• humanspiral@lemmy.ca
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    7 minutes ago

    I believe the objection to fluoride is that it is a tranquilizer that keeps us from achieving glory through violent uprising… or sweet sweet dentist profits.

  • aeternum@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    5 hours ago

    Yeah but I read an article on a bullshit website. I think some no name website knows more than a toxicologist

  • wolfshadowheart@leminal.space
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    5 hours ago

    Back when I was in college, people didn’t like fluoride because it calcifies the pinneal gland. I assume that rhetoric has only been further exaggerated over the years

    • ZeffSyde@lemmy.world
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      13 minutes ago

      Another point that conspiracy bros will bring up is that fluoride is a toxic byproduct of aluminum manufacture and dumping it into the water supply is a cheap way for Alcoa to dispose of it benevolently.

    • Jiggle_Physics@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      It does do this. However so does ageing, low sunlight exposure, low altitude, ethnicity, sex, nutrition, neuro-divergence, cell phone use, EM fields… you get the idea.

      • TopRamenBinLaden@sh.itjust.works
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        5 minutes ago

        Does fluoride-enhanced water actually do this, though? Or just pure fluoride? Yes, pure fluoride has an effect, but I always thought the miniscule amount in our water is not enough to actually make a difference to the natural calcification of our pineal gland, anyways.

  • Heavybell@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    The people who need to hear this sadly would not believe that too much water can kill you even if you showed them someone die from it, I fear. I’d also be shocked if they read “water poisoning” and didn’t think of poisoned water.

    • dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de
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      5 hours ago

      I didn’t know this was a thing when I was younger, but not young enough to not be classified as a moron.

      Drank about 7-8 litres of water in 3 hours without going to the bathroom as a contest against a work colleague. Suffice to say I started feeling a little off on the way home, even after going to the bathroom. Years later I finally learned you can drown yourself from drinking too much and the symptoms were eerily close to what I experienced that night.

      • Heavybell@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        Oh don’t get me wrong! I also only learned about water toxicity when I was very much an adult.

        But the difference between us and the type of person I’m talking about, is that we (I’m presuming on your part) don’t think fluoride in water is a bad thing.

        The kind of person who hears “the government adds CHEMICAL_NAME to water” and assumes that’s a bad thing is the kind of person who will not believe drinking too much water can kill you, even (or especially) if they are told by an expert.

  • beebarfbadger@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

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

    • Brickhead92@lemmy.world
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      15 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.

    • protist@mander.xyz
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      11 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.

  • RQG@lemmy.world
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    20 hours ago

    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 longterm studies to learn about. That makes them harder to study.

    Still doesn’t mit flouride does anything bad longerm. But the argument is bad.

    • FreshLight@sh.itjust.works
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      6 hours ago

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

      • Hylactor@sopuli.xyz
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        19 hours ago

        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.

        • ryannathans@aussie.zone
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          18 hours ago

          Are you sure fluoride doesn’t? It does accumulate in the soil, building up in crops. Considering fluoride exposure from all sources, many people are above upper safe limits, even from tea drinking alone

          I don’t think fluoride should be added to water as it just pollutes the environment, where 99.99% of water isn’t coming in contact with teeth

          • marcos@lemmy.world
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            18 hours ago

            It doesn’t. This is high-school chemistry.

            Fluoride only “accumulates” up to the peak concentration of the environment (no further) on places where it is removed from contact with that environment.

            You can only accumulate fluoride in the soil if you keep adding it and there is almost no rain to wash it away.

            • ryannathans@aussie.zone
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              15 hours ago

              Like how crops are irrigated with town water, and in many areas with lowering rainfall? Accumulates in fruit, vegetables, leaves too

              • marcos@lemmy.world
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                15 hours ago

                Yes, irrigation with the minimum possible amount of water is known to destroy land for millennia at this point. But sodium will be a problem way before you notice any change in fluoride.

      • Ferrous@lemmy.ml
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        18 hours ago

        Yup, same with PFAS and forever chemicals. Maybe I’m ignorant because I’m not a doctor, but I don’t know if this line of thinking holds water - pun not intended.

    • NeverNudeNo13@lemmings.world
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      18 hours ago

      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?

        • NeverNudeNo13@lemmings.world
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          8 hours ago

          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.

    • mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works
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      17 hours ago

      Also, isn’t it recommended to not give infants fluorided water, hence why you can buy it in virtually every grocery store?

      • blind3rdeye@lemm.ee
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        15 hours ago

        Pretty much anything you can think of is recommended by someone, because different people have conflicting views. The key is to choose whose recommendations are based on the best reasoning & evidence aligning with your goals.

    • Mango@lemmy.world
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      17 hours ago

      Also “because I’m an expert and I say so” is a good way to convince someone to let you poison them.

    • ryannathans@aussie.zone
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      18 hours ago

      Fluoride does have long term effects though once you consider fluoride exposure through all sources like diet, which is mostly due to fluoride from water ending up in farmland. Tradesmen alone regularly exceed the upper limits due to high water consumption in hotter seasons

    • Hamartia@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      Any chemical that can exist as a solid, a liquid and a gas at the same time isn’t safe to put into our bodies!

    • bradinutah@thelemmy.club
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      17 hours ago

      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!

      • BussyCat@lemmy.world
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        10 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

      • TehWorld@lemmy.world
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        11 hours ago

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

    • ryedaft@sh.itjust.works
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      6 hours ago

      This is a better argument than the one in the post. No one is worried about acute toxicity of fluoride but rather long term. But it’s not long term toxic, doesn’t accumulate in the body, and is only present in very low amounts in water. However it should be enough to use fluoridated toothpaste to get the positive effects.

    • Lowpast@lemmy.world
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      10 hours ago

      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.

      • Acamon@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        Talking about the ocean is odd, but there are towns in the UK (and most countries I’d assume?) where the natural level of fluoride is higher than the concentration they aim for when adding fluoride. I think that’s a pretty good argument for it being safe - the people of Hartlepool have been drinking fluoride rich water for 13 centuries and don’t have any noticeable issues compared to the rest OF County Durham.

      • Hamartia@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        Yeah. It’s not an entirely salient point. It does, however, underline the ubiquitous nature of fluorine.

        The biggest source of Flourine in the environment is just the normal weathering of rocks that contain it. The biggest of the anthropogenic sources include brick production, phosphate fertiliser application and coal burning.

        The minor amount added to drinking water really wouldn’t be the biggest issue if it was as toxic as it’s made out to be.

  • affiliate@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    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.

  • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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    17 hours ago

    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

    • BussyCat@lemmy.world
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      10 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

    • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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      17 hours ago

      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.

      • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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        17 hours ago

        Yep. In fact, 21% of the world’s natural drinking water used falls within the recommended range for fluoride, while over another 20% is higher and in some countries actually does cause some non-superficial side effects and problems. Those don’t pop up until in concentrations at least 3 times higher than recommended.

    • Reyali@lemm.ee
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      17 hours ago

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