The appeal to nature here isn’t just a logical fallacy, it’s a particularly bad heuristic in this case: if you ever find yourself actually stuck with nothing but “natural water”, then for the sake of your life make sure not to drink it until after you hit it with iodine tablets, give it days of UV exposure, pass it through a microfilter, or do something to make it safe first.
That’s all about microorganisms, though; I hadn’t heard of any real dangers from tap-water levels of fluoride. Even potential inhibition of iodine uptake is news to me. It’s always possible there are extremely subtle effects; look at the correlations between groundwater lithium (in tiny tiny concentrations!) and suicide/violence/addiction rates in those Japan and Texas studies. But AFAIK the only likely effect we know of is still the strong correlation between drinking fluoridated water and not having your teeth rot away.
Yep. One simple way to make water safe from micro-organisms is to boil it. The few that survive are no big deal, and it’s no worse than all the food you eat anyway.
With regards to natural, the thing is that we didn’t just decide to add fluorine to water everywhere. It’s added to water where natural level is too low, and removed where natural level is too high. And the worst that is happening from the level that is considered to be optimal is some instances of minor cosmetic effect on the teeth, which correlates with even fewer cavities. So there is actually a chance we are not adding enough, due to some stupid appearance concerns driven by fake teeth and photoshopped advertising.
I’m not even sure any more that fluorine even could have any effect on iodine uptake. There’s chlorine and bromine between iodine and fluorine, and we got a lot of chlorine in our bodies.
The cancer issues, well, studying cancer rate empirically is a popular topic for nonsense because there’s a lot of co-founding factors yet the highly dubious results that you obtain sound like ‘true evidence’ to be put against ‘theories’, whereby the theories are good reasoning based on our knowledge.
For example of one such controversy, small doses of ionizing radiation can be reasonably expected to cause cancer at a rate linearly proportional to doses, due to well understood mechanisms and the radiation not actually diluting at the cellular level. Yet, the folks who are punched in their wallets by this reasoning are funding various nonsense statistical ‘studies’ (which don’t control for co-founding factors as significant as age and smoking) that find positive effects of low doses of radiation, never mind complete lack of any remotely plausible mechanism beyond some non-specific stupidity about some anti-cancer defence responses that are presumed to be asleep when you live normal life having lifetime cancer rate of ~40% with mortality rate 20%, primarily from mutations entirely unrelated to radiation. But which would turn on when radiation several times over background would increase the mutation rate by some tiny fraction of a percent (effect of which is not statistically significant unless you got sample sizes in the tens millions, which you never will have).
The appeal to nature here isn’t just a logical fallacy, it’s a particularly bad heuristic in this case: if you ever find yourself actually stuck with nothing but “natural water”, then for the sake of your life make sure not to drink it until after you hit it with iodine tablets, give it days of UV exposure, pass it through a microfilter, or do something to make it safe first.
That’s all about microorganisms, though; I hadn’t heard of any real dangers from tap-water levels of fluoride. Even potential inhibition of iodine uptake is news to me. It’s always possible there are extremely subtle effects; look at the correlations between groundwater lithium (in tiny tiny concentrations!) and suicide/violence/addiction rates in those Japan and Texas studies. But AFAIK the only likely effect we know of is still the strong correlation between drinking fluoridated water and not having your teeth rot away.
Yep. One simple way to make water safe from micro-organisms is to boil it. The few that survive are no big deal, and it’s no worse than all the food you eat anyway.
With regards to natural, the thing is that we didn’t just decide to add fluorine to water everywhere. It’s added to water where natural level is too low, and removed where natural level is too high. And the worst that is happening from the level that is considered to be optimal is some instances of minor cosmetic effect on the teeth, which correlates with even fewer cavities. So there is actually a chance we are not adding enough, due to some stupid appearance concerns driven by fake teeth and photoshopped advertising.
I’m not even sure any more that fluorine even could have any effect on iodine uptake. There’s chlorine and bromine between iodine and fluorine, and we got a lot of chlorine in our bodies.
The cancer issues, well, studying cancer rate empirically is a popular topic for nonsense because there’s a lot of co-founding factors yet the highly dubious results that you obtain sound like ‘true evidence’ to be put against ‘theories’, whereby the theories are good reasoning based on our knowledge.
For example of one such controversy, small doses of ionizing radiation can be reasonably expected to cause cancer at a rate linearly proportional to doses, due to well understood mechanisms and the radiation not actually diluting at the cellular level. Yet, the folks who are punched in their wallets by this reasoning are funding various nonsense statistical ‘studies’ (which don’t control for co-founding factors as significant as age and smoking) that find positive effects of low doses of radiation, never mind complete lack of any remotely plausible mechanism beyond some non-specific stupidity about some anti-cancer defence responses that are presumed to be asleep when you live normal life having lifetime cancer rate of ~40% with mortality rate 20%, primarily from mutations entirely unrelated to radiation. But which would turn on when radiation several times over background would increase the mutation rate by some tiny fraction of a percent (effect of which is not statistically significant unless you got sample sizes in the tens millions, which you never will have).