30 APRIL 2020
I blame my dentists. Not for
poor dental care— Barbara and
Gordon do great work. I blame
them for sending me into a vortex
of dento- epistemological anxiety.
On a tooth-cleaning visit not
long ago, Barbara told me that in
the late 1970s, when she attended
dental school, her professors
expected that most middle- class
patients would lose a lot of their
teeth and need dentures by the
time they were in their 60s. Today,
she said, most middle- class people
keep their teeth until they are 80.
The main reason for this, Barbara
explained, was fluoridation— the
practice of putting fluoride com-
pounds in community drinking
water to combat tooth decay.
For reasons I can’t now recall,
I mentioned this remark on social
media. The inevitable but some-
how surprising response: People
I did not know troubled them-
selves to tell me that I was an
idiot, and that fluoridation was
terrible. Their skepticism made an
impression. I found myself staring
suspiciously, as I brushed, at my
Colgate toothpaste. strengthens
teeth with active fluoride, the
label promised. A thought popped
into my head: I am now rubbing
fluoride directly onto my teeth. So
why is my town also dumping it into
my drinking water?
Surely applying Colgate’s
meticulously packaged fluoride
paste directly onto my teeth, where
it bonds with the surface to cre-
ate a protective layer, was better
than the more indirect method of pouring fluoride
into reservoirs so that people drinking the water can
absorb the fluoride, some of which then makes its
way into their saliva.
Then I wondered: How much fluoride is in my
water, and how did public-health officials set the dose?
Fluoride in large quantities is bad news. Potential
side effects, I quickly discovered, include joint pain,
bone fractures, sperm decline, dementia, premature
puberty, gastrointestinal distress, immune-system dys-
function, (possibly) cancer, and (also possibly) lower
IQ in children. Children have smaller bodies than
adults and thus are at risk of relatively greater exposure
when they drink. In calculating the dose, I thought,
the authorities must have taken into account the weird thirsty kid who guzzles
water by the quart. But if they lower the dose to avoid harming that child,
where would that leave my mother-in-law, who for some reason has decided
she no longer wants to drink much water at all? Is she getting shortchanged?
Fluoridation of public water supplies is backed by every mainstream
dental organization in the nation and opposed by a lot of people who spend
too much time on YouTube. The most-watched anti-fluoridation video in
my YouTube search results—from the series Stuff They Don’t Want You to
Know—hauls out the specter of Nazi Germany before the one-minute mark.
Another video, from the series Brainwash Update, states categorically that
“fluoride is poison.” It has the high production value one associates with its
sponsor, Russia Today. When I was growing up, anti-fluoridation campaigns
were the province of the John Birch Society and other right-wing cranks.
Now I myself seemed to have become a candidate for the tinfoil-hat brigade.