Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks throughout a marketing campaign rally for Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump at Macomb Group School on November 01, 2024 in Warren, Michigan. Kennedy has known as for an finish to fluoride within the water provide, a follow that saves billions every year in dental care.
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Chip Somodevilla/Getty Photos
It’s been thought of one of many biggest 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 youngsters more healthy.
However in a publish on X on Saturday, former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. mentioned one in all his first acts as an official in a brand new Trump administration could be to “advise all U.S. water programs to take away fluoride from public water.” He went on to listing a number of false statements in regards to the results of fluoride after which linked to a video on a web site based by distinguished 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 realize, it’s doable.”
Consultants have been swift to sentence the promise to take away fluoride from the water. “Fluoride has been nicely examined. It clearly and definitively decreases cavities, and isn’t related to any clear proof of the continual illnesses talked about in that tweet,” says Dr. Paul Offit, a researcher and doctor at Youngsters’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 decreasing the variety of cavities in each youngsters and adults. Fluoride works to revive minerals to tooth which might be misplaced when micro organism develop quickly contained in the mouth, significantly after consuming sugary snacks.
Greater than a dozen latest research from governments and tutorial establishments world wide have discovered that fluoride reduces tooth decay in youngsters and adults by round 25%, in keeping with the American Dental Affiliation. It’s significantly useful for these in lower-income households who could not have entry to fluoride merchandise, resembling toothpastes and mouth rinses. A examine by the Colorado College of Public Well being discovered that including fluoride to the water saved roughly $6.8 billion {dollars} in dental bills in a single 12 months alone.
In recent times, some research have prompt that prime ranges of fluoride would possibly trigger decrease IQ in youngsters. A latest authorities evaluate discovered reasonable proof for the impact, however not on the ranges at the moment 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 – every single 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 nicely water that has no fluoride. The variations are stark, she says.
The kids who’re ingesting water that has fluoride, she says, usually have a very good, stable set of tooth with out cavities. They will take smiling and consuming with out ache without any consideration, “which is a joyful factor at that age,” Stroud says.
When youngsters are ingesting nicely water, it’s a distinct story. “They may probably have decay on each tooth,” she says. “After they smile, they may probably have tooth damaged all the way down to the gum line. Their tooth are showing brown or mottled.”
And that could be a painful situation that makes brushing and maintaining a healthy diet meals like fruit and veggies tougher. “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, in keeping with Matthew Dallek, a political historian on the George Washington College.
“In a approach the conspiracy concept about fluoride within the ingesting water is without doubt one of 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 have been clear in Grand Rapids.
However proper from the beginning, wild theories in regards to the chemical have been circulating. “It served as an virtually 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 have been significantly pushed within the Nineteen 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 direction of authorities interventions was basically a step on the street to a communist nation,” he says. Consequently, they “latched on to fluoride as a part of a communist plot.”
The claims round fluoride have been diffuse, however included the concepts that it will someway be used for thoughts management, or that it was a chemical weapon designed to poison folks. Initially, at the least, the concepts appeared to seek out some traction with the general public.
“There have been actions that sprouted up all around 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 fee of tooth-decay amongst youngsters within the nation, and it continues to have a few of 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 have been overtly mocked in motion pictures resembling Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove,” through which Common Jack Ripper begins a nuclear struggle partly over a perception that fluoride was a communist plot. By the Nineteen Eighties, the problem largely died away. “Often 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 resembling Kennedy who additionally consider that childhood vaccines trigger autism and different illnesses. In the present day, anti-vaccine advocates push the harms of fluoride together with these of vaccines and chemtrails, supposed trails of chemical compounds left by industrial 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 have the ability to 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 might show disastrous, significantly for younger individuals who profit from each fluoride and vaccines. “It’s solely the youngsters who will undergo his ignorance,” Offit says.
