Here’s something out of left field. I was listening to Sharyl Atkisson’s podcast the other day. She is normally a level-headed, careful reporter. Offhand, she mentioned concerns about the fluoridation of tapwater. I’m thinking, “Whoa, Sharyl, put down that bong!”
A quick search turns up an article from those wacky conspiracy theorists at the Harvard School of Public Health: Is Fluoridated Drinking Water Safe? Never mind the source; it’s citing the work of others. It turns out that countries who do not fluoridate water have seen comparable decreases in dental caries over time.
Some key quotes:
…the Cochrane Collaboration … published an analysis of 20 key studies on water fluoridation. They found that while water fluoridation is effective at reducing tooth decay among children, “no studies that aimed to determine the effectiveness of water fluoridation for preventing caries [cavities] in adults met the review’s inclusion criteria.”
The Cochrane report also concluded that early scientific investigations on water fluoridation (most were conducted before 1975) were deeply flawed.
…preliminary research in laboratory animals suggesting that high levels of fluoride may be toxic to brain and nerve cells. And human epidemiological studies have identified possible links to learning, memory, and cognition deficits, though most of these studies have focused on populations with fluoride exposures higher than those typically provided by U.S. water supplies.
Seems like there’s little evidence that water fluoridation does any good, along with some worrisome hints of possible harms. Maybe the cranks were right all along.
Conclusions and Relevance In this prospective cohort study of mother-child pairs in Los Angeles, California, prenatal fluoride exposure was associated with increased neurobehavioral problems. These findings suggest that there may be a need to establish recommendations for limiting fluoride exposure during the prenatal period.
To our knowledge, this is the first US-based cohort study to examine associations of prenatal fluoride exposure with child neurobehavior. The study sample resided in a predominately fluoridated region and had fluoride exposures that are typical of those living in fluoridated communities in North America.17,25,26 For example, Till et al25 reported a median MUFSG of 0.77 mg/L among women living in fluoridated communities in Canada. We found that women with higher fluoride exposure during pregnancy tended to rate their children higher on overall neurobehavioral problems and internalizing symptoms, including emotional reactivity, anxiety, and somatic complaints by age 3 years. Furthermore, each 0.68 mg/L increase in MUFSG was associated with nearly double the odds of total neurobehavioral problems being in the borderline clinical or clinical range. Women with higher MUFSG during pregnancy also tended to rate their children higher on Autism Spectrum Disorder symptoms. The effect sizes observed in this study are sizable considering the relatively low urinary fluoride levels of participants.
Interesting … but correlation is not causation. Could it be that fluoride is simply a marker – pregnant women who drink larger volumes of fluoridated water (why?) or who brush their teeth more frequently with fluoride-containing toothpaste (why?) are more likely to have babies with neurological/behavioral problems as assessed by the mother. The data is real and the problem is serious – but the action item is not obvious.
The first part is certainly true, but in this case, the action item—ending fluoridation of our water supplies—is an easy one for me for the following reasons:
Nobody is probably going to do the kind of study that will give us the definitive answer—we may never know the truth. So, it’s better to err on the side of caution, particularly when it comes to mass medical interventions.
The health issue (cavities) that fluoridation purportedly prevents isn’t all that serious in the grand scheme of things, compared to, for example, the diseases that chlorination of the water supply prevents.
Many cities in the world do not flouridate their water supplies and their populations are just fine—you never hear about outbreaks of rotten teeth.
If you believe that fluoride is good for you, you have many options to treat yourself.
We should never force (or otherwise coerce) any kind of medical intervention on a population.
Fluoridating a water supply for the purpose of preventing cavities is like cooking a chicken with a nuclear bomb—since it is ingested, it could potentially affect (adversely) the entire body, not just the intended part.
The amount of fluoride that people receive cannot be controlled. This was one of the many issues with the COVID-19 mRNA shots—it was impossible to know how much of or where in the body the antigen (spike protein) would be produced.
Especially given that fluoridation of water does not seem to have produced the desired results in adults. Given the lack of evidence of efficacy, there’s no excuse for an intervention that may pose a risk.
“Luckily, I was able to interpret these feelings correctly… I do not avoid women, Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence.”
We get our water here from a spring, there was no public water, and from age 6-18 i had cavities , lots of ‘em, at every dental visit. It was agonizing.
But at least I HAD regular dental visits. My contemporaries here on the Plateau lost a lot of their teeth at young ages. Whereas my BMD who grew up in New York, where you could really taste the fluoride, has had, I think, one cavity in his entire life. Oh and he’s also smarter than I am.
(I know you’ll say that’s a low bar…)
When my daughter was born, what I was told was that ingesting the fluoride is only effective when your permanent teeth are forming. ( So I’m not surprised that it has no effect on adults, it’s like you can’t get stewed tomatoes into a can by rubbing them on the outside.). So for a couple of years I squirted a liquid vitamin with iron and fluoride into her mouth as she lay on the changing table, and: “Look mom! No cavities!”
So I have no doubt that fluoride DOES have a beneficial effect on infants’ teeth. As @BlackPrince says, though, it’s not necessary for everyone to ingest it every day in order to get that benefit; we can just give it to the babies.
And I was gonna say it’s also hard to believe it has much of a detrimental effect, when its use has been so widespread for so long—- but now, the fact that the urban areas like NY and Philadelphia generally vote Dementocrat does make me rethink that…
Out of “229 mother-child pairs”, it looks like maybe one or two autistic children. When it’s so little data, it could be just one compulsive mother drinking fluoride, and brushing with a fluoride toothpaste three times a day, swallowing. It’s not fluoride - it’s that she’s crazy and it’s heritable.
Let’s do a sniff test. Autism rates by state show MA, VA, CT, CA, MN at the top, and LA, SC, NC, NM, SD at the bottom.
Let’s now see fluoridation rates - high autism:
MA: 57.8%
VA: 95.5%
CT: 90.4%
CA: 57.5%
MN: 98.8% avg = 79.92%
2.3% in fluoridation rates can’t explain much of the difference between the top and bottom states, so this would be barking up the wrong tree. The average for US is 72.7%, for example, so 2.3% is less than variability.
In contrast, the top states are destinations for high IQ migrations, and assortative mating seems much more of a factor.
Thank you, @eggspurt. Your observations are true: the study is limited and inconclusive. Nevertheless, it is (apparently) the first study to investigate these types of associations. Fluoridation of tap water began in the 1950s; why has it taken the greater part of a century to begin looking at these relationships?
Because the effects are tiny? Research is controlled by the interests of professors, researchers, graduate students, and the government agencies that fund it. These days, it’s various interest groups that lobby for their favorite topics - and the ordinary people lose out. I’d rather focus on highlighting the maladaptive effects of various rainbow, green, red and brown interest groups than the fluoride lobby.
A counterpoint is that even tiny effects, multiplied over the hundreds of millions or billions of people who drink fluoridated water, could have a significant impact on society. The Romans are notorious for their use of lead plumbing; perhaps future historians will look back on our fluoridation of the water supply with similar scrutiny. But I agree there are more pressing issues to focus on in the meantime.
Both in the positive and negative direction, at least for adults. Why add a substance to drinking water, effectively forcing everyone to consume it, when the benefit is negligible for everyone, except possibly children? The latter can be treated with fluoride in other ways. The money saved by putting it the water supply could be redirected to children’s dental health.
What’s that whole thing about “first, do no harm”? Maybe the harm is small but why take the chance?
People are thinking and acting on it. See this discussion on supplementation with iodine in the EU:
There might be probably similar things in the US re fluoride. These things are done quite soberly, and yes there are mistakes, but this is really small potatoes compared with the big things like what’s happening to institutions, political sectarianism, the balance between free speech and straight-out hostile propaganda.
There are plenty of other threads to discuss these other weighty topics. Most are not subject to straightforward solution — or, perhaps any solution that satisfies anyone other than Regime operatives.
OTOH, additives to drinking water are less overtly political. The only people upset by change would be those who profit from the status quo, either financially or politically. My sympathies for that oleaginous group is, shall we say, quite limited.
Maybe. Perhaps fluoridization sprang from the same root as the Ozone Hole Scam, the Renewable Energy Scam, the Global Warming Scam, the Covid Scam?
A certain idea gains currency among the “insiders” – those pitiful human beings who get their jollies by telling the rest of us what to do. They impose actions on all of us (“democracy” be damned!) consistent with that belief – for our own good, of course. Most of the “insiders” have no real understanding of the issues, and impose the action simply because they want to be part of the high school cool kids gang.
The “insiders” have no interest in rigorously assessing costs and benefits, and absolutely no interest in reviewing the data as it later develops over the years, since they can never admit that their fashionable beliefs might have been misguided.
“Hell of a way to run a railroad”, as President Reagan might have said.
Design, Setting, and Participants This prospective, multicenter birth cohort study used information from the Maternal-Infant Research on Environmental Chemicals cohort. Children were born between 2008 and 2012; 41% lived in communities supplied with fluoridated municipal water. The study sample included 601 mother-child pairs recruited from 6 major cities in Canada; children were between ages 3 and 4 years at testing. Data were analyzed between March 2017 and January 2019.
Exposures Maternal urinary fluoride (MUFSG), adjusted for specific gravity and averaged across 3 trimesters available for 512 pregnant women, as well as self-reported maternal daily fluoride intake from water and beverage consumption available for 400 pregnant women.
Main Outcomes and Measures Children’s IQ was assessed at ages 3 to 4 years using the Wechsler Primary and Preschool Scale of Intelligence-III. Multiple linear regression analyses were used to examine covariate-adjusted associations between each fluoride exposure measure and IQ score.
Results Of 512 mother-child pairs, the mean (SD) age for enrollment for mothers was 32.3 (5.1) years, 463 (90%) were white, and 264 children (52%) were female. Data on MUFSG concentrations, IQ scores, and complete covariates were available for 512 mother-child pairs; data on maternal fluoride intake and children’s IQ were available for 400 of 601 mother-child pairs. Women living in areas with fluoridated tap water (n = 141) compared with nonfluoridated water (n = 228) had significantly higher mean (SD) MUFSG concentrations (0.69 [0.42] mg/L vs 0.40 [0.27] mg/L; P = .001; to convert to millimoles per liter, multiply by 0.05263) and fluoride intake levels (0.93 [0.43] vs 0.30 [0.26] mg of fluoride per day; P = .001). Children had mean (SD) Full Scale IQ scores of 107.16 (13.26), range 52-143, with girls showing significantly higher mean (SD) scores than boys: 109.56 (11.96) vs 104.61 (14.09); P = .001. There was a significant interaction (P = .02) between child sex and MUFSG (6.89; 95% CI, 0.96-12.82) indicating a differential association between boys and girls. A 1-mg/L increase in MUFSG was associated with a 4.49-point lower IQ score (95% CI, −8.38 to −0.60) in boys, but there was no statistically significant association with IQ scores in girls (B = 2.40; 95% CI, −2.53 to 7.33). A 1-mg higher daily intake of fluoride among pregnant women was associated with a 3.66 lower IQ score (95% CI, −7.16 to −0.14) in boys and girls.
Conclusions and Relevance In this study, maternal exposure to higher levels of fluoride during pregnancy was associated with lower IQ scores in children aged 3 to 4 years. These findings indicate the possible need to reduce fluoride intake during pregnancy.
This study has the advantages of being prospective, recent, in a first-world country, of adequate size, using a high-quality IQ test and measuring maternal fluoride levels during pregnancy rather than more indirect measures. It has the disadvantage of measuring IQ at an age when IQ tests may be less reliable (looking at the WJ4 manual, though, the standard error of measurement should be less than half a point higher, perhaps 3 vs. 2.6, though the WJ 4 doesn’t have full-scale numbers under age 5, it does for some subtests.)
The effect is not at all small for boys, particularly when considering the super-exponential effects in the frequencies of scores in the tails of the distribution.
Strapping on my feminist hat, this study has to be wrong. The statistical analysis shows that fluoride had an effect on young boys … but not on young girls. That conclusion has to be blatant Wrong Speech! Everyone knows there can be no biological difference between males and females.
To be more serious, I wonder about the “statistical” analysis. From the abstract, it seems the study was based on 512 pregnant women, of whom they had full data (self-reported) on only 400 … although that is not clear. Then there is a reference to “601 mother-child pairs” – an unusually high number of twins? The women with fluoridated water (141) and non-fluoridated water (228) sum up to only 369 women. What water supply did the other at least 143 women have?
If I were wearing my “peer reviewer” hat, I would stop reading after the abstract and send the paper back to the authors with a recommendation that they clarify and re-submit.
The data may not be of the highest quality but this seems to be an avenue of inquiry worth pursuing. In any case, it seems like the fluoridation policy was thoughtlessly crafted, i.e., decided upon with only weak scientific justification. Once implemented, it was subject to little scrutiny — until recently, that is. This seems to be the pattern with public health policy.
Sharyl Attkisson just released a podcast in which she promotes her new book about the healthcare system. In the podcast, she hits some of the highlights from her book. If you don’t feel like reading the book (I probably won’t), the podcast is a relatively painless way of getting the gist of it. She summarizes some fairly shocking results of her investigations over the last several years.
