[HN Gopher] Health officials delayed report linking fluoride to ...
___________________________________________________________________
Health officials delayed report linking fluoride to brain harm
Author : gjsman-1000
Score : 69 points
Date : 2023-05-28 19:24 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.salon.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.salon.com)
| paddw wrote:
| So we know that there is definitely little benefit from ingesting
| fluoride, and also that we can not rule out negative effects from
| ingesting fluoride. This seems like... a bit of a big deal?
| mc32 wrote:
| I think The Netherlands took it out of their potable/tap water
| some while ago (like in the '70s).
| esperent wrote:
| Because they added it to salt and toothpaste instead.
| mc32 wrote:
| Toothpaste, for the most part, isn't swallowed. Salt, you
| can get any kind you want. I think this gives consumers
| more discretion/control over what they want to or do not
| want to ingest.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| I can tell you that salt is not fluoridated in the
| Netherlands (most people who care about cooking use pure
| sea salt anyway). As for toothpaste, almost every
| toothpaste anywhere in the world has it.
|
| There is evidence both ways, the original reports were that
| children's dental health _improved_ after they stopped
| fluoridation in the 70s.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Fluoride in salt? I know they put iodine in table salt, but
| not fluoride.
| Timon3 wrote:
| In Germany you can definitely buy table salt with
| Fluoride in a supermarket.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| It's been known for awhile, but you'd get labelled as a
| conspiracy theorist for any mention of it.
| hammock wrote:
| What is it about this report that no one is calling it a
| conspiracy theory anymore?
|
| Edit: why am I being downvoted for this?
| ttctciyf wrote:
| This reminded me of an old CAQ/CAIB article I read in the '90s on
| the impact of fluoride as an industrial pollutant. I found a
| copy[1] hosted at a site operated by the "Fluoride Action
| Network", which is also hosting other alarming claims such as:
|
| > * As of July 18, 2022, a total of 85 human studies have
| investigated the relationship between fluoride and human
| intelligence.
|
| > * Of these investigations, 76 studies have reported that
| elevated fluoride exposure is associated with reduced IQ in
| humans.
|
| - https://fluoridealert.org/studies/brain01/
|
| There's a historical link between fluoride alarmism and the far
| right, famously parodied in Kubrick's _Dr Strangelove_ in the
| person of Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper[2,3] who instigates a nuclear
| response to the communist conspiracy to impurify America 's
| bodily fluids via fluoride.
|
| The CAQ article at [1] explains this:
|
| > Oscar Ewing, as Federal Security Agency administrator, was a
| Truman "fair dealer" who pushed many progressive programs such as
| nationalized medicine. Fluoridation was lumped with his
| proposals. Inevitably, it was attacked by conservatives as a
| manifestation of "creeping socialism," while the left rallied to
| its support. Later during the McCarthy era, the left was further
| alienated from the opposition when extreme right-wing groups,
| including the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan, raved that
| fluoridation was a plot by the Soviet Union and/or communists in
| the government to poison America's brain cells.
|
| > It was a simple task for promoters, under the guidance of the
| "original spin-doctor," to paint all opponents as deranged-and
| they played this angle to the hilt. For example, one widely
| distributed dossier on opponents "listed in alphabetical order
| reputable scientists, convicted felons, food faddists, scientific
| organizations, and the Ku Klux Klan."
|
| I should note that CAQ has itself been attacked as communist
| propaganda, (and for that matter, some of the studies linked on
| the fluoridealert site are Chinese in origin.) Nonetheless the
| article[1] has some interesting and (to me) surprising
| information on the politically entangled history of fluoride. An
| excerpt:
|
| > One thing is certain, the name of the company with the biggest
| stake in fluoride's safety was ALCOA-whose name is stamped all
| over the early history of water fluoridation.
|
| > Throughout industry's "roaring 20s," the U.S. Public Health
| Service was under the jurisdiction of Treasury Secretary Andrew
| W. Mellon, a founder and major stockholder of ALCOA. In 1931, the
| year Mellon stepped down, a Public Health Service dentist named
| H. Trendley Dean was dispatched to certain remote towns in the
| West where drinking-water wells contained high concentrations of
| natural fluoride from deep in the earth's crust. Dean's mission
| was to determine how much fluoride people could tolerate without
| obvious damage to their teeth-a matter of considerable concern to
| ALCOA. Dean found that teeth in these high-fluoride towns were
| often discolored and eroded, but he also reported that they
| appeared to have fewer cavities than average. He cautiously
| recommended further studies to determine whether a lower level of
| fluoride in drinking water might reduce cavities without
| simultaneously damaging bones and teeth, where fluoride settles
| in humans and other animals.
|
| > Back at the Mellon Institute, ALCOA's Pittsburgh industrial
| research lab, this news was galvanic. ALCOA-sponsored biochemist
| Gerald J. Cox27 immediately fluoridated some lab rats in a study
| and concluded that fluoride reduced cavities and that: "The case
| should be regarded as proved."28 In a historic moment in 1939,
| the first public proposal that the U.S. should fluoridate its
| water supplies was made not by a doctor, or dentist, but by Cox,
| an industry scientist working for a company threatened by
| fluoride damage claims.29 Cox began touring the country, stumping
| for fluoridation.
|
| 1: https://fluoridealert.org/content/fluoride-commie-plot-or-
| ca...
|
| 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4XhhTF7vRM
|
| 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKR32ImWYzw
| wyldfire wrote:
| Wow, I'd previously scoffed at anti-fluoridation stuff,
| thinking that everyone who made these claims sounded like
| General Ripper. But this was an interesting historical
| perspective.
|
| But ... what then keeps us in the status quo of fluoridated
| water supplies? Aluminum companies, still? seems unlikely that
| their influence would hold sway for a century. A century during
| which we have found other environmental pollutants and
| enacted/enforced regulation to reduce or eliminate their
| influence.
| simoom22 wrote:
| > But ... what then keeps us in the status quo of fluoridated
| water supplies?
|
| > ...thinking that everyone who made these claims sounded
| like General Ripper.
| epgui wrote:
| As a biochemist, this seems to be a very complex issue that has
| been unnecessarily politicized. What happened with this report is
| interesting in and of itself, but I would not draw any
| conclusions (or make any inferences) from this, frankly.
| yeeeloit wrote:
| As someone who comes from an area with clean fresh water, that
| does not contain added fluoride, this is not a complex issue.
| It's simply not a question that comes up. People have good
| dental hygiene here.
|
| To my mind, yes sure you can over complicate the entire debate,
| but all of that is irrelevant in the face of these basic
| points:
|
| - Is there a chance that fluoride ingestion could be
| detrimental to human health? - Can tooth decay be prevented by
| diet and brush/floss with good quality toothpaste?
|
| Presumed safety of chemicals (at the behest of organizations)
| to human/environment until proven otherwise is shocking to me.
|
| They irony of all this is that if you want to buy good quality
| toothpaste you are forced to import it from overseas, due to
| the FDA limiting ingredients in toothpaste.
| trws wrote:
| What do you consider necessary for "good quality toothpaste?"
| bsder wrote:
| Citing: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24308394/ which
| recommends flouridating salt.
|
| "Children and adults of the low socio-economic strata tend to
| have substantially more untreated caries than higher strata.
| Salt fluoridation is by far the cheapest method for improving
| oral health."
|
| Sure, good for you that you're in one of the higher
| socioeconomic strata who can take care of their teeth. Not
| everyone else is.
| snovymgodym wrote:
| It's worth thinking about the fact that virtually the entire EU
| gets by with non fluoridated water.
| metadat wrote:
| Sure, they get by and don't often die of jaw infection, but on
| average their teeth look considerably worse than Americans.
|
| That's only looks though, I wonder what the comparative cavity
| rate is (this is what fluoride is _theoretically supposed to
| help reduce_ ).
| beezlewax wrote:
| As a European people here often make comments about American
| teeth being ridiculously white and unnaturally straight. You
| guys went a bit far on that one.
| pb7 wrote:
| Unnaturally straight? What is natural to you? My teeth are
| perfectly straight and so is my entire family's and none of
| us has ever had braces. Is that not natural?
|
| Corrected vision is unnatural. Did we go a bit far on that
| too?
|
| Europeans' teeth would be white too if they smoked less.
| beezlewax wrote:
| Touche! Maybe its just the blinding whiteness then.
| akiselev wrote:
| [flagged]
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| When people destroy their natural healthy teeth to put on
| veneers, it's very far on that.
|
| When people destroy their teeth enamel, it's very far on
| that too.
|
| Destroying your natural teeth for an extra shade of
| blinding white or marginally straighter teeth is insane,
| and quite common.
| borski wrote:
| We can all agree that somewhere in between is certainly
| the preferred option. Walking around with all veneers or
| crowns is a problem, but so is walking around with
| constant cavities and yellow teeth, so likely somewhere
| in between what the US does and the EU does.
| mc32 wrote:
| Apparently anything man-made to modify natural outcomes
| is unnatural.
|
| There are extremes, like elective cosmetic surgery, fake
| tans, cranial implants, etc., but some things just make
| living as an ordinary person easier. Glasses, hearing
| aids, normal medicines, etc.
| pengaru wrote:
| > Europeans' teeth would be white too if they smoked
| less.
|
| err, maybe if they also didn't drink so much coffee
| and/or tea
|
| Let's not ignore the fact that Americans have largely
| embraced teeth whitening as a norm.
| ttctciyf wrote:
| Their precious bodily fluids[1] retain their purity, at
| least.
|
| 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4XhhTF7vRM
| dypsilon wrote:
| There is a paper linked on Wikipedia stating that studies
| conducted in Germany showed that "Water fluoridation was
| followed by a decrease of caries, and interruptions in
| fluoridation were followed by increasing caries levels." but
| also "There was a significant caries decrease down to the
| lowest DMFT (2.0) since 1959 in spite of the fact that only
| F-poor water was available over years [...] explained by
| changes in caries-preventive and environmental conditions."
|
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1034/j.1600-0528..
| ..
| madsbuch wrote:
| this is interesting, can you refer any statistics?
| [deleted]
| esperent wrote:
| It's in other products instead. I think it depends on the
| country, but usually salt and toothpaste. I don't think there
| are any developed countries that have stopped fluoridation
| entirely.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Only two countries, Germany and Switzerland, have fluoridated
| salt.
| hosteur wrote:
| It's in toothpaste but you don't eat that. I have never heard
| of it being in salt. Maybe you think of iodine?
| nulbyte wrote:
| Several countries have flouridized table salt.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24308394/
| alakep wrote:
| I don't brush my teeth because I don't want the residual fluoride
| there.
|
| It's healthier to just slosh some vodka around to kill the germs
| (this wouldn't work with kids, but hey they'll lose their first
| teeth so who cares).
| alliao wrote:
| whiskey work better apparently due to acidity
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-05-28 23:01 UTC)