[valarauko]

Out of curiosity, why would growing up on bottled water lead to terrible dental outcomes? I grew up in India, where the water supply isn't fluoridated, and I didn't see dental health that was significantly worse than the US. We probably got most of our fluoride from ingesting bits of fluoridated toothpaste.

[xupybd]

Yeah it's possible that I'm conflating correlation with causation. But her dentist seems to think it's a factor. They coat her teeth with a fluoride paste and it seems to be working.

On the flip side her late 90s grandmother still has some teeth and walks around unassisted. I don't think any of my grandparents made it to their 80s.

[valarauko]

Tangential anecdote: I had a co-worker in India who grew up in a region with excessive naturally occurring fluoride in the groundwater. As a result, he had blotchy dark brown teeth - not stained, the substructure of the teeth were brown all the way through. The side effect was that the teeth were substantially stronger than regular teeth, as were presumably his bones. My understanding is that extremely high fluoride can mess with bone and tooth development in the embryo, with lower levels only showing up as the cosmetic blotches but no developmental issues.

[techdragon]

The benefits that motivate widespread fluoridation, kick in at concentrations well below those needed to stain teeth. If I recall the history of it all correctly, the level of fluoride needed to stain teeth basically leaves you with teeth that are all but impervious to run of the mill cavities from plaque buildup. The bugs just don’t have the power to degrade tooth enamel containing fluoride minerals at concentrations that are high enough the staining becomes noticeably brown (im talking about an arbitrary colour grade here so please be generous in interpretation of just what I mean by “brown” if performing additional research to refute me)

So basically while we don’t suffer for lack of fluoride to harden our teeth… the extra fluoride gives us a lot of protection. And yes you can have too much fluoride, but your never going to see that kind of medical pathology unless you somehow get a lot more bioavailable fluoride in you in a short span of time than you could possibly get from drinking multiple litres (or even gallons) of fluoridated water per day, they don’t put enough fluoride in the water to turn teeth brown, and we have ample evidence that fluoride bearing spring water above these concentrations does no harm for long periods of time.

I get being concerned, but we got so much more important things to worry about with regard to environmental chemicals than fluoride. It’s pretty easy to read the history, find out about the kids with the brown but perfect teeth, find the other stories from around the world, the second generation families living healthy on spring water that is/was naturally highly fluoridated, and put it all together yourself without need to take anyone’s word for the fact this actually is a pretty good “one weird trick for perfect teeth”.

[valarauko]

Agree with everything you're saying. For what it's worth, the concerns about the high fluoride in groundwater are almost entirely about unborn infants - adults seem to suffer no severe issues from drinking it. With teeth, high fluoride exposure causes blotchy teeth before they erupt - once the (adult) teeth have erupted, the fluoride seems to help. It's also a continuum - some regions have such high levels that it's considered unsafe for consumption, period. These are the regions where developmental issues are seen.