Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks during a campaign rally for Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump at Macomb Community College on November 1 in Warren, Michigan. Kennedy has called for an end to fluoride in the water supply, a practice that saves billions a year in dental care.

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It’s considered one of the greatest public health achievements of the 20th century: By putting a small amount of fluoride into the water supply, public health officials prevented millions of cavities, saved tens of billions of dollars in dental costs and made children healthier. .

But in a post on X on Saturday, former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that one of his first acts as an official in a new Trump administration would be to “recommend all U.S. water systems remove fluoride from public water.” He then listed several false statements about the effects of fluoride and then linked to a video on a website founded by prominent anti-vaccination advocate and conspiracy theorist Del Bigtree.

Former President Donald Trump seemed receptive to the idea of ​​removing fluoride from the water supply. “Well, I haven’t talked to him about it yet, but it seems OK to me,” Trump said in a telephone interview with NBC on Sunday. “You know, it’s possible.”

Experts were quick to condemn the promise to remove fluoride from water. “Fluoride has been tested well. It clearly and definitively reduces the number of cavities, and is not associated with any clear evidence of the chronic diseases mentioned in that tweet,” said Dr. Paul Offit, a researcher and physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a science denier. He makes up his own scientific truths and ignores the real truths,” Offit says.

Fluoride has clear benefits

The science is unequivocal: adding fluoride to the water supply has been effective in reducing the number of cavities in both children and adults. Fluoride restores minerals to the teeth that are lost when bacteria grow rapidly in the mouth, especially after consuming sugary snacks.

More than a dozen recent studies from governments and academic institutions around the world have found that fluoride reduces tooth decay in children and adults by about 25%, according to the American Dental Association. It is especially beneficial for people in lower-income families who may not have access to fluoride products, such as toothpastes and mouthwashes. A study from the Colorado School of Public Health found that adding fluoride to water saved approximately $6.8 billion in dental costs in one year alone.

In recent years, some research has suggested that high levels of fluoride may cause lower IQ in children. A recent government study found there is moderate evidence of the effect, but not at the levels currently used in U.S. drinking water. The ADA says the benefits of fluoridation still outweigh the potential risks.

Strong contrasts

Dr. Amanda Stroud is a dentist who sees the effects of fluoride—and its absence—every day in her job as a dental director at a nonprofit health care organization in western North Carolina. AppHealth serves children who have fluoridated city water and others who have well water that does not contain fluoride. The differences are big, she says.

The children who drink fluoride water, she says, often have good, strong teeth without cavities. They can take for granted laughter and eating without pain, “which is a joyful thing at that age,” says Stroud.

When children drink spring water, it’s a different story. “They could potentially have tooth decay on every tooth,” she says. “When they smile, the teeth can potentially be chipped down to the gum line. Their teeth look brown or mottled.”

And that’s a painful condition that makes brushing and eating healthy foods like fruits and vegetables more difficult. “It’s heartbreaking,” she says.

The original public health conspiracy theory

Despite its obvious benefits, conspiracy theories surrounding fluoride have existed almost as long as water has been fluorinated, according to Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University.

“In some ways, the conspiracy theory about fluoride in drinking water is one of the original public health conspiracy theories,” he says.

Fluoride was first introduced in 1945 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which also happens to be the Trump campaign’s last staging area before Election Day.

The use of fluoride in water quickly spread across the country as the benefits became apparent in Grand Rapids.

But wild theories about the chemical circulated from the start. “It served as an almost perfect conspiracy theory,” he explains. Fluoride was invisible, made mandatory by the government, and present in tap water, a substance that almost everyone ingested.

Dallek says the theories were pushed especially in the 1960s by the John Birch Society, a far-right group that claimed communists had infiltrated much of the government. The group believed that “any step toward government intervention was essentially a step toward a communist country,” he said. As a result, they “clung to fluoride as part of a communist plot.”

The claims about fluoride were diffuse, but also included ideas that it was somehow used for mind control, or that it was a chemical weapon designed to poison people. At least initially, the ideas seemed to find some traction with the public.

“There have been movements all over the country to stop fluoridation in drinking water,” says Dallek.

In 1966, the Honolulu government vetoed a measure to include fluoride in the water. Fluoride is still not used in Hawaii, and a 2015 report found that the state has the highest rate of tooth decay among children in the country, and continues to have one of the worst oral health conditions of any state.

Mocked in movies

But the movement never received wider attention. The fluoride conspiracies were openly mocked in films such as Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove’, in which General Jack Ripper starts a nuclear war, partly due to the belief that fluoride was a communist plot. In the 1980s the problem largely disappeared. “Every now and then there were anti-fluoride campaigns that would pop up across the country,” Dallek says.

But in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, fluoride conspiracy theories have resurfaced, often pushed by individuals like Kennedy, who also believe childhood vaccines cause autism and other diseases. Today, anti-vaccine advocates lump the harms of fluoride with those of vaccines and chemtrails, supposed trails of chemicals left behind by commercial airplanes to harm people and the environment.

Kennedy posted a video on Monday calling on his supporters to vote for Trump so that he is elected with a strong mandate. “Then no one will be able to stop us if he gives me the power to clean up the corruption in federal agencies, especially our health agencies,” he said.

But Offit says Kennedy’s potential role in leading the nation’s public health could prove disastrous, especially for young people who benefit from both fluoride and vaccines. “Only the children will suffer from his ignorance,” Offit says.