Put another way, Florida supports the right of informed consent with regard to fluoride treatment. As a thyroid cancer survivor I decline that treatment due to fluoride competing with iodine for receptors and causing goiters and tumors as a result. The only reason I can decline is that I'm using well water rather than a public system. Now people in Florida can all choose. I'm pro choice on abortion too for the same reason: Your body your choice.
Without comment on the question of health benefits or harms, I'm curious whether you've had the well water you use tested. Fluoride concentrations in bore-well water varies quite widely, and concentrations higher than fluoridated tap water not uncommon. There are several areas here (in Aus) where fluoride is removed to reach the recommended concentration of 0.5-1.1 ppm. This obviously varies based on location.
why would you want this? brush your teeth or swish with high concentration fluoride mouthwash. there's actually no benefit of ingesting fluoridated water. any benefit is simply incidental since it must touch your teeth down the hatch. don't take my word for it - go read the papers yourself, they all say as much. Or to put it another way, would pumping fluoride to your stomach help your teeth? I hope you know the answer.
literally every toothpaste in the united states explicitly says to spit, not swallow. there's a reason for that.
Not everyone has impeccable brushing habits and reducing cavities is a net benefit to public health like sanitation departments. I would be more interested to see a source as to why you think there's no benefit to fluorinated water when there are studies that are a quick search away for fluorinated water.
> reducing cavities is a net benefit to public health like sanitation departments
what is the connection between reducing cavities and sanitation departments? cavities are not communicable.
Also, the paper you linked is my point. there's no actual benefit of ingestion. the effect is purely incidental. it's more effective to apply fluoride to the teeth. nowhere does it actually explain that drinking it is what is beneficial. the difference in the incidence of caries is because by fluoridating the water it obviously will touch teeth, which has well known positive effects.
the main conclusion of the paper is what everyone should hopefully know already - brush your teeth regularly with fluoride toothpaste.
out of curiosity, would you be OK with vitamins being added to the water? most people are deficient in many.
> would you be OK with vitamins being added to the water?
Provided there's reasonable scientific evidence that this is fine and effective and not expensive, I don't see why not. I don't think I've ever seen it proposed.
that is good to know. fundamentally we'll have to agree to disagree. I do not agree with experimentation with the populace's water supply as a matter of principal. fyi there's already plenty of evidence that supplements are useful for those that are sufficient. of course the main counter argument is that if you're eating a balanced diet supplements are unnecessary (which is true). though that's just about as helpful as saying water fluoridation is unnecessary because you can brush your teeth (which is also true).
Whilst I can see your point of view, I think that fluoride in water is an issue that provoked knee-jerk reactions.
Here in the UK, there's areas with and without fluoridisation - the reason being that naturally the water in different areas has different fluoride concentrations with some areas having no need for adding fluoride as it's already there. The benefits were very easy to determine as (presumably) cavities were more common in those areas with low fluoride content, so it's less about experimentation and more about ensuring that more people can gain the same benefit.
“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.”
it probably don't make a big difference even in your case.
in the water system quantities and peer reviewed studies dosages, the psychological impacts are more real than iodine absorption.
flouride is not added today for teeth health (distributing mouth wash would do a better job) but it helps keep the water good for drinking, together with stuff like chlorine, which change by region.
... the real reason here is: it's as divisive and harder to reach an informed conclusion either way, just like abortion. oh American politics.
Adding fluoride to water is a strange topic people get very worked up about. The levels of added fluoride are very low, it's been well studied at this point. Some places in the world need to filter out naturally occurring fluoride, which is one of the reasons that not everywhere adds it.
In NZ we appear to be moving in the opposite direction where central govt is now going to mandate the addition of fluoride where it was previously a local decision.
The levels of added fluoride are very low, it's been well studied at this point.
If you want to steel man the argument you should point out that the maximum allowed fluoride levels in US are quite a bit higher than in, for example the EU (on the order of 3 times higher), and that some recent studies have indicated some potential health risks for young children who consume a lot of water around the very top end of what the US allows.
Of course the correct response to this is to overhaul the recommendations and lower the maximum allowed levels, not to issue state wide bans.
Bans are more effective. There’s always some local hero in the water supply org who thinks he knows what’s best for everyone and modifies the fluoride amount to his liking. For example there was someone in Virginia a few years ago who lowered the fluoride to sensible levels and was fired for it.
> Adding fluoride to water is a strange topic people get very worked up about
Yes. It's weird, it seems to be given a special level of paranoia. And it's a longstanding one, the paranoid general in Dr Strangelove was obsessed with fluoridation.
Lots of substances have arguments over safe legal levels, with varying levels of scientific evidence. This seems to have a crusade, and I wonder who started it.
If some areas had sufficient levels of that multivitamin in the water naturally and it produced a benefit, then it would make sense to add similar levels of that multivitamin to the water supplies that lacked it.
The recent NIH meta-study indicated there may be neurotoxic effects at concentrations within an order of magnitude of the recommended drinking water level (perhaps even at just 2x the recommendation), I wouldn't call that "very low".
Before you jump to reactions, remember that there isn't consensus worldwide on what the best approach to this is. For example most countries in the EU also don't fluorinate water, but it's instead in toothpaste or table salt or etc.
This bill is likely based on the same sort of scientific knowledge that leads people to recommend drinking raw milk. The litmus test to use is if it is banning fluoridation, or if it is reducing the maximum allowable amount of fluoride in the water to something below 0.75 mg/L (the current EPA limit is 4 mg/L).
I haven't been able to find the bill text here, but I am virtually certain that it's the former case, which tells me that they're not actually motivated by the supposed harms of fluoride in the >0.75 mg/L range.
It (circumcision) also pretty clearly unconstitutional and otherwise unlawful.
Yahweh and Allah sadly didn't mandate fluoridation when revealing their will for mankind through their prophets. But somehow genital mutilation survives in the US in no small part because of religion.
To play devil’s advocate, salt and milk aren’t pumped into your house by the government. You can also buy iodine-free salt and vitamin d-free milk if you choose.
No. Unless you want the US added to the list of countries where the advice to tourists is "Don't drink the water".
Water additives are proven to improve the health of the populace. There are corner cases, and we can debate appropriate levels, but an outright ban of all additives is regressive.
There seems to be a lot of regressive attitudes going around these days. See: Measles outbreak.
water additives are used to remove bad things in the water. so in effect the additives exist to actually move the water qualify closer to the "default", not "enhance" it. if tap water was literally h20 and nothing else the additives would be unnecessary, no?
as far as measles go, people have the right to not get vaccinated if they choose - it's dumb, though and others have the right to not let them participate in things since they're not vaccinated, too. it's not really analogous to the fluoride thing at all anyway.
Default water, lol. What an incredibly, terribly, dumb argument. There is no such thing as "Default Water" - it neither exists in nature, nor in man-made systems. Good luck with that. We can - and should - modify our our systems in the interests of public health. Nothing comes without corner cases which impact people like you - them's the breaks. Life isn't fair, but we are engineering a society for the benefit of almost everyone in it.
People can choose not to drink flouridated tap water if they want - building a well isn't that expensive, although you will probably need a treatment system because of the naturally occurring stuff (minerals, hydrogen sulphide, possibly excess flouride and other stuff).
"Freedom isn't free", as they like to say. You may have to invest in your "freedom" to drink the water you want to drink. You will have to pay the price of your kids not getting vaccinated - they may not be able to go to public schools.
There are much bigger hills worth dying on (see: Flint, MI). Leave the wildly successful public health programs alone.
> People can choose not to drink flouridated tap water if they want - building a well isn't that expensive, although you will probably need a treatment system because of the naturally occurring stuff (minerals, hydrogen sulphide, possibly excess flouride and other stuff).
that's hilarious because brushing your teeth is more effective, and cheaper than adding fluoride to water. I'm sure people in Manhattan will really get on building those wells.
at the end of the day there's not a single paper that actually says ingesting fluoride is water. they all correlate incidental fluoride contact on the teeth, due to it being in the water.
fact is, brushing your teeth is more effective and has no downsides. ingesting fluoride is bad and is discouraged literally not only by all dentists, but this fact is present on all toothpaste in the usa.
Despite people knowing about the effectiveness of brushing teeth with fluoride toothpaste, there are benefits (less cavities in young people) to having a certain level of fluoride in the water. Presumably, not everyone is good at brushing their teeth, yet we can improve dental health by adding in some fluoride in those areas that have low or no fluoride naturally in their water supply.
thank you for proving that ingesting fluoride has any actual benefit. a superior public health program would be to simply send toothpaste and a toothbrush to anyone who requests free of charge as topical application is more effective and there's literal consensus on this, unlike fluoridated water.
(ironically, I bet you don't swallow the water after you brush your teeth. deep down you know it's bad for ya).
More bad faith talking points - which have been addressed by other commenters in other sub-threads responding to you. (I am able to read those, you know)
This is a dead horse. You're in the wrong. Please do not engage with me any more.
they haven't though. feel free to post a paper showing that fluoride ingestion is good for you. there's no dispute that fluoride contact on the teeth is good.
there are plenty of papers showing that *ingestion* may be bad for you and results in lower IQ. feel free to research.
salt and milk don't come out of your tap, though. would you agree with governments building giant towers everywhere resulting in humidifying the air with chemically infused mists (which are said to be beneficial)?
after all, if you prefer the current air, you can wear a breathing mask attached to a tank with your air of choice.
it's crazy to me that people can see what harm the government can do in 2025 and still think the government knows best.
It's not about thinking the government knows best it's about thinking the research knows best. Fluoride in water is widely considered one of the largest public health victories and study after study finds it largely safe and worth the potential trade offs.
The thing that's so wild about being anti fluoride is it's been going on for so long, it's possible your grandparents have never drank unfluoridated water at least in their adult lives, and at such scale that even if everything was a coordinated lie there would be very clear numbers showing problems.
> if everything was a coordinated lie there would be very clear numbers showing problems
that's not how science works though. people in the western hemisphere are becoming more unhealthy, and there is definitely not a consensus that fluoridated water is good. there are plenty of papers showing both conclusions.
at the end of the day though, there's actually no benefit to fluoride ingestion. no paper has shown this. what they do show though, is that when you add it to the water people have better tooth health, because the fluoride touches your teeth. however brushing your teeth is even more effective.
so can I assume that if there was research that breathing some chemically infused mist is good for you, you'd support the government in creating towers to spray this mist across the country? after all in this premise the research says it's good.
Sure why wouldn’t I? We do it already with things that aren’t healthy all the time. If we could, let’s say alleviate all allergies, with only very minor impacts to the environment or human health why wouldn’t we.
That being said it’s a false equalavincy. You can’t avoid the air you can avoid the public water supply.
> You can’t avoid the air you can avoid the public water supply.
You can't though in practice. If you live in urban area for example. It's functionally equivalent. If you say well, I could say gas mask with tank. If you say bottled water, I could say respirator, etc.
I do not see how this matters at all. The government regulates it, how it gets to your house makes little difference. Also, I don’t pay “the government” for my water/electric/etc, I pay companies which makes your argument even more confusing, it all comes down to regulations.
the default water people consume comes from the tap. you don't see how it's different? it's not like people buy water of their choice and hook it up to their plumbing.
Okay. But that's not at all present in the post I responded to.
This is government action we are discussing right now. The government can't know best when it puts fluoride in the water but it can know best when it bans municipalities from doing so?
> This is government action we are discussing right now. The government can't know best when it puts fluoride in the water but it can know best when it bans municipalities from doing so?
I don't agree with the ban. people should be about to vote on this.
The chief chemical added to tap water is chlorine, to kill off all of the organisms that live in the water. Clostridium difficile isn't exactly something you want to get with your drinking water, unless you really, really love your diarrhea.
After a few years on a well, it becomes clear how much chlorine. Opening a tap on tap water smells like a swimming pool. You can smell it clear across the room.
I don't think this is, among the recent posts about US, the one for which you should have such a reaction... but maybe I'm missing something important here.
Do European countries use fluoride in their water?
Varies a lot from country to country, but over all it is done to a much lower degree than in the US.
However the big difference is that there isn't a ban on it. There are scientific guidelines published by the EU and then it is up to each country/state to decide if they want to add it or not based on local considerations.
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