I was skeptical as well so I did a quick web search and the first couple articles I found do seem to support that there are potential risks to ingesting fluoride. This article claims that fluoride has a minimal effect on dental health but has potential for other healtb risks, and this article compares the efficacy and risks of several methods of adding fluoride for public consumption.
I suppose I’ve only ever heard negative views of fluoride in water supplies from people who say it’s bad ‘because the government puts it in the water and I don’t trust the government’ or worse conspiracy theories that it’s somehow put into the water to control people etc… And the people who espouse those type of theories also tend to be the type who also don’t ‘believe’ in science and deny objectively proven facts about reality. So it’s interesting to see that maybe there is some actual science-backed merit behind the anti-fluoride movement.
Based on my read of the second article, in the US at least it seems like fluoride addition is regulated and low enough that the health risks are minimal and there still is some dental benefit from it. It seems like an even better option would be to stop adding fluoride to water and make topical fluoride treatments available to everyone from a dentist… But we can’t even get universal healthcare so universal dental care doesn’t seem likely to happen.
Jerboa started crashing for me around the time they did an update that required a newer lemmy version. I’ve been using Liftoff and that’s working pretty well so far. I’m trying to stay open to different apps because they’re all pretty new and none that I’ve tried have been exactly what I’m looking for yet.