high fluoride Archives - Making Sense of Fluoride

Gish galloping successfully vanquished

Daniel Ryan — Sun, 07 Jun 2015 10:58:25 +0000

We have had plenty of gish gallopers on the Making Sense of Fluoride Facebook page and dealing with one is usually a waste of time. You would spend many long hours reading and then debunking materials. Rinse and repeat. Sometimes if you are quick enough you get a nice win.

The Gish Gallop is the debating technique of drowning the opponent in such a torrent of small arguments that their opponent cannot possibly answer or address each one in real-time. More often than not, these myriad arguments are full of half-truths, lies, and straw-man arguments — the only condition is that there be many of them, not that they be particularly compelling on their own.Rational Wiki

Most posts start innocently enough like so…

At the time I was busy so I left a polite message and that was when the gish galloping started.

Tackling the original post.

My reply to the gish galloping.

This is where I would usually stop but I thought this time I’ll see how far I get. Now for the painful part, hunting down every abstract. If the abstract wasn’t descriptive enough, trying to find the full paper. In the end I looked at every reference.

Successfully vanquished.

Read the full Facebook thread here.

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The maths to achieve a fluoride load commensurate with chronic fluorosis

Alison Campbell — Mon, 30 Sep 2013 11:47:43 +0000

A colleague (an analytical chemist) has done the maths for us on the amount of water someone would have to drink in order to achieve a fluoride load commensurate with chronic fluorosis (around 20mg/kg dry matter in the diet).

Food varies quite a bit in its water content, but they’ve assumed an average of 50% water content and an average daily intake (from the USDA figure for average Americans) of 2.18kg wet weight, so 1.06kg dry weight of food per day.

On that diet our hypothetical someone would then need to take in 21.3mg F- each day to experience chronic fluorosis. Until fluoridation was discontinued, Hamilton’s town supply water had 0.7-1ppm fluoride ie a maximum of 1mg/L. This means our someone would need to take in 21.3 L of water a day, and maintain that intake, for fluorosis to become a reality. (At this level water intoxication would be a real threat.)

The estimated mean highest daily F- intake in New Zealanders – any age group, & from a combination of diet and town supply fluoridated water, is around 2.1mg/day (Cressey et al, 2010, J.Pub.Health.Dent 70: 327-336).

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Another example of a paper not showing what’s claimed for

Alison Campbell — Sun, 22 Sep 2013 11:21:42 +0000

Another example of a paper not showing what’s claimed for it:
Let’s look at Bataineh & Nusier’s 2006 report on the effects of sodium fluoride (NaF) on behaviour and reproduction in male rats. In the very first sentence of the abstract, we see that the experimental animals received either 100ppm or 300ppm NaF for 12 weeks, while the controls received normal drinking water (1.2ppm NaF). So the experimental rats were receiving a dose up to 2 orders of magnitude higher than what’s normally found in fluoridated town supply!
Unsurprisingly the control rats continued to do what rats normally do. In other words, the dose makes the poison – this paper does nothing to bolster claims that fluoridated municipal water is harmful to health.
But point this out and what do we get? Cries of ‘more excuses’ and/or an immediate switch of attention to the next thing that appears to show the evils of fluoridation. It seems that the Gish Gallop is a technique not restricted to creationists.

Sources:
Bataineh, H.N., Nusier, M.K. (2006) Impact of NaF on aggression, sexual behaviour and fertility in male rats. Fluoride 39(4): 293-301

http://www.donotlink.com/dem1

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Arguing against fluoridation

Alison Campbell — Sat, 21 Sep 2013 11:14:13 +0000

A common technique of those arguing against fluoridation on the MSoF Facebook page is to dump large amounts of copypasta (from various sources) & tell us that if we’d only read it we’d see the rightness of their case. Or else, we get a lengthy list of references, & the same admonition. The problem is that if you pick a paper or two at random & do read them, you often find that they don’t say what’s claimed for them, or that they contain methodological errors that bring their findings into question.

For example: a study by Reddy et al (2011) is said to have found that fluoride accumulated at very high levels in rats’ brains. The researchers used 2 groups of male rats: one experimental group, one control. There were only 6 animals in each group, which is a very small sample size & means that the data could be skewed by a single abnormal result.

The control group supposedly received no fluoride, but then there was no information on fluoride levels in the tap water they drank or the rat chow they ate. This is a significant flaw & I’d have thought it should have been picked up by peer review.
The experimental rats apparently received 20ppm fluoride by nasogastric tube for 2 months. Actually, it’s not actually clear what dose they received: the abstract says 20ppm NaF, but the methods section says “20ppm concentration of fluoride”. These are 2 different things & again, peer review should have picked this up & required clarification. Either way the dose is about an order of magnitude higher than you’d find in fluoridated municipal water in New Zealand, which means that the paper didn’t support the commenter’s assertions of the harm done by fluoridation. Also, after those 2 months the researchers recorded 864 mg/kg F- in the rats’ brains: given that a large proportion of fluoride is normally excreted, and some of the rest fixed in apatites in bone, this figure looks extremely high & should surely have been questioned by the referees.
And in addition, both groups of rats lost a great deal of weight during the course of the study. While the average body weight of the animals was 180g (+/-20g), after 2 months the control animals weighed on average 111g, while the experimental group was down to 93g (both +/- 2g). This strongly suggests they were either ill, or not receiving adequate food; furthermore, starvation can cause inflammatory changes to tissues & so could itself explain the changes the researchers observed in the rats’ nervous systems.

Do people read these papers before they cite them?

Sources:

Reddy, P.Y., Reddy, K.P., Kumar, K.P. (2011) Neurodegenerative changes in different regions of brain, spinal cord and sciatic nerve of rats treated with sodium fluoride. J.Med.Allied Sci 1(1): 30-35

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