The FUD is believing without fluoride in your water that your teeth will rot and cavities will abound. Extreme conspiracies aside, there is no direct medical evidence that fluoridated water prevents cavities. There are too many variables. Applying it to your teeth directly has an chemical effect, but in the drinking water it's not direct science. It's a big game of statistics and believing what you want to believe, right now, the medical establishment and most oral care providers believe fluoride is good. It is cheap, so I say I can buy mouthwash or toothpaste, get it out of my water.
It is a carcinogen, Rat poison as mentioned, and it bioaccumulates. Almost impossible to filter because the particle is so small. It is the only additive added to our water to medicate people rather than treat the water. Any person with a shred of medical principle knows that you shouldn't medicate all people at once with a fixed dose. There have been many cases of infants overdosing on fluoride, which makes the boned harder and more brittle. It can also mess up your teeth and cause fluorosis. The ADA has even come out in recent years having to mention to risks of fluoride to children.
You don't medicate people with a fixed dose. It's that simple. That should be enough to get it out of the water. But it doesn't happen because there's big money in disposing of toxic waste into our water supplies, and as long as people believe this, the money will keep flowing.
If you want to prevent cavities, stop consuming sugar. Stop drinking soda. I never had a cavity in my life growing up and I had bad oral hygiene routines, but I rarely drank soda or had sugar. It wasn't until college and I became hooked on soda I got cavities. I don;t plan on getting any more, I'll let you know how that goes. Xylitol is a great alternative way to prevent cavities, BTW.
if you study history, when the sugar cane, and later the sugar beet hit mass production, it was a pandemic of tooth decay problems. It wasn't that they had a fluoride deficiency.
Oh, and then there's the chlorine in the water, put there to kill bacteria. No one lets it air out or filters it. You drink it, and it kills the good bacteria in your gut as well. Does this kill you? No. Is it natural and healthy? not for me. So glad I live in VT and have real water popping out of hillsides.
Nothing is ever perfect in a public health scenario. Their job is to figure out how to have the best NET impact while minimizing public health impacts. On one hand, you have the incredibly high cost of poor oral hygiene, which exacts a huge toll in dental, medical, and social costs. You could approach this by individually counseling people, providing free dental care, toothbrushes, and toothpaste (and you DO do this, to some extent), but what's the cost of that, and what makes you think that people will actually follow recommendations? (They don't - observe obesity as a public health issue.) On the other, you have the potential toxicity of fluoride (in very high concentrations, mind you). Which side wins out? It's an ethical, economic, and debate of practicality as much as it is a public health concern.
The public health investigations would seem to point that the drawbacks of the latter is a small price to pay for the former, particularly because they can be minimized by, for example, breastfeeding or using bottled, non-fluoridated water to prepare formula. What happens is that some people (such as yourself) use loaded terms like "rat poison," extoll "natural" (also a loaded term) and have a knee-jerk reaction, running for the hills. What we are talking about here is DOSING, and the quantity of fluoride in water is a fraction of what is found in fluoridated water (unless, of course, fluoride finds its way into water naturally - which is very possible).
When public health authorities decided to fortify grains with folic acid to reduce the incidence of birth defects (NTDs), one of the arguments against it was that folate is required for cell reproduction. So for somebody with cancer, folic acid could, potentially, HELP the cancer grow (some cancer drugs are folate blockers). Ultimately, the ability to prevent NTDs won out and they fortified flour. The incidence dropped like a rock.
Chlorination of water. Well, look at it this way. Do you treat the water, or just leave it be, potentially allowing pathogenic bacteria/viruses to enter the water system? Some municipal systems handle millions upon millions of gallons a day. It is simply not technically and financially feasible to treat that much water using some of the higher-end systems available (such as those used by water bottlers - reverse osmosis and the like). New York City is building an ultraviolet treatment system for the city's water at a cost of billions of dollars. How many municipalities can afford that sort of thing? Like ALL public health inititiatives, this is a calculus of benefits and drawbacks.
Same principle applies to vaccination. The benefits - reduced incidence of disease throughout the population, reduced risk of pandemics - outweigh the drawbacks, including a population which cannot be vaccinated and the small fraction of cases who may have adverse reactions. Unfortunately, these fringe cases get the most publicity and irresponsible celebrities go on TV to tell parents NOT to vaccinate their kids, essentially spreading FUD, unraveling the public health initiatives in the process, and putting everybody at risk as a consequence.
Finally, I should point out that it is not sugar that causes dental caries, it is CARBOHYDRATES (which also include sugars). You can get tooth decay from a diet of brown rice, fish, and vegetables. The key point is the frequency of carbohydrate and the "stickiness." A person who eats 3-4 meals a day and barely snacks will have a lower risk of dental caries than somebody who grazes all day on carbohydrate-rich snacks (and face it,most snacks ARE carbohydrate) and eats meals on top of that.
I didn't have many cavities until I got to college. I, too, drank soda during college. But was it the soda? Well, yes and no. I'd drink the soda between meals and throughout the day, so my carbohydrate intake was spread out as opposed to being restricted to meals. This provides more opportunity for bacteria to feast on sugar passing through my mouth. In effect, drinking milk or juice instead of soda would have done more or less the same thing.
