this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 85 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Oh yeah? And what if someone ignores that, simply lies and says it's toxic? I'm convinced!

[–] [email protected] 31 points 19 hours ago

And both of these people telling me about fluoride in water are both experts in their field. One an expert toxicologist, and the other an expert liar. Now I don't know what to believe.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

How much oatmeal would I have to eat to die of fluoride poisoning?

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[–] [email protected] 233 points 1 day ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (8 children)

Toxicologist here. I think that take is dishonest or dumb.

Taking a lethal dose is almost never the concern with any substance in our drinking water.

Hormones, heavy metals, persistent organic chemicals, ammonia are all in our drinking water. But for all of them we can't drink enough water to die from a high dose.

Some of them still have a large effect on our bodies.

It's about the longterm effects. Which we need longterm studies to learn about. That makes them harder to study.

Still doesn't mean flouride does anything bad longerm. But the argument is bad.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah, it seems to me like he got the right idea and wanted to convince people by making an extreme statement..

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[–] [email protected] 103 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Yeah, by this argument lead in the water isn't a concern.

[–] [email protected] 98 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You just made me mad by helping me realize that the Trump bros are going to break water by removing fluoride long before they fix water by removing lead.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 23 hours ago (4 children)

Yeah but lead bioaccumulates where as fluoride/ine doesn't

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

It's so funny I was just having a similar conversation about neurotoxic venomous animals in another thread. Lethality is an obviously concerning threshold, but there are substances out there that can easily destroy your quality of life and livelihood that never reach the concern of being lethal.

I think for mostly rational people concerned about fluoride in their water is that it was a public health decision made with little to no actual science proving it's safety or efficacy when it was first decided that they were going to add it to the public water supply. The proposed benefits of it weren't even supported by scientific evidence, it was just supposed that exposure to sodium fluoride could potentially reduce tooth decay for some.

Personally, I've suffered from the cosmetic damage of dental fluorosis, and I'm not necessarily thrilled about fluoride. But I have way more issues with public mandates founded on pseudoscience than I am with sodium fluoride. Especially now that we can see evidence that for some people fluoride can be especially beneficial.

So what was wrong with giving people the option of using fluoride toothpaste or mouthwashes... Why did it have to go into the public water supply?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Mate, your entire second paragraph is completely false. Like, you need to just read this: https://www.nidcr.nih.gov/health-info/fluoride/the-story-of-fluoridation

It's considered by the CDC as one of the greatest Public Health Achievements of the last Century. There have been dozens, if not hundreds of studies about fluoride affects in the water supply.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 13 hours ago (3 children)

Yeah that proves my point entirely.

In 1945 they fluoridated the first public water supply.

In 1979 the first published research began to appear to show how fluoride might be able to remineralize dental enamel.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

I feel like I woke up in the movie Dr. Strangelove

[–] [email protected] 13 points 15 hours ago

I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

Second time I got to post this today, unfortunately because it's almost ceased being satire.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

So, once again, DHMO is the chemical we need to fear.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 21 hours ago (3 children)

The stuff also known as hydric acid. People just don't talk enough about how corrosive it is. Plus, it gets in the air and gets in your lungs!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 14 hours ago

It’s 10 million times more acidic than drain cleaner!!! And the government is trying to force you to drink it by forcing it to be used in municipal drinking fountains

[–] [email protected] 6 points 15 hours ago

It’s so pervasive that they have found it in the bodies of every single child worldwide.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

There was an incident involving it on April 14th 1912 that took over 1500 lives.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

I heard that anyone who's ever come into contact with it has later died

[–] [email protected] 11 points 19 hours ago

Its a common component of all cancer cells, and trace amounts have been found in the blood of dead lab rats.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 17 hours ago

terrorists will drink vast amounts of it every day before an attack

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 18 hours ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

I don't understand your point.

Nobody drinks the ocean. Fluoride is barely active topically. Most humans rarely if at all swim in the ocean.

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[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 day ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (3 children)

The fluoride added to water gets it up to 0.7mg/liter.

That ends up to be 2 or 3 drops in a 55 gallon drums worth of water. Not much.

Fluoride is a natural substance and is found in many areas drinking water already. Many areas in much higher concentrations than 0.7mg/liter, so realistically people all over the world have drank fluoridated water for thousands of years.

You have to well over double the 0.7 before any health issues may appear and the first to appear is at about triple the concentration in kids under 8 years old who drink it for years getting spots on their teeth. The spots are only superficial.

Going into concentrations even higher than that CAN cause health issues when drank for longer periods of time. All of those cases being from naturally occurring fluoride, which actually effects somewhere north of 20% of the world's population.

Which makes the argument that fluoride in our water keeps us passive as being extra stupid, since water sourced around Columbia (the country) is far higher than .07mg/liter and Columbia seems to be caught in violence and turmoil and instability quite a bit over the decades.

*edit: Colombia

[–] [email protected] 9 points 14 hours ago

Just because a concentration is low doesn’t mean it’s safe. Water with 0.7 mg/L of Po-210 is lethal.

You can put an amount of it in a 55 gallon drum that is not visible

It’s a natural substance

Fluoride is in fact safe at the amounts that the FDA regulates but saying it’s a small concentration or that it’s natural are not the reasons it’s safe. It’s the hundreds of peer reviewed research articles that show that it’s safe

[–] [email protected] 20 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Its presence in groundwater is how we discovered it's good for teeth.

In fact, there used to be so much in some areas,it actually stained the teeth. In Colorado Springs a dentist noticed that the children were developing brown stains on their teeth. In researching it, it was discovered that the "Colorado Brown Stain" was caused by excessive fluoride in the drinking water. But it also lead to the discovery that regions with natural fluoride present but in lower levels than Colorado Springs didn't have stained teeth, but did have lower levels of tooth decay.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Small note: the country name is spelled “Colombia,” and spelling it correctly means you don’t need to specify which one!

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

i know this guy has a fancy degree and everything, but is he really as reliable a source as rfk junior? you don’t need fluoride when you have an army of worms ready to eat any kinds of bacteria that may enter your system.

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[–] [email protected] 64 points 1 day ago (5 children)

It's not about toxicity, it's about mind control! Fluoride makes you passive. But you know this since you're a tool of the government pushing poison.

Just bleach your teeth like normal people! You know, with the bleach under the kitchen sink.

(Don't actually do this)

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Like the ol' General said / s

We can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

Fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face.

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 1 day ago

Toxicologist, toxicity, minuscule, fluoridated -- your big doctor words are just trying to trick us!

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 day ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (11 children)

I want someone who knows about these things to respond to this 2012 metastudy that ties naturally fluoridated groundwater to neurological problems. I have used this the past decade to say “well the science is unclear;” I found it back then (2013 at the latest) when I was trying to disprove a crank and really questioned my shit. There was a(n unrelated?) follow up later that questioned the benefits. Since this is very far from my area of expertise, I’m not championing these; I just want to understand why they’re wrong or at least don’t matter in the discourse.

(Edit: for the educated, there could be a million ways these are wrong. Authors are idiots, study isn’t reproducible, industry capture, conclusions not backed up by data, whatever. I just don’t have the requisite knowledge to say these are wrong and therefore fluoridated water is both safe and useful)

Update: great newer studies in responses! You can have a rational convo starting with these two that moves to newer stuff.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 23 hours ago

There’s a follow up meta study from 2020.:

In conclusion, based on the totality of currently available scientific evidence, the present review does not support the presumption that fluoride should be assessed as a human developmental neurotoxicant at the current exposure levels in Europe.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 23 hours ago

A study in Canada was published in 2019 looking at the differences between 2 neighboring cities where on stopped fluoridating water in 2011. They saw that saw a significant increase in cavities in children in the city that stopped fluoridating vs the other. This is despite the fact the the city without fluoridation actually has somewhat higher adherence to brushing, flossing, and going to the dentist. No difference was seen yet in permanent teeth, but that's because the study would need more time to see effects there.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cdoe.12685

Of course, we still should do more studies on fluoride neurotoxicity. Most studies look at levels of fluoride at 1.5mg/L or higher, which is more than double the recommended level by the US (0.7 mg/L). There is a hard limit in the US of 4mg/L, but the EPA strongly recommends a limit of 2mg/L. This only really matters for locations with very high levels of fluoride in the groundwater, and is thus quite rare. The EU's limit is 1.5mg/L.

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