Again with the drinking water!? FFS, Jack, I never said anything about drinking water! You’re shadow boxing against your own strawmen here. I’ve never said anything at all disparaging about the proven health benefits or safety of water fluoridation. You claim there is a loud minority of alarmists trumpeting its dangers, but where are they? Who are they? They’re certainly not in this thread. There’s just you, arguing against things that were never said. So, from my perspective, there are zero people saying that water fluoridation is dangerous, and there is you, continuing to argue in defense of something that shouldn’t even require defending. Keep fighting the good fight, though :rolleyes:
You’ve shown great zeal in your efforts. I commend you. You’ll be ready when one of those alarmists or conspiracy theorists show up. Though, I predict they never will.
In fact, I am betting we will see another post from you reassuring us about the safety of fluoride in drinking water before we see anything from that loud minority you’re fighting against.
Then do inform us where in the U.S.* this mysterious “overuse” of fluoride is occurring and document the alleged health consequences.
*next we’ll get “I never said anything about the U.S.!”. O.K., then where are these dreadful things happening? Ulan Bator?
My dentist has me using a prescription high fluoride toothpaste.
I have a couple shallow spots of decay that aren’t bad enough for a filling. Dentist told me high fluoride can sometimes reverse early decay. That’s why he has me using the special toothpaste.
I haven’t seen the research. But following my dentists advice makes sense to me.
Yes, there are other fluoride treatments to improve dental health besides water fluoridation, which is far and away the best-known application.
I may be again going out on a limb here, but I’m going to guess that when Bear_Nenno linked to a website (of the IOAMT) discussing alleged fluoride hazards, he might just possibly have noticed this header at the top of the page:
“In summary, given the elevated number of fluoride sources and the increased rates of fluoride intake in the American population, which have risen substantially since water fluoridation began in the 1940’s, it has become a necessity to reduce and work toward eliminating avoidable sources of fluoride exposure, including water fluoridation, fluoride containing dental materials, and other fluoridated products.”
The group is heavily into “biological dentistry” which means opposing water fluoridation (they also view amalgam fillings as “poison” and support their removal for highly dubious health reasons):
Forgive me for assuming that someone who cites the IOAMT might just possibly be aware that water fluoridation is an issue for some and that there are activists opposing it with bad science and fearmongering.
Ask the EPA, man. They’re the ones who claimed " In a few areas of the United States fluoride concentrations in water are much higher than normal, mostly from natural sources. Fluoride is one of the drinking water contaminants regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) because it can occur at these toxic levels." Does that statement upset you? Ask them where these areas are. You’re the one who is so passionate about fluoride. I personally don’t care where these areas are. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. You’re really grinding that ax on this one.
You are forgiven. And for the sake of ending this hijack, and because I’ve grown tired of this futile effort to explain myself to you. You obviously care a great deal about fluoride. I’m sorry I’ve offended you. I was not citing the IOAMT for anything, nor did I read that pamphlet or even care what it had to say. I made no comment on any opinion or conclusion that the pamphlet may have reached. That was not the point of the link I provided. If you would please reread my original post, and read it without projecting some kind of crazy agenda on my part, you will see that I was merely directing the OP to a *list]/i] of studies “showing that increased sources of fluoride over the past decades have elevated our exposure to potentially harmful levels.” That’s it man. “Dangerous”. “Hazardous”, etc. Those are your words, not mine. I said “harmful” which is the same word used by the EPA. You’re attacking me as if I said, “Water fluoridation is dangerous, and here is a cite from the IOAMT to back up my statement”. That is absolutely not what I said. I’ve already apologized for any such implication. I’ve also apologized for being off-topic. The bibliography on that IOAMT “fact sheet” had many scientific studies that I thought the OP was asking about. I did not intend to endorse or refute any conclusion or opinion that the fact sheet itself had reached. I only meant to provide the OP with a list of studies. Before posting, I looked at the list and checked several of the studies from .gov or other reputable sites. The first one I check, (the third on the list) stated, “Fluoride pollution from various industrial emissions can also contaminate water supplies. In a few areas of the United States fluoride concentrations in water are much higher than normal, mostly from natural sources. Fluoride is one of the drinking water contaminants regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) because it can occur at these toxic levels. In 1986, the EPA established a maximum allowable concentration for fluoride in drinking water of 4 milligrams per liter, a guideline designed to prevent the public from being exposed to harmful levels of fluoride." I checked a few others that studied the rising rates of exposure of the past several years and others that studied the affects of fluoride toxicity. I felt like this was a comprehensive list of the types of studies the OP was asking about, so I pointed him to it to do his own reading. Most of the studies talked about contamination from natural sources, from industrial applications, and from incidents like children eating toothpaste like its candy. I didn’t mean to imply anything about water fluoridation or anything of the sort. I was simply saying, “sure, here’s a list of studies you’d be interested in”. RitterSport already pointed out how the OP was actually asking about studies showing that fluoride had no medical benefit, not that fluoride can be harmful at particularly high levels. RitterSport was right, and I admitted that my reply was off-topic and apologized for any anti-fluoride statements inferred by my post.
I really don’t know what more you want from me. I was unaware of the IOAMT or of any anti-fluoride agenda. I now regret using the bibliography in their pamphlet as a convenient sample of studies that I thought were relevant and interesting to the OP and germane to the discussion.
There are plenty of studies on the dangers of artificial sweeteners as well. If someone were to ask if there had been any studies on the dangers of aspartame, I would have posted something similar along the lines of, “sure, and here is a long list of them”. That wouldn’t mean that I think it’s dangerous, or really give two shits either way. If I’m referencing a bibliography, and not the paper itself or its conclusion, then I wouldn’t expect people to think I necessarily agree with the pamphlet, but rather, I just found a long list of relevant studies, conveniently compiled by an irrelevant organization. It’s the studies I thought were relevant.
Anyway, I think I’ve rambled enough. I really need to end this hijack. I’m not sure how many different ways I can say that I don’t think water fluoridation is a bad thing. If it helps you to think that you’ve crushed an anti-fluoride uprising, then that’s fine. Good work!
I think you would have been better off actually linking to the cites that you think are valid rather than a scare-piece from an actual anti-fluoride crackpot group. I’m sure you’re all on board with reasonable water fluoridation and fluoride toothpaste, but the group you cited is not.
I don’t know why you think Jackmannii is some pro-fluoride nut – he hasn’t come across that way to me in this thread. Your link to those crackpots may have set him off – they certainly set me off.
Anyway, the answer to the OP is, yes, fluoride has proven dental health benefits.
“more likely to occur due to increased sources of contamination and exposure” is not a simple, factual statement when your source states “In a few areas of the United States fluoride concentrations in water are much higher than normal, mostly from natural sources”.
You contributed a scare sheet from a quack organization and then went hunting for support for that quack organization’s agenda. The question here isn’t whether excessive fluoride intake is problematic, it’s whether excessive intake is a pervasive issue.
Regardless of the “controversial” subject involved, whether it’s fluoridation, aspartame, vaccines, genetically modified foods or whatever, if someone says “sure, there are a lot of studies showing it’s dangerous” and links to quacky websites containing a cherry-picked list of them, it’s going to look like an endorsement of that point of view.
If that wasn’t obvious to you before, it should be now.
New from JAMA Pediatrics: Association Between Maternal Fluoride Exposure During Pregnancy and IQ Scores in Offspring in Canada
I only read the abstract, and the thing that immediately stands out is that they only found an effect on boys, not girls. When they combine girls and boys, then the effect comes back, but that can be due to the size of the effect in boys being large enough to statistically swamp the lack of effect in girls.
Girls and boys are different, and I have no idea how fluoride might lower IQ, so it might make sense to see a sex difference, but that is something to me that is a red flag for multiple testing problems, or just spurious findings.
Again, I only read the abstract, so maybe this is all addressed in the article. It is stated that the subjects with fluoride in their water are urban, and the non-fluoride subjects are rural. It is possible that fluoride is just a proxy for something else which differs between urban and rural environments, such as pollution.
Mostly what I’m saying is that if I were a reviewer on this paper I would have read the whole thing more carefully instead of just skimming the abstract, but those are the things I would have been thinking about while reading it after reading the abstract.
Oh, and Fotheringay-Phipps thanks for posting a link to the actual paper, instead of to some wire service article on some newspaper’s website that doesn’t mention the study authors, and maybe, if we’re lucky, mentions the journal it was published in.
Can you quote where you saw that? AFAICT, all subjects were from one of 6 cities (Vancouver, Montreal, Kingston, Toronto, Hamilton, and Halifax).
OTOH, there were differences in education and income level between the two cohorts - I would think that might be significant.
You’re right, looking at it again I’m not seeing an urban rural divide. I must have misread “urine” (and I’m sticking with that excuse). Looking through things more carefully, the regression graph almost makes it look like fluoride increases FSIQ in girls, and decreases it in boys. The confidence interval around the girls’ line includes 0, so it is not significant (p=0.11), but that is a very strange result if it were to fall out that way.
Beyond the peculiar finding of an effect only in boys and not girls (with no demonstrable mechanism to explain such a difference) other problems have been noted with this study.
“…several researchers argue that the paper’s methodological shortcomings undercut its importance. In a statement to the Science Media Centre in London, an independent organization that sources expert opinions on science in the news, psychologist Thom Baguley of Nottingham Trent University in the United Kingdom noted the data “are very noisy,” meaning they contain a lot of other factors that could easily lead to false positives. Psychologist Stuart Ritchie at King’s College London added that the findings are just barely statistically significant, calling them “pretty weak and borderline.” By itself, the study “shouldn’t move the needle much at all on the question of the safety of fluoride,” he wrote.”
Until the results are convincingly replicated elsewhere, I’d take the paper with a grain of salt (non-fluoridated and non-GMO of course).
I only eat free range, naturally iodized salt. The conditions that they keep the factory farmed salt in are execrable.