Iodized salt with nothing else should be available in most supermarkets.
[EDIT: as pointed out in a child comment, the taste actually comes from chlorine, not fluoride.]
Either way I actually do assume water filter companies lobby to keep public water as subpar an option as possible, there's certainly no incentive not to.
Most of the taste problem that’s in our water “on purpose” is chlorine and it’s not added out of spite, it’s added for sanitary reasons.
I haven't done a lot of research on how to clean water, but e.g. in Germany, tap water isn't chlorinated and thus has a much more neutral taste. And it's very much regulated to a high standard.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/magazine/magazine_article/fluor...
That’s a meaningless comparison. The whole point is that people aren’t doing topical application.
A similar debate to this is the adding folate to flour or bread.
Most of Western Europe bans fluoridation. It can make your bones a little less elastic and a little more brittle, and there are a few other known or potential negative effects.
There are also just better ways to prevent cavities.
But people only just getting electricity in the early 1900s easily benefited more than were harmed by such things. Poor dental health gets scary quick.
I guess the question becomes how low do you lower the bar for those who would willingly devoid themselves of sane things to include in their lives. How much freedom does one man have to harm his self, though he thinks as a self, costs to him are more often than not also costs incurred to society (and usually a society that'd prefer to not see people do self harmful things)
At least in the US though, it seems that popular opposition to fluoridation started with cold war era conservative conspiracies (precious bodily fluids). So, you know.
The only favorable effect of fluoride is achieved externally, by replacing the hydroxide ions in the tooth enamel, so tooth paste with fluoride or mouth wash with fluoride are good, but not drinking water with fluoride.
Ingesting fluoride is at best useless and at worst harmful, because too much ingested fluoride causes bone fragility, as it happens in some parts of the world where the drinking water contains naturally too much fluoride.
Moreover, while the amount of salt eaten daily is more or less constant, the amount of ingested water can vary a lot, so it is not possible to predict accurately how much fluoride will be ingested daily, to ensure a safe concentration in the drinking water.
No matter how you analyze it, adding fluoride to drinking water is just stupid and dangerous, like also the alleged justification for it, that most people are so dumb that they cannot be taught to wash their teeth.
If we ignore the whole point of it (reducing dental cavities), what do you think it is added for?
There are natural sources of water that have fluoride levels high enough to cause harm, but these are at levels of fluoride much higher than what is in treated water.
(b/c it is chlorinated)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3956646/
> Public health approaches for global dental caries reduction that do not involve systemic ingestion of fluoride are urgently needed.
There is no scientifically sound reason against it.