[colordrops]

I've gone through several studies and you are not representing the field fairly. There are many studies going both ways. It's far from a slam dunk consensus. Furthermore, there is absolutely no question that fluoride is toxic. It's just a question whether the amounts in water and toothpaste are enough to cause measurable negative effects.

Considering this, why don't we add things like B12, magnesium, and vitamin D to the water? They are all deficient in a large percentage of the population and cause severe problems, far worse than dental caries. The reason they are not is because it's not the business of the water supply to act as medicine for the general populace. It should come from individual products. You see fortified foods and vitamins, as well as fluoride toothpaste and mouth washes.

[azinman2]

Could you cite your sources? I’m genuinely curious. There’s a lot of quackery out there on this since the tin foils love to accuse fluoride of somehow being a gov brain control method.

Of course fluoride is toxic at a certain level - so is water! The dose makes the poison. The question is if it’s a worthwhile trade off for society, and is it toxic at the levels used. It can’t be too toxic given the extremely large populations that have received it for decades without people dropping dead because of it. In fact life expectancy has only gone up since it’s introduction in 1945. Municipal water I believe is chlorinated as well, which in sufficient quantities is bad, but in small amounts is worth the trade off to kill the germs.

The US requires flour to be enriched with thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, folic acid, and iron. So there are other mandated ways to achieve vitamins in public health. My guess is water just isn’t an appropriate vector for those things for a variety of reasons, but that’s pure speculation. It’s an interesting question. On the other hand, I don’t believe you’ll naturally get fluoride anywhere else but injected into your water (or naturally occurring), so that’s probably a good deal why.

[colordrops]

This is not a good faith argument to claim that fluoride and water are in the same class of substances when it comes to toxicity.

Also you are wrong that all flour in the US must be enriched. I have some unenriched flour on my shelf right now.

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/fluoride-children...

[azinman2]

I’m not implying they’re in the same class, I’m saying that the level used is implicitly important in saying whether or not something is toxic. To me it’s not a good faith argument to assume otherwise.

You’re right I was wrong about enrichment [1] - I didn’t know that. It is wide spread, however.

The study you cited seemed to be from areas of naturally occurring high levels. So I guess I should further qualify my statement - I am to mean that it’s non-toxic at the levels used in municipal water and in toothpaste. I thought you were saying there were studies suggesting otherwise at the levels used, which the CDC disagrees with [2]. I’m now rereading your comment where you talk about the levels used so you did address that. Apologies for not better latching onto that. But it did make it sound like these levels in use were potentially toxic, which has been very widely studied across many countries over decades with increasing life expectancy and dental improvements, so it would be very unexpected if so.

It seems that there isn’t a federal requirement for fluoride in municipal water - perhaps there are areas that don’t.

[1] https://www.fda.gov/media/94563/download

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/fluoridation/faqs/community-water-fluori...

[colordrops]

To claim that dose is the only factor involved is bad faith, or at least overly simplistic. For example, radiation and lead are cumulative. There is no minimum safe dose. Can you say definitively that there is no damage or cumulative effect from regular small dosages of fluoride?

Did you look at the study? The naturally occurring levels are below levels added to water in the US in many of the regions studied.

In any case you should be able to see that I'm not coming at this from some conspiracy nutjob angle but from sourced studies and reasonable thought processes.

My point is not that you are wrong. It's that, even if you are right, it's not some obvious open and shut case.

[defrost]

The Harvard quoted study above looks at children in China in areas with high levels in groundwater .. high being of the order of 3-11 mg/litre.

The correlated 'damage' cited was of less than half an IQ point observed difference at the upper end of the high levels.

The fluoride doses used in water treatment (here in Australia) are at most 1 mg/litre.

[colordrops]

The amounts with measurable cognitive deficits were less that the amounts added to drinking water in the US in several of the Chinese regions. It's in the study's data.

[defrost]

The study Developmental Fluoride Neurotoxicity: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis [1] (discussed in your link above) has data on drinking water in China.

It includes quotes relavant to the USofA:

    Such circumstances are difficult to find in many industrialized countries, because fluoride concentrations in community water are usually no higher than 1 mg/L, even when fluoride is added to water supplies as a public health measure to reduce tooth decay.

and

    In response to the recommendation of the NRC (2006), the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and the U.S. EPA recently announced that DHHS is proposing to change the recommended level of fluoride in drinking water to 0.7 mg/L from the currently recommended range of 0.7–1.2 mg/L, and the U.S. EPA is reviewing the maximum amount of fluoride allowed in drinking water, which currently is set at 4.0 mg/L

Note that the U.S. EPA is reviewing the maximum amount of fluoride allowed in drinking water concerns levels naturally occuring and is not a recommendation to add fluoride to US drinking water in excess of 1 mg/litre.

I am unable to find data in that report that supports your assertion.

If you have data you wish to draw eyes to then please quote the numbers and link to the source.

[1] https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/ehp.1104912

[colordrops]

The problem is that it's an EPA recommended dosage, and not regulated nationwide, leading to a large variance in levels. "The fact that fluoridation of water is not regulated nationwide leads to a challenge for individuals interested in generating meaningful data for nationwide databases." [1] In the short list of measurements in the quoted paper, it ranged from almost nothing to 1.5 mg/L, and that's a very small sample. Borden County in Texas has levels above 5.5 mg/L in some areas [2]

[1] https://www.ars.usda.gov/ARSUserFiles/80400525/Articles/jfca...

[2] https://www.beg.utexas.edu/files/content/beg/research/TCEQ_s...