It is not that expensive to run double-blind fluoride experiments. There are hundreds that have been run over decades. There is a Scotland that the found an 81.4% reduction in cavities. A double-blind study from New Zealand found no benefit to osteoporosis is postmenopausal women. Etc. Etc.
If these neurocognitive effects were actually measurable, they wouldn't need to cherry-picking population-level correlation studies to find effects that are within the margin of error of the tests.
> we would like to give your child something that we think will lower their intelligence
“The association between drinking carbonated drinks, eating chips and intelligence level was significant (P= 0.043, 0.001) and prevalence odds ratio of 1.5 and 2.4 respectively” [1].
Anyone arguing this is about childhood IQ and wouldn’t similarly ban (not stop mandating, ban) soft drinks, chips and fast food for kids, they’re signalling this is about something other than kids’ health.
(Note: this isn’t my mole hill. I think communities should have the right to make this call on their own. And the cited study quality is just as good as the fluoride causes autism ones.)
Even if you believed that to be the case, you could choose an area that had high natural fluoride in the water, provide gravity filters and then double-blind supplement fluoride at a moderate level for one group.
It is certainly more ethical than saying "we are definitely going to let your children's teeth rot because some people think, on the basis of circumstantial evidence, it might have approximately the same effects as not having children's books in the home."
I live in a town where most people grew up on well water, but we grew up in cities in another state with fluoridated water.
When I took my daughter to see a dentist here, the dentist saw my daughter's good teeth during the check-up and said, "You didn't grow up here, did you?"
N = 1 doesn’t work for these effect sizes. Each of brushing frequency, use of proper toothpaste, flossing, diet, hydration and I think even genetics affect dental health more than fluoride. The point is fluoride in water provides a good catch-all if those practices aren’t followed.
Water fluoridation is considered very common in the United States, Canada, Ireland, Chile and Australia where over 50% of the population drinks fluoridated water.
Most European countries including Italy, France, Finland, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Scotland, Austria, Poland, Hungary and Switzerland do not fluoridate water.
Is there a solid 'trust this paper' site out there? I would think that something could be built that rated papers on how much they have been reproduced, supported or refuted by other papers.
Here is the abstract if you can't load the page normally:
A recent meta-analysis in this journal (Taylor et al 2025) produced ostensible evidence of a negative correlation between fluoride exposure and intelligence in children, which garnered major public attention. There has, however, been criticism of this undertaking and conclusions. In order to address the controversy over this work, we in this special communication undertake an independent forensic meta-science review of the methodology and statistical approaches employed and inferences drawn by the authors, as well as an investigation of the underlying data integrity of the constituent studies. We find that the authors employed unjustified methodological and statistical errors which invalidate their conclusion, and demonstrate that the data cannot be analysed as the authors assert. We further find major problems with the sources employed, including reliance on studies from non-MEDLINE indexed publications with an anti-fluoridation editorial stance, and major underlying issues with the data reported in several instances, indicative of impossible or unreliable data. Taylor et al is not reliable nor are its errors remediable. It should be retracted to avoid harms to public health and scientific discourse.
Look, folks, you're being lied to, and you're victims of pseudoscience, and it's easy to prove using facts and logic, so downvote away at your own peril.
Heavy industry, the dental industry, and your municipalities are lying to you when they say that drinking fluoride helps your teeth.
Now when a dentist applies a fluoride treatment in a paste or appliqué, the solution stays in contact with living bone for a significant dosage time. The process is known as "remineralization" and so there is scientific basis for such a treatment to be effective.
But when you drink water with the same substance, it quickly washes around those bones and into your esophagus. It doesn't stick around. It's like getting a cross tattoo to become Jesus. Fluoride will be digested, and absorbed into your bloodstream, and cross your blood-brain barrier, for sure! But it won't stay adhering to your tooth-bones and the remineralization process never has a chance to start. That's absurd thinking that it somehow is internally effective. It's simply not the mechanism of action. There's not enough time for it to work. The process requires physical contact in order for a chemical reaction to occur!
Fluoride is, however, well-known to produce favorable psychoactive effects. For the past century or more. That's why we got Prozac, where the active ingredient is "fluoxetine". Prozac was the next step forward in getting fluoride to the masses who may not drink black/green tea, or live in fluoridated municipalities.
I have a meta-hypothesis that excess surplus of any product is often remarketed as beneficial. For example, heavy industry produced massive amounts of talc and they were able to parlay it into many products as a powder. I simply feel the same way about minerals such as magnesium. How much Epsom salt is sold, simply because industries need to unload this stuff by the 5lb bag, vs. how good it works in a bathtub, I don't really know. But I literally envision cigar-filled back rooms where executives go "we can profit by digging a lot of this crap out of the ground and putting it on store shelves, or just dumping it right into water supplies, if only there's a way to convince everyone it's good for them!" And there's nothing different with the way lithium's being used, either. It used to be a soft-drink additive! Wait until they begin lithiating all your potable water supplies! (Sort of horrific, because side effects of lithium consumption include polydipsia and polyuria...!)
But fluoride is the biggest scam of the 20th century. It's pseudoscience and quackery that sold it to the general public, and your cities are literally lying through their teeth when they don't tell you their ulterior motive and they pretend that there is "evidence" of beneficial effects on teeth. Nothing could be further from the truth. Y'all might as well believe in phrenology and astrology.
But when you drink <coffee>, it quickly washes around those bones and into your esophagus. It doesn't stick around. It's like getting a cross tattoo to become Jesus. coffee will be digested, and absorbed into your bloodstream, and cross your blood-brain barrier, for sure! But it won't stay adhering to your tooth-bones and the <yellowing> process never has a chance to start. That's absurd thinking that it somehow is internally effective. It's simply not the mechanism of action. There's not enough time for it to work. The process requires physical contact in order for a chemical reaction to occur!
Sort of absurd that you think that the process of staining is comparable to a remineralization. For one thing, coffee and its colorants are thicker and they’ll adhere for longer. Fluoride is simply an elemental substance, not a molecular solution.
While we’re on the subject of cosmetic appearance: fluoride itself can gradually discolor bones such as teeth, and leave really unsightly dark spots on them; good luck to y’all’s dentists trying to distinguish where y’all’s staining came from, because they ain’t gonna blame King Fluoride for it! [They also can’t scrape off your fluorosis with their hand tools anyway...]
It may not be ineffective to formulate fluoride into a paste or gel and then a medical professional deliberately paints it onto dental caries and then carefully holds it there whilst the chemical reaction takes place: honestly, the longer the better.
But just randomly rinsing your mouth with it and then swallowing all of it immediately is the dumbest fucKing pseudoscience I’ve ever heard, yet AmeriKans have swallowed it hooK, line, and sinKer: Seig Heil, DoKtor Mengele!
Honestly, as long as we’re not collectivising the cost of dental caries, and insurers can discriminate dental pricing based on fluoridation if they choose to, I’m okay with folks who don’t brush their teeth doing whatever they want to.
The problem is that children aren't allowed to choose for themselves. Their parents are able to set their kids up for a life of pain and dental bills the parents don't have to experience or pay for.
For completeness sake that could potentially also cut both ways. If it turns out that fluoride does lower academia potential then it would be occurring in the brain's most important development period. Once they are adults they would have to live with that artificial limitation. Though they do say ignorance is bliss.
My personal preference would be to let the scientists, researchers and skeptics put on boxing gloves and in the mean time give the child a healthy diet, teach them to use a water-pick daily to avoid not only cavities but other potential issues related to diet and gum hygiene.
> Their parents are able to set their kids up for a life of pain and dental bills
This is true of a lot of parenting, and the case is more critical for vaccines than dental hygiene because cavities aren’t transmissible. (Within reason.)
So yes, ideally the kids of the uninformed wouldn’t be born into dental debt. But that’s better than them having gone blind from measles or lame from polio. (Coldly, because those costs will be socialised.)
Great. Except fluoridation isn't a per-household choice, it's on the municipality level, so your insurance rates will go up because your neighbors aren't taking care of their teeth, even if you are.
That's just not how a society should work. Children should get a fair chance at life no matter how ignorant or negligent their parents are. Fluoridated water keeps teeth in mouths and students behind desks instead of missing school.
This is also true for measles and chickenpox, both of which have quite unpleasant or even lethal medium-to-long-term consequences in some fraction of people who appear to have recovered.
> Children should get a fair chance at life no matter how ignorant or negligent their parents are
I agree in principle. But this just isn’t the country we live in. Smart states and communities can still think this through logically. But it may be for the best to let the antivax rural areas do their own thing and stick to themselves.
You’re begging the question. If fluoridation decreases IQ through developmental neurotoxicity, is the lost cognitive capacity in the general population justified by the protection of children with irresponsible parents (who do not enforce eg the brushing of teeth) from the consequences of caries? This is a real moral problem we ought to contend with.
I believe society suffers from lower IQs, and that targeted interventions against childhood caries can be applied effectively without dosing the whole population. Why don’t schools teach toothbrushing? Why not have the school nurse check children’s teeth, or have a dentist come to school periodically?
> as long as we’re not collectivising the cost of dental caries
We certainly do, through ER visits and illnesses and medical events that can develop as a result of poor oral hygiene -- stroke and heart disease being among them.
If in order to avoid a healthcare treatment, you have to avoid drinking or bathing or cooking with the public water supply, and also avoid most restaurant food, do you still have the right of informed consent to that treatment?
I don't think informed consent is violated by removing a pollutant. But adding a substance as a healthcare treatment denies informed consent as an individual right, and turns it into a majority right. I'd hate for that to happen to other civil rights.
Banning more than one daily triple cheese burger would be net benefit to society as well. Likely more than we’re getting on dental cost savings. I doubt most would be okay with that though.
They don't even have to move to another country. They can move to parts of the United States that don't fluorinate or that don't have municipal water at all, or just get a gravity filter.
i think the dissent in this thread is unqualified. Society is completely over "net-benefit" solutions. Stop perscribing 20th century one size fits all solutions. How about free flouride tablets instead of dosing everyone. Then saying "we need public policy to govern insurance rates". If this arugment saw its maxima, it would be manditory euthansia after 65. Certainly would really drop insurance rates. Btw genetics are a massive factor in oral hygine requirements, probably something your not considering. Should everyone wear the same brand/make of shoes?
Are you aware that fluoride is a natural mineral in all sources of water? People were found to have better teeth in areas with higher natural concentrations of the stuff. It's like yelling at the sun for administering vitamin D.
Readit News
If these neurocognitive effects were actually measurable, they wouldn't need to cherry-picking population-level correlation studies to find effects that are within the margin of error of the tests.
Do you have a reference?
“The association between drinking carbonated drinks, eating chips and intelligence level was significant (P= 0.043, 0.001) and prevalence odds ratio of 1.5 and 2.4 respectively” [1].
Anyone arguing this is about childhood IQ and wouldn’t similarly ban (not stop mandating, ban) soft drinks, chips and fast food for kids, they’re signalling this is about something other than kids’ health.
(Note: this isn’t my mole hill. I think communities should have the right to make this call on their own. And the cited study quality is just as good as the fluoride causes autism ones.)
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3507933/
It is certainly more ethical than saying "we are definitely going to let your children's teeth rot because some people think, on the basis of circumstantial evidence, it might have approximately the same effects as not having children's books in the home."
When I took my daughter to see a dentist here, the dentist saw my daughter's good teeth during the check-up and said, "You didn't grow up here, did you?"
Most European countries including Italy, France, Finland, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Scotland, Austria, Poland, Hungary and Switzerland do not fluoridate water.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_by_countr...
Make your own conclusions.
A recent meta-analysis in this journal (Taylor et al 2025) produced ostensible evidence of a negative correlation between fluoride exposure and intelligence in children, which garnered major public attention. There has, however, been criticism of this undertaking and conclusions. In order to address the controversy over this work, we in this special communication undertake an independent forensic meta-science review of the methodology and statistical approaches employed and inferences drawn by the authors, as well as an investigation of the underlying data integrity of the constituent studies. We find that the authors employed unjustified methodological and statistical errors which invalidate their conclusion, and demonstrate that the data cannot be analysed as the authors assert. We further find major problems with the sources employed, including reliance on studies from non-MEDLINE indexed publications with an anti-fluoridation editorial stance, and major underlying issues with the data reported in several instances, indicative of impossible or unreliable data. Taylor et al is not reliable nor are its errors remediable. It should be retracted to avoid harms to public health and scientific discourse.
It’s a bit late for that! “Fluoride makes you dumb” is now established in the public discourse as if it were true.
Heavy industry, the dental industry, and your municipalities are lying to you when they say that drinking fluoride helps your teeth.
Now when a dentist applies a fluoride treatment in a paste or appliqué, the solution stays in contact with living bone for a significant dosage time. The process is known as "remineralization" and so there is scientific basis for such a treatment to be effective.
But when you drink water with the same substance, it quickly washes around those bones and into your esophagus. It doesn't stick around. It's like getting a cross tattoo to become Jesus. Fluoride will be digested, and absorbed into your bloodstream, and cross your blood-brain barrier, for sure! But it won't stay adhering to your tooth-bones and the remineralization process never has a chance to start. That's absurd thinking that it somehow is internally effective. It's simply not the mechanism of action. There's not enough time for it to work. The process requires physical contact in order for a chemical reaction to occur!
Fluoride is, however, well-known to produce favorable psychoactive effects. For the past century or more. That's why we got Prozac, where the active ingredient is "fluoxetine". Prozac was the next step forward in getting fluoride to the masses who may not drink black/green tea, or live in fluoridated municipalities.
I have a meta-hypothesis that excess surplus of any product is often remarketed as beneficial. For example, heavy industry produced massive amounts of talc and they were able to parlay it into many products as a powder. I simply feel the same way about minerals such as magnesium. How much Epsom salt is sold, simply because industries need to unload this stuff by the 5lb bag, vs. how good it works in a bathtub, I don't really know. But I literally envision cigar-filled back rooms where executives go "we can profit by digging a lot of this crap out of the ground and putting it on store shelves, or just dumping it right into water supplies, if only there's a way to convince everyone it's good for them!" And there's nothing different with the way lithium's being used, either. It used to be a soft-drink additive! Wait until they begin lithiating all your potable water supplies! (Sort of horrific, because side effects of lithium consumption include polydipsia and polyuria...!)
But fluoride is the biggest scam of the 20th century. It's pseudoscience and quackery that sold it to the general public, and your cities are literally lying through their teeth when they don't tell you their ulterior motive and they pretend that there is "evidence" of beneficial effects on teeth. Nothing could be further from the truth. Y'all might as well believe in phrenology and astrology.
While we’re on the subject of cosmetic appearance: fluoride itself can gradually discolor bones such as teeth, and leave really unsightly dark spots on them; good luck to y’all’s dentists trying to distinguish where y’all’s staining came from, because they ain’t gonna blame King Fluoride for it! [They also can’t scrape off your fluorosis with their hand tools anyway...]
It may not be ineffective to formulate fluoride into a paste or gel and then a medical professional deliberately paints it onto dental caries and then carefully holds it there whilst the chemical reaction takes place: honestly, the longer the better.
But just randomly rinsing your mouth with it and then swallowing all of it immediately is the dumbest fucKing pseudoscience I’ve ever heard, yet AmeriKans have swallowed it hooK, line, and sinKer: Seig Heil, DoKtor Mengele!
My personal preference would be to let the scientists, researchers and skeptics put on boxing gloves and in the mean time give the child a healthy diet, teach them to use a water-pick daily to avoid not only cavities but other potential issues related to diet and gum hygiene.
This is true of a lot of parenting, and the case is more critical for vaccines than dental hygiene because cavities aren’t transmissible. (Within reason.)
So yes, ideally the kids of the uninformed wouldn’t be born into dental debt. But that’s better than them having gone blind from measles or lame from polio. (Coldly, because those costs will be socialised.)
I agree in principle. But this just isn’t the country we live in. Smart states and communities can still think this through logically. But it may be for the best to let the antivax rural areas do their own thing and stick to themselves.
I believe society suffers from lower IQs, and that targeted interventions against childhood caries can be applied effectively without dosing the whole population. Why don’t schools teach toothbrushing? Why not have the school nurse check children’s teeth, or have a dentist come to school periodically?
Dead Comment
We certainly do, through ER visits and illnesses and medical events that can develop as a result of poor oral hygiene -- stroke and heart disease being among them.
Water fluoridation is a net-benefit to society.
Banning more than one daily triple cheese burger would be net benefit to society as well. Likely more than we’re getting on dental cost savings. I doubt most would be okay with that though.
But I am struggling to see how this has anything to do with a white paper highlighting and examining flaws in another white paper.