Water utility announces it’s ditching fluoride—then reveals it did so years ago
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Many thanks for your constructive reply! That may explain the difference in perception. Cheers!
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No no no, do not weasel out. Provide one. I will read through it. Preferably one with statistics, I can handle that. I will be open minded, try not to give in on confirmation bias. I will not start nitpicking. Let's do this the ars way, not the facebook way.
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I can remember the old pre-NHS US stereotype that "all British had bad teeth" (they didn't but that didn't affect the sterotype much - my parents and MiL, all of whom were around pre-NHS had excellent teeth..).
I think we can safely start the "all the people from the US that don't have millionaire parents have bad teeth" stereotype.
(And from my experience of non-urban US - the rural population in the US have far worse dental hygiene than anyone I've known in the UK).
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.. I don’t know about teeth, I do know some friends from UK with pretty obscene ones
And some with Jimmy Carr ivory atrocities in their mouth
But .. I will say there are areas of the states where I’ve seen more badly set broken bones (like crooked forearms) than I can recall seeing anywhere else.
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It's like when I found out how eggs are distributed in Britain vs the U.S. Both methods are perfectly workable, but they are mutually incompatible. Britain keeps the natural coating on the eggs, distributes them at room temp, and aside from a need to give them a little rinse for... chicken waste that ends up on them from time to time, they're fine that way. In the U.S., the natural coating is eroded away from the initial cleaning process (since here, seeing those waste specs on an egg would make one lose their appetite immediately), and so an artificial coating is added after the fact, and instead of distributing at room temp, it's at refrigerated temp. Same result, but it must be kept at that refrigerated temp the entire time. Same thing, once it's home, it's all good. The one advantage of the more expensive U.S. method is longer shelf life. They "keep" a lot longer, which helps both for the sometimes very long shipping times from farm to store, and also because of U.S. grocery shopping habits. I'm to understand in Britain people shop for just what they need for that day's meals, often to stores right within walking distance. In the U.S., grocery trips are far enough away they're done by car, so rather than make it a daily problem, we end up stocking up for a full week, so what we get needs to last longer.
I may have a lot of these details way off, because I'm hearing all of this second hand from traveler's tales of what they observe as the differences, and also a long documentary on egg distribution differences.
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Yup. I buy eggs at the store and get eggs from friends who have chickens. The store eggs go in the fridge and the eggs from friends go on the counter. The only reason store eggs are needed are for consistency in baking. The local eggs vary wildly in size while the store eggs are all the same size.
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Belgium here. Yup... I can confirm eggs are at room temperature and sometimes need a bit of cleaning if you have a bad patch. Day to day shopping? Maybe in the big cities. Most people go shopping for groceries once or twice a week.
Supply is closer to the shops here I guess. I think our farms are smaller and more localized. Heard that is why our chocolate tastes different. Less milk acid. Tough luck when you live close to a chicken or pig farm though. Smell can be a real nuisance and farmerse enjoy driving tractors during rush hour.
Diversity in action. What a pleasant way to converse. No us them, just advantages and disadvantages and mutual respect. It has been a while, the internet is becoming a dark place. Luckily real life people are still enjoyable. Oh well. Drop by for a beer if you are in Belgium. Cheers!
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From what I understand, you're doing what you should. However they're handled, they're meant to be kept at the same temp from shipment to storage until they're used, due to the way different contaminants grow or are inhibited by temp. Here our eggs vary in size, and are sorted by "weight class" more or less. So all the eggs in a carton may be the same size, but you've got different size cartons, ranging small-medium-large-extra large (we're still Americans after all, gotta have that even further beyond size).
My only concern is how well the artificial coating protecting the eggs after our wash cycle works compared to the natural coating. If there were a way to gently and effectively wash our eggs while keeping that natural coating intact... well that just makes good business sense since it cuts out a whole step from the process. With all that said, I've been given unchilled eggs by a few local farmers from time to time. No harm there, so long as I double check and do a little cleaning. That's what gloves are for if I'm that squeamish.
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I find it fascinating, discovering workable solutions that different cultures have come up with for the same problem. We put fluoride in our water, and you put it in your toothpaste. Frankly, while before I would have leaned towards the U.S. method since it gets the fluoride to everyone connected to a municipal water supply, now I see some of the wisdom in putting it in toothpaste, as I'd be able to reliably keep that in my diet should my local supply decide to kneel down to the deluded folk healer we've currently got in charge. Did I mention he's a living Ren & Stimpy character?
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The milk acid part is right, but the reason is protectionism. Milton Hershey wanted to branch out from the caramel business, which he (correctly) saw was being commoditized, and went to Europe to learn the chocolate biz. The leaders there did not want to compete with Americans, and declined to teach him*.
Hershey figured out a different way to temper the chocolate, essentially with sour cream/crème fraiche, and that’s why “American” chocolate tastes different. Scare quotes there because plenty of American chocolate is made using the traditional method, also.
*That's not a criticism. It was literally a “trade secret” in that those in the trade knew it and weren’t about to share it.
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I would make one small adjustment to the steady storage temperature advice, not disputing that at all but if you intend to boil your eggs - and some suggest this for poaching as well- an older’ egg is supposed to be better.
For boiled the older egg is much easier peeled.. for poaching you get better whites
For North American type washed eggs this means either checking the sell by date : this is not the expiration date ..
( if in doubt submerge- ‘if it floats it may cause bloat’, as in don’t eat, if it stands up on one end then its aging- so a judgement call)
Or maybe leaving ‘fresh’ eggs on the counter for a day - ‘a day on the counter is a week in the fridge’
That’s at least is the advice I got from a guy who runs a fresh egg farm/business
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Fresh, old, doesn't matter. Peeling boiled eggs is always a PITA for me.
Where from the counter or fridge really does matter is when you are really picky about where you want your yolks for soft boiled. I like 'em runny, except if I'm doing ajitama to go with ramen, then more jammy. Room temp or cold from the refrigerator can really throw a wrench in there.
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Fair enough. The WHO Global Oral Health Status Report covers things by continent. Europe as a whole falls pretty far behind North America, Australia, New Zealand, etc. The Health Interview Survey is from the Belgian government. 9.7% edentulous rate among "individuals aged 15 and over", however this is made from a survey of 10,000 people. I suspect the rate is higher due to how the data is achieved, but for the sake of this conversation I accept it.
As far as I'm aware, we don't measure any such thing in the US. I've made about 3 million bucks worth of dentures so far in my career, and I have only ever done one on somebody under the age of 21. However, for the US you can look at PMCID PMC4212322. The last time the United States had an edentulous rate as high as Belgium is currently, Reagan was still President.
The United States is a pretty trashy country in a lot of ways, but we are pretty much top of the heap when it comes to dentistry and dental education.
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when I get poached eggs at a restaurant
they always ask how I want them
and normally have three choices
hard medium or soft
- which is confusing because firm whites runny yolks is the only ‘correct’ to poach an egg
but what really concerns me is when I ask how they classify the only ‘proper’ way in their scale
some places say that’s a soft
which kinda makes sense but some places call that a medium
..
?
who is ordering poached eggs with runny whites?
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And candy! Adverse events associated with lead colors in candy were some of the first impetus for the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. For an interesting...if scary, read on where the health and safety regs first came from kind seem to be headed towards) read Blum's The Poison Squad.
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Scary Devil Monastery
Ars Scholae Palatinae
It does wash out but...the fertility of soil is a complex interaction between organic humus, an active ecosystem, and the prevalence of trace minerals. In such cases where you do get a salting of the earth - close to some industrial plants, for instance, or in the vicinity of large rock salt deposits experiencing flooding - the ecosystem in the soil dies, the minerals bond to the salt and get washed away with it, and you end up with what is basically dust and sand unable to support growth. A wasteland.
It can take centuries of deliberate preparation to restore fertility to such land, and usually it involves literally transporting arable soil to spread over the wastes as a form of seeding.
Which, tangentially, is why the current agri zones shifting with global warming is such a big deal. The places where the climate conducive to farming has been for millennia is moving to what is most often literal wasteland or terrain which requires extensive preparation before you can build farms on it - like burning down the forest or draining the wetland in the way.
As you assert below, it's largely allegorical. It was certainly part of the rhetoric at the times, as can easily be read in the abundance of roman memoirs covering the era of Carthage, for instance. It's reasonable to assume that at the time it was their way of demanding an enemy be made a glass crater, paved over as a parking lot, or "nuked from orbit, just to make sure".
Some have suggested that it wasn't strictly speaking mythological. An Augur or flamens travelling with the legions might ceremonially spread handfuls of salt over the conquered land and calling down curses on it. The romans, in whose writings we most often find reference to 'salting the earth', were a superstitious people who made a big thing out of religious hedge wizardry with which to curse their enemies.
Leaden curse tablets are almost more often found than roman coinage, which says a lot about how the lengths a roman would go to get even with a bad neighbor.
I would posit that when you find a historical reference or myth about earth being salted it involves something like that. A ceremony with suitable gravitas to indicate that the land of an enemy beyond the pale is condemned.
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Scary Devil Monastery
Ars Scholae Palatinae
"Soil" is a concept beyond just minerals and dust. What salt will do - and has done in natural or artificial salt wastes - is kill the existing soil ecosystem which makes the land arable. After which what you've got left is a mineral-dense wasteland where the salt has often bonded to the minerals useful to plant growth, meaning that once you've washed it out, what's left is often just nutrient-deficient sand and rubble.
Plenty of mining operations which involve large amounts of water do, as a side effect, often spread existing rock salt to surrounding areas, causing exactly such wastelands to form.
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It is disappointing that the senior public health reporter for Ars Technica seems to have not heard of concerns raised by redneck yahoos like the National Toxicology Program of the Department of Health and Human Services; the knuckle-dragging savages of the National Institutes of Health; or the mouth-breathers at the Journal of the American Medical Association who publish JAMA Pediatrics.
What is frankly astonishing is that somebody who writes for Ars TECHNICA doesn't seem to grasp how easy it is to do a bit of research using AI tools. Here--let me help:
@Grok "There was commentary (and perhaps academic study) about the possibility that fluoridation in water might actually be harmful. Remind me--what were the concerns? Where were those concerns published?"
As longtime Ars readers might suggest--RTFA.
What is frankly astonishing is that somebody who writes for Ars TECHNICA doesn't seem to grasp how easy it is to do a bit of research using AI tools. Here--let me help:
@Grok "There was commentary (and perhaps academic study) about the possibility that fluoridation in water might actually be harmful. Remind me--what were the concerns? Where were those concerns published?"
As longtime Ars readers might suggest--RTFA.
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