• Former President Donald Trump said that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s proposal to remove fluoride from the U.S. water systems “sounds okay” to him.
  • Kennedy, who is poised to play a health policy role in a potential Trump administration, recently wrote, “The Trump White House will advise all U.S​. water systems to remove fluoride from public water.”
  • According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “the safety and benefits of fluoride are well documented and have been reviewed comprehensively by several scientific and public health organizations.”
  • kinkles
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    18 days ago

    I’ll take the:

    According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “the safety and benefits of fluoride are well documented and have been reviewed comprehensively by several scientific and public health organizations.”

    …over your:

    fluoride only helps out when used topically (like in toothpaste). Drinking it may actually weaken your bones, supposedly.

    • Rutty
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      18 days ago

      This is a good take, I liken it to iodine in salt.

      However, I worry about the effects of fluoride in groundwater. I don’t know if I should be too concerned about that per se, but I hear some plants hate it and that and it says in the ground for like forever.

    • forrgott@lemm.ee
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      18 days ago

      You have anything says that ingesting or actually helps? That’s the part I find kinda weird, and that quote doesn’t address that specific issue. Using it on the surface of your teeth is shown to be helpful, I get that; but drinking it is a whole different ballgame… Besides, I thought the fluoride in the toothpaste was the reason you’re not supposed to swallow?

      • shackled@lemm.ee
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        18 days ago

        You can always use examine.com to start base level research on most substances. It tries to cover the most common questions and link the research papers most relevant to that question if available. Excerpt below, but I recommend scrolling through the whole page. It also discusses maximum safe daily levels, toxic levels, and symptoms when you exceed those levels.

        Fluoride (from drinking water, supplements, tea, or dental products) is absorbed by the small intestine, and about half is excreted via the kidneys. Absorbed fluoride in the blood can bind with apatite in bone and teeth, becoming fluorapatite. Blood and bone concentrations of fluoride are in equilibrium and are impacted by bone remodeling activity and age.

      • g0nz0li0@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        Casually states without evidence that fluoride was only introduced to keep people docile, then demands citations on rebuttals. Looks like we got ourselves a full blown case of the MAGA.

          • g0nz0li0@lemmy.world
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            18 days ago

            Are you so singularly interested in proving you are right that you don’t bother to read or try to genuinely comprehend what other people write when they are calling you out for your bad behaviour?

            The source you posted doesn’t mention anything to support your statement about fluoride originally being used to test if it could keep the working class docile. The fact remains that you are asking others to source themselves despite being unwilling, unable, or disinterested in doing so yourself.

            Still I am glad you’re voting for Harris 🙂

                  • g0nz0li0@lemmy.world
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                    17 days ago

                    My only point is to let you know that you’re being disingenuous. You made a claim without evidence and then literally said “You have anything says that ingesting or actually helps?” to the person who rebutted you.

                  • orgrinrt@lemmy.world
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                    18 days ago

                    This is funnily something actually taught at (at least some) Russian troll farms. Confuse the conversations and revert to thin, barely applicable accusations of logical fallacies or other kinds of “rules” of supposedly civil discussion. But this certain sense of “civil discussion” where some misguided sense of self-perceived (and sadly, almost always unfounded) logical superiority prompts one to be as confusing as this comment here, claiming to have a point, which the other supposedly does not, while elevating the fact that they themselves already claimed not to have found a source for their outlandish and confusing prior claim, to be some sort of bonus point to “win” the argument with. All this, without a hint of self-consciousness or admittance that their very original comment was equally or more pointless, if this is how points would be decided according to their view. And the importance put in virtual brownie points that prompts them to go to the trouble of amending their initial, ill-received comment to with an edit explicitly stating that they laugh at the downvoters, while being obviously hurt and unnecessarily heavily affected by it…

                    It’s so weirdly confusing and recognizable that this must be a cultural thing. A long time ago I knew some academics/students from Russia, and they all seemed similarly interested in some logical “winning” even in just normal discussions, in this certain way that is just uncanny. Self-importance and the persistence with misguided logical superiority despite having clearly themselves made an oopsie in the first place, seems to be something of a cultural difference in this specific flavor.

                    Of course this is done everywhere, the whole self-importance and all (as demonstrated by yours truly!), but not in this one specific uncanny way.

      • kinkles
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        18 days ago

        That’s a fair question. I Googled around and arrived at a couple different gov health websites (National Institutes of Health, Cleveland Clinic) which mention that, while high levels of fluoride can be harmful, the amount put into the US drinking supply doesn’t approach that threshold.

      • inkrifle@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        Fluoride, when swallowed, can be distributed throughout the body, which includes being in the saliva that covers the teeth. Nevertheless, fluoridated water has been shown with more than enough evidence to improve the quality of teeth in humans compared to its risks (if any) and removing it in water will reduce those benefits.

        • forrgott@lemm.ee
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          18 days ago

          I’ll go ahead and press x to doubt. First, no, it absolutely will not go everywhere in your body. Chemistry/biology doesn’t work like that. Second, the amount of fluoride you’d have to ingest to still have an effective amount in your saliva would be well past the safe limit (by the way, only poisons need to have a safe limit; aka fluoride is not good for you). Finally, it’s in our toothpaste, we don’t actually need any more than that.

          Putting it in our water has no benefits. Really. But you do you, man.