@Renofox I’m pretty sure correlation and causation are still two different words; that “study” is about as medically valid as the one which determined that every single person who ate a pickle in 1899 died.
“Parents reported higher rates of medically-diagnosed ADHD in their children in states in which a greater proportion of people receive fluoridated water from public water supplies.”
Maybe because ADHD is much more widely diagnosed in the US in general. It could just prove the issue of overmedicalization in the US.
@TexasUberAlles
It seems you completely misrepresent me. I take offense… on the other hand, you may just be partially confusing me with other people.
“your misrepresentation of an unsafe concentration of a chemical as being indicative” - I did and do not say any such thing. That was someone else. I find it to be a silly anecdote.
I do not doubt that fluoridated water reduces cavities. I do believe fluoride is unlikely to cause significant harm at common municipal concentrations.
However, the negative effects of ingested fluoride has not been studied as much or as competently as you think it has. At the levels that civilized countries fluoridate, the degree of skeletal fluorosis - clarification: “pre-skeletal fluorosis” - would be minor enough it would be undetected but could cause slightly reduced bone strength. Slightly increased rates of arythmias and heart attacks, enzyme destruction, and cellular damage also might get overlooked. That’s not say that any of these are a sure thing. But it hasn’t been studied well enough. An abscence of evidence is not evidence of abscence.
However, all the protective effect of fluoridated water on teeth is when it touches the surface of the teeth from the outside. All of it. (Yes, if you do drink fluoridated water, swish each sip in your mouth for a good long while - it’ll work better.) Thus you don’t need to swallow fluoride to get the benefit.
The body does lose some fluoride over time but it is not great at it. Fluoride can accumulate. The most prudent course of action when there is doubt is as I have said before.
Brush your teeth with fluoride. But don’t swallow fluoride.
@achy
Peroxide is one example out of many, and the body’s ability to process it in biologically appropriate concentrations says nothing at all about your misrepresentation of an unsafe concentration of a chemical as being indicative of a general lack of safety. Ingested fluoride is harmless in normally-encountered concentrations, and smarter people than the both of us have been studying its effects on oral health for decades and have determined it to be beneficial at those concentrations.
Your “Chemicals that the body DOESN’T have a system to counteract” is, to coin a phrase, “a poor example”; fluoride is processed and excreted like any other mineral moving through the kidneys, and bioaccumulation to harmful levels is rare enough that there were only 5 cases of severe skeletal fluorosis in the United States in 35 years according to the American Dental Association– none of which were linked to municipal fluoridation– while hundreds of cases of acute hypercalcemia (unrelated to cancer, its most common cause) were reported in the same timeframe from overdoses of calcium and vitamin D supplements.
I really do not feel like wasting a lot of time in a dueling statistical citation fight with an apparent conspiracy theorist, not least because I actually agree with many of the arguments against municipal fluoridation and think that it’s a 20th Century solution to a problem better solved through 21st Century education. Histrionics and moonbat theorizing are completely unnecessary to pointing out the somewhat problematic practice of injecting industrial waste into a public water supply to fix a condition as simple as “WHY U NO BRUSH YOUR TEETH?”.
Peroxide is a special case and thus makes a poor example.
Weak peroxide is harmless specifically because the human body has enzymes called “peroxidases” that neutralize weak peroxides, making weak peroxide unusually harmless and impossible to accumulate.
Chemicals that the body DOESN’T have a system to counteract, on the other hand, can cause cummulative damage. The concern with fluoride is that a cummulative effect - skeletal fluorosis, heart arythmias, heart attack.
Fluoride toothpaste is good, but it should be spit out after using.
Fluoridated drinking water is a useless, bad, damn stupid idea.
@ps3 poster-fag @someguy111
Sure, and if you poured 100% hydrogen peroxide on a finger wound it would literally dissolve your entire hand and then blow the walls out of your bathroom when it exploded. Try not to concentrate too much.
@ps3 poster-fag
That’s similar to the pesticides they use on crops; everyone says it’s fine but the guy spaying them is wearing a full body protective hazard suit and a respirator.
@Background Pony #84D6
In davenport,IA one of the trucks had a leak and its concentrated flouride melted the concrete and the only thing that pissed people off was the tax increase to redo all the parking lot and loading bay concrete for the water works
It’s the ultra-aggressive tactics they use to ‘put’ it in the water which says something about it’s purpose. Plus in Brisbane not so long ago, one of the fluoride holders broke contaminating the water too strongly. Many people’s pets died from that. Don’t know about the kids however… Plus a recent study proved that it’s a neurological contaminant, which is great news if you want to attack a country’s water supply with it.
Again it’s not so much the amount of fluoride that’s bad, it’s type of fluoride that matters. Calcium fluoride is good for you while sodium fluoride is toxic in high does over time.
@Lefty643
it takes a lot more concentration in the water for it to actually harm you. it is too diluted. there is more flouride in a brush of toothpaste than in a full glass of water. perhaps not acucrate persay bt still.
I don’t know how bad drinking flouride is but I know it isn’t actually good for you. The only proper way to apply flouride that does anything good is apply to the surface of the tooth and spit afterwards.
You know it IS actually true they put fluoride in the water. And apparently both the Nazis and Soviets experimented with fluoride in water as a means of dumbing down their prisoners.
Don’t know if it actually had any effect or produced any results, but here in America the people ARE pretty freaking stupid, so maybe it does screw your brain.
Plus fluoride is classified as a toxin by the EPA. So I mean either way it’s really not something you should be putting in your body.
