<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>adrian_b</author><text>No, fluoride must not be added to any food or beverage, because it provides no benefits whatsoever when ingested.&lt;p&gt;Fluoride is beneficial only when applied externally on the dental enamel, so that the fluoride ions will passively substitute the hydroxide ions. There is no known biological process that uses actively fluoride in the human body and excessive ingested fluoride has bad effects, e.g. bone damage.&lt;p&gt;Therefore fluoride must be added only to tooth paste and mouth washes, which provides all the benefits and none of the risks.&lt;p&gt;Intentionally ingesting fluoride is incredibly stupid and it is beyond my power of understanding how this could be mandated by law in USA and in some other countries which imitated USA irrationally.</text><parent_chain><item><author>TheAceOfHearts</author><text>Adding fluoride to water has always seemed weird to me, since you can&amp;#x27;t control for how much water someone is drinking or account for different bodily factors like age and weight. I wonder why the European solution of adding it to salt isn&amp;#x27;t the default, especially given that iodized salt is already so popular and commonplace.&lt;p&gt;As a general rule of thumb, I think it&amp;#x27;s interesting to scrutinize dosage recommendations and compare regulations between countries. If someone claims that the science on some topic is well settled then health officials in multiple countries should arrive at roughly similar results. If there&amp;#x27;s a discrepancy between the suggestions made by health officials in the US and EU, it&amp;#x27;s worth asking why.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Health officials delayed report linking fluoride to brain harm</title><url>https://www.salon.com/2023/03/16/health-officials-delayed-report-linking-fluoride-to-brain-harm_partner/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>osigurdson</author><text>I think the obvious answer is, we can’t actually tell one way or the other if it is a net benefit. However, humans can’t handle uncertainty so must be told in confident tones that the decision is the correct one. If anyone questions the established decision, they must be discredited.</text><parent_chain><item><author>TheAceOfHearts</author><text>Adding fluoride to water has always seemed weird to me, since you can&amp;#x27;t control for how much water someone is drinking or account for different bodily factors like age and weight. I wonder why the European solution of adding it to salt isn&amp;#x27;t the default, especially given that iodized salt is already so popular and commonplace.&lt;p&gt;As a general rule of thumb, I think it&amp;#x27;s interesting to scrutinize dosage recommendations and compare regulations between countries. If someone claims that the science on some topic is well settled then health officials in multiple countries should arrive at roughly similar results. If there&amp;#x27;s a discrepancy between the suggestions made by health officials in the US and EU, it&amp;#x27;s worth asking why.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Health officials delayed report linking fluoride to brain harm</title><url>https://www.salon.com/2023/03/16/health-officials-delayed-report-linking-fluoride-to-brain-harm_partner/</url></story>