The story of fluoride in dentistry traces back to southern Colorado in 1901 or earlier. A dentist, Dr. Frederick McKay, noted that many of his patience experienced a slight mottling of their teeth with dull white patches.
This was a regional phenomenon with the colloquial name of Colorado Brown Teeth or Texas Teeth because in its extreme, the mottling shows up as brown patches.
By 1916, McKay had determined that naturally occurring fluoride ions found in the water were the source of the discolorations. The more fluoride, the more severe was the mottling with extreme mottling labeled fluorosis.
But McKay and other dentists also noted that patients with mottling had better dental health - stronger teeth, fewer cavities.
By 1931, epidemiologists had confirmed that fluoride was both related to the mottling of teeth and better dental health. The landmark case study came from Minonk, Illinois, where groundwater has a natural fluoridation level of 2.5 ppm. Children raised in Minonk have significantly less tooth decay than children that moved to Minonk after their teeth were fully developed.
(A ppm constitutes one part in a million or, to put it in perspective, one milligram per kilogram of drinking water. These children were consuming about 2.5 mg of fluoride per day or an amount equivalent to about half a grain of salt.)
The U.S. Public Health Service studied 13 additional communities in five states and concluded that fluoride in drinking water positively correlated with better dental health. This result was confirmed by studies in twelve other countries.
As a result, the U.S. Public Health Service began four case-control studies in 1945 to test whether artificially fluoridated water at a 1.0 ppm level would improve children's dental health without causing mottling or other side effects. The original study was scheduled for 10 years, but after five years, the result were so striking that the U.S. Public Health Service recommended that communities without natural fluoridation should consider adding fluoride to their
water supply.
This is where things got derailed.
It was the 1950s. The United States was still recovering from World War II when the normally independently minded American public had been required to work collectively. There was an extreme distrust of the bureaucrats in Washington. Conspiracy theories were running rampant.
Organizations that supported the inclusion of fluoride in water supplies, such as the American Dental Association, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council, thought that the science was self-evident. There was no need to defend the decision other than to state that fluoridation would enhance dental health.
However, an anti-fluoridation movement quickly arose declaring that fluoridation was a plot to steal the souls of American youth by bureaucrats. Since the bureaucrats were Americans, this narrative was quickly changed to a communist plot to subdue the nation. Fluoride was actually a drug to make Americans dumber and more docile and therefore easier to conquer by the Soviets. Or so the story went.
In the 1960s, the narrative changed again to include the possibility that fluoride was being introduced into the water supply by alien life forms.
In the 1970s, it was corporations bent on creating a subservient working class that would fill the factories and never question their lot in life.
Through it all, the science kept
saying that fluoridation at concentrations of 1.0 ppm is a safe and effective method of increasing dental health for a vast majority of the population, particularly children. Fluoridated toothpastes became the norm. Fluoridation became a routine part of a trip to the dentist.
More recently, those opposed to fluoridation in public water supplies have become more subtle and sophisticated in their attacks. For example, there is now a focus on the source of fluoride. Statements such as "Certain fluoridation mixtures include silicone and sodium, differing from naturally occurring calcium fluoride." are
misleading at best.
Silicone is a chemical compound of silicon, oxygen, and organic groups not relevant to fluoridation mixtures. Sodium is an innocuous ion necessary for human survival.
But more to the point, fluoride ions are fluoride ions are fluoride ions.
They do not bear any relationship to their source.
Once a fluoride salt dissolves, fluoride ions from all sources are indistinguishable from each other.
There is no chemical way to distinguish fluoride originating in sodium fluoride from calcium fluoride. There is no natural fluoride or unnatural
fluoride.
As a final note, the notion that fluoride can lead to a decrease in intelligence has been put forth as proof that fluoridation is bad. One recent letter even quoted an article purporting to be a meta-analysis of 27 different studies with the conclusion that "The results support the possibility of an adverse effect of high fluoride exposure on children's neurodevelopment."
Sounds pretty damning until you read the full article and find out that the level of exposure was 20 times that allowed in North American drinking water.
Traces of fluoride in our drinking water results in improved dental health for children and that is what really matters.
