For context, I live in Hong Kong where most people drink tap water after boiling first. Some may install water filter but may still boil the water. Very few drink bottle water unless they’re outside and too lazy to bring their own bottles.
Now, I’m researching whether I can drink tap water in Iceland (I’m going there in August), and while it looks like the answer is affirmative, almost no web article mention whether I need to boil the water first. People in Japan (a country I’ve visited a few times) also seems to be used to drink tap water directly without boiling.
The further I searched, the more it seems to me that in developed countries (like US, Canada and the above examples), tap water is safe to drink directly. Is that true? Do you drink tap water without boiling?
It sounds like a stupid question but I just can’t believe what I saw. I think I experienced a cultural shock.
Northern California, United States.
I filter my tap water mostly for taste, but it’s completely safe to drink without boiling. I would even argue that it’s beneficial to drink because of the fluoride (I’m not an anti-fluoride/anti-science nutjob).
Right, you’re a pro-fluoride
nutjobignoramus.If you spent even five minutes reading about it, you’d understand that fluoride has no proven benefits when ingested, but several proven adverse reactions.
Do you have any research or articles that summarizes these findings?
I was skeptical as well so I did a quick web search and the first couple articles I found do seem to support that there are potential risks to ingesting fluoride. This article claims that fluoride has a minimal effect on dental health but has potential for other healtb risks, and this article compares the efficacy and risks of several methods of adding fluoride for public consumption.
I suppose I’ve only ever heard negative views of fluoride in water supplies from people who say it’s bad ‘because the government puts it in the water and I don’t trust the government’ or worse conspiracy theories that it’s somehow put into the water to control people etc… And the people who espouse those type of theories also tend to be the type who also don’t ‘believe’ in science and deny objectively proven facts about reality. So it’s interesting to see that maybe there is some actual science-backed merit behind the anti-fluoride movement.
Based on my read of the second article, in the US at least it seems like fluoride addition is regulated and low enough that the health risks are minimal and there still is some dental benefit from it. It seems like an even better option would be to stop adding fluoride to water and make topical fluoride treatments available to everyone from a dentist… But we can’t even get universal healthcare so universal dental care doesn’t seem likely to happen.