Meryl Horn (Senior Producer, PhD)
speaker
109 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Meryl Horn (Senior Producer, PhD)’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I don't know. I've talked to enough researchers on this pregnancy thing specifically that say, you know, they would not do it. They would not drink fluoridated water. It freaks me out now, yeah.
I mean, it's really hard, right? Because in theory, like, you could try bottled water, but we don't actually know a lot of the time how much fluoride is in bottled water. Some of it might have fluoride in it too.
Like, I think... It's not perfect, but like I would probably look into a filter. There's some filters that get fluoride out of the water. Or honestly, if it was just for a limited period of time, like if I were pregnant, maybe I would just buy distilled water that didn't have any fluoride in it and like try to drink that.
But, like, this is all probably being super cautious since tons of kids are exposed to fluoride in the uterus and don't have these behavioral issues. And there are just still some big unknowns.
Well, it's not just about the brain here. Like some people are worrying that fluoride might be making our bones weaker or increasing our risk of thyroid disease, like hypothyroidism. Yeah. And there is some evidence that that stuff is real, too, even at relatively low levels.
Yeah. Yeah. So like for for the thyroid, like we know that the thyroid needs iodine. Right. If you don't get enough iodine, then you can get a goiter.
So fluoride can sort of outcompete iodine. So in the past, we've actually given fluoride as a treatment for people who have overactive thyroids. And there was a study that found that people who lived in an area with fluoridated water were twice as likely to have hypothyroidism than people who didn't.
But like other studies haven't found those associations or like one found that it was only significant if you also had an iodine deficiency to begin with. So what do we make of that as well? What do you make of it? Yeah, I mean, it's not like I looked at the evidence and was like, oh, this is real for sure. Like, fluoride is giving us all hypothyroidism.
And then for other stuff, it's even less convincing. Like, for bone health, there were some studies that say that drinking fluoridated water can increase your risk for bone fractures. But there was a meta-analysis that looked at everything together and said that there was no increased risk.
But then, like, I don't know, for me, even if there are just a few studies saying that some of these risks could be real, it doesn't make me feel great because, like, I mean, the stakes are so high. We're doing this at such a big scale that ideally you'd want to see, like, a mountain of rock-solid evidence of studies all saying this is totally safe. For sure.
This is okay to be basically forcing this many people to be having this chemical.
And we don't have that. I talked to Ashley about why we don't have a more definitive consensus on this. I mean, why has it taken so long? Is this kind of a failure of science?
Yeah, that seems true.
Well, scientists all agree that back in the 1940s when we first started doing this, there was this huge benefit. But lots of people today are saying that things are different now. And like, I think it does kind of make sense because when we first started doing this, our teeth were way worse. Like we didn't go to the dentist as often.
We didn't get sealants or brush our teeth with fluoridated toothpaste. Right. So it's something like putting fluoride in the water had this big potential to make a huge difference because our teeth were so crappy. Right. Where now people say that like, well, we don't really need to be doing that anymore because we have all these other like, you know, tools in the toolbox to help our teeth.
Well, now we actually have like kind of a perfect opportunity to look at this because as cities are taking fluoride out of the water today, we can see like, okay, how much, like do the teeth actually get worse in places that do that? Right. And so that's what I wanted to talk about with Lindsay McLaren. She's a professor in community health sciences at the University of Calgary in Canada.
And this all first got on her radar back in 2011 when her city decided to stop putting fluoride in the water.
And Lindsay and some of her public health nerd friends saw this and they published an op-ed in the local paper just kind of questioning whether this was actually a good idea. Yeah.
So Lindsay was like, yeah, let's do some science here. Like we're taking fluoride out of the water. Will our teeth get crappier?
And I wanted to talk to her about this one study that she did looking at cavities in kids. They did this one about seven years after the city stopped water fluoridation. And so they looked at kids who had basically gone their entire lives without fluoride in the water. So these kids were about seven years old.
Showing 61–80 of 109 · page 4 of 6
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