the same for the 50th ignore the fact that dental hygiene and awareness dramatically improved during this time. Thus, the better dental health is more likely from better topical application of fluoride and more regular brushing/flossing. I'm concerned that we have all the scientific facts and keep ignoring them.
Fun fact: Dentists recommend flossing before brushing.
Edit: "For example, in Finland and Germany, tooth decay rates remained stable or continued to decline after water fluoridation stopped in communities with widespread fluoride exposure from other sources." - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation
1. We know that topic fluoride usage increased resistance to caries.
2. It is kind of difficult to consume fluorinated water without exposing your teeth topically to the fluoride.
3. Ingesting fluorine is definitely not good for you and recent studies seem to confirm this.
So, it seems to me that while fluorinating drinking water would incidentally topically expose teeth to its beneficial effects, we don't really need to fluorinate our drinking water as there are other ways to expose teeth topically to fluorine that don't involve drinking fluorinated water.
And no, fluorinating water was not a good decision because of the cautionary principle. Even from the beginning, they knew that the effects came from topical exposure, adding it to drinking water was reckless.
But hell, this was the time where we added lead to gasoline.
The first meta-analysis of water fluoridation studies – The York Review – was conducted in 2002 and found that the data on efficacy was limited and of low quality. [1]
A point to be considered here is that the institutionalised belief in water fluoridation for the half-century which preceded the York Review was apparently not grounded in much solid scientific enquiry, if any.
This review was conducted 3 years after the CDC published "Ten Great Public Health Achievements in the 20th Century", which included water fluoridation as one of these great achievements.
Another curiosity of this public health belief was the guideline that water fluoridation levels need to vary in a region based on temperature. This was because it is apparently a predictor of water consumption amounts by small children.
Colder climates were meant to have higher levels of fluoride (up to 1.2 ppm) because people apparently drink less water, and warmer climates were meant to have lower levels (0.7 ppm), because they drink more water.
It indicates that consumption is a very important factor in considering additive levels, and that all other factors are less important than climate.
This was codified in a 1957 paper "Determining optimum fluoride concentrations" (Galagan and Vermillion) [2] which includes their scientific formula:
parts per million of fluoride = 0.34 / E
"Where E is the estimated average daily water intake for children through 10 years of age in ounces per pound of body weight. It may be calculated from the estimation equation E=-0.038+0.0062 temperature, where temperature is the mean maximum temperature in degrees Fahrenheit."
This seems to reflect the kind of scientific rigour behind this belief, and perhaps the absurdity of the formula is why the US DHHS updated their guidelines in 2015 to settle on a flat 0.7 ppm regardless of climate [3].
I’ve been thinking about this recently - fluorapatite is stronger than hydroxyapatite when it bonds to enamel, and less soluble by acid. But fluoride doesn’t occur in any natural processes in the body - while hydroxyapatite is a perfect biomimetic - very safe, you can swallow it safely - and also works great in toothpaste to remineralise teeth.
Currently using BioMin F (fluorapatite - very little fluoride due to a novel delivery mechanism but still) but considering switching to BioMin C (nanohydroxyapatite)
I've used both apagard and boka toothpastes with nanohydroxyapatite and I've enjoyed them, though my tooth sensitivity is not totally cured. I still get a jolt of pain from sweet things on certain teeth occasionally.
These n-Ha toothpastes seem at least equal to if not greater than high-fluoride options (in effectiveness) I tried previously like sensodyne and prevident (prescription-strength). I would say the boka mint toothpaste tastes better also, and as a bonus their electric toothbrush is much nicer than the old one I'd used a few years ago.
I still drink water with fluoride in it as well, mostly because it's the best tasting water I've come across. (From a city I grew up in, and I still fill jugs full to drink at home) I have well water at my house, which is safe as far as I know, but I still feel hesitant to swallow it.
Another option is just hydroxyapatite without the nano (sometimes nano particles end up having their own safety issues). A higher hydroxyapatite concentration might work almost as well. Kinder Karex is such a toothpaste. https://www.consumerlab.com/answers/finding-the-best-toothpa...
Given that the health bureaucracies of many countries seem to disagree with you, you need to cite more evidence and sources to support this claim. You can't just do it by strong assertion.
Having the health bureaucracies in many countries all agreeing on something would have been convincing enough for me three years ago. Now, it means nothing.
> it is beyond my power of understanding how this could be mandated by law in USA
It isn't mandated by law in the USA. All water contains some naturally occurring fluoride, some localities choose to add additional fluoride to their water in the USA but certainly not all. I'm pretty sure it is added in something like 60% of city water supplies.
Obviously a little fluoride will be ingested. However it is doubtful that this would increase much the total amount of fluoride that is ingested daily, mainly from the plants that you eat and from the natural water that you drink.
When you brush your teeth with fluoridated paste or you wash your mouth with a fluoride solution and you spit it, most of the fluoride acts against the tooth enamel to harden it and only a little is ingested.
On the other hand, when you drink fluoridated water, only very little of the fluoride acts against the tooth enamel to harden it and most of it is ingested, which will provide no further benefits, but which might have bad effects.
How there is even a discussion about which choice is better, beats me.
Yes - in the UK at least that's one of the reasons why the ultra high fluoride toothpastes are effectively only available when prescribed by a dentist.
Wow WTF I've found french baby products to be quite nice but somehow child birth it's a weird industry there. I remember there was heavy lobbying to increase people's wishes for c sections there.
>it is beyond my power of understanding how this could be mandated by law in USA
Consider that fluoride ingestion has been linked with increased anxiety and depression[*]. Depending upon one's political objectives, this could be a desirable outcome. For instance, the "anti-terror" decades of invasion would be easier to accept for an anxious public. Or depression may lead to more consumer activity.
Or, hear me out, watching terrorists kamikaze a few commercial airliners into a couple of buildings in downtown Manhattan and the Pentagon live on TV was actually kind of a nerve racking on its own irrespective of what the dissolved minerals in our tap water might have told us.
At the time Republicans reported much better mental health than Democrats [1]. iirc, this study was reproduced with children as well (in terms of kids raised under a political ideology).
Moreover, as someone else pointed out, watching commercial airliners fly into skyscrapers and having our world upended with military guards at airports and new governmental snooping powers that we just had to accept is all pretty much enough for the things you mentioned.
adrian_b vs. health scientists throughout the world and history, ca. 1:1e10
Who to believe here, who should we believe here, hm, very difficult problem, adrian_b's passionate statements or practically all the professionals of the world. I go and contemplate over this for a while now. : )
If you judge the truth of the information you receive based on the claimed authority of those who provide it, instead of using your own mind to discern whether that information is logically consistent or inconsistent, that is sad and I believe that this should be a cause of concern for you.
Consider the following facts, which can be easily be verified in countless sources, e.g. in books written by real chemists or "health scientists":
The mineral component of the teeth and bones grown by a human body is made of hydroxylapatite.
When a hydroxylapatite crystal is immersed in a water solution of fluoride ions, in the superficial layer of the crystal, which is in contact with the fluoride solution, some of the hydroxide anions from the crystal are dissolved in the water and they are substituted by fluoride anions, thus converting the superficial layer of the hydroxylapatite into fluorapatite.
The fluoride ions bond more strongly to apatite than the hydroxide ions, so once formed the fluorapatite layer is more resistant to dissolution than the parent hydroxylapatite.
In the conversion of hydroxylapatite into fluorapatite, like in any other chemical reaction, the converted amount increases with the concentration of the reactant, i.e. of fluoride and with the time of contact between hydroxylapatite and solution.
All of the above explain how the contact between the tooth enamel and a fluoride solution creates a superficial tooth layer that is more resistant to dissolution, which decreases the likelihood of tooth cavities.
The dependences of the conversion efficacy on fluoride concentration and on contact time explain why tooth brushing or mouth washing are far more effective in enamel hardening than drinking fluoridated water, when the fluoride concentration is low and the contact time is very short and most of the fluoride never enters in contact with the tooth enamel to have a chance to harden it.
After the fluoride is ingested, it never comes again in contact with the tooth enamel, so there is no way for it to harden the enamel.
Please tell us how your "1E10 health scientists throughout the world and history" have told you that ingested fluoride from inside your body can harden the tooth enamel from outside your body.
Perhaps the fluoride ions use The Force to harden the enamel from a distance?
The fluoride ions are carried by blood in most parts of the body, but the tooth enamel does not contain blood vessels. Even if it had blood vessels, they would have been buried in it and they would not have reached the external surface of the teeth, which is where the fluoride is needed for protection against dissolution.
Moreover, the fluoride ions spread uniformly in the entire blood volume. Only a small part of the ions pass close to the teeth, most of them pass through the bigger organs, including through the bigger bones, which, unlike the tooth enamel, contain numerous blood vessels.
Because the fluoride ions have high affinity for apatite, many of those passing through the bones stop there and remain incorporated in the mineral part of the bones.
While at the surface of the teeth fluoride is desirable, in bones it is harmful because it makes the bones more fragile, increasing the likelihood of fractures.
In conclusion, when drinking fluoridated water, only very little fluoride is retained in the tooth enamel, but most ends in the bones, so this method is much more effective in making the bones fragile than in hardening the tooth enamel.
There are only 3 ways in which the ingested fluoride could protect against tooth cavities: eating one's own excrement, washing the mouth with one's own urine or biting one's own body and drinking one's own blood or washing the mouth with it.
Whoever does not have such habits will not receive dental health benefits from ingested fluoride.
I look forward to see how "all the professionals of the world" can explain the magical ingested fluoride effect claimed to exist by the proponents of drinking water fluoridation.
It is not something sensitive, but I dislike the fact that the camp who has introduced water fluoridation does not have any rational or experimental argument in its favor, yet there are many who believe that water fluoridation is supported by "health scientists", so I believe that it is necessary to speak against such disinformation.
Hardening the tooth enamel by fluoride is exactly like an anti-corrosive treatment of a steel surface.
If someone would propose that instead of applying the anti-rust layer on the external steel surface, a hole should be made in the steel, then the anti-corrosive coating should be put inside, then the hole should be plugged, enclosing inside the anti-corrosive material, and after all this they would expect that the external untreated steel surface will not rust, they would be laughed at. But this is equivalent with the theory that one should drink fluoridated water to harden the tooth enamel.
Since there are examples of locations having a more accelerated rise over time in tooth decay when water fluoridation is discontinued [1], I think one can extract from that, that possibly the explanation is that enough water is being drank/used in ways where it contacts teeth, that a difference is clearly seen in the dental statistics of a population monitored over time when fluoridation changes are made.
[1] Article/study discussing Calgary vs Edmonton in Canada, linked elsewhere in the comments here that has this snippet:
What’s happened since 2012? A study found that within a couple of years of ending fluoridation, decay in children’s baby teeth had risen by 65 per cent compared to 2005, while the increase was only 14 per cent in Edmonton, which continues to fluoridate its water.
--
I won't argue the fact that there may indeed be problems with ingestion, and additionally that contact to the teeth is the only way for the fluoridated water to help, but I'm not convinced that existing water fluoridation isn't having a positive effect on tooth decay. Whether it's worth other potential health trade-offs is certainly a valid concern.
> Some people lack the self control to use toothpaste regularly. For those people it's beneficial adding flouride to water.
At some point, we can't just replace individual personal responsibility with the State as a solution. This attitude just reeks of infantilization of the total populace just because a certain percentage of them lack such self control.
If you still want to provide support to them, make it targeted towards those individuals in need of such help. Do not drag down the rest of the populace in order to make the lives of a few easier.
I don't think I was expressing much of an attitude in my comment. Just a factual statement that seeks to explain why the intervention is successful even though better alternatives clearly exist.
I don't think water should be flouridated and I don't think we should provide support for people lacking self control.
It's not satire. It takes enough self-control/willpower that, for example, a lot of people suffering from ADHD have problems with it. There are a lot of people out there who just aren't capable of habituating the tasks of brushing their teeth to the point of being done on autopilot - they have to consciously make themselves do it every time.
And that's after more than half a century of brushing teeth being a cultural expectation and something kids are taught in schools.
And that's not counting people in dire economic conditions, where frequency of brushing teeth with fluoride toothpaste is something to trade off against e.g. eating.
It's the 21st century. If we know anything about people, we know that self control and "free will" are overrated, and you can't rely on them at scale. On the contrary, you can rely on people having very predictable reactions to right nudges and incentives. It's the basis of modern economy and policymaking. It's the entire reason marketing and advertising are as big and well-paying jobs as they are. Etc.
I can imagine that there might exist people who cannot brush their teeth.
However, for such people the solution is not to drink fluoridated water, but to use fluoridated water to wash their mouth and then spit it.
If they cannot take water in mouth and spit it, then they certainly cannot feed themselves and they need permanent care. Whoever does that should also take care of their teeth.
Regarding money, I cannot believe that to be an obstacle. I eat relatively cheap food, because I buy only raw ingredients that I cook myself. Therefore in most days food costs me at most $5. I doubt that anyone who is really poor succeeds to spend much less for food. I wash my teeth after each meal with rather expensive tooth pastes from Colgate or Sensodyne. Even so, the daily cost for the tooth paste is at least 30 or 50 times less than the cost of food, so unless there is some remote place where the price of tooth paste is much more than 10 times more expensive than in Europe or North America, I cannot believe that being poor would prevent someone to brush their teeth. They would die of hunger much sooner than that.
You could give targeted help to the ones that needs it, it would be more efficient to help them brush their teeth than just adding fluoride to the water that everyone drinks.
We do it by noticing who needs help on the free dental checkups during the first years of life usually. If they have some sort of handicap, they can get help physically brushing or support to do it themselves every day. Helps a lot more than adding something that might work a little in everyones water.
On what basis have you evaluated that it "helps a lot more"? What if your method doesn't lead to more people actively brushing their teeth, thus reducing the amount of people with properly protected teeth (since they are also missing fluoride now), increasing amount of dental healthcare required?
You have to consider that these people have lost some cognitive faculty by ingested fluoride so they may not be capable of rational self interested decision-making.
I think the obvious answer is, we can’t actually tell one way or the other if it is a net benefit. However, humans can’t handle uncertainty so must be told in confident tones that the decision is the correct one. If anyone questions the established decision, they must be discredited.
It's worse than that. We may know perfectly well which way is better on the net. But since masses can't handle uncertainty, you can't just say "doing this is more beneficial on the net" - you have to project certainty, or else people will interpret your lack of confidence as indicative of scheming, and do the opposite.
What related problem domains are understood “perfectly well”?
I think until we can accurately simulate the human body, there is essentially no hope for these areas. Unless it is possible to run highly controlled multi-generational studies with large numbers of people, statistical significance cannot be attained. Various meta analysis are funded and completed, but these do not count as strict definition science requires actual experiments to be independently replicated.
It's on the label and you can decide to just buy the non-fluoride version. Not sure how salt in processed food or restaurants is used though - this is the 'out-of-control' factor here.
RO water is demineralized and the pH is impacted. It is not a healthy drinking water outside of occasional use. It is also not appetizing and thus it's easy to become dehydrated.
After years of RO water I switched to spring water due to health issues and I will never look back.
Of course, it is insanely expensive to drink 3L of spring water and so frustrating to not have unpoisoned water from the tap.
There are certain models which have a sixth stage to remineralize the water and balance the pH.
Also relying on municipal water for mineralization is a bad argument. The minerals in water supplies is highly localized, or drinking tap water could leave you deficient in one or more minerals depending just depending on where you live.
It won't be used for showering, bathing, flushing toilets, washing clothes, washing dishes, watering plants, washing cars, filling pools, or other outdoor water usage. How much does it increase a household's water usage?
I think that's improved, at least according to product literature (I haven't tested it myself), however:
The latest generation of small under-sink reverse osmosis filters claim to waste only 1 gallon for every 2 gallons of usable water. Still bad but much better than before.
It's been a popular and wide spread conspiracy theory that the "shadow government" is either trying to lower the IQ or the total population numbers using fluoride in the water supply. And since politicians don't get chosen on a basis of competency, but rather popularity, you have the vast majority being relatively severely logically challenged and thus unable to read scientific papers and understand complicated topics like child dental care.
Or any topic that involves more than one interacting decision, a graph, or any numbers at all.
COVID made it pretty clear that neither the general population nor most politicians are remotely qualified to make decisions. Not just medical decisions, just… decisions.
I have a lot of very smart friends, like significantly higher than average in terms of degrees and technical jobs and standardized testing scores at least.
One of them purchased a game that is like Apples to Apples but the point is to provide labels or name the axis of a graph.
It was enlightening just how many of my friends that had a passing notion of calculus could not intuitively interpret what a graph actually means. For example, they would often misunderstand the relation between the dependent and independent variable, or not even understand what it meant for a variable to depend on another variable. Too bad too, because it was a really fun game for me.
Something I saw a smart IT manager do is produce graphs for the monthly board report without a legend, labels, or any numbers at all. Just lines, but not even grid lines.
His explanation was that nobody understood the numbers anyway, the graph is just there to be a pretty colourful picture while he talks.
No credible scientific evidence exists that ingesting fluoride is beneficial.
Whenever you point this out, people respond with studies that focused on topical application. This topic is weird. Otherwise intelligent people shut down and begin quoting movies from the 1960’s, and are somehow incapable of distinguishing between a topical mouthwash and oral consumption.
Might as well drink sunscreen and talk about the reduction in lip skin cancer.
We've been putting fluoride in water for a long time, and there are multiple studies that have looking in to it, I don't know why you think there aren't?
I guess it's arguable whether better dental health, plus cancer, could be considered a benefit. Would heavily depend on the rates of cancer or other harms vs. the rates of improved dental health. Certainly without thinking too deeply about it, childhood cavities would seem vastly preferable to nearly any sort of cancer unless the risk is minuscule.
Assuming you are not being disingenuous: there is a trade off with a lot of uncertainty - other things are also implicated in stomach cancer, and at the same time untreated dental disease causes other health problems too.
But I prefer to rely on brushing my own teeth and avoiding certain foods to maintain my own health, rather than have a medication added to my water supply because the guy next door does not take care of his health.
There are studies for children, but from what I’ve seen there’s no advantage for adults/permanent teeth. I don’t really think it’s worth potential harm for baby teeth.
It's harder to do studies that seperate out adults who didn't have fluoridated water as children, but for example from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23456704/ "In this nationally representative sample of Australian adults, caries-preventive effects of water fluoridation were at least as great in adults born before widespread implementation of fluoridation as after widespread implementation of fluoridation."
So if you didn't have fluoridated water as a kid, having it as an adult still provides a benefit. This particular study doesn't say anything about having it as a kid and then stopping, but again, it's hard to find significant populations that have experienced that.
>No credible scientific evidence exists that ingesting fluoride is beneficial.
???
>Regular toothbrushing with fluoride toothpaste is the principal non‐professional intervention to prevent caries, but the caries‐preventive effect varies according to different concentrations of fluoride in toothpaste, with higher concentrations associated with increased caries control.
Caveat that I have no issue whatsoever with fluoride.
The parent poster said "ingestion" of fluoride, but brushing is strictly not ingestion but rather topical application - you are directed to spit it back out. I'm curious if there were studies that covered drinking it.
The amount is calibrated for the small part that you ingest despite spittingit out. Kids toothpaste have much less because most of the paste is assumed to be ingested.
Putting fluoride in water to topically apply it to teeth (and get a higher risk of brain damage and stomach cancer among other things due to completely unnecessary ingestion).
The study you linked is indeed like proving that drinking sunscreen is great at preventing lip cancer. Or better yet: maybe we can start putting sunscreen in drinking water to prevent lip cancer?
Omg, no wonder my teeth are getting worse after moving to Amsterdam. I drink a ton of water and use Maldon salt. I didn’t realize there wasn’t fluoride in the water. (All the Nutella isn’t helping either, but… ooh, maybe that’s a reasonable vector for Europeans)
Authorities making recommendations about minutiae does not really dictate much of the way I live my life. If they want to make it a law, fine, I'll brush my teeth in between the cups of coffee I serially drink from the moment I rise until roughly dinnertime when I then switch to alcohol (something strongly discommended by other authorities). My teeth are fine, 40 years and counting. Perhaps it's all a conspiracy by Big Toothpaste to sell more toothpaste.
The CDC recommends breastfeeding infants, as breastmilk contains significantly less fluoride than fluoridated drinking water. If breastfeeding is not possible, the CDC also endorses using fluoridated water in infant formula, though it suggests mixing the formula with low-fluoride bottled water to lessen the risk of dental fluorosis.
Infants who are fed formula made with fluoridated tap water can have three to four times higher fluoride exposure than adults, warned Lanphear. He added that before an infant's teeth erupt, there's no benefit to fluoride exposure. "There are vulnerable groups we have to be worried about," he said, "and that's not being brought out adequately by these agencies."
Hmm, its been a while since I worked in the area of dental fluoride (was part of my PhD) but my understanding was systemic exposure pre-eruption was still beneficial. This (possibly biased source) agrees:
None of the studies I have seen properly account for the lifetime effect, and instead only deduce lack of harm from flawed isolated studies.
It’s in the entire water supply.
You were gestated in a womb of a woman consuming highly fluoridated water.
You were fed formula made with fluoridated water tuned to dose a 200lb man when you were 8lbs.
The water you drank as your bones were growing was similarly overdosed
The food you eat is washed in fluoridated water. The coffee and beer you drink is brewed with fluoridated water. The bread you eat is made with fluoridated water.
Basically, the dose is insanely wrong from the get go and then it’s applied to everything so there’s no way to accurately measure exposure. Then factor in the bell distribution and you are massively overexposing huge numbers of people a few standard deviations out.
> You were fed formula made with fluoridated water tuned to dose a 200lb man when you were 8lbs.
Er, no. A baby only consumes 4-8oz of water per day while an adult is consuming 125oz. The concentration is the same in both cases so the adult is getting 30X more.
> Then factor in the bell distribution and you are massively overexposing huge numbers of people a few standard deviations out.
How are you defining 'overexposed' and 'highly' in these statements. Do you have any studies or evidence? How are you deciding this consumption isn't factored into how much is put in water?
> The concentration is the same in both cases so the adult is getting 30X more.
That should read 15-30 times more, according to your own figures. And then, the baby's mass is about 15-30 times less than the adult, so at the end you are in the same ballpark again, percentagewise.
Yep, but the implication was that the child was getting a megadose. They're not. They would be if they were drinking 15-30X as much water per unit mass. That's not a child, that's a water balloon.
Not quite. In the US about 15% of the population get their drinking water from private wells. I wonder if anyone has compared groups that are similar except for whether they are on a well or municipal?
It shouldn’t be hard to find such groups by looking at the boundaries of municipal water systems. For example on my street everyone east of me is on city water and everyone else is on wells. Both groups are demographically very similar.
First kid was born and lived for a year or so when we had city water, which was flouridated. 2nd and 3rd kid were born where we were on well water, with no flouride.
First kid had no baby tooth cavities. Second and Third wound up with cavities on the front teeth, and we used topical flouridation for re-mineralization.
As a biochemist, this seems to be a very complex issue that has been unnecessarily politicized. What happened with this report is interesting in and of itself, but I would not draw any conclusions (or make any inferences) from this, frankly.
As someone who comes from an area with clean fresh water, that does not contain added fluoride, this is not a complex issue. It's simply not a question that comes up. People have good dental hygiene here.
To my mind, yes sure you can over complicate the entire debate, but all of that is irrelevant in the face of these basic points:
- Is there a chance that fluoride ingestion could be detrimental to human health?
- Can tooth decay be prevented by diet and brush/floss with good quality toothpaste?
Presumed safety of chemicals (at the behest of organizations) to human/environment until proven otherwise is shocking to me.
They irony of all this is that if you want to buy good quality toothpaste you are forced to import it from overseas, due to the FDA limiting ingredients in toothpaste.
> but all of that is irrelevant in the face of these basic points:
> - Is there a chance that fluoride ingestion could be detrimental to human health? - Can tooth decay be prevented by diet and brush/floss with good quality toothpaste?
When evaluating those points, be sure to assess what actually happens, in real life, to real people, and not what could happen in theory.
For example, even if tooth decay could be effectively "prevented by diet and brush/floss with good quality toothpaste" in theory, the effect might be smaller (possibly much smaller) in practice, as people in general suck at lifestyle changes, dieting being a prime example, and then a noticeable subset of the population has problems with regularly brushing their teeth (for some reason, this is surprising to many). Unless you have a way for fixing that (so far no one has), this may well make fluoridated water come out ahead in comparison.
--
EDIT: The above is similar to the argument for, e.g., opt-out health insurance and social retirement savings plans - you're still free to choose an alternative or decide to stay with the default, but if for some reason you can't understand the choice or can't be arsed to make one, you and everyone else are better off with you having some insurance and savings by default. The similarity is that we know for certain that the "incapable of making a choice" bucket will contain a substantial segment of the population, so at policy level, making health insurance/retirement savings opt-in with nothing as default, is just deciding to screw all those people over.
Nobody is screwing anybody over when the water supply is not poisoned (which is the case for nearly every European country). The basis of "contract over status" that let us advance beyond feudalism is mutual assent (or do no harm to the counterparty). What you're describing is essentially centralized tyranny and comes in many forms ("think of the children!")
And no, your health insurance / social retirement example doesn't fit. Sticking to the default in these cases does not amount to willingly poisoning oneself.
My understanding is that some water sources naturally contain fluoride anyhow so this isn’t a great comparison. From the sources I read awhile ago they started fluoride additives because it was known that certain areas like Texas had bad teeth.
They irony of all this is that if you want to buy good quality toothpaste you are forced to import it from overseas, due to the FDA limiting ingredients in toothpaste.
I never heard such a thing. Can you be more specific? Plus you can buy Darlie toothpaste in most Chinatown's around the world, even if unapproved by local dental orgs.
Ever since I started brushing with Novamin my dentist has started being really positive about the condition of my teeth in a way I’ve never experienced - even though I haven’t had a cavity in at least 20 years. I didn’t tell him what I’ve been doing.
Interesting. I use Sensodyne for a completely unrelated reason: it does not contain Sodium Laurel Sulfate. I have not had a cavity in my entire life, and I'm over 45.
I mention that I like this toothpaste due to the lack of SLS - not for the cavities prevention. But I've not had any cavities, so that is another datum on top of the others who mention using this toothpaste and not having dental problems.
You can get it on Amazon, since they don't do a ton of vetting or enforcement. You can also get toothpaste with Biomin, a substantially similar deal (its manufacturer claims it's better).
For me, novamin/biomin didn't seem to make a difference with tooth sensitivity.
I always thought anti fluoridation sentiment in Utah was related to them having the highest dentist count per capita. It’s the only state that I know of where fluoridation isn’t common.
Dentists are the ones who are pro-fluoridation … at least it was a dental trade group that fought the release of this report (maybe they are funded behind the scenes by a different interest group)
It seems pretty simple. Stop putting toxic waste in the water. If you’re worried about dental health, cut the sugar and use those little interdental brushes in addition to flossing and brushing well.
Would increase water consumption in the general populace — diverting some usage of sugary drinks.
Health officials get to say they lead an initiative that drastically improved water drinking and drastically reduced soda drinking. Who wouldn’t that on their CV?
Long-term side-effects require longitudinal studies that can be done post facto. Give it 50 years, maybe. By then everyone who dreamt up the scheme will be already retired or dead — and no careers will ever be in jeopardy.
Sounds familiar, but it has a certain special twist to it. If anyone here decides to implement this idea, please invite me to your Nobel prize reception.
I’m not OP or american, but i can comment. >1,500ppm concentration of fluoride is prescription only (so you either pay for a pointless dentist visit or get it on the grey market), despite being safe and much more effective at remineralisation. There are also experimental ingredients such as nanohydroxyapatite and Novamin which are difficult to find on the american market due to the FDA
Novamin works wonders. It took me the last 30% of the way to not being sensitive to heat/cold/acid.i got about 20% there with just normal sensodyne toothpaste and another big chunk with vitamin k complex and vitamin d supplementation (this took about six months to be really noticeable). The order was dictated by me figuring out what i wanted to try and general availability in the case of novamin. So i cant really say if the relative help from each intervention would be different if tried in a different order unfortunately.
For the record, the rest of the stuff I mentioned has middling evidence for effectiveness as well, it's just the things that worked out of the myriad of things I tried that didn't. The vitamin k complex and d thing especially has limited evidence (and recently a paper came out that showed k2 increasing artery calcification, which is concerning but maybe not as bad as one thinks since the really dangerous part of arterial calcification is when it is in process. it also didn't control for vitamin d status and the hypothesis of k2 causing bone/teeth remineralization and not soft tissue mineralization usually hinges on d status being adequate).
Reminds me a lot of my struggle with migraines before the recent, good treatments came out. I was facing a certainty of at least one migraine per day everyday of my life. Led me to trying all sorts of stuff. Not exactly the best experience but better than migraines.
I just tinker as a hobby. If i live long enough even the minor annoyances in my life will eventually get iterated on and improved. The teeth thing was a medium to major annoyance so got attention first.
Warning: Excessive fluoride is known to stain teeth with white steaks. You see it a lot in people who drink certain types of Chinese tea, high in fluoride.
This is called fluorosis and it only affects children. Ingestion of excess fluoride in early life changes the development of permanent teeth and causes white speckles.
Novamin used to be available via Sensodyne Pronamel in Canada. I was surprised to see that at some point it disappeared from our market - no longer able to buy at any grocery store or pharmacy or on Amazon, whereas it used to be available in all of these places.
It's still available, look for "Sensodyne Repair and Protect" (no other name). Shoppers Drug Mart has it, Superstore, Walmart, etc. Most everywhere. We also have other options here with nanohydroxyapatite that are easy to get too, from X-Pur to Davids Toothpaste. Those products tend to be more expensive though due to higher %, whereas Sensodyne tops out at 5% Novamin.
Also as a Canadian you should avoid Amazon for groceries and most hygiene goods, they're overpriced even compared to Shoppers Drug Mart most of the time, half of the time the goods aren't even offered by the company but instead by a random middleman charging absurd markup.
It's now in Sensodyne repair and protect and I usually buy it from walmart.ca 6-10 tubes at a time. There was about 2 years there where I had to buy it on ebay shipped from India though. I did try Biomin and I think that even if the material performs better than novamin, the rest of the toothpaste is so inferior to sensodyne that as a whole it works worse, for me at least.
My wife comes from a country that did not add fluoride to the water. She has very good dental hygiene but here teeth are not in good shape for her age. That's one data point that I have observed.
Her home city of Hanoi doesn't have tap water that the locals like to drink. Even after boiling I think it can taste bad. So she grew up with heavily filtered water or bottled water. I would guess her diet was lacking in many trace minerals from this.
Just because a treatment works doesn't mean it's the best treatment, or is treating the "cause." To say that a lack of fluoride is the cause of their bad teeth is silly. Not eating sugar/acidic foods, Novamin, or a different set of bacteria in her mouth would also improve her teeth.
I’ve noticed the same thing living in Taiwan. They don’t fluoride the water, and in general people have pretty bad teeth with caries and decay that I never see in Americans in their 20s and 30s. The highly sugary diet probably doesn’t help either.
It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids, without the knowledge of the individual, certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.
"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."
Sure, good for you that you're in one of the higher socioeconomic strata who can take care of their teeth. Not everyone else is.
As a biochemist, I know this perfectly well. But the motivation behind your “this is terrifying” was left as an exercise to the reader, so there was no way of distinguishing it from “omg the chemicals”.
It already is that way. Your steak came from a cow that drank fluoridated water, the salad was watered constantly with fluoride. Your bread was baked with fluoride water, same with your coffee/beer/tea. Your Mayonnaise even.
Besides being politicized, views on this issue will also be affected by personal experience. I've lived much of my life in Oregon, where there is no fluoridation. It seems to be widely believed by dentists here that people growing up in Oregon have poorer teeth and that it's largely because of the lack of fluoridation. I'm not arguing the merits, just pointing out the cultural belief.
What you’re pointing at is a scientific question of fact though, not a cultural belief. It’s the (or a) conclusion you’d likely reach after completing dental school.
There is a cultural/political side of the question, however: given that we know water fluoridation is safe and relatively efficacious at preventing caries, are we willing to pay for it and actually do it, and how much do we want to listen to people’s arbitrary feelings on the matter? That is a valid political question.
Twenty years ago, I moved from Michigan (a state that uses fluoride) to Mississippi (a state that doesn't use fluoride). My dentist at the time told me that I was going to end up with tooth decay if I stayed down there for more than a few years. Sure enough, five years later I moved back to Michigan and ended up with a cavity in an unusual place. My (new) dentist in Michigan was completely unsurprised.
He said there are two problems with tooth decay in Mississippi:
1. They don't use fluoride in their water.
2. No decent dentist would ever work in Mississippi.
Fifteen years later, with no changes in dental hygiene in my entire life, and I've had no other problems with my teeth. Anecdotal evidence, maybe. But that is my experience.
Fluoride is beneficial only when applied externally on the dental enamel, where it converts the hydroxyapatite synthesized by the human cells into fluorapatite, which is less soluble in the acids contained in food or excreted by bacteria.
On the other hand, ingested fluoride has no benefits, because it cannot reach the tooth enamel and when in too large quantities it has bad effects, e.g. it may cause bone damage.
Brushing the teeth or washing the mouth with something containing fluoride is very good, drinking water with fluoride is very stupid.
Can you point to one single data point which has found any negative effect on human bones from excess consumption of fluoridated water at town water concentrations?
This should be easy since it's been done at enormous scale for decades so a huge quorum of people have spent their their lives drinking fluoridated water.
Skeletal fluorosis is well known to occur in regions where the natural drinking water has high fluoride content, e.g. in some regions from India and China.
You need search no further than Wikipedia.
I am not aware of any study about the incidence of fluorosis in places where the drinking water is fluoridated artificially, but it would be very difficult to do such studies, due to the lack of comprehensive past statistics, to the many confounding factors and because only few of the existing cases are detected. When someone heals a bone fracture they almost never do additional complex tests to determine if it was normal for the fracture to happen or its likelihood was increased by a condition like fluorosis.
In any case no such studies are really needed, because when you have an activity like ingesting fluoride, for which there is absolutely no evidence of benefits and no known mechanism by which it could provide benefits, but there is weak evidence that it might be harmful and there are known mechanisms by which it may be harmful, then there is no rational doubt whether that activity should be done or not.
That is funny. However Ill postulate this: Why wouldn't someone go to where the most interesting work is to be found though? You don't become a military doctor if you don't find it interesting stitching up bullet holes. And vice versa, you don't become a military doctor if you're not interested in working on the same.
> Why wouldn't someone go to where the most interesting work is to be found though?
Well, Mississippi is ranked 34th in crime, 41st in education, 49th in healthcare, 49th in economy, 40th in fiscal stability, 47th in infrastructure and 36th in opportunity. Assuming a medical professional cares about anything other than "natural environment" in which they rank 16th, I suspect there's a long list of places they'd rather end up.
Not to refute your n=1, but reviews are a safer way of establishing whether something actually works. Eg here, from 2015:
> There is insufficient information to determine whether initiation of a water fluoridation programme results in a change in disparities in caries across socioeconomic status (SES) levels.
> No studies that aimed to determine the effectiveness of water fluoridation for preventing caries in adults met the review's inclusion criteria.
> Over 97% of the studies were at high risk of bias and there was substantial between‐study variation
Genetics plays a huge roll. As does your daily dental hygiene routine. Based on you posting here means you probably have access to tooth brush, floss, tooth paste and somewhere to use them daily and effectively, this reduces the impact of water fluoridation variables.
Is brushing twice a day with fluoridated toothpaste and floss or similar not a thing in the US? In Europe most countries don't fluoride tap water and there's not a massive tooth decay problem.
And since oral hygiene seems to be linked to eg. Alzheimers (https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/264164) and flouride seems to be indispensable oral hygiene thing the issue is not so straightforward...
The link you mention is from the mouth bacteria/plaques and their leakage into the blood stream near the brain.
Fluoride is not an antibiotic, so there is no plausible mechanism for it’s known topical benefits to prevent bacterial growth that might lead to Alzheimer’s (itself a theory, but an interesting one)
Municipal water fluoridation is problematic for a range of reasons but as a toothpaste and mouthwash it has merit and it actually does demonstrate direct bacterial growth arrest effects in addition to indirect substrate permissiveness inhibition via mineralisation.
“Fluoride acts to enhance membrane permeabilities to protons and compromises the functioning of F-ATPases in exporting protons, thereby inducing cytoplasmic acidification and acid inhibition of glycolytic enzymes.Basically, fluoride acts to reduce the acid tolerance of the bacteria. It is most effective at acid pH values. In the acidic conditions of cariogenic plaque, fluoride at levels as low as 0.1 mM can cause complete arrest of glycolysis by intact cells ofStreptococcus mutans.Overall, the anticaries actions of fluoride appear to be complex, involving effects both on bacteria and on mineral phases. The antibacterial actions of fluoride appear themselves to be complex but to be dominated by weak-acid effects.”
https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.1139/m95-133#:~:text=Basica....
It's in other products instead. I think it depends on the country, but usually salt and toothpaste. I don't think there are any developed countries that have stopped fluoridation entirely.
Salt fluoridation schemes are reaching more than 100 million people in Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Cuba as well as
85% of Switzerland and 67% of Germany.
France has some too, but it always was an option for those who care and not a default. As such it's clearly labelled and marketed (same for iode and other additives)
And I am happy to live in a country that doesn't fluoridate its water. That way I can just wait out the whole scientific and political discussion and start drinking fluoridated water when it has finally and conclusively has been proven that it's beneficial. I suspect it wont be though, because it seems like the real scientists are saying no and the political scientists are saying yes.
Not sure if you are trolling but are you alluding that the US population has healthier teeth? The "difference you see" is most likely just the much more widespread usage of bleaching in the US (which actually worsens the health of your teeth).
I have no idea if there is a genetic difference in the US, but according to Wikipedia, it seems modern toothpaste first took hold in America.
Colgate, a US company, introduced modern toothpaste in 1873. Later, toothpaste that had been developed by researchers in the UK and US, did not find commercial success in the UK, and they focused on the US where it took off.
This suggests that the US were more interested in the appearance of their teeth.
Do you have a reference for that? I'm from Sweden and I can definitely say preventive dental care is a huge thing here. I felt your statement sounded weird so I googled around. DMFT seems to be one index used to rank countries oral health, which is produced by WHO. In that ranking several European countries beat or sit at US levels. Do you only mean eastern Europe?
That study is for children. Oral health problems take years to surface and looking at adults would be a better way to measure these things.
Having lived in both the US and France, I can say that it’s been my experience that Americans have “nicer” looking teeth. Whether that translates into anything medically relevant is apparently really difficult to prove.
WHO produced the exact same data but for adults. I did see similar results there (several EU countries above US). You gave no references as response, instead giving another personal experience.
My original response were specifically about references. But sorry if it sounded more aggressive than it was. I mistook you for the original person I replied to, which made me answer more direct than maybe was necessary. Also, it was my bad for not linking the actual reference for WHOs adult data. I'll link it here instead [1]. That said, on second look it is from 2000, so it is much older than the one on children. Maybe not as reliable. I remain am quite sceptical to the claim that there is an actual difference between in oral health between EU and US though. And my original response were to someone saying preventive care is completely non-existent in EU, which is simply demonstrably wrong.
Sorry that it took me so long to respond. I was wrong to over generalize to the EU. My personal experience is with countries around the Mediterranean and I maintain that while it may be available it’s not taken advantage of the way it is in the US.
And? I was very clear that this was anecdotal and responding in a thread about the aesthetic aspect of teeth.
I’m sorry I didn’t dig any deeper than the link that was presented but it was about adolescent kids. And no one is saying that these differences show up in young people.
I don't really know what this means for the US, but in Belgium you are required to go to the dentist at least once a year if you want to keep being reimbursed by social security.
When I lived in Canada (which I assume isn't too different from the US) with poor social security due to my legal status, I never went to a dentist because it was far, far too expensive.
As a European people here often make comments about American teeth being ridiculously white and unnaturally straight. You guys went a bit far on that one.
Unnaturally straight? What is natural to you? My teeth are perfectly straight and so is my entire family’s and none of us has ever had braces. Is that not natural?
Corrected vision is unnatural. Did we go a bit far on that too?
Europeans’ teeth would be white too if they smoked less.
Apparently anything man-made to modify natural outcomes is unnatural.
There are extremes, like elective cosmetic surgery, fake tans, cranial implants, etc., but some things just make living as an ordinary person easier. Glasses, hearing aids, normal medicines, etc.
We can all agree that somewhere in between is certainly the preferred option. Walking around with all veneers or crowns is a problem, but so is walking around with constant cavities and yellow teeth, so likely somewhere in between what the US does and the EU does.
Healthy teeth have nothing to do with veneers and crowns. The opposite of a decorated mouth is not a sick mouth, just like the opposite of a bright pink house isn't a burned down house.
Sure, that’s obviously true, but misses my point; on average, European teeth are less healthy than American teeth. At the same time, American teeth tend to have too much work done on them on average.
There is a paper linked on Wikipedia stating that studies conducted in Germany showed that "Water fluoridation was followed by a decrease of caries, and interruptions in fluoridation were followed by increasing caries levels." but also "There was a significant caries decrease down to the lowest DMFT (2.0) since 1959 in spite of the fact that only F-poor water was available over years [...] explained by changes in caries-preventive and environmental conditions."
They don't have to spend tens of thousands of dollars on their children's teeth to make sure that their kids can find professional jobs without being written off the first time they smile during the job interview. It's a symptom of our sick culture in the US.
> In vitro and in situ studies are demonstrating promising results of HAP toothpastes on the remineralization of enamel lesions and preventing/reducing demineralization. Specifically, research appears to demonstrate either its superiority or equivalency to fluoride toothpaste as anti-caries agents.
I'm not sure how conspiratorial I'm being, but for years I've felt that the fluoridation of water was more about the dilution of neurotoxic industrial waste product and not oral health.
Regardless of whether I'm on or off base in that regard, I see little reason to continue to use something that - at best - will only react with pre-existing enamel, when hydroxyapatite toothpastes can actually fix damage (albeit to a limited degree).
> I'm not sure how conspiratorial I'm being, but for years I've felt that the fluoridation of water was more about the dilution of neurotoxic industrial waste product and not oral health.
"CITIZEN, please check yourself into a fema retraining facility! The government is there to serve us all for the greater good."
Nevermind the double speak, where the term 'the greater good' means the good of those people who consider themselves to be greater than you.
So we know that there is definitely little benefit from ingesting fluoride, and also that we can not rule out negative effects from ingesting fluoride. This seems like... a bit of a big deal?
Also a long history of spurious statistical correlations where you find "possible" links.
e.g. for a while there was a scare for RF from overhead powerlines causing brain cancer.
Turns out, the issue is the statistics used to try and isolate an effect from a general population sample have bias: plug in any effect, and any grouping factor, and you'll probably observe a doubling of the risk.
This effect was the cause of a whole spate of "X may cause cancer" reports in the 2000s.
Except that we can! The oral microbiome can be modulated to get exactly what you’re asking: remove pathogens that are good at creating acid and replacing them with ones that are good at remineralizing.
Shameless plug for my company (Bristle Health) that is trying to do exactly that via oral microbiome testing and personalized recommendations and products to improve.
Interesting, can you tell more? I’ve tried oral probiotics without much effect.
Did notice a difference for a couple of days after taking antibiotics for a week for something else, but it quickly subsided (my regular micro biome probably quickly recolonised the mouth).
All the species in the probiotic have been clinically studied with evidence that supports improvement in the oral microbiome and reduction of oral disease. Although, for transparency, the mechanism of action of some of the probiotics is still unclear, and we're working on figuring that out to improve oral probiotics and products in the future.
There are lots of "big deals" in the environment that we silently tolerate -- things which studies conclusively and repeatedly show are substantially detrimental:
* Roadside air pollution
* Lead pipes
* Indoor CO2 buildup
Studies relating to flouride are nowhere near as conclusive and show nowhere near the same magnitude of effect. If flouride is contributing negatively in a similar way, it's doing so to such a small extent that it very nearly falls within the margin of error. Anyone genuinely worried about flouride should consider double-checking that they've already taken more meaningful action regarding their health, such as going on a walk, getting a full night's rest, or opening a window.
Not from ingestion, but exposing the enamel periodically during the day to fluoride and having trace amounts of it on your saliva supports remineralisation.
Sure, but to achieve equal remineralization, you'll likely end up ingesting orders of magnitude more fluoride when delivered via drinking water vs toothpaste.
I can tell you that salt is not fluoridated in the Netherlands (most people who care about cooking use pure sea salt anyway). As for toothpaste, almost every toothpaste anywhere in the world has it.
There is evidence both ways, the original reports were that children's dental health improved after they stopped fluoridation in the 70s.
We don’t fluoridate our water but from 12-18 we do “fluor happen” (loosely translated: “fluor biting”), where we are given an upper and a lower bit which are both filled with heavily fluoridated gel, you bite into it and after a couple of minutes you take the bits out, rinse your mouth and then spit out any left-overs.
I grew up in the US and remember this too, an absolute gag inducing gel that they put in a little mouthguard shaped thing and jammed in your mouth.
There have been various iterations of dentist office flouride treatments I remember.
As an adult the dentists I went to switched to a 2x 30 second rinse (60 second?) with a mouthwash at the end of the appoinment.
The last 10 years they eliminated that and I do a nightly flouride rinse.
I lived various places as a kid, from 10-18 I lived somewhere with no flouride in the water (rural with well water) and we did pills and dentist treatments instead.
Too much in this thread assumes everything is the same everywhere in a given country.
I have also probably never brushed my teeth with a non fluoride toothpaste living in the US. So it's not like that's different from the EU.
I forgot about this. This was a total nightmare for me as a kid. The gel made me want to throw up badly. I think they offered two "flavours" you could pick from, both equally nightmarish.
In Italy, many years ago, when I was a kid, this fluoride bite was something that was given to us at (elementary) school, cannot remember if once or twice a year, they made a sort of quick medical checkup and while the doctor was visiting you, you had this bite.
But the practice was later abandoned, as it seems that the 6-8 age is the worst one to supplement (too much) fluoride, that could later develop in dental fluorosis:
> There is evidence both ways, the original reports were that children's dental health improved after they stopped fluoridation in the 70s.
Has that effect been persistent? I would think the news of flouride being removed from the water would cause an increase in dental health diligence, but I would also be surprised if that effect didn’t wane over time.
I don't know what they do in the Netherlands, but in rural parts of the United States where people are on well water, fluoride treatments are common. Florida is directly applied to the teeth during a dental visit, then washed out.
Anecdotally, this is what I had and I have great Dental Health despite for brushing hygiene. I often skip brushing my teeth and almost never floss and haven't had a cavity in 40 years
Fwiw, I’ve pretty much always lived with access to municipal water with added flouride and have also always been given flouride treatment at the dentist. I think the latter is pretty universal in the US.
I remember growing up in the 80s in the Netherlands I used to get daily fluoride tablets, from a small pink bottle. Did not persist long I believe, but was definitely common back then.
Toothpaste, for the most part, isn't swallowed. Salt, you can get any kind you want. I think this gives consumers more discretion/control over what they want to or do not want to ingest.
Yes, I agree. I was just pushing back against the common false narrative that no fluoride in tap water equals no fluoride at all. It's brought up as a fact in every online discussion about fluoride.
Usually it's alongside that one study that shows naturally occurring fluoride in water is harmful to children's mental development. Which is true, but neglects to mention that the areas studied (in rural China) had levels of fluoride twenty times higher then public water fluoridation programs and that the same study also included a control group at "normal" added fluoride level and found no negative effect.
Heres the study. You'll start to recognize it if you get involved in a few of these discussions.
As an aside, your gums and tongue will absorb a lot - think about chewing tobacco, people putting cocaine on their gums, pills you leave under your tongue. This is also why resorts will tell you to brush your teeth with bottled water.
While it obviously absorbs less than eating any compound, it still absorbs quite a bit!
This seems like it is ultimately a result of the politicization of the issue: it becomes difficult to have an honest conversation of the merits and demerits of something if you know there’s a political faction ready to seize on everything you say and take it out of context. Not saying that makes it right, but it’s an outcome we could anticipate, I think.
This extensive review has been available since 2006:
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/11571/fluoride-in-...
Neurotoxicity, especially in the presence of iodine deficiency, which is common, has been clearly documented. Toothpaste level exposure is enough to lower IQ in iodine deficiency.
>> This January, Birnbaum issued a scathing legal declaration as part of the lawsuit, writing, "The decision to set aside the results of an external peer review process based on concerns expressed by agencies with strong policy interests on fluoride suggests the presence of political interference in what should be a strictly scientific endeavor."
with
>> Despite this unusually rigorous review process, a network of health officials and influential dental groups argued that the NTP had failed to address several issues raised by the NASEM review committee.
Health officials and dental groups have interest on fluoridation for political reasons? I don't buy it!
I would imagine a self interst focused dental and profeccional helthcare group would argue for the decrease of fluoridation so more income comes from the work on decayed teeth. If it is meant of interest of their patients then that is just desirable! Also health officials and dentists are not the typical polititian group I picture in my mind. I'd sooner call them scientists than politicians. (if meant about scientific politics then should say so - including themselves and that why they push despite widespread scientific critics).
I am telling this with having only topical use of fluoride - with good results -, and with no desire for water fluoridation but also knowing that topical may not be sufficient enough for children and the broad population.
Somehow the feeling is that the NTP and Birnbaum is the manipulative and polititian here. Just a felling though, based on this limited and filtered report, but based on quotes.
I think because you presumed that everybody was calling it a conspiracy before, which is patently untrue? (Correct would be: some people were, and some people still are)
I once found myself stuck in a biker bar west of Dallas. I had to listen to this old timer Hell’s Angel go on and on about fluoride conspiracies. Some of them are pretty wild - “fluoride is created by nuclear weapons construction as waste and the government has to get rid of it somehow, so in the water it goes” for example. The rest of the evening is a little hazy but I remember that.
Incidentally, I used to think Hell’s Angels were just retired dentists.
> fluoride is created by nuclear weapons construction as waste and the government has to get rid of it somehow, so in the water it goes
Like some wild conspiracy theories, there is a kernel of truth to this one. Namely, the fluoride used in water fluoridation is indeed an industrial byproduct -- except not from nuclear weapon manufacture, but from the production of phosphate fertilizer.
I wonder why it's been so difficult to stop blanket water fluoridation. Maybe something to do with corpos having a cheap way to dump toxic waste from fertilizer production that would otherwise be expensive to dispose of:
>The three fluoride additives used for water fluoridation are derived principally from phosphate fertilizer production.
Plus we don't just drink fluoridated water- we bathe in it, we cook with it, our pets drink it, we water our lawns with it, its everywhere. I recall trying to find studies on the effects of these non-drinking uses years ago and not finding much. Again, I wonder why.
It's fascinating. Having gone through 301 comments and there really hasn't been any deep discussion at whether or not fluoride has been linked to brain harm.... There are little debates about drinking water. I'm disappointed..I'm gonna to have to do some digging.
>But the report did find a possible link to cognitive harm at approximately two times the current recommended water fluoridation level, records show.
This is more a report about consuming excess fluoride from other sources that water.
>Because many common foods and drinks contain fluoride, consuming them along with fluoridated water could amount to harmful exposure levels, these experts say.
I do wonder what the other common food and drinks could be
This guy posted a video a few weeks ago, claiming to be sick from being over exposed to chlorine in drinking water in Mexico. He believes the combination of highly chlorinated drinking water and swimming daily in a chlorinated pool caused his symptoms.
My friend is convinced her autistic child was over exposed to aluminium or other metals...but maybe it was fluoride. These things need to be investigated.
We know that Lead exposure is widely known to cause harm to the brain, so other metals could have similar effects. Babies having a much smaller mass, would be much greater risk of ingesting toxic amounts or slow dose environmental exposure through things like aluminum cookware.
A substance might not be toxic on its own, but in combination with another substance in the environment could be highly toxic, but affect only some small percentage of people that come in in contact with both.
Like we know many prescribed drugs, can't be mixed with alcohol, because they become toxic if you do.
are you assuming they haven't been? that people just bunged in chlorine into swimming pools without a second thought? that nobody has thought to look into heavy metal exposure in babies?
If anything, the issue is the opposite. All of these tests have been repeated so many times, often by honest scientists, but also often by biased companies, that people struggle to find the truth and instead find whatever they want to believe (and its usually something about how all the professionals are stupid and dumb but they personally are special and right)
How do you think those labels about mixing drugs with alcohol/grapefruits/whatever else came about? if it goes into your body, it needs to be tested.
Fluoride increases precipitation of calcium onto tissues. It's very straightforward. Some parts of the brain are directly exposed to the blood and get easily calcified. In particular, parts of the brain associated with regulation of circadian rhythm are known to get calcified in the presence of higher fluoride. This has been known and understood for a long time.
I'd like to take this as an opportunity to voice frustration with "rationalist skeptics", who for the longest time have ridiculed critics of mass water fluoridation. Maybe it's because they're really into the comforts of orthodoxy moreso than skepticism?
Using bullying and ridicule to reinforce unfounded scientific/medical orthodoxy in the name of "skepticism", or even in the name of "evidence" that you don't have... It isn't scientific no matter how much you'd like to believe it is.
Health officials, believe it or not, are like any other human beings - in that they also have their own agendas and sometimes those agendas may be in direct opposition to the well being of others. I am surprised that anyone is surprised when news like this comes out.
Looks like the future neuralink test subjects have come into force against fluoride.
But of course people forgot the history of water fluoridation and the risks of dental cavities
(of course, for modern countries I guess it makes more sense to have it in dental products than just in tap water, but I don't buy the moral panic)
> The report found that a link between typical levels of fluoride added to water and possible harm to brain development is unclear... the report did find a possible link to cognitive harm at approximately two times
Well good think we are at the current level and not at two times it then
All foods are full of sugar, government does nothing, children get teeth issues,
government solves it, by adding fluorine to our drinking water, adding more to our toxic overload.
I learned this too late: after brushing, don't rinse your mouth clean with water, leave the toothpaste residue on your teeth all night to improve effectiveness.
Are places generally adding more than the recommended level of fluoride in their water? How much water do you have to ingest to reach the maximum recommended exposure? Given how bad people are at drinking the recommended level of water, I'm curious how they accurately assessed outcomes based on what I assume are relatively few data points
A reverse osmosis filtration system will remove the majority of ions from water, including fluoride. This enters into another scientific debate though, as some suggest that you are also removing beneficial minerals from the water at the same time.
I’ve heard from someone who worked in a water district that they didn’t add fluoride to water for dental health, that was a spin they put on it. Not sure how true it is though.
After the city treated and purified the water, they needed something to add in to keep it from reacting with the city’s pipes. Otherwise the water will eat the pipe and you get dirty water full of pipe delivered to the tap.
They needed something that was cheap, relatively safe to drink, and available in large quantities- fluoride checked those boxes. Supposedly they came up with the dental spin to sell the solution to the public.
> These are just a few of the images we've recorded. And you can see, it wasn't what we thought. There's been no war here and no terraforming event. The environment is stable. It's the Pax. The G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate that we added to the air processors. It was supposed to calm the population, weed out aggression. Well, it works. The people here stopped fighting. And then they stopped everything else. They stopped going to work, they stopped breeding, talking, eating. There's 30 million people here, and they all just let themselves die.
Wouldn't statins lower cholesterol in large populations of people who need it to, e.g., produce hormones? I can't imagine anyone wanting to inhibit the production of sex hormones (testosterone, estradiol, etc.) in children.
Statins are dangerous... they block cholesterol, which incidentally, is fundamental, crucial, even, to the formation of both cell membranes and innumerable important hormones.
This reminded me of an old CAQ/CAIB article I read in the '90s on the impact of fluoride as an industrial pollutant. I found a copy[1] hosted at a site operated by the "Fluoride Action Network", which is also hosting other alarming claims such as:
> • As of July 18, 2022, a total of 85 human studies have investigated the relationship between fluoride and human intelligence.
> • Of these investigations, 76 studies have reported that elevated fluoride exposure is associated with reduced IQ in humans.
There's a historical link between fluoride alarmism and the far right, famously parodied in Kubrick's Dr Strangelove in the person of Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper[2,3] who instigates a nuclear response to the communist conspiracy to impurify America's bodily fluids via fluoride.
The CAQ article at [1] explains this:
> Oscar Ewing, as Federal Security Agency administrator, was a Truman “fair dealer” who pushed many progressive programs such as nationalized medicine. Fluoridation was lumped with his proposals. Inevitably, it was attacked by conservatives as a manifestation of “creeping socialism,” while the left rallied to its support. Later during the McCarthy era, the left was further alienated from the opposition when extreme right-wing groups, including the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan, raved that fluoridation was a plot by the Soviet Union and/or communists in the government to poison America’s brain cells.
> It was a simple task for promoters, under the guidance of the “original spin-doctor,” to paint all opponents as deranged–and they played this angle to the hilt. For example, one widely distributed dossier on opponents “listed in alphabetical order reputable scientists, convicted felons, food faddists, scientific organizations, and the Ku Klux Klan.”
I should note that CAQ has itself been attacked as communist propaganda, (and for that matter, some of the studies linked on the fluoridealert site are Chinese in origin.) Nonetheless the article[1] has some interesting and (to me) surprising information on the politically entangled history of fluoride. An excerpt:
> One thing is certain, the name of the company with the biggest stake in fluoride’s safety was ALCOA–whose name is stamped all over the early history of water fluoridation.
> Throughout industry’s “roaring 20s,” the U.S. Public Health Service was under the jurisdiction of Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon, a founder and major stockholder of ALCOA. In 1931, the year Mellon stepped down, a Public Health Service dentist named H. Trendley Dean was dispatched to certain remote towns in the West where drinking-water wells contained high concentrations of natural fluoride from deep in the earth’s crust. Dean’s mission was to determine how much fluoride people could tolerate without obvious damage to their teeth–a matter of considerable concern to ALCOA. Dean found that teeth in these high-fluoride towns were often discolored and eroded, but he also reported that they appeared to have fewer cavities than average. He cautiously recommended further studies to determine whether a lower level of fluoride in drinking water might reduce cavities without simultaneously damaging bones and teeth, where fluoride settles in humans and other animals.
> Back at the Mellon Institute, ALCOA’s Pittsburgh industrial research lab, this news was galvanic. ALCOA-sponsored biochemist Gerald J. Cox27 immediately fluoridated some lab rats in a study and concluded that fluoride reduced cavities and that: “The case should be regarded as proved.”28 In a historic moment in 1939, the first public proposal that the U.S. should fluoridate its water supplies was made not by a doctor, or dentist, but by Cox, an industry scientist working for a company threatened by fluoride damage claims.29 Cox began touring the country, stumping for fluoridation.
Wow, I'd previously scoffed at anti-fluoridation stuff, thinking that everyone who made these claims sounded like General Ripper. But this was an interesting historical perspective.
But ... what then keeps us in the status quo of fluoridated water supplies? Aluminum companies, still? seems unlikely that their influence would hold sway for a century. A century during which we have found other environmental pollutants and enacted/enforced regulation to reduce or eliminate their influence.
Just about every minerals business is going to have loads of fluoride to discard--aluminum, uranium, gypsum, NPK, etc. A few years back I watched a documentary about a fertilizer plant in Morocco, dumping the fluoride they discarded from their NPK mix into the water supply. All of the children near the plant had spindly, twisted arms and legs from skeletal fluorosis.
It is also peculiar that a toxicologist becomes a dentist, and ends up at the atomic energy commission[0].
Once again the conspiracy theory has become a conspiracy. If you get your news and information from Alex Jones you would know about this since at least 2008 making you a well-informed citizen, but if you only get your news from places like Salon you have been misinformed.
I hope this is poorly conveyed satire. If not… good God.
Apart from the hygienic value in brushing, whether you agree with it or not, halitosis is an offensive smell to most of the public. Some of the worst breath I’ve ever had to smell came from alcoholics whose spirit of choice is vodka.
I’m very much anti fluoride in drinking water. And did not buy fluoride tooth paste for my kids until they learned to spit.
But 1) kids brush teeth to form a healthy habit, and protect their gums. Kids who do not brush teeth often develop gum disease which can cause tooth loss in the future as adults.
2) residual fluoride isn’t anything to worry about. Just spit the toothpaste out. If you’re super worried about fluoride then look for calcium fluoride toothpaste which is not poisonous.
3) sloshing vodka or whiskey around doesn’t remove plague from your teeth and you will suffer tooth decay regardless.
Whats the point of calcium fluoride in your toothpaste, the water solubility is very low I would suspect it to do almost nothing, could be wrong, never heard of this. Generally soluble salts like sodium or tin fluoride are used.
Sodium fluoride is a by product of aluminium production and is poisonous in high dosage. That’s why people are so anti fluoride.
Calcium fluoride is naturally occurring and was what was discovered to be so good. Well the water it was first discovered was contaminated with sodium fluoride from aluminium but the water that promoted the research was calcium fluoride.
But while sodium fluoride is poisonous in high levels. You could drink super high levels of calcium fluoride and be totally fine.
So if you’re super worried about sodium fluoride (which you shouldn’t be in tooth paste since you should spit it out and anything you swallowed is harmless as the dosage is so low) then the alternative is to source tooth paste with calcium fluoride. Which is harder to get but it does exist.
The fact that its produced from aluminum refining is irrelevant. Also everything is poisonous in high enough doses.
I understand that calcium fluoride isn't going to harm you because its not soluble, its just like eating some inert rocks but its basically pointless to add to toothpaste.
I'm not worried about fluoride, its very helpful for dental health, I did a bunch of my PhD on this.
That will just dehydrate your mouth and kill all the bacteria which is supposed to be there. I joke about it with my neighbors when we have a boil water advisory, do not actually do it in real life.
As a general rule of thumb, I think it's interesting to scrutinize dosage recommendations and compare regulations between countries. If someone claims that the science on some topic is well settled then health officials in multiple countries should arrive at roughly similar results. If there's a discrepancy between the suggestions made by health officials in the US and EU, it's worth asking why.