Fluoride may be doing more harm than good

[superrific]

According to this nih article which is talking about something a little different, one IQ point correlates to 1.4% greater earnings. I assume they use earnings because it's a quantitative measure but If we can improve society by 5% by removing fluoride from the water, huge if, that seems like a slam dunk.
Monetary Valuation of Children’s Cognitive Outcomes in Economic Evaluations from a Societal Perspective: A Review - PMC.

Eta: here is probably a better way of thinking about it. According to this Duke study, leaded gasoline caused 170 million Americans to lose about 4.8 IQ points on average.

Lead Exposure in Last Century Shrank IQ Scores of Half of Americans | Duke Today

today.duke.edu

And if you think that prenatal exposure to tiny amounts of flouride is going to have an effect at all comparable to prenatal exposure to lead AND environmental exposure to lead during all of childhood -- environmental exposure that is not limited to water but includes inhalation and other forms of ingestion -- then you're sillier than we thought.

 

[finesse]

Speak for yourself.

 

[Mulberry Heel]

Someone posted similar a while back. Needs posting on ths thread.

Brilliant dark comedy and satire - Slim Pickens is superb, as is Peter Sellers playing 3 (maybe 4, I don't remember) different characters. What's striking is how prophetic that sixty-year old movie has turned out to be in describing our 21st Century insanity and nighmare. Batshit crazy right-wing general triggers World War Three and the Apocalypse because he's paranoid about commies putting flouride into water supplies and he's convinced it has rendered him impotent and sterile. Not at all hard to see Trumpers believing the same.

General Jack Ripper: "Nineteen hundred and forty-six. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? 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."

Group Captain Mandrake: "Uh, Jack, Jack, listen... tell me, tell me, Jack. When did you first... become... well, develop this theory?"

Ripper: "Well, I, uh... I... I... first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love...Yes, a uh, a profound sense of fatigue... a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I... I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence."

Mandrake: "Hmm"

Ripper: "I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women uh... women sense my power and they seek the life essence. I, uh... I do not avoid women, Mandrake."

 

[farce©]

How much tap water actually gets drank?
It seems wasteful to put fluoride in the water we use to wash out clothes and cars and flush our toilets.
Most people seem to drink bottled or filtered water or some other beverage.

Poor people drink tap water. You know, the people who can least afford dental care.

 

[dcf2]

The LA area study indicated that cooking rice played a role in tap water consumption/exposure. Rice accumulates the ions as water is boiled.

edit: and the cohort was culturally enriched for rice consumption

edit again - sorry: The LA area study did not measure and was thus not able to control for air quality/pollution. Although they did measure and control for blood lead levels. This seems like possibly a structural flaw for conclusions on early cognitive development - I think the authors were quite reasonable in limiting conclusions in their discussion(s). IMO what is most suggested by the aggregate results is a more comprehensive study at population scale.

 

[finesse]

I drink it. Unless things have changed, the purity standards for tap water is higher than it is for bottled. I do it because I don't care. I've drunk bad water all my life in various times and places and it's just not a big deal to me. I use it to make coffee with as well.

Hell, when I was a kid a bunch of my relatives had a well with a bucket. You'd have to draw a bucket and let it settle before you used a tin dipper to drink off the top.

 

[Paine]

I grew up with well water. The tap water in Raleigh is a luxury. Consistently rated some of the best tasting tap water in the country. Bottled water so expensive and wasteful.

 

[Bobfripp]

Please stop, and let scientists do their effing jobs. RFK Jr. is not a scientist, he's conspiracy theorist and hack, at best.

 

[Milk and Cookies]

I understand very well that there is no proof of causation. I also understand that there is mounting evidence that fluoride does cause lower IQ in children.

These two sentences back to back are hard to understand together. They're pulling in opposite directions.

I read through the Malin study. My first big caveat is since the study was from May I haven't been able to find peer reviews which typically start appearing about 6 months after a study is published. That's what I generally rely on when evaluating this type of info. I'm not an expert so my take on the study is just above worthless.

Nevertheless, as a skeptic, here are some of my takeaways:
1. This study tried to measure behavior problems - ADHD, emotional disorders, mood disorders, etc. Its not attempting to evaluate IQ, so using it as a buttress to the Canadian IQ study is a misnomer from the jump.
2. My biggest issue is that it seems to support what we already know -- at very high levels fluoride is unhealthy. It doesn't try to evaluate or ascertain thresholds where fluoride consumption is healthy.
3. There is no evaluation of how flouride in tap water influences these results. The study participants are ingesting fluoride from all different types of sources. How does this show that fluoride in tap water should be removed? It doesn't.
4. Pregnant women represent about 3% of the population at any given time. Even IF you could demonstrably show fluoride in tap water at regulated levels is a direct cause for small negative outcomes in babies (which no one has done yet), you have a very large hill to climb to make it worth removing the positive benefits for the rest of the population instead of educating pregnant women on consuming tap water.

I could go on but who cares. I think what's a big cause for you jumping to this unsupported conclusion is the fact that yes fluoride at 3x 4x 5x what's in the water supply may lead to health impacts so when you read a study you're just seeing the headline blinking "fluoride bad". But at the levels in our water supply now its not.

 

[gtyellowjacket]

Please stop, and let scientists do their effing jobs. RFK Jr. is not a scientist, he's conspiracy theorist and hack, at best.

Scientists have been doing their jobs. Over a dozen studies. Now it's our job to discuss the trade-offs of lower dental health versus lower IQ points. It's definitely not our job to ignore the science simply because some nut happens to agree with the scientists.

 

[aGDevil2k]

Anyone who trusts RFK should be forced to sit in a room and listen to him speak, continuously for 48 hours.

 

[farce©]

I grew up with well water. The tap water in Raleigh is a luxury. Consistently rated some of the best tasting tap water in the country. Bottled water so expensive and wasteful.

I drank tap water my whole life. My grandparents and cousins out in the country had a well and I thought it tasted horrible, but my sister thought it was better tasting than our tap water. But my wife grew up in a town in Ohio where you couldn't drink the water. Nobody drank the water. I worked for a company with a distribution center there and they supplied old school water coolers with those big 5 gallon water bottles, and had signs cautioning visitors about drinking the tap water. You could literally see stuff floating in the water.

So in her mind tap water is not something you drink, it is something you wash your clothes and water your yard with. So we drink bottled water. I agree it is generally wasteful and environmentally horrible but it is a not a hill I am going to die on.

 

[gtyellowjacket]

These two sentences back to back are hard to understand together. They're pulling in opposite directions.

I read through the Malin study. My first big caveat is since the study was from May I haven't been able to find peer reviews which typically start appearing about 6 months after a study is published. That's what I generally rely on when evaluating this type of info. I'm not an expert so my take on the study is just above worthless.

Nevertheless, as a skeptic, here are some of my takeaways:
1. This study tried to measure behavior problems - ADHD, emotional disorders, mood disorders, etc. Its not attempting to evaluate IQ, so using it as a buttress to the Canadian IQ study is a misnomer from the jump.
2. My biggest issue is that it seems to support what we already know -- at very high levels fluoride is unhealthy. It doesn't try to evaluate or ascertain thresholds where fluoride consumption is healthy.
3. There is no evaluation of how flouride in tap water influences these results. The study participants are ingesting fluoride from all different types of sources. How does this show that fluoride in tap water should be removed? It doesn't.
4. Pregnant women represent about 3% of the population at any given time. Even IF you could demonstrably show fluoride in tap water at regulated levels is a direct cause for small negative outcomes in babies (which no one has done yet), you have a very large hill to climb to make it worth removing the positive benefits for the rest of the population instead of educating pregnant women on consuming tap water.

I could go on but who cares. I think what's a big cause for you jumping to this unsupported conclusion is the fact that yes fluoride at 3x 4x 5x what's in the water supply may lead to health impacts so when you read a study you're just seeing the headline blinking "fluoride bad". But at the levels in our water supply now its not.

I actually care. I thought you brought up some great points. As for number four, I actually found that one pretty weak. It might be 3% of population that are pregnant at any one time, but it's 100% of the population that have been very close to a pregnant woman at one point in time. If fluoride is a problem for prenatal babies, it's a problem for everybody.

I also think that you're right that there may be safe levels of fluoride. But I think the studies do show that there are dangerous levels of fluoride and at least some communities in the United States are at that level in their water supply. There should be a national standard instead of a national recommendation. Followed by more studies on what is the right level.

 

[finesse]

Scientists have been doing their jobs. Over a dozen studies. Now it's our job to discuss the trade-offs of lower dental health versus lower IQ points. It's definitely not our job to ignore the science simply because some nut happens to agree with the scientists.

A dozen out of how many on the subject? How many of those studies reference this and how many actually study it?

 

[Paine]

I drank tap water my whole life. My grandparents and cousins out in the country had a well and I thought it tasted horrible, but my sister thought it was better tasting than our tap water. But my wife grew up in a town in Ohio where you couldn't drink the water. Nobody drank the water. I worked for a company with a distribution center there and they supplied old school water coolers with those big 5 gallon water bottles, and had signs cautioning visitors about drinking the tap water. You could literally see stuff floating in the water.

So in her mind tap water is not something you drink, it is something you wash your clothes and water your yard with. So we drink bottled water. I agree it is generally wasteful and environmentally horrible but it is a not a hill I am going to die on.

Oh yeah, totally makes sense for places where you can’t drink the tap water. Growing up my parents bought bottled water because our well water tasted pretty bad and sulphuric at times. Always hated how wasteful it felt because we went through a ton of water bottles and ofc had to haul them off the county dump every week. I still drank the bottles though lol

 

[finesse]

I lived in one house that had an artesian well in the yard. It was some of the best tasting water I ever drank.

 

[Bobfripp]

Scientists have been doing their jobs. Over a dozen studies. Now it's our job to discuss the trade-offs of lower dental health versus lower IQ points. It's definitely not our job to ignore the science simply because some nut happens to agree with the scientists.

Fluoride exposure and cognitive neurodevelopment: Systematic review and dose-response meta-analysis - PubMed

Many uncertainties still surround the possible harmful effect of fluoride exposure on cognitive neurodevelopment in children. The aim of this systematic review and meta-analysis was to characterize this relation through a dose-response approach, by comparing the intelligence quotient (IQ) scores...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

"The inverse association between fluoride exposure and IQ was particularly strong in the studies at high risk of bias, while no adverse effect emerged in the only study judged at low risk of bias. Overall, most studies suggested an adverse effect of fluoride exposure on children's IQ, starting at low levels of exposure. However, a major role of residual confounding could not be ruled out, thus indicating the need of additional prospective studies at low risk of bias to conclusively assess the relation between fluoride exposure and cognitive neurodevelopment."

MORE WORK NEEDS TO BE DONE! RFK Jr. is as biased as a person can be. The USA has bigger fish to fry than prioritizing what that maniacal, narcissistic nitwit decides is important.

 

[Milk and Cookies]

There should be a national standard instead of a national recommendation. Followed by more studies on what is the right level.

I would invert those two sentences but generally don't disagree. And there are a LOT more studies happening on this in recent years it appears. The work is happening. We don't need to make it a national priority of a new administration though. That's ridiculous distraction.

 

[gtyellowjacket]

A dozen out of how many on the subject? How many of those studies reference this and how many actually study it?

I've linked them.

 

[gtyellowjacket]

I would invert those two sentences but generally don't disagree. And there are a LOT more studies happening on this in recent years it appears. The work is happening. We don't need to make it a national priority of a new administration though. That's ridiculous distraction.

I actually disagree with one point. The national recommendation I think is about .7 mg/liter. The study mentioned that there's some pretty good evidence that IQ loss happens at levels of 1.4 mg or higher. Some communities have bumped it up to 4 mg/liter. I don't think it's a terrible idea to lower the amount to around .7 for all communities while we figure out what the right level is with those studies. To me, there seems like there's enough evidence out there that there may be a problem.