Oh recarding sodium silicofluoride, who knows, really.? I suppose
what one thinks will depend upon which authority’s views of its history
and safety one chooses find credible.
Here’s are two anti-establishment reviews of the subject I find to be
reasonable credible sounding, enough so to to consider, anyway.
I doubt it’s entirely a single causal factor, we do have a lot of smoking guns in the room. In the end, they may all cause subtle problems or multiply comorbid factors…
Doesn’t bother me. I drank fluoridated water throughout my childhood, and not only do I still have most of my teeth, but I barely glow in the dark and I’m just about as smart now as I ever was. Okay, maybe a little dumber.
My teeth are lightly stained, and some dentists have attributed their color and relative bulletproof-ness to the levels of Chicago-water fluoride I received as a babe.
Hey, do you think we could all stop scoffing to actually seriously consider this for a sec?
Because if epidemiological meta-analyses confirm a significant (and a few IQ points across a whole population is significant) detrimental effect on cognitive development, then a thoroughly ingrained tendency for society as a whole to dismiss this phenomenon out of hand, even in the face of clear evidence, makes me suspicious…
I can think of dozens of bullshit myths perpetuated as fact, to varying and sometimes astounding effect, that are like a gold-plated smoking gun: by some wild coincidence the effect of the bullshit nicely serves the interests of the privileged few. So the notion having widespread currency, that anyone worried about flouride = tinfoil brigade could conceivably have been furthered to cover up a monstrous effort to con humanity at large to dumb itself down.
Which on the face of it sounds patently absurd, but then I refer you to the success of the mainstream media on that very front. And when you consider the relative levels of sanity and altruism found amongst the world’s most powerful individuals, maybe it starts sounding marginally plausible…
A few IQ points is noise. When I was 15, I took an IQ test every day for 2 weeks. I never got the same result twice (yes it hovered around the average, no outliers except the one I fell asleep while taking). I ended the fortnight significantly better at taking IQ tests.
IQ isn’t a particularly compelling measurement of intelligence to me. It’s a lot like a p-value, or a stock price in my opinion.
A few points is noise on the scale of an individual, not so much when you’re talking an average from a large sample size.
And I see a lot of people poo-pooing IQ, as if they can nominate a better quantitative measure of intelligence than scores from tests designed to measure it.
The studies in China are focussing on water that naturally contains high or low levels of fluoride ion.
The fluoride ions enter the Chinese water via gradual dissolution of the ground rocks. (as opposed to being added artificially)
It could be that the fluoride ions correlate with the presence of other elements that influence cognitive development, without actually being responsible for an effect themselves. e.g. perhaps the presence of fluoride correlates with the presence of lead, mercury, cadmium, etc.?
It’s potentially a different situation if fluoride is added independently to the water in the water treatment plant, versus the fluoride and metal ions that are added by nature.
