Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks throughout a marketing campaign rally for Republican presidential nominee and former President Donald Trump at Macomb Neighborhood School on Nov. 1 in Warren, Mich. Kennedy has referred to as for an finish to fluoride within the water provide, a follow that saves billions every year in dental care.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Photographs
cover caption
toggle caption
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Photographs
It’s been thought-about one of many best public well being achievements of the twentieth century: by placing a small quantity of fluoride within the water provide, public well being officers have prevented tens of millions of cavities, saved tens of billions of {dollars} in dental prices, and made kids more healthy.
However in a submit on X on Saturday, former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. mentioned considered one of his first acts as an official in a brand new Trump administration can be to “advise all U.S. water techniques to take away fluoride from public water.” He went on to record a number of false statements concerning the results of fluoride after which linked to a video on an internet site based by outstanding anti-vaccine advocate and conspiracy theorist Del Bigtree.
Former President Donald Trump appeared receptive to the concept of nixing fluoride from the water provide. “Effectively, I haven’t talked to him about it but, but it surely sounds OK to me,” Trump mentioned Sunday in a phone interview with NBC. “You understand, it’s doable.”
Consultants had been swift to sentence the promise to take away fluoride from the water. “Fluoride has been effectively examined. It clearly and definitively decreases cavities, and isn’t related to any clear proof of the persistent ailments talked about in that tweet,” says Dr. Paul Offit, a researcher and doctor at Kids’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a science denialist. He makes up his personal scientific truths and ignores the precise truths,” Offit says.
Fluoride has clear advantages
The science is unambiguous — including fluoride to the water provide has been efficient in reducing the variety of cavities in each kids and adults. Fluoride works to revive minerals to enamel which are misplaced when micro organism develop quickly contained in the mouth, notably after consuming sugary snacks.
Greater than a dozen current research from governments and tutorial establishments around the globe have discovered that fluoride reduces tooth decay in kids and adults by round 25%, based on the American Dental Affiliation. It’s notably helpful for these in lower-income households who could not have entry to fluoride merchandise, equivalent to toothpastes and mouth rinses. A examine by the Colorado Faculty of Public Well being discovered that including fluoride to the water saved roughly $6.8 billion in dental bills in a single 12 months alone.
Lately, some research have steered that prime ranges of fluoride may trigger decrease IQ in kids. A current authorities evaluate discovered reasonable proof for the impact, however not on the ranges at present utilized in U.S. ingesting water. The ADA says that the advantages of fluoridation proceed to outweigh any doable dangers.
Stark contrasts
Dr. Amanda Stroud is a dentist who sees the results of fluoride — and its absence — day-after-day in her job working as dental director at a well being nonprofit in western North Carolina. AppHealth serves children who’ve fluoridated metropolis water and others who’ve effectively water that has no fluoride. The variations are stark, she says.
The youngsters who’re ingesting water that has fluoride, she says, usually have a superb, stable set of enamel with out cavities. They’ll take smiling and consuming with out ache with no consideration, “which is a joyful factor at that age,” Stroud says.
When kids are ingesting effectively water, it’s a special story. “They might probably have decay on each tooth,” she says. “After they smile, they may probably have enamel damaged all the way down to the gum line. Their enamel are showing brown or mottled.”
And that could be a painful situation that makes brushing and maintaining a healthy diet meals like vegatables and fruits harder. “It is heartbreaking,” she says.
The unique public well being conspiracy concept
Regardless of the clear advantages, conspiracy theories round fluoride have existed for nearly so long as the water has been fluorinated, based on Matthew Dallek, a political historian on the George Washington College.
“In a method the conspiracy concept about fluoride within the ingesting water is among the unique public well being conspiracy theories,” he says.
Fluoride was first launched in 1945 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which additionally occurs to be the Trump marketing campaign’s final rally web site earlier than Election Day.
Placing fluoride in water shortly unfold across the nation as soon as the advantages had been clear in Grand Rapids.
However proper from the beginning, wild theories concerning the chemical had been circulating. “It served as an nearly good conspiracy concept,” he explains. Fluoride was unseen, mandated by the federal government, and current in faucet water, a substance that just about everybody was ingesting.
Dallek says that the theories had been notably pushed within the Sixties by the John Birch Society, a far proper group that alleged communists had infiltrated a lot of the federal government. The group believed that “any step in the direction of authorities interventions was primarily a step on the street to a communist nation,” he says. Because of this, they “latched on to fluoride as a part of a communist plot.”
The claims round fluoride had been diffuse, however included the concepts that it will one way or the other be used for thoughts management, or that it was a chemical weapon designed to poison folks. Initially, at the least, the concepts appeared to search out some traction with the general public.
“There have been actions that sprouted up everywhere in the nation to cease fluoridation within the ingesting water,” Dallek says.
In 1966, Honolulu’s authorities vetoed a measure to incorporate fluoride within the water. Fluoride nonetheless isn’t utilized in Hawaii and a 2015 report discovered that the state had the best charge of tooth decay amongst kids within the nation, and it continues to have among the worst oral well being of any state.
Mocked in motion pictures
However the motion by no means caught on extra broadly. The fluoride conspiracies had been brazenly mocked in motion pictures equivalent to Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove,” wherein Normal Jack Ripper begins a nuclear struggle partially over a perception that fluoride was a communist plot. By the Nineteen Eighties, the problem largely died away. “Sometimes there have been anti-fluoride campaigns that might pop up across the nation,” Dallek says.
However within the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, fluoride conspiracy theories have resurfaced, usually pushed by people equivalent to Kennedy who additionally consider that childhood vaccines trigger autism and different ailments. At this time, anti-vaccine advocates push the harms of fluoride together with these of vaccines and chemtrails, supposed trails of chemical substances left by business airliners to hurt folks and the setting.
Kennedy on Monday posted a video urging his supporters to vote for Trump so he’s elected with a powerful mandate. “Then, nobody will be capable of cease us when he empowers me to wash up corruption within the federal businesses, and particularly our well being businesses,” he mentioned.
However Offit says that Kennedy’s potential position in main the nation’s public well being may show disastrous, notably for younger individuals who profit from each fluoride and vaccines. “It’s solely the kids who will endure his ignorance,” Offit says.
