Millennials, Tap Water and Bad Teeth
Millennials are drinking less fluoridated water than any generation before them.
By Casey Morgan
We’ve heard it our entire lives: Brush your teeth at least twice a day. But has your dentist ever told you to go home and drink tap water? Doubt it. And that’s a problem.
The reason: fluoride. A naturally occurring mineral present in water and some foods, and is used in toothpaste, mouth rinse and other dental hygiene products to strengthen enamel and prevent decay, fluoride is also added to public water supplies at one part per million. It quietly helps prevent tooth decay with every glass of tap water you drink. Except people aren’t drinking as much tap water as they used to.
Dr. Steve M. Levy, professor and associate director of the graduate program in the Department of Preventative and Community Dentistry at the University of Iowa, studies the impact of fluoridation in water. “We’ve been studying in our research the factors that affect fluoride intake over time, and we’ve found many people are drinking less tap water,” he said. “And more and more people are using bottled water.”
Not just a bottle of water — a lot of bottled water. According to the International Bottled Water Association, total U.S. bottled water consumption increased to 9.67 billion gallons in 2012, up from 9.1 billion gallons in 2011. And per-capita consumption is up 5.3 percent in 2012 — with every person in America drinking an average of 30.8 gallons of bottled water last year. That’s roughly 233 16.9-ounce bottles per person in a calendar year.
Those numbers differ slightly from those released in 2013 by Beverage Digest, the trade magazine for the beverage industry. Its research showed Americans drink 58 gallons of water a year; bottled water accounts for 21 of those gallons — nearly double the amount of bottled water Americans drank in 1998.
Regardless of whose numbers you believe, the issue is clear: Less tap water means less fluoride. Dr. John Kearns, owner of Fleur Dentistry in Des Moines, notes that although fluoride treatments like gels or varnishes are available at six-month dental checkups, continued fluoride exposure is what really protects those pearly whites.
“There’s no question that the most effective method of delivering fluoride is ingestion of it in community water sources,” he said. “Water fluoridation is the most valuable form of fluoride treatment.”
And although cavity rates have plummeted in the last half-century (community water fluoridation became popular in the ‘40s), that doesn’t mean people should stop using tap water. Lower decay rates are the result of drinking fluoridated water in the first place.
“For those of you that have never had a cavity or a filling, you may not realize that fluoride is important to keep you in balance,” Levy said. “Maybe you haven’t had a cavity in your life, but that could change if you didn’t have any fluoride.”
“So the Millennial Generation, in a way, takes for granted lower rates of tooth decay because you’ve been fortunate,” he said. “But the reason you’ve been fortunate isn’t just lucky and by chance, and it’s not because cavities have gone away. It’s because you have the relative benefit of all of these good things: knowing about how cavities start, knowing to clean your teeth, using dental floss and toothpaste, and then all the different fluoride treatments. All those together give you a big benefit.”
To learn more about water fluoridation visit the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s website.
Photo courtesy of Megan Berberich
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