Gov. Spencer Cox says he will sign a bill that prohibits adding fluoride to public water systems, a move that would make Utah the first state to impose a fluoride ban.
The new legislation is slated to take effect in early May.
Meanwhile in Calgary, the city plans to begin adding fluoride to the water system in the near future, sparking an outcry from doctors and special interest groups.
While the upheld narrative is that the naturally occurring mineral promotes healthy teeth, studies in recent years have reported adverse health effects such as diminished bone density, neurodevelopmental issues and learning disabilities, as the Western Standard recently reported in an in-depth examination of the matter.
Cox acknowledged the mounting number of politicians and medical professionals calling for governments to stop “medicating” the public.
Referencing discussions he’s had with dentists, the Republican governor said he believes there isn’t a major difference between communities that fluoride their water and those who do not — but it seems better to err on the side of caution.
“It’s got to be a really high bar for me if we’re going to require people to be medicated by their government,” Cox told ABC4 Utah.
“It’s not a bill I felt strongly about; it’s not a bill I care that much about, but it’s a bill I will sign.”
Lawmakers in Kentucky, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee and Montana have taken similar steps to ban the practice of adding fluoride to water.
According to the US National Library of Medicine, the process is prohibited in nearly every European country, including Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland.
The only three European countries that allow it are Ireland (100%), Spain (10%) and the United Kingdom (11%).
With fluoride, quantity is everything. Low levels of fluoride is generally agreed to be safe, as it’s a mineral often found in water in nature. However, it’s when the fluoride-to-water ratio increases that it could become dangerous.
In 2024, a California judge ruled the 0.7 mg/L recommended by America’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC) posed an unreasonable risk of harm and ordered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to take unspecified regulator action.
Newly appointed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a longtime critic of the fluoridation of water.
“I was called a conspiracy theorist because I said fluoride lowered IQ,” Kennedy said at his confirmation hearing, per the Wall Street Journal.
“JAMA published a meta-review of 87 studies saying that there’s a direct inverse correlation between IQ loss.”
Kennedy was referencing a review based on analysis of dozens of fluoride studies from the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics, which found high levels of fluoride correlated with lower IQ scores in children.