• RQG@lemmy.world
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    29 days ago

    Toxicologist here. I think that take is dishonest or dumb.

    Taking a lethal dose is almost never the concern with any substance in our drinking water.

    Hormones, heavy metals, persistent organic chemicals, ammonia are all in our drinking water. But for all of them we can’t drink enough water to die from a high dose.

    Some of them still have a large effect on our bodies.

    It’s about the longterm effects. Which we need longterm studies to learn about. That makes them harder to study.

    Still doesn’t mean flouride does anything bad longerm. But the argument is bad.

      • Hylactor@sopuli.xyz
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        1 month ago

        You just made me mad by helping me realize that the Trump bros are going to break water by removing fluoride long before they fix water by removing lead.

        • ryannathans@aussie.zone
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          1 month ago

          Are you sure fluoride doesn’t? It does accumulate in the soil, building up in crops. Considering fluoride exposure from all sources, many people are above upper safe limits, even from tea drinking alone

          I don’t think fluoride should be added to water as it just pollutes the environment, where 99.99% of water isn’t coming in contact with teeth

          • marcos@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            It doesn’t. This is high-school chemistry.

            Fluoride only “accumulates” up to the peak concentration of the environment (no further) on places where it is removed from contact with that environment.

            You can only accumulate fluoride in the soil if you keep adding it and there is almost no rain to wash it away.

            • ryannathans@aussie.zone
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              1 month ago

              Like how crops are irrigated with town water, and in many areas with lowering rainfall? Accumulates in fruit, vegetables, leaves too

              • marcos@lemmy.world
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                1 month ago

                Yes, irrigation with the minimum possible amount of water is known to destroy land for millennia at this point. But sodium will be a problem way before you notice any change in fluoride.

      • Ferrous@lemmy.ml
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        1 month ago

        Yup, same with PFAS and forever chemicals. Maybe I’m ignorant because I’m not a doctor, but I don’t know if this line of thinking holds water - pun not intended.

      • reptar@lemmy.world
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        29 days ago

        lead poisoning becomes evident pretty early though doesn’t it? (With respect to kids)

        I would think that the ratio of persistent exposure to unsafe level has got to be easily higher in cases like Flint than any fluoride-in-the-water usage. Just speculation on my part.

        What measures are taken to avoid screwing up the dosage, anyone know? Maybe predilute so that an oops requires multiple buckets instead of vials?

    • NeverNudeNo13@lemmings.world
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      1 month ago

      It’s so funny I was just having a similar conversation about neurotoxic venomous animals in another thread. Lethality is an obviously concerning threshold, but there are substances out there that can easily destroy your quality of life and livelihood that never reach the concern of being lethal.

      I think for mostly rational people concerned about fluoride in their water is that it was a public health decision made with little to no actual science proving it’s safety or efficacy when it was first decided that they were going to add it to the public water supply. The proposed benefits of it weren’t even supported by scientific evidence, it was just supposed that exposure to sodium fluoride could potentially reduce tooth decay for some.

      Personally, I’ve suffered from the cosmetic damage of dental fluorosis, and I’m not necessarily thrilled about fluoride. But I have way more issues with public mandates founded on pseudoscience than I am with sodium fluoride. Especially now that we can see evidence that for some people fluoride can be especially beneficial.

      So what was wrong with giving people the option of using fluoride toothpaste or mouthwashes… Why did it have to go into the public water supply?

        • NeverNudeNo13@lemmings.world
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          30 days ago

          Yeah that proves my point entirely.

          In 1945 they fluoridated the first public water supply.

          In 1979 the first published research began to appear to show how fluoride might be able to remineralize dental enamel.

          • winterayars@sh.itjust.works
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            29 days ago

            In 1945, Grand Rapids became the first city in the world to fluoridate its drinking water.The Grand Rapids water fluoridation study was originally sponsored by the U.S. Surgeon General, but was taken over by the NIDR shortly after the Institute’s inception in 1948. During the 15-year project, researchers monitored the rate of tooth decay among Grand Rapids’ almost 30,000 schoolchildren. After just 11 years, Dean- who was now director of the NIDR-announced an amazing finding. The caries rate among Grand Rapids children born after fluoride was added to the water supply dropped more than 60 percent. This finding, considering the thousands of participants in the study, amounted to a giant scientific breakthrough that promised to revolutionize dental care, making tooth decay for the first time in history a preventable disease for most people.

            • Alteon@lemmy.world
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              29 days ago

              Yeah, I guess that somehow totes proves his point. Super easy to see the world wrong when they have the reading comprehension of a 6th grader.

              • winterayars@sh.itjust.works
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                29 days ago

                So the person above may think they’re so clever, or whoever fed them that factoid may think that. Notice the claim is remineralization. Maybe that’s true, it may be that a study first showed that in 1975 and that’s not contradicted by your link but that is a non sequitur. It’s not what we’re talking about, it’s not a good faith argument.

      • jrubal1462@mander.xyz
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        26 days ago

        In our area, the only water supply WITH Fluoride serves an area with a median HOUSEHOLD income of less than $40k with more than 25% living below the poverty line. For communities like these the fluoride is critical because there will be a lot of children that don’t have access to fluoride supplements, or regular care from a pediatric (or regular) dentist.

    • ryannathans@aussie.zone
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      1 month ago

      Fluoride does have long term effects though once you consider fluoride exposure through all sources like diet, which is mostly due to fluoride from water ending up in farmland. Tradesmen alone regularly exceed the upper limits due to high water consumption in hotter seasons

    • refalo@programming.dev
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      28 days ago

      never the concern

      It is when you’re responding to people who think 5G is turning the frogs gay and activating hidden vaccine microchips.

    • Mango@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Also “because I’m an expert and I say so” is a good way to convince someone to let you poison them.

    • Pulptastic@midwest.social
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      29 days ago

      We probably have enough A/B data now to make some inferences yeah? Compare countries with fluoridated water to countries without.

      • jrubal1462@mander.xyz
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        26 days ago

        You can get even more granular than that. CDC maintains a list of water systems and whether or not they add fluoride. CDC My Water System. To give you an idea of how granular that is, there are 78 different water systems in my county alone. For most of my life I assumed we had fluoridated water but apparently only 1/78 of our water systems are. I only checked when we had kids and I needed to know whether or not I needed to give them Fluoride Drops.

    • FreshLight@sh.itjust.works
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      30 days ago

      Yeah, it seems to me like he got the right idea and wanted to convince people by making an extreme statement…

      • RQG@lemmy.world
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        29 days ago

        That might well be the case. I’m not sure if it is helpful to use those half truths which are simpler to convince certain people. Or if it weakens the point because it is in the end not really correct.

    • observes_depths@aussie.zone
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      29 days ago

      This. How can we be completely certain that something isn’t damaging over the long term. I’m not anti fluoride, but healthy debate and scepticism is a good thing, especially when we’re all forced to consume a substance with the only alternative being dehydration and death. People need to be free to make their own choices.

      • blind3rdeye@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        Pretty much anything you can think of is recommended by someone, because different people have conflicting views. The key is to choose whose recommendations are based on the best reasoning & evidence aligning with your goals.