Pien Huang
speaker
78 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Pien Huang’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Now, these results are controversial, but the analysis has spurred opponents of fluoridation to call for a new assessment of its benefits and its risks.
Okay, so the story starts at the turn of the 20th century, early 1900s, when dentists in the U.S. started noticing that people who live in certain areas have lower rates of tooth decay. And they don't know why until a few decades later, the 1930s, when they realized that in these areas, there's actually a higher than normal amount of fluoride in the water.
Yeah, naturally. And it's also in the 1930s that a team of scientists at the University of Pittsburgh proposed in a paper to add a controlled amount of fluoride to the drinking water to prevent tooth decay.
And then in the 1940s, cities started experimenting with adding fluoride to the water. So it starts with Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1945. By the end of the decade, dental examiners are reporting markedly lower cavities. And so hearing this, you know, other towns in Michigan, Texas, and Wisconsin start their own programs.
And that doubles the number of Americans who get fluoridated water to over a million. Wow. So if you fast forward to 1962, federal drinking water standards are updated to give fluoride guidelines. And then over the subsequent decades, more and more Americans get access to fluoridated water to protect against tooth decay. That figure is up to around 70% in the U.S. today.
Yeah, it's been the case for decades now. I mean, basically every toothpaste I've used throughout my entire life has had it in it. Plus it's in mouth rinses. It's in dental floss.
The science is clear, Emily. Fluoridating water lowers the numbers of cavities in people, which it does by restoring minerals to teeth that are lost when bacteria grow inside the mouth, especially after, like, say, drinking sugary drinks. And this is especially useful for lower-income families who might not have access to fluoride products like toothpastes and mouth rinses.
There's a study by the Colorado School of Public Health which found that adding fluoride to the water saved around $6.8 billion in dental expenses in one year alone.
Yeah. So ever since it started, there's been this debate over fluoridating water. Our colleagues Jeff Brumfield and Selena Simmons-Duffin have reported about conspiracy theories surrounding fluoride in drinking water. There was this time in the 1960s when the John Birch Society, this far-right group, alleged that it was part of a communist plot.
And there are lots of other theories around it as well, different versions that reflected the concerns of their times. But meanwhile, the scientific understanding is also evolving, which brings us to this latest research in JAMA Pediatrics. It was done by government scientists at the National Toxicology Program. That's the part of the NIH that you mentioned earlier. Uh-huh, with that August report.
That's the one. And like we were saying, they just published a study in JAMA Pediatrics that looks at a few dozen studies that other people have conducted. And it finds this link between high levels of fluoride and a small decrease in children's IQ. Now, it's not totally definitive. This is something that they're saying with moderate confidence.
So moderate confidence is basically like a grade that they put on the quality of evidence that's available to them. It's not low quality. It's not high quality. It's enough to say something with moderate confidence. Does that make sense?
Yeah. Science. So many words. Yeah. And while this conclusion is not new, this research has already been quite influential in the debate over fluoride in drinking water. It was accompanied by two op-eds in the paper that was published on Monday. One questioned its methods, disagreed with its conclusions, and the other fully supported it. I spoke with Dr. Bruce Lanphier.
He's at Simon Fraser University, and he co-authored that supportive piece.
So he's arguing that there's enough evidence to prompt this reassessment of the risks and the benefits of fluoride in the water system. Hmm. Now, on the other hand, you've got a dentist like Stephen Levy. He's a public health dentist at the University of Iowa. He wrote the other op-ed that argues for staying the course. And he says that using this data for that debate is a stretch.
So he says that they didn't fully consider some other recent research that cast doubt on the links between fluoride exposure and IQ. And he also makes the point that, you know, because water fluoridation is so common, we take its benefits for granted. You know, there are problems definitely associated with getting cavities too. It can be painful. You can get infections.
You can have to go to the dentist and get expensive fillings, or you can miss school for it. Like there are all these problems that are also associated with getting cavities.
Yeah, so there are a couple that are being raised right now. One of them is about whether, you know, because people get fluoride not just from their drinking water, but also from the food that they eat, the toothpaste and mouthwash they use.
whether that total cumulative fluoride might be pushing some vulnerable people, again, that's pregnant people and young children, whether that's pushing their fluoride levels to levels that might be harmful. And another question is really on the benefit side of it.
There is recent analysis that showed that fluoride in the drinking water definitely prevents cavities, but it's not to the same extent that it was back in the 40s, 50s, 60s, before fluoridated toothpaste became a regular thing. So Some are saying that it's time to reweigh the risks and the benefits given how society has changed.
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