Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water

In bold from your source:

> It is important to note that there were insufficient data to determine if the low fluoride level of 0.7 mg/L currently recommended for U.S. community water supplies has a negative effect on children’s IQ.

The canonical form is "I see what you did there".

your study has been heavily criticized where you already posted it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43523900

I can only assume once you see those very valid criticisms, you will update your references

What do you mean? There's literally tons of evidence. Do you think fluoride doesn't actually reduce cavities?

7mg/L? Where the heck did you get that figure? The correct value is a tenth of that: 0.7 milligrams per Liter (mg/L) The limit is 2mg/L, and that's only found in places with naturally occurring high levels of flouride.

The people of Flint, MI were (and some still are!) forced to drink bottled water for years when their water was contaminated with lead.

When you drink from publicly supplied water, you accept risks that can be much worse than fluoride in your water. If you want to avoid that, you need to procure your own drinking water.

You can solve your “problem” for a very small price: it costs under $0.50 per day to distill your own drinking water per person.

So for $15/mo, “problem” solved.

Are you doing that?

It's not your water, it's municipal water you purchase with the fluoride in it.

There isn’t any! GP doesn’t have that authority! Well done!

On the other hand, the society you live in probably has some sort of document establishing who does have the authority, and how it devolves to the actual policy-makers. Google “$YOUR_LOCATION government” and you’ll have some good starting points. If you’re lucky, you might even get to participate in the process; “$YOUR_LOCATION elections” will give you good pointers in that case.

I've heard this and it doesn't fit in my brain. They never drink water? Ever?

Particularly when traveling, I don't enjoy the taste of tap water. Filtered or (factory filtered then) bottled... and I'm not alone in that viewpoint.

Wisconsin tap water tastes fine. Waco, Texas tap water is really nasty.

I bet those people drink fountain drinks, cofee, tea, etc. made from tapwater.

Maybe instead of removing fluoride from the water they should add sweetener in there along with it /s

If that figure is for the US, then that's ~7M people. Feels like "many" to me.

2% is definitely many

> Even every single controversial belief?

Yes.

> Have you looked, yourself, into whether the world is flat? Whether the 9/11 conspiracy theories are true? Whether crop circles were created by aliens?

Yes.

The only reason for lack of concrete statements on the 0.7 level was a lack of data, owing largely to US political culture (1.5 is the World Health Organization 'safe' limit). Not long ago fluoride stuff was considered a 'conspiracy theory' which greatly deters meaningful scientific research on the topic. This is in part because of social reasons (most people don't want to be perceived as 'fringe') and in part because it results in funding for such research drying up. For that matter even IQ studies themselves are borderline given the US political culture.

So for instance of the 19 low risk-of-bias studies, exactly 0 came from the US. 10 were in China, 3 were in Mexico, 2 in Canada, 3 in India, and 1 in Iran. 18 of those 19 studies found a significant reduction in IQ that corresponds strongly with increases in fluoride (the outlier was in Mexico). With the current administration we'll certainly be seeing funding for such studies in the US and so there should be much more high quality data on the 0.7 level forthcoming. But in general this is a major problem that needs solving. Exploring the breadths of science, including the fringes, should not require an activist political administration.

Using toothpaste with fluoride can be effective when used regularly as part of dental hygiene. What percentage of the population is going to do this? I've encountered grade school children who have never owned a toothbrush.

If a state wants to ban cars it should be free to do so. I think the benefits outweigh the costs and no one would choose to live there.

Also important to note no one is banning flouride. They're preventing it from being put in the drinking water. The equivalent would be if cars were distributed upon arriving to the state.

This is textbook whataboutism and seemingly an example of the nirvana fallacy too. All of the above as well as euthenasia and abortion can be included under bodily autonomy and there's no reason we shouldn't support all of it.

I'm skimming the results, but it looks like adult teeth had less cavities when they turned the fluoride off...and that was not observed in Edmonton where they left the fluoride on the whole time.

"For all tooth surfaces among permanent teeth (Table 1a), there was a statistically significant decrease in Calgary, for the overall mean DMFS, which was not observed in Edmonton."

Based on their data, you could argue that fluoride increases cavities in adults... I'm not making that argument. I agree with you in that I think confounders are at play and the difference attributed to fluorinated water isn't as large.

People will use this study to take about the rampant tooth decay in Calgary, ignoring that there is roughly as much decay in Edmonton which had the fluoride on the whole time.

there are people who own a toothbrush but do not purchase toothpaste. money is not something everyone has and when you start having to choose between certain things, tough choices get made.

I really don't feel like you're interpreting my comment in good faith. Do you really think I was arguing that poor people literally never brush their teeth, and every single poor person in the country will eventually suffer from periodontitis? If you read my comment again, I'm sure you could find a way to engage in better faith.

It's not that they can't afford a $3 toothpaste, it is the environment they are in that makes it hard to prioritize things like this. It is the education and the overall life quality (or the lack there of) that causes this problem.

Your argument essentially amounts to "why are poor people poor when they can just get a job." I can't find anything to say about it that isn't snarky.

The number of Wal-Mart employees I know who can't get their managers to schedule them for the thirty hours a week required to be eligible for dental care far exceeds the number of Wal-Mart employees I know who can.

Why not?

I was thinking the same thought- maybe we should fluoridate Brawndo :-)

Thats not really true. I had problems brushing during my childhood, because most toothpastes triggered my gag reflex, but I mostly drank tap water.

I was responding to this point:

  It is trivial today to get whatever level of fluoride is recommended for dental health, via toothpaste. So there is no compelling need to fluoridate as there exist viable alternatives to achieve the same that fluoridation is for any other purpose than dental health.

Presumably when they voted to get rid of fluoride in the water in Calgary, they didn't do so expecting the outcome would be that people in their town would be less healthy overall. Nonetheless, that was the outcome of their vote.

The anecdote shows that it's not trivial, because when the fluoride in the water went away, people were not able to trivially replace it, leading to worse health outcomes. Ultimately people found too high of a cost, seeing as that they reversed the decision.

Sadly it took a decade for them to realize their mistake. I worry people today are making the same mistake, and we will reverse it in a decade after health outcomes are shown to have worsened.

They're doing both tipping and untipping.

> 20% tips

Is this real?

I'd be happier if that broken-but-correct-2x-a-day guy banned HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup) instead. It is my personal hypothesis that it is the cause of 'sugar cancer' (general cases of bad sugars / imbalances of sugars in the body), including Diabetes.

Fluoridated water was already a plot point in Kubrick's Strangelove from 1964.

Using certain family members as a personal rubric, fluoridated water has been a right-left issue for at least 2.5 decades. I think it’s been pretty polarized for longer, though it may have taken a long time to gain steam in mainstream “discourse”.

> People who brush with toothpaste don't need this and people who don't are probably drinking too much soda

I think every person in my social circles with any kind of illness or disability would be incredibly grateful for fluoridation, and it's not because of drinking too much soda

I think that's exactly what the GP meant when they said "perfect white teeth culture".

Perfect white teeth doesn't mean they're healthy.

People don't bleach their teeth much outside the US as far as I know. You can see it especially well with US actors, their teeth looking like the someone photoshopped them to #FFFFFF

Others note the bleaching, which is relatively low cost, but the (purely cosmetic) straightening is probably the more interesting example.

People in the US pay a lot of money to have very straight teeth. You can see this clearly with American celebrities and actors (versus European counterparts), but the culture of cosmetically modifying teeth is very strong all across "middle class" and up America as well.

Way more people having their teeth whitened? Braces being more popular.

US people wear facades to hide their teeth.

Bleaching your teeth, specifically.

That study did prove, that too much flouride is not good for intelligence.

And there are other sources besides water from the tap, so I don't think it is intelligent to raise the base level, when the option of local applying exists. What is wrong with toothpaste?

this is it exactly. See west virginia recently banning artificial coloring. Because MAGA said so, is basically the reason, they were completely unworried about it before it became important to MAGA world by way of RFK

There’s also fluoride salt added to table salt that is widely used to accomplish the same thing as fluoridating water.

https://www.acffglobal.org/salt-fluoridation/

That doesn’t work because it’s topical. You give kids vitamins to get fluoride into their system to strengthen their developing adult teeth.

What needs to stop happening is people ignoring objective reality just because the results happen to align with the other "team's" position on something.

"Out of a population of about three-quarters of a billion, under 14 million people (approximately 2%) in Europe receive artificially-fluoridated water."

The problem I continually see in the USA is the ascription of differences of opinion on [any topic] to America's Great Divide between enlightenment and barbarism. I find it often helpful to just check, what do these policies look like outside of America? It doesn't mean Europe got it right on fluoride, it just suggests against adopting the framing that your POV is 100% objective reality proven beyond doubt by Science™ and no rational person not in the throes of "own the [other team]" bad faith might disagree.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_by_country#...

I'm not saying you're wrong, but you made multiple strong claims without a single citation or study link. We could have a better conversation with data to look at. There's a decent (though somewhat biased) review of the debate in [1]. It's worth noting that if you read the linked studies there closely you'll find the truth is, as usual, nuanced. Specifically, that "fluoridation is a population-level caries preventive strategy" [which may or may not be effective at the individual or small community level due to other factors]. I.e., good at the national level for statistically significant reduction of tooth disease incidence, but at less-aggregated levels the confounding factors like diet and how often/well people brush their teeth are going to be bigger determinants of efficacy.

It's also worth nothing that 1) over-fluoridation is pretty bad and can affect poor or malnourished communities (ex, [2]); and 2) there are alternatives to fluoride that may be equally effective with fewer risks at higher concentrations (ex. nano hydroxyapatite).

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2222595/

[2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1064338060067811...

> Thoroughly scientifically debunked. Repeatedly, over decades.

"The NTP monograph concluded, with moderate confidence, that higher levels of fluoride exposure, such as drinking water containing more than 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter, are associated with lower IQ in children"

This is from an NIH meta-analysis. Its a pretty rigorous study.

https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/whatwestudy/assessments/noncancer/...

"It is important to note that there were insufficient data to determine if the low fluoride level of 0.7 mg/L currently recommended for U.S. community water supplies has a negative effect on children’s IQ"

This is why there's such a fierce debate. Based on the most recent scientific literature there seems to be evidence of a dose-dependent effect of fluorine levels in water and lowered IQ in children, meaning it has some kind of neurotoxic effect. But we don't have robust evidence to say 0.7 mg/L has a similar effect. That doesn't mean it is DEFINITELY safe, it just means more research needs to be done and the current research that does cover the 0.7 mg/L range may not reach statistical significance.

The fact though the NIH suggests 1.5mg/L is likely unsafe, which is only 2x what America's tap water contains, I would not blame people for being uneasy about. It is often the case the that the FDA regulates food additives that have potential negative side effects to be limited to concentrations 10x lower than what is seen as unsafe.

I am not suggesting it's a straightforward choice to defluorinate water, but I see people often repeating claims like you have that dangers of fluoride are "thoroughly debunked" and that's simply not true. I don't blame people for having that sentiment either, because 0.7mg/L is seemingly still considered safe, and some of the loudest advocates of defluorination have no shortage of thoroughly debunked crazy views on things (possibly due to brains half eaten by worms). It makes it very easy to brush off the skepticism.

But it's also important to keep in mind science is built on the premise that one must be ready to re-evaluate past assumptions when new data arises, and generally speaking the new data around fluoride I hate to say seems to show there is indeed smoke.

It's also the case that when the US initially fluorinated water supplies it was a massive public health success, but these days it seems to make a much lower impact now that fluoride toothpaste use is ubiquitous (plus the levels were lowered from 1.0mg/L in the 70s, likely reducing its overall effectiveness). It is IMO both very reasonable to fund more research into this to know conclusively if 0.7mg/L is indeed safe, and also consider public health policy that focuses on promoting dental hygiene through other means in places that do defluorinate.

I do not agree with Utah's decision here mostly because it seems to neglect that defluorination will create a void that requires other public health policy efforts to fill it, poorer and less educated communities will suffer unless government led efforts to promote and make dental hygine affordable are not also undertaken.

While I would like to think that I have gotten a lot smarter in the last 20 years it seems more likely that other people have on average gotten a lot dumber.

While I’m sure there are many causes I’m of the opinion that no stone should remain unturned when looking for answers. Fluorine in water has a viable alternative (toothpaste that is spit out) so out of an abundance of caution my preference is for unflurinated water. In my past life as an applied researcher I have learned to be rather distrustful of academia and the ‘science’ that is produced, ‘fruit from a poisonous tree’.

The conclusion from the largest and strongest studyies is that there is a certain level of fluoride that harms IQ: https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/whatwestudy/assessments/noncancer/....

"The NTP monograph concluded, with moderate confidence, that higher levels of fluoride exposure, such as drinking water containing more than 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter, are associated with lower IQ in children"

They found fluoride in drinking water concentrations was associated with lower IQ, the opposite of your claim of "proven safe".

Show us some evidence that is proven safe, so far as I can tell all evidence points to unsafe or "we're not sure".

> What needs to stop happening is people ignoring objective reality just because the results happen to align with the other "team's" position on something.

I couldn't agree more. The study that is cited above started when Obama was president by the way.

> Except it's not—fluoride in the drinking water concentrations is proven safe and it doesn't affect brains.

What's amazing is these anti-science wackos are rejecting the largest-scale experiment of all time, with the best evidence that anyone is ever going to have on the subject. We have both temporal and spatial boundary conditions with and without community water fluoridation, where a large population has it and another large population doesn't have it. There is no evidence that the without-fluoridation population has higher intelligence! There is a huge body of evidence that the people without fluoridation have more decayed teeth.

> fluoride in the drinking water concentrations is proven safe and it doesn't affect brains.

We can never be sure who funded the studies and whether or not the results can be trusted. Studies have shown that studies cannot be trusted. I err on the side of caution.

You're welcome to put it in your own drinking water if you trust the studies.

> What needs to stop happening is people ignoring objective reality just because the results happen to align with the other "team's" position on something.

Nobody can perceive objective reality. Everyone is delusional concerning just about everything. The people who think they know what's going on, are most delusional of all.

Dark times are ahead, I'm afraid, and people's trust-meters are going to be valuable again.

> Except it's not—fluoride in the drinking water concentrations is proven safe and it doesn't affect brains.

You mean like this: Fluoride Exposure and Children’s IQ Scores A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...

"Findings: Despite differences in exposure and outcome measures and risk of bias across studies, and when using group-level and individual-level exposure estimates, this systematic review and meta-analysis of 74 cross-sectional and prospective cohort studies found significant inverse associations between fluoride exposure and children’s IQ scores. [...]"

Maybe you should reconsider that what you heard once was the definite truth.

"The problem is science challenges those who derive power from means other than reason."

There's been a fundamental shift away from science in the last fifty years or so. Some is understandable—chemical pollution, etc. which is unreasonably blamed on science instead of industry's bad behavior—but there's another thread running here and it's an anti-establishment one.

The question I can't fully put a measure on is why nowadays so many people automatically reject anything that's mandated by government even when they'll benefit from that mandate. The fluoride debate is somewhat akin to the vaccination one, rather than weighing up the comparatively minor risks versus overwhelmingly beneficial outcomes of those mandates they'll simply reject them outright.

That doesn't make much sense to me.

Tolerating this slippery slope that “theres always the other side” is how we got to a place where I have to vaccinate again for measles at 40 because there are people out there saying the measles vaccine isn’t safe.

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I don’t agree with the framing of “we are experiencing an assault on objective truth…”.

We are experiencing a challenge to some existing status quo practices, some of which have come out of science in the past.

But nowhere in any conversation has the dialog been “we must question status quo institutional knowledge, and objective truth, to dismantle the institution”. (That’s left speak, actually, and I am acutely aware of leftist circles where that is the conversation.)

Look at RFK Jr. This guy doesn't need power and control. He’s a whacko with some different beliefs about health—who fundamentally believes he’s making humans safer because of his negative lived experience with health policy in the US.

Occam's razor points to there being a credible benign reason for him to be motivated to challenge existing policy. (And if there is one area of science ripe for iteration, it’s nutritional health.) We don’t need to grab for more extreme alarmist narratives to explain what’s happening.

It simply doesn't take some autocratic utopian agenda to question whether fluoride is worth it and advocate for political change.

It’s honestly really disingenuous and disheartening to hear people towing this “the right is trying to dismantle the fabric of western liberal democracy and install fascism” line.

It’s even worse than that. People aren’t even voting for their own self interest. The people in the poorest states and in poor counties in richer states in the United States are consistently voting against universal healthcare, affordable post high school education and are cheering the government taking away services that they depend on the most.

There are two basic categories of causes.

The first is being pure anti science - anti vaccine, anti fluoride, etc

The second is they are more concerned about “God and guns”, immigrants, and the demographic shifts in the US than their own interest.

Oh and the third is the cult of MAGA.

I’m 50, Native born American and on a meta level it concerns me. On a micro level, me and mine will be okay.

While I am not one of these shrill people saying I’m leaving the US tomorrow, my wife and I are definitely putting plans in place to have a dual residency (not citizenship) in Costa Rica closer to when I get ready to retire.

You're close but still a bit strawmanny. If we want poor kids to have better dental outcomes we should do more than just flouridate. We should find out why the poor have worse dental outcomes and address the root problem(s), which I would imagine in the US is something like soda consumption or lack of dentists in poor areas.

Objective truth isn't something you can know, but it's a destination that must exist for pursuit of knowledge/curiosity to have any meaning.

With contradictions you know what is not true, and through knowing what is not true, you can approach what is true. Truth is expressed in consistency, not completeness.

That's why anyone should be extremely suspicious of anyone who is not, or doesn't care about, being internally consistent.

You're getting downvoted because you're retreating into philosophical nihilism rather than actually addressing the points. If you disagree with how people interpret the studies, the studies themselves, or how science measures reality - just say that.

I also love SMBC's explanation of this: https://smbc-wiki.com/index.php/2010-09-23

You're refuting a statment based on studies and statistics by anecdotal evedince. Also, GP never denied that flouridation is still helpful for non-brushing residents.

> I don't use a toothbrush or toothpaste, and haven't ever really, as my ASD makes it unbearable.

99% of the world does brush their teeth, so I don't see how this is relevant to their health.

As a recent QLD convert thanks for this. I had been wondering why the water up here was so hard.

Are you in FNQ? Around Brissie and the Goldie we're all flouridated.

I've heard similar rumours about army recruitment in the 80s though.

Black Tea has an astounding amount of fluoride. You dentist is stupid for only asking where you live and not what you eat and drink.

There is difference between banning and just deciding putting fluoride in public drinking water too. Who are they banning? Themselves?

Not really when it comes to government initiatives. They'd like the water plants to stop adding fluoride, so they make a policy that the plants should not add fluoride.

You can add fluoride in your own water if you want to. Nobody is preventing your own freedom to drink fluoride.

Yeah but anyone can buy fluoride toothpaste so not really banned.

I really don't agree with that Paracelsian view. Some substances are Paracelsian, other are like lead, and I'd place fluorides in-between these two, a neither fully Paracelsian or non-Paracelsian poison.

Fluoride exposure beyond a small amount has a statistically significant effect on childhood IQ: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...

You have to drink 32 ounces of milk per day to get enough daily calcium.

Good link.

There a really unfortunate use of "significant" in that document. The scientific meaning and the general meaning will cause very different interpretations from laymen.

Generally not, but we choose where we take our from water from.

If there's too much fluoride in the rock water we take soil or surface water instead, for example. If there's too much fluoride in the water we do not supply it to people's taps, but this is for values like 4 mg/L.

So we mostly don't take any measures. In Stockholm it's apparently less than 0.2 mg/L though.

Yes, I was going to mention this. Had a friend who went down the coast for a day trip with a bunch of mates. On the way back on the train (1.5 hour ride) they had a competition to see who could drink the most water and most of them had several litres, a few of them managed a bit more. My mate also had a bunch of chips/snacks, but not everyone did.

Later that night, he got a desperate phone from his friends mum, screaming at him "What did you take! What drugs did you take!!!", he replied that they hadn't taken anything, but wasn't really believed. His friend was rushed to hospital with severe seizures and convulsions. The doctors eventually put him on a saline drip and he recovered.

Basically his friend lowered the salt content in his body so much that his body could not pass electrical signals. My friend was fine because he had consumed a bit of salt in his snacks. Kinda crazy.

Indeed: "Water Intoxication" - https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/water-intoxic...

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Your GDP per capita is 50% higher than ours. You have money for this.

If there's no will to raise up the poor, you it should be straightforward to use the state directly to ensure that everyone is taught how to brush their teeth and ensured to have access to brushes and toothpaste.

I agree with this in an American context. In Sweden, it will be much less true. This difference can also however be attributed to government "interference" with higher taxation supporting better social care for those at the poorer end of the scale.

Freedom comes at a cost, the US and Sweden are paying that cost in different ways.

This is factually incorrect. Even though in most European countries there is a formal separation of religion and state, there is nothing that "forbids" any political party from having a strong religious affiliation. In fact, in nearly every European country there are major political parties with a strong Christian affiliation. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_democracy

There are even countries which have political parties that are Islamic affiliated.

The separation between religion and state refers to two things: the state not being able to enforce any religious aspects on citizens (freedom TO exercise any religion without interference from government), and religious entities not being able to influence or pressure the government outside the electoral process (freedom TO govern without interference from religious entities). Neither of these things prevents a political party founded on religious beliefs to participate in the electoral process.

> The European way is all about having a strong firewall between religion and politics

I find this quite contrary to my experience of e.g. modern Germany, Spain, Poland, Italy where many politicians are explicitly religious, laws are written with majority religious affiliation in mind, religious taxes may still be levied. Even France still feels in many ways like a "catholic country", even if they do have good explicit separation of church and state.

I would have said that government and (Christian) religion are completely inextricable for most Europeans, even if the majority of the population isn't seriously devout or even practicing.

> Canada does the opposite of America even if it hurts Canada - it’s a part of its identity.

As a duel citizen of the US and another Commonwealth nation, I have to say that this is exactly the ridiculous self-caricature perspective that gives foreign nationals a sort of combination of pity and contempt for the average US citizen.

While it's true that your cartoonish portrayal of freedom is one possible interpretation, there are most certainly others, many of which present citizens with actual measurable freedoms that they would not enjoy in the US.

For instance, Australians have, since the late 1990s, been relatively free of mass shootings, especially in schools or other public areas. Because the police are allowed to force you to take a random breathalyser test without probable cause, we are generally substantially freer of drunk driving. Because we have a social safety net, people are free from the need to opt out of life saving surgery because they fear the abject economic violence that the US visits upon the "uninsured".

On the other hand, the US has substantially more sensible libel laws than most Commonwealth countries. These things can cut both ways, but it would be a mistake to interpret other countries as attempting a childish breath holding exercise just to differentiate themselves from the hip and cool nation.

"freedom from", you will not be given a prevention from some horrible disease. You can buy it if you can afford it, but a significant portion of the population can't, and some of them will not be able to enjoy life because of it.

"freedom to", a prevention will be provided. You can always decide to take alternatives, if you can afford it. A significant portion of the population can't. They will be able to enjoy life.

Equating freedom with the liberties the rich have is absurd. In any society, the rich will have the most freedom, even in the most oppressive ones. The true litmus test for freedom is seeing the freedoms the poor can enjoy. By that standard, the US doesn't score very well.

As a European who has lived in both countries I can only laugh at this. From our perspective, US and Canada are 99% identical, culturally.

Or you have just been sweeping preventable birth defects under the rug. The UK determined that had been happening and are going to start doing it.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c206d60xe7no

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8264257/

2023 Study:

"Despite Public Health Initiatives across Europe recommending that women take 0.4 mg folic acid before becoming pregnant and during the first trimester, the prevalence of NTD pregnancies has not materially decreased in the EU since 1998, in contrast to the dramatic fall observed in the USA. This study aimed to estimate the number of NTD pregnancies that would have been prevented if flour had been fortified with folic acid in Europe from 1998 as it had been in the USA."

"Conclusions: This study suggests that failure to implement mandatory folic acid fortification in the 28 European countries has caused, and continues to cause, neural tube defects to occur in almost 1,000 pregnancies every year."

The most famous NTD is Spina Bifida, and most of them aren't really fixable by modern health care. So this is 1000 babies a year who are either born with severe birth defects, or, in what I'm guessing is many cases, terminated when they could have been born healthy with a flour enrichment mandate.

It would be interesting to know why EU countries chose not to mandate it. Also, I wonder if EU flour millers/producers add it voluntarily, and whether flour produced in Canada destined for EU markets leaves out the folate that's mandated for inclusion in the Canadian market.

Anti-folates (similarly with magnesium and a few other things) are closer to chemotherapy than anything else. They promote cancers because they promote nearly every human cell, and the logic behind removing them is that since cancer cells divide so comparatively rapidly they'll be selectively targeted by a lack of division-enabling nutrients. Most people absolutely shouldn't be restricting their folate intake.

If we take your claim to its logical conclusion (that we shouldn't add those vitamins and minerals to our foods because they might hurt a small percentage of people), the other side of the coin is that we should _remove_ extra vitamins and minerals. If we don't, we're just implicitly medicating a whole population rather than proactively medicating them. Peanuts hurt some people; let's ban them everywhere. End-stage kidney patients without full renal failure often can't tolerate salt or phosphorus; let's not salt any of our food and ban the sale of eggs and meats. Diabetics can't easily tolerate a high glycemic load; let's be extra safe and not use any sugars or alcohols.

Or...make reasonable population-level interventions and let people with special needs handle their own special needs. There are gluten-free breads, no-excess-folate flours, and all sorts of things on the market.

While we're talking about baseline levels of B vitamins (folate), did you know that most bakers are also dumping a rich, broad-spectrum source of most B vitamins and trace minerals into your bread? It's not just folate. They then let that yeast further multiply for 2hr+ just to bump the vitamin levels up (or, worse, add extra yeast at the start to speed up the baking cycle).

Presumably, if you're in the US or any of those countries that mandate folate then you don't eat bread or anything containing flour—or you have to get special flour without it.

I'd imagine that must be very difficult for you.

BTW, that fluoride reference refers to excessive fluoride in water whether natural or added. I've not entered the fluoride debate here except to ask a question. I'd certainly object if fluoride levels were excessive in my water supply.

So instead of the niche individuals and groups working around society to meet their needs—because this absolutely can be done today—-those with an anti-flouridation belief are mandating that the majority give up economy of scale for something that it still wants and needs.

It’s doubtful that this stance is being promoting in good faith.

> Freedom applies to individuals, not collectives.

In the US, it most certainly does. We have freedom to associate, and associations also have freedoms. Were it not so, we wouldn't have even been able to arrive at the conclusion we have with regard to corporate money in politics.

But nobody is forced to drink municipal water. You can go to the grocery and pallets of gallon jugs if you prefer.

Why are the remaining individuals in the community forced to include your individual in their decisions?

(I'm not being serious, I'm pointing out that you may not have found your first principle just yet)

yes, and i think that’s a pretty recent reading of the US comprehension of freedom. my sense is that the collective individualistic tendencies have ballooned.

even as recently as the early 90s, my civics classes emphasized the importance of other people’s rights and that of the expression of your individual rights infringed on the rights of others then it was an irresponsible and improper use of individual rights.

it seems like this has devolved into people whose perspective on individual rights loosely aligns enough to coalesce and shout the loudest to create policy. until someone in the in-group’s individual freedom is impacted and the group fractures into smaller coalitions. rinse. lather. repeat.

AKA as the spoiled brat kind of freedom.

But, taking the individual freedom argument to its ultimate implications, the Free individual is also Free to not drink tap water in a community that decided to add fluoride to their water supply, and is also Free to move to a community that decided against it.

In reality though, the freedom of the companies, which is just the freedom of the super rich ~100 - 1000 people (proxied via companies without taking direct responsibility: The sacred duty of company is to maximize shareholder returns!)

10,000 food additives that are banned in Europe are perfectly fine in US.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-food-additives-banned-europe...

https://isitclean.org/the-ingredients-banned-in-the-eu-but-l...

You joke, but a lot of these freedom-rah-rah-rah people absolutely cried like babies and resisted seatbelt laws back in the 80s and 90s, too. Half my family believed it was evidence a communist takeover, and they all had those little defeat devices that you plugged into the latch, which silenced the car's seatbelt-off indicator.

"You can't tell me what to do" has been a religion in the USA for a long, long time.

This is getting wildly off topic, but I firmly believe that "we tried everything and free market capitalism is the best we have" is a myth.

It's incontrovertible that, under certain conditions, an unrestricted price system (a "market") is the most efficient allocation mechanism possible. There's a lot of research on that kind of thing.

The myth is that we have ever tried anything resembling that on a nationwide scale, or maybe even that it is achievable at all. There is a fundamental "paradox of tolerance" in economics, where market participants have strong and persistent incentives to distort or damage the market. This is why business interests so often align with free-market liberalism or conservatism.

Most of the so-called deregulation under the current Trump administration for example as little to do with improving the efficiency of market allocation. It's much more about making sure very large and powerful corporations can get even larger and more powerful, and removing the regulatory apparatus to prevent them from distorting and damaging markets to suppress competition, or to suppress labor costs.

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