But, like most things in nature, the concentrations vary geographically depending on the water sources and surrounding geology. It’s present to some degree everywhere, but a few places have higher concentrations.

One of those places is Colorado Springs, and a hundred years ago it was observed that the very high levels of fluoride there put some dark swirls in the teeth, but that the teeth were rock solid and had very little decay (at a time when most people had lost all their teeth by age fifty). Further study found that the remineralizing effect of fluoride was the secret ingredient to that phenomenon.

In the 1940s, the US Surgeon General decided to see if supplementation of fluoride could generate the same benefit. They selected two neighboring communities in Michigan, Muskegon and Grand Rapids, that both had similar demographics and nearly non-existent levels of natural fluoride. Grand Rapids got supplemented and Muskegon was the control group that remained unchanged in order to compare the results. They found clear benefit after five years, and after ten years the kids in Grand Rapids had 60% less cavities.

The science was so credible and clear (and the fluoride supplementation was so relatively simple, safe, and cost-effective) that most communities would follow suit in coming decades. You’re not introducing a drug or medication into the water — you’re simply assessing the amount of the mineral that Mother Nature started with and raising it to the threshold where it makes a proven benefit.

It’s not a magic potion that takes the place of other oral health steps, but it raises the baseline for how effective all the other stuff will be. Given the avalanche of sugar and acid in the modern American diet, fluoride can shift things back in our favor.

Fluoride behaves like most every other natural substance: it’s problematic if you don’t get enough, and it has complications at excessive levels. You find the same trend with vitamin D, calcium, water, zinc, exercise, sunlight, carbs, etc, etc, etc.

There are some very rare communities (less than 1% of US population) where fluoride levels are beyond the useful levels and they go through steps to reduce it, but for most of us, our existing levels could use a boost. Most public health measures are more complicated, but fluoride is pretty straightforward— raise a naturally occurring mineral into the useful zone, and keep it well away from the complication zone.

It is most unfortunate that in our state’s justifiable pushback against costly and complicated government health interventions that we decided to target a simple, proven, and cost effective mineral that is already universally present to some degree. The cost of that decision will not materialize for another 5-10 years, but given the non-renewable nature of tooth structure, all the future kids born in Utah are going to be shortchanged to some degree for decades to come.

I recognize there’s no undoing the legislation, but we can still get the facts straight.

You can read more of the development of community fluoride here: