Misinformation campaigns increasingly target the cavity-fighting mineral, prompting communities to reverse mandates. Dentists are enraged. Parents are caught in the middle.
The culture wars have a new target: your teeth.
Communities across the U.S. are ending public water fluoridation programs, often spurred by groups that insist that people should decide whether they want the mineral — long proven to fight cavities — added to their water supplies.
The push to flush it from water systems seems to be increasingly fueled by pandemic-related mistrust of government oversteps and misleading claims, experts say, that fluoride is harmful.
“The anti-fluoridation movement gained steam with Covid,” said Dr. Meg Lochary, a pediatric dentist in Union County, North Carolina. “We’ve seen an increase of people who either don’t want fluoride or are skeptical about it.”
There should be no question about the dental benefits of fluoride, Lochary and other experts say. Major public health groups, including the American Dental Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, support the use of fluoridated water. All cite studies that show it reduces tooth decay by 25%.
Hi! I’m a scientist. A microbiologist, even. If I watched the video evidence every Internet person threw at me, I’d likely still be catching up to a backlog from my twenties. It’s time consuming and, more often than not, completely full of insane conspiracy theories.
If there’s even any primary research referenced, then you have to vet that to determine if the video makers even interpreted it correctly. If they haven’t, that’s an entire extra step where you argue with the person providing the video about how the research was misrepresented or misunderstood.
So GTFO of here with “if you had bothered to watch the videos”. It’s “if the OP had bothered to link the actual research”.
We’re not going to do the work of substantiating someone’s point for them.