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
And they started by sending out teams of dental hygienists and researchers to schools in Calgary to check their teeth.
They would, like, set up shop in the nurse's office usually where dental hygienists would look at each kid's mouth one by one for signs of tooth decay. And Lindsay's team wanted to make sure that the kids felt comfortable with this.
It's like a dance party.
And they weren't just looking at these kids in Calgary that had lost fluoride from their water. They were also doing this entire thing in another city that was nearby called Edmonton that kept fluoridating their water. So what did they find? You're stringing me along like floss here. Okay, okay. So, yeah, we've got 5,000 second graders across these two cities.
And now they can finally see, did the kids who grow up with fluoride added to the water have fewer cavities compared to the kids in Calgary?
It's like 10 percentage points different.
What did you think when you saw that data?
So other studies generally find the same thing. Kids do tend to get more cavities when they grow up without fluoridated water.
Yeah, these kids are getting fewer cavities, and I know maybe you're thinking... Who cares? Little cavity here or there. Maybe it doesn't matter so much. Right. It's just their baby teeth. They're going to get more. Well, it actually does matter. So like if you lose your baby teeth early, like if you have to get them extracted, then your adult teeth might not come in as straight.
So that could affect you for the rest of your life. And we do have evidence that living in a place with less fluoride in the water will make it more likely that kids will need to get teeth extracted and also get intense dental work done like where they'll need to go under general anesthesia. Which ideally, like we'd want to avoid putting kids through that.
And we also have evidence that fluoride is particularly good for kids who come from poorer families. Like in Lindsay's study, after Calgary stopped fluoridating their water, it widened the gap between the richer and the poorer kids when it came to like how bad their teeth were. Not all studies find this to be true, but Lindsay's does seem to be like one of the best ones.
Well, it's kind of hard to tell how much it matters. Like, if you're already an adult and you live in a place with fluoridated water, how much that makes a difference. Like, one study said that there was just 2% less tooth decay for adults who lived in places with more fluoride in the water.
Partly, yeah, actually. And also, apparently, I just learned this, that the enamel of baby teeth is thinner and more porous. And then even after you start getting your adult teeth, those teeth are also more cavity prone since they're softer. It takes them years for them to reach maximal hardness, according to one paper. Wow.
So, yeah, it's like pretty convincing to me that fluoride in the water is still helping our teeth. Right. Which brings us back to Lindsay's study. So there's one more thing I wanted to tell you about that, which is about how people reacted to it in Calgary. So after her studies came out, the town actually ended up voting on this. And decided to put fluoride back in the water. Whoa!
Yeah, it seems like it. Like they had a vote and 62% of the people said, yes, we want to fluoridate our water again.
Yeah, so her study got a lot of attention, like even in the U.S. Here's some of that coverage.
So yeah, I asked Lindsay like where she lands after all this. Should we be putting fluoride in the water?
Yeah, we talked about that research. Like it's something she's keeping an eye on, but so far it hasn't changed her mind on water fluoridation in general.
I mean, they were really split, actually. I was surprised by how many scientists, including some dentists, who told me they think we should either stop or they were, like, seriously doubting it. Like, there is one that I talked to who used to be a big fluoride supporter. Yeah. And he'd been thinking more and more about this research.
And I asked him, like, all right, like, if you're in charge of the machine, do you cut it off?
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