On this Skeptical Sunday, Jessica Wynn brushes away fluoride fears and gets to the root of this controversial mineral's cavity-fighting powers! On This Week's Skeptical Sunday, We Discuss: Fluoride is a naturally occurring mineral found in water, soil, and food that helps prevent tooth decay by strengthening tooth enamel and making teeth more resistant to acid. When added to water supplies at controlled levels, it has been shown to reduce cavity rates by 40-70% in children. The discovery of fluoride's benefits came from investigating "Colorado Brown Stain" in the early 1900s, where researchers found that while high fluoride levels stained teeth brown, it also made them remarkably resistant to decay. This led to research determining safe, effective fluoride levels for water supplies. Despite widespread scientific consensus on its safety and effectiveness, fluoride remains controversial, with some groups claiming health risks. However, extensive research has found no evidence linking properly fluoridated water to cancer, bone problems, or other serious health issues at recommended levels. The optimal fluoride level in water has been adjusted over time as other sources of fluoride (like toothpaste and food products) have become more common. In 2015, the US Public Health Service lowered its recommended levels, showing ongoing monitoring and adjustment of public health policies. You can take control of your dental health by understanding your local water fluoride levels (easily found on the CDC website), using fluoride toothpaste appropriately, and making informed choices about water filtration — while remembering that every $1 spent on water fluoridation saves about $38 in dental healthcare costs! Connect with Jordan on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. If you have something you'd like us to tackle here on Skeptical Sunday, drop Jordan a line at [email protected] and let him know! Connect with Jessica Wynn and subscribe to her newsletter: Between the Lines! Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1073 If you love listening to this show as much as we love making it, would you please peruse and reply to our Membership Survey here? And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! This Episode Is Brought To You By...See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What are the benefits of fluoride?
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wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer, and researcher Jessica Wynn. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.
We'll see you next time. Topics such as why the Olympics are kind of a sham, circumcision, sovereign citizens, diet supplements, the lottery, Reiki healing, ear candling, self-help cults, and more. And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs.
These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion, negotiation, psychology, disinformation, cyber warfare, crime and cults, and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today, fluoride, the lip-smacking curiosity in our water supply.
It's a fascinating mineral that's a hero for our teeth, but a puzzle for a lot of the general public. We associate it with dental health, but in some mouths, the fluoride added to our water leaves a bad taste. So what is fluoride? Why is it in our water? Will this lead to mind control via our faucets? Researcher and writer Jessica Wynn joins me to wash away the confusion around fluoride.
Right. Hey, Jordan, thanks for having me back on Skeptical Sunday.
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Chapter 2: How did fluoride become part of our water supply?
Yeah, for sure, it can be. I mean, fluoride strengthens tooth enamel, making our teeth more resistant to acid, and it stops cavities from forming. So fluoride can even help to rebuild our tooth's surface. And water fluoridation, that is adding it to the public water supply, provides frequent and consistent contact with low levels of fluoride, and this prevents tooth decay. It's amazing.
So you say it occurs naturally, but where does it actually come from?
Well, fluoride is the 13th most abundant element in the Earth's crust. So when water moves through spaces between rocks, fluoride just dissolves naturally into the water. The amount varies depending on where in the world your water comes from. So natural fluoride levels range from barely perceptible to over 10 parts per million.
So that doesn't sound like much, but what do I know? 10 parts per million, is that a lot? How do they even measure something that small? It's actually quite impressive.
I know it's hard to conceptualize, but it is not a lot. 10 parts per million is the same as 0.009 milligrams per liter. If you want to think about it in a more solid way, one ppm is comparable to one inch in 16 miles. So, yeah, not a lot. But fluoride, it's everywhere. It's in all our water sources. It's in rivers, lakes, surface water. But it's really, really trace amounts.
If it's in all natural water, then why do we also then add it to our water supply? I don't understand.
Yeah, it's a balance. So we add it to reduce cavities among the population. That's it. I mean, fluoridation, it's not actually required in any community in America. And the Safe Drinking Water Act prohibits the EPA from mandating the addition of any substances to our drinking water. But every town just votes on it.
And by the time that fluoride reaches humans, it's absorbed into the blood through the digestive tract. And then it collects in areas with high calcium content like our bones and teeth. It's estimated to reduce tooth decay in children by 40 to 70 percent.
Wow. OK, that's great. But how does it actually work?
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Chapter 3: What is the Colorado Brown Stain and its significance?
Well, fluoride works in three different ways. It reduces the ability of plaque bacteria to produce acid. It strengthens tooth enamel. And it's absorbed into the crystalline structure of tooth enamel, making it harder for acids to attack our teeth. I mean, fluoride is objectively effective in lowering cavity rates in children. And there's a lot of evidence it does the same for adults.
But there's just not as many studies on adults, so it's unclear how much it actually helps our teeth. Regardless, no matter what our age, our teeth are always in either a state of demineralization or remineralization. And cavities occur when bacteria feed on sugars in your mouth, creating acids that erode your teeth by dissolving your tooth mineral. That's demineralization.
And then remineralization, that's what fills in our small cavities and involves the construction of crystals from minerals.
Wow. Crystals that actually do something. I got to notify all the listeners who are furious about our Skeptical Sunday on crystal healing. They'll be happy to hear that.
Yeah, they'll be happy. These crystals are actually legit. And they stack together like Legos and they just make our teeth strong. So this happens naturally just in regular mineralization. And it results in an inorganic mineral substance called hydroxyapatite. And hydroxyapatite, it creates these super physiologically strong bonds that wouldn't otherwise naturally occur in nature.
So even though fluoride and hydroxyapatite have different chemical bonds, they're producing similar results.
And all of this from just that little bit of fluoride that's in our drinking water.
Yeah, incredible, right? I mean, about 80% of the fluoride consumed is absorbed in our gastrointestinal tract. And then about half of that is stored in our bones and teeth. Children, they store more like 80% because they're still developing. And then the rest of it, it just shows up in like our plasma and saliva and urine. It's everywhere.
There's over 214 million Americans that live in communities which supply fluoridated water. So it's like 75 percent of the population.
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Chapter 4: Is fluoride safe and what are the controversies?
Oh, it's not. So not everybody is getting fluoride in their water, even in the United States.
No, no, because it's not mandated. So it's just most people are voting for it. But the U.S. Public Health Service, they have fluoride recommendations for different variables, like places without fluoridated water, they recommend should use some kind of fluoride supplement. And places people are expected to drink more water, like warmer climates, have less added to their water.
In 1986, the EPA established the maximum allowance, which is four milligrams per liter in public water supply to prevent overexposure while still preventing these cavities.
But why are we just adding this one mineral? It sort of seems reasonable to me for people to be skeptical here.
Sure. I mean, I get that. But people are all over the place with what they don't like about fluoride. And I think a lot of it is misinformation and ignorance to what fluoride is and does. Remember the movie Dr. Strangelove?
Yes, of course. It's a classic, perhaps the most disturbing movie about the illusion of our control. Did that influence how people feel about fluoride?
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Chapter 5: How does fluoride work to prevent cavities?
Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived...
I mean, that's an extreme example. But in that movie, General Ripper claimed that not only that, but that water fluoridation was destroying our precious bodily fluids, which is a reference to this conspiracy that water fluoridation is a a plot to weaken America and make it susceptible to a communist takeover.
I have come across occasional communist conspiracies about fluoride that still exist, but they're pretty fringe.
That movie was in black and white. So this is a longstanding conspiracy theory, man. This thing really has legs. And many conspiracies, of course, are indeed fringe. But I also, I got to admit, I understand why people get weirded out by having something added to their water supply.
Sure. I mean, right now there's a major lawsuit in California to get fluoride completely removed from the water. That's still pending. The case was brought by a group who claim any level of fluoride is harmful, but it At the same time, there's a major lawsuit in Buffalo, New York, where the city is being sued for damaging their children's dental health by not putting enough fluoride in the water.
So it's just this wide divergence about how safe people feel with having fluoride in drinking water. And it's confusing because... If fluoride exceeds a certain threshold, it is actually poisonous. And that sounds really scary. But, you know, we control fluoridation levels so they are at the healthiest amount to decrease tooth decay without making us sick.
For obvious reasons, there are strict rules about our water supply.
When did we start doing this? It's naturally in some food and water in trace amounts. And then in, what, the 60s or whatever, we just started, like, dumping it into the water supply? What am I missing?
It wasn't quite that drastic. It was more of a slow ride. So fluoride was discovered in 1901, and it took decades to prove to the world that it's a scientific revolution in preventative care and minimizing tooth decay.
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Chapter 6: What are the risks associated with fluoride?
All right. All right. So I take Advil. I take vitamin C sometimes, but I don't want that stuff flowing through the water supply. So how did the world just go, all right, you know what, this needs to go in everybody's water?
Okay, first, let's just point out that fluoridation is such a minor part of water's journey. There is way more concern about getting things out of our water supply. How we got to fluoride as an additive, it's actually a pretty good detective story. So in 1901...
Frederick McKay, he graduated from UPenn Dental School on the East Coast in Philly, and he headed to Colorado Springs to open up a practice. And when he got there, his mind was blown because his new community was just filled with people who had gross, gnarly brown stains on their teeth. He actually wrote that it looked like chocolate candies were stuck on everyone's teeth.
Oh, wow. That's gross, but also somehow delicious.
Oh, God, no. I mean, he never saw anything like it in any academic books or new dental literature. And the residents there gave him two theories. They thought it was either from drinking cheap milk or eating too much pork. I don't know why.
Sounds plausible.
Sounds science-y. I mean, whatever it was, everyone had it, so they just normalized it, and they called it Colorado Brownstain. Ha!
That's what I call my kids' diapers.
What a coincidence. Gross. But this guy McKay, he spent the next several years researching the bizarre condition and presented all his findings at the Colorado Dental Association convention. There was this researcher there at the convention who was pretty well known and did not believe McKay. So
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Chapter 7: Why is fluoride also in toothpaste?
Of all the things to be known for, Colorado, no wonder they were so eager to get weed on the map. Aren't you the brownstain guys? No, no, no, no, no. We're the weed guys now. We are the weed guys now. Please.
You know, like anything else. This was before the weed thing, but by 1915... A hundred years or so. Yeah. McKay, his research showed that the stained enamel was rooted in childhood and because the kids' teeth aren't calcified. So if you're an adult, it's not going to happen to your teeth because our teeth are calcified. So people like McKay, who were new to town, they were not at risk.
And the weird thing is that Colorado brown-stained teeth were surprisingly and just inexplicably resistant to tooth decay.
What? So you're telling me those ugly brown-stained teeth weren't decaying. So they were ugly, but very resilient, which actually sounds like a good metaphor for the people of Colorado. No, I'm kidding. I'm from Detroit. I've got no room to talk whatsoever.
I'm from Philly. I can't say anything. McKay dug deeper and deeper into this theory that there was an ingredient in Colorado Springs water that was causing this, but it was just a hunch.
Just a hunch, eh? Here we go.
I see where this is going, I think. His hunch restored healthy, unstained teeth in the children of Oakley, Idaho, where a new pipeline had been built for the community. Children started to have these brown stains on their teeth. And then when McKay convinced them to abandon the new water source, within just a couple years, children were back to having healthy, unstained teeth.
OK, so the hunt, he was getting warmer, apparently.
Yeah, exactly. And then the United States Public Health Service was paying attention and they took McKay's research and sprinted to investigate this Colorado brown stain that was appearing in bauxite Arkansas. And this is interesting because bauxite was owned by the Aluminum Company of America or Alcoa. And it's important because a toxic byproduct of aluminum manufacturing is fluoride.
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Chapter 8: What alternatives to fluoride are available?
Yeah, yeah. Capitalism was strong then, too. McKay persevered, and he took water samples from all these towns where the brown stain was experienced. And his 30-year quest finally just confirmed that high levels of waterborne fluoride was in all the samples and was causing this staining of tooth enamel.
So if the high levels of fluoride caused the Colorado brown stain, why am I and everyone else listening pretty much making damn sure that this fluoride's in my toothpaste and in my water? I mean, why do we want that?
Well, one mystery often ripples into others, right? So when the research took off and fluoride studies were finally being done by the NIH, the Dental Hygiene Unit, their first task starting in 1931 was to to develop an accurate way to measure fluoride in drinking water. That took a couple years.
And then when they had the right tools, a critical discovery found levels of up to one part per million in drinking water did not cause brown stain.
I see. But it did prove that fluoride prevents cavities, or are we not there yet?
Well, yeah. I mean, researchers understood too much fluoride caused the stains, but the teeth were resistant to decay. So they wondered whether adding fluoride to drinking water at the exact right, safe, balanced amount would help fight tooth decay. But this hypothesis would need to be tested. So... That was 1931, you know, early 30s.
But it wasn't until 1944 that the City Commission of Grand Rapids, Michigan, voted to add fluoride to its public water supply. In 1945, Grand Rapids became the first community in the world to fluoridate its drinking water.
Wow. So it is a Michigan thing. Us Michiganders, well, we do have beautiful smiles and our water does taste like a swimming pool half the time.
Oh, gross.
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