Fluoride: Is Your Water Safe?

Hi. I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Versus. Today on the show, we are pitting facts against fluoride. Should we put it in the water? To tell us all about it, senior producer, Meryl Horne. Hello. Hi. Okay. There's so much controversy right now around water fluoridation I know. Which we'll get to. Okay. But first, I have to tell you the, like, wild and surprising story about why we started putting fluoride in the water in the first place because it is kind of weird that we do this. Right? I guess so. How did it all start? Well, it's actually a detective story. Oh. It starts in nineteen o one. So picture a young dentist, Frederick McKay moves to Colorado Springs, and he starts seeing patients and immediately notices that there's something weird going on. A lot of his patients have dark brown stains on their teeth. Mhmm. He writes that the color was sometimes dirty or an almost ebony black. Mhmm. Do you wanna see pictures? Of course, I do. Alright. Oh, it's a real black line, thick line across their teeth. That is unsightly. Yeah. So McKay starts to obsess over this, searching for an explanation. He writes to a friend at one point who who responded, quote, I have never seen a stain that penetrated the enamel so deeply before. And this guy guessed that maybe the stains came from dead organisms. So, like, they had no idea at first, like, what what was going on here. I mean, it looks you could see. It looks like mold on their teeth. I can understand why they went for the dead organisms. Yeah. It's it must have been pretty startling. Right? Yes. So McKay starts traveling around The US looking at other places which also have this staining, and he starts suspecting that it's coming from, quote, something in the drinking water. Uh-huh. But he doesn't really know for sure. But then he goes to this town in Arkansas where people only started getting stains in their teeth if they were born after nineteen o nine. And apparently, that's when the town switched water supplies. So now they just have to see what is in the new water supply. Yes. What's different? And so someone does this analysis, Anne McKay finally gets an answer after three decades of searching. It was the fluoride. Right. This new water in Arkansas had higher fluoride levels. Yeah. Yeah. It had really high fluoride in that water. They they weren't adding it, but these places just happen to naturally have a lot of fluoride seeping into the water from the Earth's crust. Mhmm. And now we know that when you drink water with high levels of fluoride, it can mess with the crystal structure of your teeth, and that can lead to staining. Right. But then McKay also noticed something else that was weird about these people with the stained teeth. They basically weren't getting cavities. So, like, …