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Transcript:
Hey so I can’t believe I forgot to mention this but last month I was in an antique store and I found this monkey’s paw and while I was holding it I said out loud for no reason “Man I wish I had an unlimited source of ideas for videos debunking health-related pseudoscience” and then one of the fingers on the paw curled down? It was super weird so I threw it back on the shelf and left.
Anyway, recently Donald Trump announced that he has decided to appoint Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Now, I’ve talked about RFK several times in the past few years, mostly focusing on how he’s a disgusting anti-vaxxer, though I also had a little fun talking about the dead worm in his brain. But with his nomination to run the department responsible for protecting the health of all Americans, I’d like to talk about his proposed plan to take fluoride out of our drinking water. As he posted on Xitter:
“On January 20, the Trump White House will advise all U.S?. water systems to remove fluoride from public water. Fluoride is an industrial waste associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease. President @realDonaldTrump and First Lady @MELANIATRUMP want to Make America Healthy Again.”
Did anyone else forget Melania existed? I look forward to once again seeing her beautiful smiling face around the White House.
Now, if you have multiple brain cells, you’re probably already assuming it’s good and safe merely due to the fact that RFK hates it and wants it gone, but on this channel we remember that broken clocks are correct twice a day, assuming they’re analog. And so, let’s talk about fluoride: the good, the bad, and the uncomfortable.
Fluoride is a naturally occurring ion that is found throughout our planet: it’s in plants, groundwater, and our own teeth and bones. Back in the 1800s, physicians suspected that it might help prevent tooth decay, noting an increase in cavities that occurred alongside an increase in the use of refined flour that naturally contained less fluoride than flour that contained grain husks and stems. They started toying with the idea of reintroducing fluoride in a natural way that might reverse the problem.
In 1945, H. Trendley Dean, a scientist at the National Institutes of Health, conducted a controlled experiment with his colleagues in which they added fluoride to the drinking water of Grand Rapids, Michigan. After only five years, they saw a drastic decrease in the number of cavities with no noticeable negative results. After a decade, they found that children born after fluoridation had 60% less tooth decay and cavities. More and more studies were done in the US and around the world, with all of them finding the same thing: adding about 1 milligram of fluoride to each liter of water results in children having better oral health, with fewer cavities and less tooth decay.
The clear and immediate benefits led to the US adopting fluoridation as a standard policy. Today, fluoridation only costs about $1.30 per person per year, and according to the California Dental Association, every $1 we spend saves $140 in dental bills.
Over the decades, tens of thousands more studies were done and they all found the same thing as that first study in Grand Rapids: a small amount of fluoride in drinking water is a huge benefit with no downsides.
So. Why does RFK want to stop fluoridating our water?
Well, there were fluoride deniers even during the Grand Rapids study–of course, the government adding “chemicals” to our drinking water is going to attract kooks who will apply their particular brand of kookiness to the idea that fluoridation is bad. It’s a communist plot to impurify our precious bodily fluids! (Yes, Dr. Strangelove was based on a real conspiracy theory spread by people in the 50s.) It’s government overreach! It’s poison! It’s a devilish plot to help poor black kids have the same level of healthcare as rich white kids! I mean, that last one is just a guess I made after learning that the KKK joined the anti-fluoride brigade.
RFK’s objection to fluoridation comes from that long line of kooks, and he has just as much evidence for its danger that they did–which is to say, he has no evidence.
But! He, and they, do have a tiny kernel of a truth that they have exploded into this popcorn of bullshit, and it is this: fluoride IS a poison, just like many compounds that we’ve managed to make into something beneficial. It’s all about the dose. It’s like water itself: safe to consume and even necessary for life! But water is a deadly poison in large quantities. I’m not just talking about floods and drownings: there is literally a condition known as water poisoning, or water intoxication. You can actually drink so much water that it causes weakness, difficulty breathing, and yes, even death.
In much the same way, too much fluoride is bad for you. One of the early signs that fluoride was linked to dental health was found in the early 1900s, when a dentist named Dr. Frederick S. McKay noticed that a large number of his patients in Colorado Springs had absolutely zero cavities, but strange brown stains on their teeth. He spent years trying to work out what was happening, and eventually discovered that the answer was fluoride: these people were unknowingly consuming a large amount of it, which was protecting the health of their teeth but also discoloring them. So literally from the start of fluoridation research, experts have known that too much fluoride could have negative effects, and they proceeded with that in mind. How little fluoride can we put in the water to still get benefits without, say, staining our teeth brown, or worse?
And there IS worse. Brown teeth is just an aesthetic thing, but larger and larger amounts of fluoride can be dangerous to your health. In 1950, a researcher was feeding fluoride to mice to see if it worked as an anti-cancer drug. Instead, he noticed that the mice got cancer earlier than the control group. His grad students leaked this result before he had a chance to investigate, and the resulting news coverage killed fluoridation efforts in Texas. After a thorough investigation, they realized they were feeding the mice 42 parts per million of fluoride. 42. You get 1ppm in your water, and they gave 42ppm to MICE.
Again: it’s the dose.
And that’s why, during my last Patreon Q&A livestream, one patron wanted to know whether to be worried about the news that back in September a federal judge had ordered the EPA to institute stronger regulations on water fluoridation because of its negative impact on children’s IQ. The short answer is no, you should not be concerned that this means fluoridation is bad. Here’s the longer answer: basically, a coalition of activist groups sued the EPA over IQ concerns, and this judge, who is not a scientist or a doctor, decided that he thought they had a point that “water fluoridation at the level of 0.7 mg/L – the prescribed optimal level of fluoridation in the United States – presents an “unreasonable risk of injury to health or the environment, without consideration of costs or other non-risk factors, including an unreasonable risk to a potentially exposed or susceptible subpopulation under the conditions of use.”
But that is simply not true. That is, once again, bullshit popcorn. Here’s the kernel of truth:
In August of this year, the National Institutes of Health released a massive report, and I mean massive, it’s like 300 pages long, with a rigorous amount of data that suggests that high levels of fluoride in drinking water MAY be associated with, and thereby may be causing, a drop of a few IQ points in children. This research is impressively thorough but their results are not conclusive, and so they recommend more studies be done.
But the key there is, once again, in the dose. The drop in IQ was only found in areas where children were drinking at least TWICE the amount of fluoride that we currently put into the water. So what was happening there? Government overreach deciding that if a little fluoride is good then a lot of fluoride is great? No! Remember at the start of this video when I said that fluoride is a naturally-occurring ion found everywhere? Well, some places naturally have more fluoride in their water. That’s why all those people in Colorado had brown teeth: there was no governmental fluoridation in 1901. They were NATURALLY consuming too much fluoride. And there are some places in the US where people are NATURALLY consuming even more fluoride than that, leading to potential issues like reduced cognition.
That explanation is very obvious when you think about it for a minute, but we humans are primed to assume that anything “artificial,” “manmade,” or “government mandated” must be BAD, while anything “natural” must be GOOD. This is known as an appeal to nature, and sometimes colloquially called a version of the naturalistic fallacy. In reality, things are the precise opposite, here: the .7 mg/L the government adds to our drinking water has substantially improved everyone’s lives, while the 1.5mg/L that is naturally found in some rocks and soil is potentially damaging those people’s health.
So yeah, that’s the story of fluoridation, thus far. If RFK gets his way, he’s going to doom a generation of kids who are going to grow up with substantially worse oral health. And at the same time, the families who will bear the worst of all this are going to have to hope that their Medicaid will still cover their dental checkups, because that department is now going to be led by…Dr. Oz.
And that’s a video for another day. Thanks, antique store monkey paw!
