7 hours Ago
Lynette Schwinn grew up drinking well water on a ranch in Idaho. When she was about 20, she said, a dentist told her that her teeth were deteriorating and would likely be gone by the time she was 35. Then she moved to Brigham City, which began adding fluoride to the city’s water in 1965, things turned around.
“It saved my teeth and I’ve drank it for 57 years,” Schwinn said in an interview. She is not alone in being a proponent of fluoride. Asked in 2023 if they wanted to stop adding fluoride to the city’s water, a two-to-one majority of Brigham City voters chose to keep it in place.
But starting next month, when Brigham City residents turn on their faucets, they’ll no longer be receiving a small dose of fluoride after Gov. Spencer Cox signed legislation to make Utah the first state to ban fluoride from public water systems. In total, about half the state’s population who is currently receiving fluoride in their water — including Brigham City, Salt Lake and Davis counties — will no longer find the mineral at their faucets.
“Brigham City said they wanted to keep it,” Schwinn said, “and now the state says we have to take it away. I don’t think it’s fair, personally.” The move puts Utah on the vanguard of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement spearheaded by President Donald Trump and his secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F.
Kennedy Jr. (Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Rep. Stephanie Gricius speaks as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F.
Kennedy, Jr., left, and Rep. Kristen Chevrier, right, listen during a news conference to discuss health-oriented laws passed during the Utah legislative session, held at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City on Monday, April 7, 2025.
To drive home that point, Kennedy visited Utah earlier this month , praising Utah lawmakers for the ban, as well as two other bills that are part of his agenda — barring low-income Utahns from using food stamps to buy soda and banning artificial dyes from school lunches. “I’m very proud of Utah, it has emerged as the leader in making America healthy again,” Kennedy said, flanked by Rep. Stephanie Gricius, R-Eagle Mountain, who sponsored the ban, and Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper.
Kennedy has called for a ban on fluoridated water nationwide, and several other states are looking to follow Utah’s lead. Ohio, Florida and South Carolina have bills pending that would ban fluoride from water, while attempts to ban it failed this year in Montana, Tennessee, Arkansas, North Dakota and New Hampshire. “The evidence against fluoride is overwhelming,” the secretary said.
“We know that it causes IQ loss, profound IQ loss ...
and also other neurological injuries like ADHD. Science indicates that it affects kidney health, affects liver health and it causes hypothyroidism. It causes osteoarthritis.
” What studies show about fluoridation But experts in Utah and nationally say Kennedy is exaggerating and distorting the truth about fluoridated water, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called one of the greatest public health achievements of the 20th Century — along with breakthroughs like vaccinations, motor vehicle safety and recognition of the risks of smoking. When Gricius presented the bill in a legislative committee, she, too, made the argument that fluoridation causes lower intelligence and pointed to a California judge’s ruling that the Environmental Protection Agency must reassess the recommendations for safe levels of fluoride — currently 0.7 milligrams per liter, or about three drops in a 55-gallon drum .
“The indicators are that fluoride damages IQ in the same way that lead gasoline at about the same level does,” Kennedy claimed during his visit. (Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
speaks during a news conference to discuss health-oriented laws passed during the Utah legislative session, held at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City on Monday, April 7, 2025. Those claims of lower IQs are based on a National Institute of Health’s Toxicology Program report that found — relying mainly on low-quality studies from China and India — a correlation between very high levels of fluoride and lower IQs. However, the authors also said that there was no evidence that fluoridation under 1.
5 mg/L — more than double the level of fluoride in drinking water — had any impact on intelligence. And Utah dentists, who urged Cox to veto the bill, point to decades of scientific studies proving that fluoride reduces cavities and tooth decay, as well as research done on areas that abandoned fluoridation as proof that Utahns — in particular children — will suffer the consequences. Calgary, Canada, for example, stopped fluoridating its water in 201 due to costs, not politics, while nearby Edmonton kept adding fluoride as it had for decades.
Researchers found a jump in cavities and extractions among 2nd graders in Calgary between 2013 and 2019, while Edmonton saw a small decrease in that span. And the rate of children needing treatment for severe tooth decay increased by 78% in Calgary from 2010 to 2019, compared to a 12% increase in Edmonton. After witnessing the spike, Calgary decided to restore fluoride to its water early this year, but the project has been delayed .
The City Council in Windsor, Canada, voted in 2013 to cease fluoridation. In 2018, it reversed course and started adding fluoride after there was a 51% increase in children needing urgent dental care due to tooth decay. In Alaska, voters in the city of Juneau voted to stop fluoridating its water in 2007, while Anchorage kept adding fluoride.
Juneau children in every age group saw increased cavities and dental-related expenses by 2012 , with the highest increases among the younger age groups who had never had fluoridated water. Children in Anchorage experienced a slight decrease in cavities, with no significant change in costs. And after Israel banned fluoride in 2014, researchers saw the rate of restorative dental treatments in young children double .
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) The fluoride station at the Big Cottonwood Water Treatment Facility on Monday, April 21, 2025. Utah will see an increase in dental disease, said Rodney Thornell, president of the Utah Dental Association, whose organization urged Cox to veto Gricius’ bill, arguing it ignored decades of science and would harm children, in particular, and lead to additional costs to families. “That’s great for us dentists,” Thornell said.
“We’re going to make a bunch more money ...
but is that really what we should be doing? I try to put myself out of business every day.” ‘The freedom to choose’ There will be financial impacts to Utah families and state government, as well, says Lorna Koci, chairwoman of the Utah Oral Health Coalition, who estimates that the state Medicaid system, which covers low-income Utahns, will see $60 million in increased costs. And studies have estimated that fluoridated water saves households about $32 per person annually .
Gricius contends that fluoridation should be a matter of personal choice: “Every individual and family will have the freedom to choose for themselves whether to consume supplemental fluoride, rather than having it be automatically included in our public drinking water.” If people want fluoride, Gricius argues that her bill allows pharmacists to prescribe fluoride tablets, making it easier than having to get them from the dentist. Tablets are a poor substitute, Koci contends.
First, they are only available to those under 18 years old. Second, she said, to accurately prescribe them, a pharmacist has to know how much naturally occurring fluoride the individual is getting, so they don’t consume too much. And generally, Koci says, the pills are infrequently used, meaning the benefits will reach far fewer people than simply through fluoridating drinking water.
Few Utahns wanted fluoride gone, according to a poll conducted in March by Noble Predictive Insights . The survey found that just one in five Utahns opposed adding fluoride to water, compared to 32% of voters who want it in water and 34% who recognize the health effects, but believe it should be up to local governments. The poll of 609 registered voters had a margin of error of 3.
9%. Science or politics? But the Legislature’s decision to ban fluoride, in spite of public opinion, is just the state’s latest chapter in a decades-long, complicated saga of fluoride in Utah. Nearly 50 years ago, voters approved, by fewer than 1,200 votes, a ballot initiative called the “Freedom from Compulsory Fluoridation and Medication Act — at the time just the second citizen initiative passed in the history of the state.
It prohibited statewide fluoridation and instead left the decision to water districts, based on a vote from the districts’ voters. While places like Brigham City began adding fluoride in 1965, it wasn’t until 2000 when residents in Davis and Salt Lake counties voted to join the trend. Under Utah law, up until the most recent change, those water systems also had the ability to stop adding fluoride, provided it was put to a public vote — as Brigham City attempted, and failed, to do.
Despite more than twice as many residents in his city voting to keep fluoride in their water in 2023, Brigham City Mayor DJ Bott told lawmakers during a public hearing on the bill that his town was evenly split on the issue. The Salt Lake County Council in January passed a resolution supporting Gricius’ bill on a party-line vote, with Council Chair Aimee Winder Newton saying that after 20 years of fluoridating water, the county didn’t have any data showing it had made a difference. Gricius told her fellow lawmakers that the data showed there was no difference between the rates of cavities in Salt Lake and Davis counties, which have fluoride, and Utah County, which does not.
Actually, Koci said, the data shows both Salt Lake and Davis are lower than Utah and are on the lower end statewide. But she isn’t sure accurate data would have mattered because, she says, it was a decision driven by politics. “Here’s part of what I think has happened: Public health has gotten a black eye in the COVID timeframe and while that’s happening we have these more radical Republicans gaining momentum on their freedom train and ‘My choice’ and all of this ‘You can’t tell me what to do,” Koci said.
“We have people in the anti-fluoride movement who’ve been waiting 25 years,” she said, “and then Kennedy hits the scene and everything is out and these people who’ve been waiting — between the California judgment and Kennedy being there — now’s their time.”.
