944
Fluoride in drinking water has no effect on IQ or brain function, long-term study shows
(www.nbcnews.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2026
944 points (99.4% liked)
News
37314 readers
2656 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious biased sources will be removed at the mods’ discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted separately but not to the post body. Sources may be checked for reliability using Wikipedia, MBFC, AdFontes, GroundNews, etc.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source. Clickbait titles may be removed.
Posts which titles don’t match the source may be removed. If the site changed their headline, we may ask you to update the post title. Clickbait titles use hyperbolic language and do not accurately describe the article content. When necessary, post titles may be edited, clearly marked with [brackets], but may never be used to editorialize or comment on the content.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials, videos, blogs, press releases, or celebrity gossip will be allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis. Mods may use discretion to pre-approve videos or press releases from highly credible sources that provide unique, newsworthy content not available or possible in another format.
7. No duplicate posts.
If an article has already been posted, it will be removed. Different articles reporting on the same subject are permitted. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners or news aggregators.
All posts must link to original article sources. You may include archival links in the post description. News aggregators such as Yahoo, Google, Hacker News, etc. should be avoided in favor of the original source link. Newswire services such as AP, Reuters, or AFP, are frequently republished and may be shared from other credible sources.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That’ll be a risk if you have pure sodium fluoride sitting around. Fortunately “no one” does. (Yes, industrial toothpaste manufacturing workers might have an opportunity to be exposed to such a thing).
Typical toothpaste is 1000-1100 ppm of sodium fluoride. “Prescription strength” is about 5000 ppm. So to hit your target LD50 you need to eat around 10 g of toothpaste per kg. Assuming on the extremely small end (40 kg bodyweight): if I did my math right, that’s about 400 g of prescription strength toothpaste, or more than two (170 g) tubes.
Normal toothpaste (1100 ppm) for a normal person (80 kg female average), you need to eat more than 22 tubes of toothpaste to kill half the people involved.
Thats just stupid, there’s zero risk of any of that happening.
Look, I'm not saying the average consumer will ever run into this risk, I'm saying that you shouldn't go around saying H301 acutely toxic chemicals are as safe to ingest as bananas. You're not the president of the United States.
That's not what they were saying. They were saying the levels in drinking water are so low that it's comparable to radiation levels in bananas.
As in, you'd need to consume so much for it to be lethal that you'd have to be intentionally doing it to cause harm to yourself.
I believe it is what they meant to say, but it is simply not what they said.
The bolded sentence is unambiguous. It uses no prepositions, no context-dependent phrases, no complex punctuation. It is a simple sentence ending in a full stop. How can you deny this is what they said?