Health: physical and mental, individual and public.
Discussions, issues, resources, news, everything.
See the pinned post for a long list of other communities dedicated to health or specific diagnoses. The list is continuously updated.
Nothing here shall be taken as medical or any other kind of professional advice.
Commercial advertising is considered spam and not allowed. If you're not sure, contact mods to ask beforehand.
Linked videos without original description context by OP to initiate healthy, constructive discussions will be removed.
Regular rules of lemmy.world apply. Be civil.
Remember how the UK was sort of made fun of for bad oral hygiene? That's about to be the US.
Yeah. They don’t know how shitty this is. I grew up in the sticks with well water that had effectively no fluoride. I’ve had increasing amounts of dental work done as I get older. It’s expensive. Painful. Irritating. At least three dentists just outright said “You grew up on well water, didn’t you?” after looking at my teeth. My partner grew up on public fluoridated water and easily has less than 1/3 of the work I’ve had done.
Fluoride has real benefits. These kids will be paying the price for a lifetime.
From one of the links:
“Prior to the age of 6, you need to have some fluoride that you swallow so that it can get into the developing permanent teeth,” she said. “That’s the most important time for systemic fluoride.”
Explains why we were forced to take fluoride tablets in school. I wonder if parents (who are pro fluoride) could just do that for their children, if they can’t manage to keep fluoride in the public water supply.
We don't do that in Germany and we're not all running around with rotting teeth.
While true, Germany does have fluoridated salt and fluoride rinses instead. Its just easier for USA water to be fluoridated since the water supplies are more unified. See https://web.archive.org/web/20170206122513/http://www.wda.org/wp_super_faq/european-countries-have-rejected-fluoridation-so-why-should-we-fluoridate-water
replace the fluoride with raw malk
Mmm, the listeria builds a stronk immunity.
I hate just how the fluoride conspiracy theory is still a thing when it's been proven time and time again that fluoride is needed to maintain healthy dental hygine.
I think calling it a conspiracy theory is not entirely fair. It's a genuine scientific debate, hindered by the lack of proper evidence and studies that apply to the US.
Read https://www.statnews.com/2025/01/06/fluoride-iq-jama-pediatrics-critiques-meta-analysis/ for example, it highlights a recent meta-study that found a small, but non-negligible effect on neurodevelopment if people were ingesting fluoride. But a lot of studies it relies on have some asterisks attached. Those are properly accounted for in the meta-study, but ultimately the answer is "we don't really know".
Many western countries don't add fluoride to the drinking water; many used to do so in the past but stopped. There were the concerns about neurotoxicity (albeit minor) but also some ethical concerns regarding mass-medicating the population without any realistic opt-out. But the other major reason is that those countries have the population exercise good dental practices like brushing twice a day with fluoridated toothpaste, which is spat out instead of swallowed. This avoids concerns of neurotoxicity but maintains the dental benefits: a best of both worlds basically (also endorsed by most scientists).
The US has systemic poverty issues, and a large part of the population do not observe these good dental practices, not necessarily through ill-will but rather because they lack the money to buy toothpaste. Because of that, removing fluoride will likely increase cavities in the US, unlike in other western countries.
Ideally the US keeps the fluoride around until these systemic poverty issues are largely resolved. But knowing the current shitstains in government...
People would find a way to demonize vitamin B if the government had a program to supply it to people for free.
But why put it in the water and drink it, better to have in in toothpaste and mouthwash if you can't brush
Because it's shown that adding it to the drinking water is safe for human consumption and at the same time causes significantly lower dental issues. It's a jet positive, always has been
It actually works much better in salt: your teeth are exposed to higher concentrations of fluoride for longer periods of time, yet you consume less total fluoride. Plenty of countries fluoridate salt much like we iodize it.
Poor people. To repeat myself:
Poor people often can’t afford toothbrushes and/or toothpaste, let alone the “recommended” (read: mandatory, or people will say you deserved to lose your teeth) floss, mouthwash, electric toothbrush, etc., all from “reputable brands”.
Fair point. Although I've used my 2$ toothbrush for two years now. I think even if you're poor you could get a toothbrush. Even if you don't afford toothpaste just brushing goes a long way.
My cousins never brush their teeth, but they drink tap water. Their teeth has outlasted their parents teeth by 10 years and counting
Is fluoride the only option? Is not hydroxyapatite in toothpaste as effective as fluoride in toothpaste and cannot it be used as replacement for fluoride in toothpaste?
Wikipedia: Hydroxyapatite#SafetyConcerns
The European Commission's Scientific Committee on Consumer Safety (SCCS) reissued an updated opinion in 2023, where it cleared rod-shaped nano hydroxyapatite of concerns regarding genotoxicity, allowing consumer products to contain concentrations of nano hydroxyapatite as high as 10% for toothpastes and 0.465% for mouthwashes. However, it warns of needle-shaped nano hydroxyapatite and of inhalation in spray products.
Based off the article and the cited Opinion document by the EU's safety committee (SCCS) it seems like rod-shaped nano hydroxyapatite is safe for use in only toothpaste provided that at least 95.8% (particle count) are comprised of rod-shaped instead of needle-shaped particles and in addition are not coated or surface modified.
composed of rod-shaped particles of which at least 95.8% (in particle number) have an aspect ratio of less than 3, and the remaining 4.2% have an aspect ratio not exceeding 4.9;
I'll be honest in that a bit of this sentence especially regarding the aspect ratio is somewhat incomprehensible to me as the sentence structure obscures what they're trying to communicate.
I believe by aspect ratio, they mean the ratio of diameter to length of the rod shaped structures. At an aspect ratio of less than 3, the structures are more cylinder shaped than rod shaped.
So the minerals must be mostly stubby cylinder shaped, and less than 4.2% can be needle shaped or long rod shaped. Same problem we had with asbestos actually, that the long thin needle shaped fibers were physically damaging to tissue.
They know it's bullshit, they're just using it to sell the idea to morons.
The point is actually the increase in cavities. They want to make it even more expensive to be poor, with the ultimate goal of starving out anyone who isn't profitable.