| From: | Marc Renouf renouf@********.com |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Second Hand |
| Date: | Wed, 1 Sep 1999 12:35:23 -0400 (EDT) |
> -I wasn't joking about floride, yet 95%+ of Americans live in
> areas where the water is floridated. There have ben tests that shows
> that mice and rats that don't consume enough floride to kill them become
> spontanously agreesive and violent towards thier cage mates (How many
> highly publized killings in the past few years have been commited by
> people who were "so nice, we never saw it comming"), particularly when
> placed under crowding and enviromental stresses.
Okay, the rest of the stuff is reasonable, but every time I hear
this one it makes me crazy. Fluoride is there for your teeth. Talk to
someone who's more than 40 years old sometime and they'll tell you about
trips to the dentist's office and the unpleasantness that was having a
fluoride treatment, the whole point of which was to strengthen tooth
enamel.
Dentists very rarely administer fluoride treatments anymore. Why?
Because they don't *have* to. They realize how nasty it tasted, and now
that you get enough (trace amounts, really) from your drinking water, they
don't have to worry about it. It's actually *less* dangerous to get it in
small doses over time than it is to get a massive dose all at once (which
is true for most things).
If there's a conspiracy afoot, you must realize that that means
that *every* dentist in America is in on it.
Further, just because something is toxic to rats does *not* mean
it produces the same effects in humans. This is why testing on lab
animals isn't a true analog for testing on humans. Sure, it can give you
some ideas, but consider this: silicone doesn't cause breast cancer in
rats. It does in humans.
Finally, rats a pretty piss-poor behavior model for agressive or
violent behavior. They respond with spontaneous violence to crowding and
environmental stresses even *without* exposure to fluoride.
It's easy to lie with pseudo-science. Being net-denizens we've
all read that bogus warning about aspartame. It's easy to exaggerate
one's findings, and it's easy to lie. The media doesn't help, because
they'll sensationalize something when it comes out, but when it turns out
to be crap they'll print a tiny little retraction, a miniscule "oops" on
page D12 that completely torpedoes the story they've been running on the
front page for an entire week.
In short, unless you can show me some actual, honest-to-god
scientific *proof* that fluoridation of drinking water is a significant
danger to humans (and I have yet to see any that wasn't thoroughly
debunked by a variety of respectable researchers), I'm going to have to
keep drinking the water and enjoying the fact that I don't have to go to
the dentist every six months to have my tooth enamel fluoridated.
Marc
