There isn’t any. The very little research showing any effects on cognitive abilities are experiments using very high fluoride levels - nowhere near the levels in water. Like most conservative “stances”, it’s a farce.
> However, in 1973, the Dutch Supreme Court ruled that there was no legal basis for fluoridation…. The debate hasn’t been meaningfully revived since then, Hofman told Euronews Health. "People started to say, ‘Well, the government should not give us some medicine [when] we cannot choose where to buy our drinking water from," she said.
That’s the “little c” conservative viewpoint. You don’t need to prove it’s harmful. The default should be not putting chemicals in everyone’s drinking water.
but youre taking chemicals out right? and lots of water has natural flouride?
there is definitely an argument for an optimal amount of minerals in water being non zero (not only because having it that clean would be practically expensive) but also because we benefit from natural minerals. now if some natural water source isnt as good as another one, why not correct it? we have the technology.
especially at the community level. the little c stance should be to let communities decide, not ban it from the top down.
im not saying they are putting too much in. im saying natural water is already fluorinated in many places and doesnt need supplementation. so to treat fluorinful water as unnatural is disingenuous.
You are assuming they are just randomly flouridating water without measuring for target levels. I don't even know if you are thinking this through clearly as if they are just randomly dumping flouride into water supplies without measuring against specific targets.
Because if adding fluoride to water isn't additionally preventative beyond the use of toothpaste, then adding the fluoride to the public water system is just wasting public funds.
How do you prove no effect on any bodily system long term? People don’t like to talk about it, or they pretend otherwise, but this is basically impossible.
If the benefit is great enough then the risk makes sense. That is the case in a lot of areas. Is it worth taking a risk of an unknown effect somewhere in the body in exchange for… a marked but not even drastic reduction in cavities…? Not sure…
The bitch about scientific studies is you can’t find what you don’t know to look for. That has to be part of the trade off calculus when deciding what substances to introduce to our internal environment.
> The bitch about scientific studies is you can’t find what you don’t know to look for.
This is only true if you assume that all effects are too small to notice. If you run an experiment on adding fluoride to water, declare an interest in enamel thickness, and then observe that 30% of the experimental group died within six months, you just made a finding that you didn't know you should have been looking for.
Okay? You can still come up with a correlation between net fluoride mass of bones and teeth and negative health traits or outcomes. You can also compare occupational exposure against normal exposure, no drinking water exposure (lived life in country without this policy), etc. There are many different types of scientific studies.
I am much less confident than you appear to be that we are able to detect a significant percentage of negative health traits.
Let’s say that hypothetically there is a 3rd order effect on the excretion pattern of some neurotransmitter. Can we detect that? Could it negatively affect mood regulation? There are a million things like that.
I guess the question is why your priors are so far weighted to the side of negative outcomes. If we're talking about yet undiscovered effects of something it seems equally plausible for those effects to be positive. Aspirin is a pretty good example of this where we keep discovering more positive effects. And I can understand somewhat the bias toward the state of nature but there's lots of examples where our deviations were positive, the biggest one being the cognitive effects of cooking food.
> If we're talking about yet undiscovered effects of something it seems equally plausible for those effects to be positive.
Where do you get this from? If you ingest a random chemical (or imagine licking random objects...), do you really expect the chances of it being beneficial vs. detrimental to your health to be remotely close to 50/50?
> The fractional retention or balance of fluoride at any age depends on the quantitative features of absorption and excretion. For healthy, young, or middle-aged adults, approximately 50 percent of absorbed fluoride is retained by uptake in calcified tissues, and 50 percent is excreted in the urine. For young children, as much as 80 percent can be retained owing to increased uptake by the developing skeleton and teeth (Ekstrand et al., 1994a, b). Such data are not available for persons in the later years of life, but based on bone mineral dynamics, it is likely that the fraction excreted is greater than the fraction retained.
> .9 Radiographic detection of teeth and skeletal changes and microscopic examination of affected bone are helpful adjunct procedures for diagnosis.
> Histopathologic and radiographic examination of bones detects bone lesions and tentatively confirms osteofluorosis.14,26 Biopsy or rib or coccygeal vertebrae is used to obtain samples for skeletal fluoride analysis.23
> We have developed a localized noninvasive nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) method for determining the accumulated bone fluoride content in human index fingers
When it comes to things like radioactivity we assume a linear no threshhold model (e.g. that lower concentrations still have effects, just our measuring tools aren't good enough to detect it) and spend billions as a result. Why wouldn't we do the same for flouride?
By default, we should not add anything to the water.
The burden of proof should be on the people who want to add it. Because that is extra cost, extra chemical. If they can't prove it, then we don't do it.
> Is there scope to believe they just think it may be better not to have it in the water?
Are you asking if there's room to believe it's just a sincere "everything you eat or drink should stay untouched, like it's found in nature" belief? OK sure, let's go with that. So why aren't they working to dismantle water treatment plants altogether and e.g. fighting against modern industrial farming practices in that case?
> No, I’m asking if it’s possible they might just rightly or wrongly believe water fluoridation is bad.
I'm happy to believe it if I can understand what is leading them to that belief, which is exactly what I'm asking. Is it a general aversion to unnatural stuff (hence my previous comment) or based on some evidence (hence my initial question) or something else (what?)?
> I believe they think water fluoridation is linked it lower IQs, again, rightly or wrongly. I could be mistaken but that’s always seemed pretty clear.
Again, we go back to my initial question [1]: what is the best evidence in favor of this?
I'd like to point out that fluoride was previously very much a liberal stance until the rise in MAGA/Qanon conservatives.
I grew up in the PNW of the USA and lots of small hippie towns have been removing fluoride for decades. It comes up on city ballots every year in Oregon.
