In fact, Flouride may be actually harmful in children. According to a peer-reviewed finding, "aggregate fluoride exposure from all sources in an amount equivalent to 1.5 mg/L in drinking water is consistently associated with lower IQ in children." See https://www.law.com/thelegalintelligencer/2024/10/04/fluorid....
Nobody fluoridates the water to 1.5 mg/L. If you're fluoridating the water, your target is 0.7 mg/L.
The people with 1.5 mg/L fluoride (or higher--the EPA limit is 2.0mg/L) are because the groundwater is percolating through rock that is high in fluorides, and people don't want to spend the money on defluoridating the water down to acceptable standards. Defluoridation is of course much harder than fluoridation because fluorides are highly soluble.
The limits are set such that if you _only_ drank tap water you won't consume more than the safe limit. If you then reduce how much tap water you consume because you get hydration from other sources, your well under the limit.
Not accounting for someone eating tubes of fluorinated toothpaste, which is out of specified usage.
The coffee, soda, beer, or kombucha you drink was made with fluoridated water. Your salad was grown with fluoridated fruit was washed in fluoridated water.
Fluoride permeates modern supply chains because it’s literally in the water which is an input to countless things.
Fluoride proponents have utterly failed to control dosage and harmed public health in doing so.
> The coffee, soda, beer, or kombucha you drink was made with fluoridated water. Your salad was grown with fluoridated fruit was washed in fluoridated water.
>
How much flouride? And from what sources?
Typically farms need wells because of how much water infrastructure they need can't generally be supported by municipal water. There are exceptions particularly in dense areas with vertical farms or urban farms but this doesn't align with your claim, that effectively everything we consume has some detectable level of flouride.
The only thing studied that contained more flouride than municipal water but still 3x less than the safe limit, is tea. And that was measured with distilled water to eliminate the water source as a variable.
Most tea isn't grown in the USA.
So your claims fall flat on their face here, but I'm not done.
> Fluoride permeates modern supply chains because it’s literally in the water which is an input to countless things.
>
How much? Making such a claim is fine if we want hand waved values. But when you want to be an Internet advocate for a specific policy, show up with receipts or don't show up at all.
See previous link for current source of information on food supply.
> Fluoride proponents have utterly failed to control dosage and harmed public health in doing so.
Based on what evidence?
You have utterly failed to show you have a solid grasp on the scientific method, public policy, and critical thinking.
1. Most tea consumed worldwide is of Asian origin. Camellia sinensis is native to East Asia.
"On any given day, more than one half of the American population drinks tea. On a regional basis, the South and Northeast have the greatest concentration of tea drinkers."
Tea may easily contain 5 to 10 times as much fluoride as fluoridated water.
2. TOTAL intake is what determines fluoride toxicity. This has been established since the 1930s when fluoride was discovered to be the source of "mottled enamel" - dental fluorosis.
In 1991, total intake among adults in fluoridated areas in the US was estimated to be up to 6.6 mg/day. (US PHS, 1991)
"The daily intake of most adults is about equally divided among food, drinking water, beverages, and mouthrinses." (U.S. Dept. Health & Human Services, Report on fluoride benefits and risks. MMWR Recomm Rep. 1991 Jun 14;40(RR-7):1-8. PMID: 2051975.)
While you are right that it is very rare that a water system will fluoridate their water to levels of 1.5 mg/L, I don't think it's true that all systems fluoridating their water have targets or achieve a level of 0.7mg/L. You can see in the EPA's analysis of their fourth Sixth Year Review (SYR4) (https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2024-04/syr4_fluo...) that there is a large variation in the fluoride concentrations of fluoridated entry points (from 0.6mg/L to 1.2mg/L, with the 0.6mg/L cut-off being artificial).
The NTP monograph doesn't conclude that fluoridation at levels of 0.7mg/L are safe or unsafe, but it is better to be safe than sorry. With some populations receiving fluoridated water at concentrations of 1.2mg/L and an estimated 2% to 7% of the population receiving water fluoridated above this concentration, I think it's reasonable to be concerned in light of the NTP's monograph on fluoride (even if this just means to increase focus on de-fluoridation of water).
As per the NTP:
> The moderate confidence conclusions may also be relevant to people living in optimally fluoridated areas of the United States depending on the extent of their additional exposures to fluoride from sources other than drinking water.
Also just to note, the EPA's secondary maximum contaminant limit (SMCL) is 2.0mg/L. This isn't the federal limit as set forth by the MCL of 4.0mg/L, but notice is still required by the EPA here.
Taking the recent Cochrane report in mind, which shows a small reduction of 0.24 decayed tooth per child in places practicing fluoridation, and fails to find high quality studies on the effects of fluoridation for adults, it is reasonable to question the EPA's limits and the US's policy of fluoridation.
I can't find any strong evidence for the benefits of systemic ingestion of fluoride which makes me ultimately conclude that the policy is an ineffective one of forced medication (in the name of those who can't brush their teeth).
With no evidence of it being a safe policy, I don't know why the CDC and EPA still advocate nowadays for water fluoridation. Although perhaps costly to change, neither do I know why the EPA sets their limits to levels above where known harms (such as dental fluorosis and neurodevelopmental effects) occur. As Judge Edward Chen says:
> In all, there is substantial and scientifically credible evidence establishing that fluoride poses a risk to human health; it is associated with a reduction in the IQ of children and is hazardous at dosages that are far too close to fluoride levels in the drinking water of the United States.
The underlying study makes a much weaker claim than the people who are using it to campaign against fluoridation.
A big issue in this discourse is that for the strong claims to be true, it would essentially require existing science around fluoride toxicity and the related mechanisms of action to be materially incorrect, contrary to all historical evidence. Fluoride poisoning is a thing that happens and has straightforward interventions. Are we supposed to pretend this science doesn't exist? I actually worked in fluoride chemistry, it is difficult to square this circle.
In addition to the "plausible mechanism of action" question, there is the inconvenient observation that exposure to fluoride from natural dietary sources is far higher today than from municipal water. Why the obsession with municipal water augmentation in historically low-fluoride environs? Most people eat far more fluoride than what their water exposes them to.
I find this particular social contagion deeply weird. You see the same persistent misrepresentation on social media as climate science, but in the case of climate science the effects on people is obviously consequential so the motivated reasoning is more understandable. The fluoride thing is trying to invent an issue around a topic that is inconsequential by all evidence and science.
Who benefits by encouraging people to tilt at this windmill?
Do you have a reference for the claim that exposure to fluoride from natural dietary sources is far higher than what occurs from fluoridated water?
An EPA review on fluoride exposure that I found (https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2019-03/documents/fl...) puts most estimates of the "natural" dietary fluoride intake at 0.9mg per day. This is in contrast to the estimated 0.7 * 2 = 1.4mg of fluoride a person will ingest from consuming fluoridated water (with a fair number of water systems fluoridated at levels greater than 0.7mg/L).
Another study I found from the EFSA estimates fluoride intake from non-supplemented food at 0.120mg per day for adults compared to 0.500mg per day from water fluoridated at (1.0mg/L)
(https://efsa.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.2903/j.efsa...). Admittedly, in countries where salt is fluoridated, this will constitute the majority of fluoride ingested (especially given most of them don't fluoridate their water :P). But I don't think anti-fluoride advocates would support this either.
I also don't understand what you mean by the "strong claim" and "weak claim" of the NTP monograph. You seem to have doubts that the claims of the NTP monograph are true, based off of the known mechanisms of fluoride toxicity?
My best guess for why the rational anti-fluoride advocates are so stirred up over water fluoridation is that it is a policy proposed without currently a rigorous scientific backing. Per the recent Cochrane review, there is evidence that fluoridation mildly benefits children's teeth, and a lack of high-quality evidence that fluoridation presently benefits adults teeth. There also isn't good evidence that fluoride consumption isn't harmful at present levels (fluorosis is known to occur, and studies evaluated by the NTP point to neurodevelopmental harms, albeit with the conclusion for higher concentrations of fluoride); nor is there strong evidence that systemic fluoride ingestion has any benefits. They might therefore be angry at a somewhat political policy of forced medication that isn't well backed.
The NTP monograph is a very flawed document, as the review failed to consider a crucial confounder/modifier - iodine/thyroid status. Fluoride toxicity is directly dependent on the individual's thyroid/iodine status. If iodine-deficient, even miniscule amounts of fluoride may affect you. If iodine intake is excessive, then iodine toxicity may be pre-dominant - this has been known since the 1930s.
Are you sure the estimates of the fluoride intake and fluoride consumed respectively are wildly incorrect in light of this? This isn't the best source of information but using data from here (https://www.teausa.com/teausa/images/Tea_Fact_2021.pdf) you can put the estimate at the number of cups of green tea consumed by the average US citizen at 0.1 per day. This is definitely concerning for someone drinking lots of green tea but I don't think it invalidates the statistics. The EPA study also does account for tea consumption, stating in some contexts it forms the highest component of fluoride intake from beverages.
For the second article, this is interesting information and I can see causes for concern in the study (there were multiple hick-ups in the peer review process), and ideally high-quality randomised control trials would form the basis for a conclusion. But what is your opinion on policies of water fluoridation in light of this (I know you are a different commenter than who I was replying to, and don't expect your opinion to be the same)? Is it that people should be focussing on studying its (potentially harmful) effects in light of iodine exposure within regions? The link you posted, written by members of Parents of Fluoride-Poisoned Children, states that:
> As fluoride toxicity is directly related to iodine status - and iodine toxicity to fluoride status -, both mass-supplementation programs require urgent reassessment on a global scale.
and also asks:
> Furthermore, we call for the proper evaluation of the toxicity of fluoride on neurodevelopment based on the extensive body of evidence that addresses the impact on iodine and thyroid hormone metabolism.
They (Andreas Schuld) also state in a later article (https://substack.com/home/post/p-139843513) that:
> We also learned that most of the research linking fluoride to thyroid dysfunction had been actively suppressed by public health agencies worldwide, including the World Health Organization (WHO), the European Scientific Committee on Health and Environmental Risks (SCHER), as well as the U.S. CDC, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), the NTP, and the EPA.
The NSA can’t regulate itself - it needs court oversight. Courts are allowed to decide what matters to national security and what doesn’t, despite not being agents.
The Police can’t regulate themselves - they need court oversight. Courts are allowed to define what is acceptable policing and what is not, despite not being police.
The EPA can regulate itself and understands science. Courts aren’t allowed to weigh in because they aren’t scientists. The EPA is a morally upright actor, all other government agencies aren’t.
A perfectly rational position. (I say that with extreme sarcasm - it’s malarkey.)
The EPA was already significantly more subject to judicial review than the NSA, even prior to Chevron deference falling.
The cops are theoretically subject to it, but in practice... nah, mostly not. They receive at least Chevron-levels of deference for things like "I feared for my life!" or "he was coming right at me!" or "I thought it was a gun!" or "based on my experience and training the suspect was acting suspiciously" sort of expert claims.
The people with 1.5 mg/L fluoride (or higher--the EPA limit is 2.0mg/L) are because the groundwater is percolating through rock that is high in fluorides, and people don't want to spend the money on defluoridating the water down to acceptable standards. Defluoridation is of course much harder than fluoridation because fluorides are highly soluble.