Of Fluoride, Precious Bodily Fluids and Whale Juice

Last week NPR’s All Things Considered reported on a National Institutes of Health study that says fluoride can lower children’s intelligence quotients.

Surely, I wasn’t the only baby boomer alarmed by this revelation. In the 1960s and ‘70s, my parents considered my brushing my teeth with fluoridated water good for their dentist bills, even if it also promoted godless communism. Anyway, my precious bodily fluids somehow survived.

But might I otherwise have a higher IQ? What about someone like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is some half a decade older?

Unlike the independent presidential candidate-turned personnel advisor to Donald J. Trump, I have never tried to stage a bicycle-bear collision in New York’s Central Park on the way to dinner and a flight, nor have I ever thrown a whale’s head in the back of my minivan as its juice stained the side of the vehicle. Come to think of it, I’ve never owned a minivan, either.

I have never had the sort of money, nor has my family ever had the sort of money Kennedy’s family has, to allow for such levels of eccentricity. Nor did I face the sort of awful tragedies RFK Jr. grew up with.

In the end, I’d guess it’s that level of wealth that has made RFK Jr. the man he is. Although Kennedy family wealth is only slightly older than Trump family wealth, the Kennedys’ somewhat bluer blue blood allows for extra too-rich-to-care eccentricity.

Anyway, the NIH study says that only “higher levels of fluoride exposure, such as drinking water containing more than 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter, are associated with lower IQ in children.”

I don’t know how much fluoride Southeast Wisconsin tap water contained during the Cold War, but I’m guessing it was within the 0.7 milligrams per liter recommended by the US Public Health Service and the World Health Organization.

Kennedy’s anti-vaccination philosophy is, certainly, as much a concern as his history of how he treats animals, but it’s unlikely either can be blamed on how much fluoride he swallowed in his youth. Let’s perhaps blame his anti-vax beliefs on a desire for ever more power and wealth and the greater eccentricities such additional power and wealth excuses.

Lassa is founding editor of The Hustings